By Les Tan

Singapore Basketball Centre, Saturday, September 27, 2008 – According to Red Sports readers, a huge fight erupted between Tanjong Pagar CSC and Teck Ghee CSC at the Singapore Basketball Centre yesterday in a Group A game that tipped off at 7pm.

Apparently, chairs and helmets were weapons of choice as both teams fought it out and there was blood on the floor after it was all over.

Said reader Meng Ming in the chat box: “Yeah, real big fight. My team was playing on the other court. Our ref actually stopped our game to watch their fight.”

According to a reader in the tag box, what triggered the fight was rough play with a Teck Ghee player throwing elbows here and there. The Tanjong Pagar bench was infuriated and the Teck Ghee player went over to argue with them, leading to the fight.

However, another reader disagreed. “The fight wasn’t triggered by (the) Teck Ghee player throwing elbows here and there. Tanjong Pagar players were rather over physical. If you’d only count how many times Teck Ghee players were knocked off the ground.”

On why the referees didn’t intervene, the same reader said: “I think nobody would want to step in. Someone bothered to call the police though. By the way the refs were okay. Most fouls were called but those were really hard fouls and then trash talking came on. It was actually a heated argument until number 9 of Tanjong Pagar kicked a Teck Ghee player in the stomach. Then everyone rushed over.”

Regardless of who started and what triggered it all, this is the second huge fight to break out in the National Basketball League in successive years. The league is run by the Basketball Association of Singapore. Last year’s fight night was between the Home United team and the SAFSA team. That’s quite ironic, considering Home United are funded by the Ministry of Home Affairs and SAFSA are funded by the Ministry of Defence, the two ministries responsible for internal and external law and order respectively. SAFSA were demoted to Division 2 while Home United continue to play in the top division.

Perhaps the NBL also stands for “National Boxing League”. The least they could have done was to tell us they were planning to fight. We could have watched two sports in one.