The Away Day: Inside the hidden work behind Lion City Sailors’ stunning Adelaide win

Lion City Sailors are flying high after a stunning 2-0 win over Adelaide United at Hindmarsh Stadium that sent them to the top of Group F. But while the result is ultimately what matters, the work behind it largely goes unseen. This week in Adelaide, The Asian Game spoke with key figures across the Sailors’ football operation to understand what it really takes to prepare for – and execute – an away day in Asian football.

As soon as the email lands in Huong Tran’s overflowing inbox, the work and the countdown begin.

The email she is waiting for is from the AFC’s competitions department – a department she knows only too well after six years working within it – confirming the match schedule for this season’s AFC Champions League Two.

The draw was conducted the afternoon prior in Kuala Lumpur, so she knows the teams and cities in which Lion City Sailors will be playing this season. What she needs is confirmation of dates and stadiums.

From there she can get to work, and top of the list is the flights.

“The planning I do for the flight, I have to discuss with the coaching staff, the head coach, the director of football, because that one is the (most) important, we cannot plan anything without the flight,” Tran, Lion City Sailors’ football manager, explained to The Asian Game.

“So, first I make sure to find the best flight, the best route, the best timing for the flight that can save our players from tiredness and fatigue. I also have to see from the schedule for the local league (from) before that if we have any league games. After that, do we have any games?

“So the flight is the thing that I will book first before the hotel, because the flight is the thing that we cannot control. And also to make sure that we all fly together, that the flight has enough seats for at least 45 of us to travel together.”

It’s an enormous travelling party, and given the amount of personnel and equipment required, it’s akin to picking up their entire football department and temporarily locating it in another country.

For the trip to Adelaide, the 45-strong travelling party was only part of the logistical challenge. Then there was everything that had to travel with them.

As the 45 players and staff boarded flight SQ279 on Monday evening at Changi Airport, beneath them on the Singapore Airlines Boeing 787 was hundreds of kilograms worth of equipment, 26 bags and containers worth to be precise – training gear, match and training kits, medical equipment, massage beds, performance equipment and so much more.

That doesn’t include the individual bags for the players. The sheer amount of freight required is staggering.

The amount of work and level of detail required is immense, but is all part of the hidden apparatus that fans rarely see; all elements of the football club working in unison so that the 23 players – and especially the XI that start the game – are best prepared to perform when they arrive.

At the top of that operation is the head coach, Mark Jackson, who pulled himself out of an analysis session two days before the game to speak with The Asian Game.

“We work in a multidisciplinary way,” he explained. “We know that all departments surrounding the players are vital for their development and their performance. Ultimately, it’s my job to pull all that together and coordinate that.

“People don’t realise the work that goes in from every member of staff logistically to get this right, from getting the kit right, the amount of kit you’re going to have to get ready, what can you take over, coming to Australia and making sure everybody’s boots are clean because you can’t bring dirty boots into Australia – I’ve learnt that before.

“So little things like that, making sure that every element of the trip is covered.”

For Tran that often involves a familiarisation trip weeks beforehand to stress test the logistics. She will take the same flight, stay at the same hotel, and inspect the stadium and training facilities to ensure every aspect of it meets their stringent requirements.

Having worked in Asian football for well over a decade, she has a contact book full of people she can call upon for help and recommendations wherever the team travels, and often the players themselves will report back from international duty with recommendations of their own on hotels and facilities they liked.

For a lot of destinations across Southeast Asia, the logistics are well established. For a trip to Adelaide, however, that required a reconnaissance visit in September. Happily everything checked out.

The hotel was less than 4km from Hindmarsh Stadium, and only 10km from the training base, and conveniently located in the heart of the city.

“When choosing the hotel, we also look at what hotels have experience working with the football teams. Not only sports teams, but football teams because like different sports, they will have a different kind of requirement. But once they work with a football team, at least they know not only the arrangement, the meetings, (but) also the nutrition, and the food.”

And yet, for all the hours, weeks and months’ work invested by dozens of people across the football club, the only thing that matters is the 90 minutes at the end of it.

That is true for the players as well. Especially for the players.

While there’s a novelty around travelling to a foreign land, they’re not here to be tourists. Win, and the trip becomes memorable because of it. For as much fun as they might have as a group on the road, it means little if they don’t get the result.

“It’s purely about the result,” veteran defender Bailey Wright told The Asian Game.

“If I look back at one of our best away trips, Sydney two years ago (in the) semi-final, and the only reason we remember that trip so fondly is because we made it to the final.

“I know we lost on the day, but over the two legs we won, and the celebrations, the feeling; that feeling is what you remember from the trip, and then it made the trip ten times better.

“If we had not qualified for the final, our trip would not have been put down as the same trip. So winning changes everything. Winning is what we’re here to do. We’re here to win trophies.”

As glamorous as it seems from the outside, Jackson laid bare the reality of an away trip for those involved in the inner sanctum.

“Of course, we live a very privileged life that we can travel the world and see different places,” the former AFC Cup-winning coach remarked.

“(But) you’re getting on a plane, you’re getting on a bus, you’re going into a hotel, you’re going to a training ground, you’re going back to a hotel, to a stadium, to an airport, back home… You do get to visit a lot of places, but not see a lot of places.”

For as seamless as this trip to Adelaide has been, however, there are times when it goes wrong.

Take their trip to Hiroshima back in March last year, now infamous because of what happened after the game when Sanfrecce were found to have fielded an ineligible player and had their 6-1 win overturned into a 3-0 forfeit win for the Sailors.

While that match is best remembered for the overturned result, perhaps the on-field result – a 6-1 loss for the Sailors – can be explained by the journey getting there.

With only ten days to prepare from their Round of 16 victory over Muangthong United, Huong recalled being in the office at 7am the following morning to begin the logistical challenge.

With no direct flights available between Singapore and Hiroshima, they had to find alternatives. They reached out to Filipino side Kaya-Iloilo, who had faced Sanfrecce in the group stage, who advised they flew into Fukuoka before taking the Shinkansen up to Hiroshima.

Doing something similar via Osaka was also a possibility. In the end they decided to go via Shanghai, from where they could fly directly to Hiroshima.

The first problem came in the form of available seats. With limited time, they had to take what was available and that meant splitting the travelling party across two separate flights and two separate days.

Tran was due to travel with the second group and recalls being at home around midnight when the frantic phone calls came through – the flight from Shanghai to Hiroshima for group one had been cancelled due to severe weather in Shanghai that forced chaos across their network.

Tran remembers telling them,”whatever flight, just get out of Shanghai today.”

After scrambling to find alternatives, and with no other available flights to Hiroshima, they pleaded with airline officials to get them on a late night flight to Osaka.

Eventually they got on, but they then had to scramble to find last-minute accommodation in Osaka, before catching the train to Hiroshima the following morning.

At that time, however, the second group, including Tran, was preparing to take the same journey to Hiroshima via Shanghai. Thankfully the second group encountered no such issues, but the disrupted preparation could explain their below-par performance.

Contingency planning is just as important on the pitch as it is off it.

For weeks before the game, the Sailors analysts are poring over data and match video of their opponents – in this week’s case, Adelaide United – looking for not just vulnerabilities, but also looking at what they do well.

“As a staff, we have plan A, plan B, plan C, and one of the most important things is to adapt to what is happening,” explained Varo Moreno, Sailors’ assistant coach and analyst.

“Sometimes we want to do one thing, but for whatever reason we cannot. So then we have to adapt.”

Moreno has worked at the Sailors since 2024, and has an infectious appetite for his work.

“I really like my job,” the Spaniard told The Asian Game. “I really like what I do, because at the end I can help a lot to the staff, to the coach, sporting director, the players, and at the end maybe just a little bit of information can help us.

“For me, that’s amazing.”

That means working at all hours of the day or night, including on the overnight flight from Singapore to Adelaide, which left Singapore at 11pm.

“That’s normal,” he joked. “Not just on the plane. Even at home at 1am, if I remember, ‘Oh, I need to check something’ I go to the laptop, and I check something. Otherwise, I cannot sleep.”

What fans, and sometimes even the players themselves, don’t see is the amount of work that goes into providing the analysis that the players will eventually see. For Moreno, the information he rejects is just as important as what he includes.

For the players, it’s about giving them just the right amount of information and not overloading their minds before the game.

So while Moreno might produce hundreds of clips of analysis, the players might only ever see a small fraction of those.

“In the end, this is one of the most important parts of my job,” he explains.

“I have to filter a lot because I can watch 500 or 600 clips per team. So I have to decide (and) I have to filter, and then I share the information with the coach and with the staff, and then together we filter one more time.

“So maybe I have 600 clips and the players only watch six maximum. So this is one of the most important parts of my job (deciding) which kind of information that we think that can help us.

“So, imagine that we are not going to press high on the goal kick, I’m not going to show them how they build up because we are not going to press. So I need to understand our game model, our game plan, and then I can get the information that we need for it.”

Being able to perform at their maximum means ensuring they arrive in peak physical condition, and that is the remit of He Qixiang, the head of performance at Lion City Sailors.

“The biggest challenge I think will be sleep, because I mean when we are traveling, sleep is always the biggest factor,” says Qixiang, who is known simply as ‘Q’ among the Sailors family.

“If you are sitting in a plane for extended hours, it’s not the best for recovery, especially on the plus-one or plus-two after the games, which is quite often the case when we play midweek and then on a Sunday as well.”

With the entire squad sitting in economy, not business as some might assume, that means doing what they can on the flight is paramount.

“I mean, it kind of starts in the plane because being in an extended seating position for long hours, being reclined for long hours, is very bad for blood circulation,” he explained.

“So we try to get them to do some squats, some basic mobility in the plane, if they are able to, and getting as much hydration as possible in the plane as well. These are small things that kind of contribute to better recovery when they step off the plane.”

Once they step off the plane, every aspect of the players’ wellbeing is monitored.

“We check in on them on things like fatigue, sleep, how they’re feeling after the game in terms of did you sleep well? Did you recover well?,” Qixiang said.

“We try to pick up any patterns based on that. We also ask them how intense physically was the game that they played prior? Try to pick out certain trends based on that as well.

“So, if there’s a few signs based on intensity of the game, recovery, sleep, this will pick up certain red flags that we will try to reflect to the coaches and maybe adjust individual programs for them as well.”

While much of the experience is different – different city, different hotel, different climate – the players try to keep their routine exactly the same, and by now most of them are experienced enough at international travel to know how to take care of themselves.

“I think everyone at this level of football is here because you’re a professional and you get the best out of yourself,” Wright commented.

“Of course, having more experience in travel, you learn how important sleep is, hydration, mobility, and sometimes going for little walks and helping yourself sleep are important rather than just sitting there and doing nothing.

“I like my routine and I like my preparations to be the best they can be and what works for me. So there’s a few, like when I do my mobility sessions, when I go to the pool, what time I eat, what time I wake up, time I try to go to sleep.

“I’m not like anal about certain things that are pointless, but if they’re things that I feel influence my performance, then I’ll do them, and I always do them the same leading up to every game because I like every game to feel the same.”

That makes the down time super important, because while much of the schedule is structured, players are quite often left to their own devices. Some spend it gaming, others calling loved ones back home, or exploring their new surroundings.

While we were speaking with Wright on Tuesday evening after their team dinner, his phone was lighting up with messages from teammates asking him to join them on a late night stroll through the streets of Adelaide.

Then there’s card games. Uno is the game of choice, which Wright admits he is relatively new to. But he was more than happy to throw others under the bus as the worst in the team.

“Song Ui-young has had a few punishments, that’s for sure. Or Ilhan Fandi. He won’t like that (but) he’s the worst,” he joked.

For all the preparation, however, everything eventually narrows to 90 minutes.

On Thursday night at Hindmarsh Stadium, the flights, hotel inspections, recovery protocols, hours of analysis and carefully curated routines disappeared from view.

All anyone saw was Lion City Sailors against Adelaide United. And, as Wright made clear two nights earlier, the result will ultimately shape how the entire trip is remembered.

On this occasion, it will be one worth remembering, with Wright captaining the side – in his 100th appearance for the club – to a deserved 2-0 win that prompted wild celebrations from the 45-strong travelling party.

“The gaffer made a clear point that we come here to win,” he remarked to The Asian Game afterwards. 

“We’re not here to take part, we’re here to win. That was clear from our intentions of the way we set up in training, how we set up today in the game, how we played.

“We wanted to win that game because we want to make trips like this memorable. It’s a great place to come, Adelaide, and it’s a great arena to come play football, but it’s an even better place to come and win.”

For Moreno, there was satisfaction too. After weeks spent trying to anticipate Adelaide, the match largely unfolded as expected. 

“It was the game that we expected – the formation, the structure, the patterns,” he said. “And also we adapt because they change some little things.”

But he was quick to give all the credit to the players who put everything they’d worked on into action.

“I can analyse everything but at the end the players are the main actors here.”

But even on the night itself, there was work behind the scenes – that Moreno wouldn’t elaborate on – that goes unseen.

“Not a lot of people know what is happening behind (the scenes),” he said.

“We had some problems before the game, but at the end players don’t need to know what is happening. The only thing is to give them the good information, the right information.

“And it looks like we didn’t do anything. But behind (the scenes) we have a lot of jobs to do.”

But even when the referee blew for full-time, the away day was not quite finished.

For Tran and her team, attention almost immediately turns towards getting everyone home.

“We will choose the earliest flight back to Singapore,” she explained, “because (when) we travel for ACL it will be (midweek) and usually the weekend after we have another game, so the players also need the rest time to be ready for the next game.”

On Sunday, the Sailors are due back in Singapore to face Balestier Khalsa, barely three days after walking off the pitch in Adelaide before facing Adelaide in the reverse fixture back in Singapore next week.

That compression is precisely what Qixiang is trying to manage.

As he explained, sitting on an aircraft for hours is “not the best for recovery,” particularly when continental fixtures are followed almost immediately by another domestic game. Speaking to Wright after the game, he had already switched his focus to recovery.

“It’s about eating the right things,” he explained. “It’s about enjoying the moment as well. These wins and hard-fought performances galvanise the group, really make you stronger and connected as a group.

“We’ll be together, we’ll enjoy our dinner tonight together as a team, (but) we’re ready to get on the plane early tomorrow.

“It’s about getting as much sleep as you can, eating the right things… get back to Singapore, get in a routine as quickly as possible, and just do our jobs.”

And there is little time wasted once Thursday night is over.

If the return flight is early – and in this case they had to be at the airport at 7.30am – Tran says the team will begin packing almost immediately after the match. Equipment will be packed at the stadium. If the team returns to the hotel late, there may not even be time for the kit to be washed.

It simply travels home dirty.

Then the process begins again.

For the supporters at Hindmarsh on Thursday night, Lion City Sailors’ away day will last 90 minutes. For the people inside the club, it began weeks ago.

And by the time most of the crowd had gone home, the next one had already started.

All Photos: Najwan Noor / Lion City Sailors FC