Watching Thai Footy on TV

For me Sunday afternoons are usually spent lying on the sofa nursing a hangover watching UK downloads or American TV series with a quirky cop in them. In all honesty I’m just waiting until the live Thai football is broadcast in the evening. 

This season True Visions has bought the rights to screen live games from the TPL. They show the majority of the TPL games and most weeks they’ll screen the big game of the round on True Sport 2. From what I’ve seen and heard, True are doing a reasonably good job of broadcasting the Thai football. 

Unfortunately you have to pay a subscription to True Visions and for most Thai football fans that prices them out of viewing the games.

I don’t have that problem but my apartment won’t allow anybody to connect to True Visions so I can’t get access to most of the Thai games. In retrospect, it’s probably doing me a favor as football apart, the rest of the True Visions package is garbage and the 1500 or so Baht saved can be better spent elsewhere.

My apartment does however have the Charoen cable installed. Until recently I had the option of Football Siam (FBS), T-Sports and the terrestrial NBT 11. 

The excellent FBS was binned a couple of weeks ago by the cable company as it only had the rights to 1^st Division games this season. For a footballing anorak like myself, watching 1st division games was great. Now in place of FBS, I’ve got Man Yoooo Tee Wee dubbed in Thai. I’ve got nothing against Manchester United but I’ve got no desire to watch re-runs of Eric Cantona’s 10 greatest goals or listen to expert punditry from the out-of-date Paddy Crerand.

That leaves my options for live football as T-Sports and NBT 11. T-Sports is just about bearable. Their games usually involve one of the top 5 teams. They do have the odd commercial break during the action and it’s obvious that the commentary is being done from the 2 pundits watching the TV monitors in the studio.

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So that leaves us with NBT 11. When it comes to selecting the fixtures, NBT 11 must have last dibs as they regularly serve up delights such as Khon Kaen v Samut Songkram or TOT v Siam Navy. Even diehard followers of Thai football struggle to get excited about games like these.  In addition to having the worst games, their coverage is annoyingly peppered with commercial breaks. Whenever there is a lull in play, up pops a cheery Thai girl with a high pitched voice advertising some brand of shampoo or some other crap like that. They only seem to have 3 commercials which are played in a loop and by about 30 minutes into the game, I’m ready to stick my foot through the TV.

So that’s the options I have for watching live Thai football on TV. To be honest, I much prefer going to the actual games anyway. It’s always more fun soaking up the atmosphere and you can see so much more of what’s going on at the game than you can at home. The only advantage TV has is that you can see replays of major incidents.