Funny how things coincide. With the bleary-eyed fatigue of watching 2 consecutive early-hours semi-finals, you don’t expect all these crowds at Sam Yan underground station. Eventually you twig. The fluffy toy animals, posies of flowers and wedding-thick make-up can mean only one thing.

Graduation.

And as your lethargic mind puts the two together, you realise that Thailand could teach the World Cup something.

Not on the football side of things. For those of you who are wondering why confusingly obscure countries like Slovenia (FIFA ranking 25, population 2 million) and Slovakia (FIFA ranking 34, population 5.5m) should be there and the Thai team (FIFA ranking 106, population 66.4m) absent, you should know that they did try.

Thailand had to start at Round 1 of the Asian group (no seeding to give them a bye to Round 3 such as Japan and South Korea had) where they comfortably swept past Macau (FIFA ranking 188, population just over half a million). They now came up against Yemen (FIFA ranking 112, population 23.5m), who had squeaked past the Maldives (FIFA ranking 129, population 0.4m).

A draw and a win put Thailand into the group stage of Round 3 where they were drawn with Japan (FIFA ranking 45, population 127m), Bahrain (FIFA ranking 69, population 0.7m) and Oman (FIFA ranking 91, population 3m). Thailand managed just one draw against Bahrain but otherwise it was a wash-out. Ho-hum and wait for another go next time round.

But even with second-string managers sent from (and largely paid by) England, I can’t see much hope of Thailand packing their kit bags for Brazil in 2014. No, it’s more in the way of crowd behaviour that Thailand can make its presence felt.

I mean, the spectators in South Africa haven’t done much for the reputation of the well-heeled supporters. And FIFA makes sure they are the better-off.

The cheapest ticket for a group game was US$80. So if you were a Ghanaian supporter with the national average income, you would be paying the equivalent of 3 weeks wages per game. Ghana made it to the quarter-finals, and if you saw each game, you would have spent a third of your annual income on the cheapest tickets available. Good job they didn’t score that last-gasp penalty and go on to the final, or it would have cost you almost your entire annual income.

So what do the privileged supporters from around the world do with the rest of their way-above-average income? They deck themselves in silly costumes and garish face-paint (which means they have to spend half the game ignoring the football and watching the big screen so they can wave to mum if the producer picks them out). And when they’re not incessantly honking on those zuluvulvas or whatever they’re called, their vocalizations are largely in a language that most primates would understand. When the occasional fan can be persuaded to use the gift of human speech, you discover that their moral universe is based on a touching if simple-minded belief that if you come from somewhere, then so does the best football team (pace those teams with players who claim nationality by parentage, grand-parentage and some whiffy nationality changes).

Even among the ones who can’t afford to turn up in person, one doesn’t see a great intellectual depth. The Bangkok Post’s subeditors think it warrants double columns of larger than normal font to give us such religious insights as:

Dear Uruguay, the Hand of God slapped you in the face
There is one God in football and that is Maradona
God is great. God will help Uruguay win the World Cup
The hand of God has been punished

The only organized crowd activity is the occasional Mexican wave when the play becomes even too dire for the hyper-excited fans.

The incorporation of some features of Thai student behaviour could really raise the whole tone of the affair. The prancing of the cheer-leaders and the disciplined if mindless chanting of tomorrow’s future graduates; the tastefully decorated graduation grottos where families can pose in front of the misspelled English slogan of their choice; the assumption that the intellectual competence required to earn a degree (modest though this may be) brings with it the responsibility to consume conspicuously and the right to assume moral superiority.

But what is most sadly lacking in the World Cup, especially one where the two finalists both represent monarchies, is the lack of respect for their own highest institutions. Every Thai sportsperson declares as a matter of course that they will be competing for the honour of His Majesty. The volume of material about the Dutch and Spanish squads is much more than I have been able to digest, but so far I have seen not a single player say anything similar concerning their own monarchs.

Tut-tut.

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).