With Sarawak being on form in football this season, numerous football fan sites, including football groups have emerged online. Some have been doing their favorite team justice, by providing undying support for their favourite team, known as the Crocs.
The likes of UltraCrocs (UC) and Gallore Bucerous (GB13) are some of the notable names when it comes to football ultras in Sarawak, with the former nowadays focused more on providing online support and details through their facebook page and twitter account, although I must have to say that many of them still frequent games and can be spotted at the Grandstand area of the stadium.
With all honesty, the huge amount of support the Crocs have garnered in the past few months is tremendous.
Videos and news which are related to Sarawak football go viral with little effort, and fans are definitely backing their home team when games are played at the State Stadium, with even non-competitive friendly games even having a good turnout. If those aren’t good indications of support, then try savor at the fact that a sizeable number of fans are willing to take work leaves to go watch their team play away, with the game against Johor FA probably scoring the highest number of Sarawak fans in an away game.
I reckon there was close to 500 at the stands, and they were warmly greeted by the Johor Ultras who called themselves ‘Boys of the Straits’.
In the game Sarawak won, Robert Alberts, who is Sarawak head coach commented that the real winner was the fans, and he was right. There is rarely any love among fans in Malaysian football, but this was indeed one of the rare occasions.
Unfortunately, not everything seems rosy, with trouble already beginning at home.
With the huge number of fan groups, noticeably in Facebook, fans seem to be divided as these pages try to lure fans to their page to gain more following, or ‘LIKES’.
The competition of who would be the bigger one goes on with some Facebook pages using other pages property without consent, to the extent of putting their own watermark on the photos, much to the dismay of the original owner. – These pages sometimes choose not to ‘share’, but rather simply download and re-upload the information without giving any credit to the original owner.
Lately, another fan group was also detected manipulating graphic images for commercial use, provoking the owners to be visibly upset with the group. According to a source, there has been fair ‘advice’ for such action, but it went to deaf ears. By the time someone in the group itself stepped in, the person commercially using the images had ranked thousands from sales.
Although there are many reasons why Sarawak only has one team in the Malaysian League, one stands out, which is for unity.
Football has always been a good unifying factor, and it has worked well in Sarawak. However, the indiscipline and ruthlessness of certain groups (or individuals) which try their best to ‘be number one’, and become ‘more profitable’ has cause anxiety among Sarawak fans as each supporter group tries to outdo their opponents online.
Offline, unsynchronized beats during games prove that there are different sets of supporters for Sarawak, with GB13 being the more prominent and favored by the masses, if compared to the longer serving Sarawak Football Fan Club (SFFC).
Despite the valid reasons given by both parties for not collaborating, it is rather a shame because if they did work together, a more electrifying atmosphere could be created in the stadium.
With that said, it is hoped that groups supporting Sarawak, be it offline and online do come together to not ‘kill each other’, but rather grow together.
This can be done by avoiding conflicts among groups with each other acknowledging efforts done by certain groups, or even better, collaborating with each other because at the end of the day, we are not supporting any other football team. We are all behind Sarawak.
As for Sarawak Crocs, we are not a community. We are just a news portal with the aim to bring up Sarawak football, and hopefully kick some sense in those overly fanatic fans, which we too think are bad for the industry.
Stay calm, and Ngap Sayot!
