Sarawut Treephan took over a sick man’s team in March, lifted the League Cup in May and finished second. Five weeks into the new season he is gone, replaced by Božidar Bandović. It is a brutal decision. It may also be the right one, because the thing that has been wrong at Khlong Toei since the spring was never really the coach.

There has been a quiet around the club since the loss to Sukhothai. Not the quiet of contentment — Port supporters do not do contentment, it is against the constitution of the place — but the flatter, wearier quiet of people who have decided, more or less collectively, that they are not being told the truth.

On Friday the club broke it. Two graphics went out within minutes of each other. One, in muted gold, thanked Sarawut Treephan, “Coach Oud”, the man pictured holding the League Cup he won four months ago. The other, in the club’s furious red, welcomed Božidar Bandović, a 57-year-old Montenegrin with two Thai League titles, a Vietnamese Super Cup and a CV that reads like a train timetable. Fifteen jobs in seventeen years. The longest of them, at Buriram United, was the best thing anyone has done in this league in the last decade. The shortest, at Prachuap, lasted seven matches.

The club’s slogan sits at the top of both images: One Team, One Goal. Nobody at Port has believed that for some time. That, more than a defeat at Sukhothai, is what Friday was about.

The wound that did not close

To understand why a coach with a cup and a second-place finish can be dismissed after three league games, you have to go back to a hospital bed in Bangkok in February.

Alexandre Gama, the Brazilian who had rebuilt Port in his own image over eight months, developed a dry cough that would not go away. Two and a half weeks later he was admitted to hospital with what turned out to be pneumonia, a diagnosis that — by his own account to this website — nobody managed to explain to him in a language he understood. He was there for 22 days. He lost 16 kilograms. When he asked to go home to Brazil to recover, the club’s answer, as he recalled it, was short.

Alexandre Gama, to Football Siam: “We need to cancel the contract, simple like this.”

Sarawut, his assistant, took charge on 3 March. Gama’s farewell post did not appear until 15 May, by which time the club had long since moved on. It was gracious, as these things always are. It thanked the president, the players, the supporters. It talked about a “special chapter”. It did not talk about the manner of the ending, and it did not need to, because everyone in Khlong Toei already knew.

That is the ill feeling. It is not that Gama was sacked — coaches get sacked, and Port sack more than most. It is that a man who had done nothing wrong except get seriously ill was shown the door while he was still weak, and then watched from Brazil as the team he built, playing the system he built, with the left-winger and right-winger and left-back he chose, went on to win a cup and finish second. He now sits third in the table with Uthai Thani, three places and not a single point above the club that let him go. Port fans are not stupid. They can count.

What Sarawut inherited, and what he did with it

None of this is Sarawut’s fault, and it should be said plainly that he did his job. He is 46, from Nakhon Si Thammarat, a former right-back with a SEA Games gold medal from 2001, and a Port man through and through. This was his third spell in charge. The first, in 2020–21, produced 18 wins in 33 matches. The second, as caretaker in 2021–22, ended with him resigning in February 2022 to “take responsibility” for a run that had brought one league win and a seventh-place finish. He has always understood how this club works: the results are yours, the credit belongs to the board.

From March he did not lose a league match. He kept Gama’s shape, which the players were honest enough to acknowledge in public, and rode a squad at the top of its game to a 1-0 League Cup final win over Pathum United on 24 May in front of 16,807, Imron Hayiyusoh’s goal ending a 16-year wait for that trophy. Port finished on 60 points, 18 wins, six draws, six defeats, 59 scored and 23 conceded. The full-time job followed, and with it a summer transfer window that told you everything about where the club thought it was heading: Erik Sviatchenko from Houston Dynamo, Jude Soonsup-Bell on a four-year deal, Rui Costa, Bruno Moreira, Marcel Scalese, a Brazilian influx made possible by the end of the ASEAN quota.

Michael Falkesgaard, in these pages three weeks ago, described the new approach as “fast formation”: shape by opponent, not by dogma.

Michael Falkesgaard: “For me the formation isn’t that important. It’s more about how we adapt to the opposition, and about playing to the strengths of whoever’s on the pitch.”

It sounded a lot like a goalkeeper being loyal to a coach who did not yet have a plan of his own.

The three weeks that ended it

The record this season is not disastrous. It is worse than that: it is ambiguous, and ambiguity is what gets coaches sacked at ambitious clubs.

The opening win at newly promoted Rasisalai needed an 86th-minute goal from Marcel and was celebrated, as we wrote at the time, “with the particular relief reserved for stolen points”. Lamphun Warrior were beaten by a penalty and a substitute, Teerasak Poeiphimai, off the bench on 77 minutes; the team looked stretched at the back and reliant on individuals. Then Vissel Kobe, then Sukhothai, where Peeradon Chamratsamee scored inside two minutes and Port had 70 per cent of the ball, eight shots on target and an expected goals figure of 2.99 to Sukhothai’s 1.15, and still lost. That is the sort of defeat a board can read either way. This one read it as evidence.

Behind it sat the August exit from the Indonesian President’s Cup, a competition Port had won the year before, and the wider sense in the stands that a squad assembled to win the title was being managed rather than coached. Sixth place, six points from nine, is not a crisis. But Buriram are already ahead, Rayong and Uthai Thani — Gama’s Uthai Thani — are ahead, and the ACL Elite group contains Kobe, Kashiwa, Gamba, Kashima, Shanghai Port, Beijing Guoan and Johor. A club that put this much money into a squad was never going to wait for the table to make the decision for it.

The case for doing it now

Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone who liked Sarawut, which is most people: the fans wanted this.

Not out of any dislike of the man. Out of exhaustion with the arrangement. Every good result since March has been credited, quietly and not always fairly, to Gama’s blueprint. Every bad one has been Sarawut’s. He was the caretaker who never stopped being the caretaker, and the club’s decision to give him the job in the summer, rather than go and find a coach of genuine stature to match the recruitment, was read in the stands as a board saving money on the one position where it should not.

The supporters’ grievance, in other words, was with the club, not the coach, and the club has done the only thing that addresses it: it has gone out and hired someone with a record. Whether Bandović is that someone is a fair question. That the fans wanted a proper appointment is not.

Who is Božidar Bandović?

Born in Nikšić, Montenegro, on 30 August 1969, Bandović was a defender of the hard, unlovely, useful kind. He came through at Sutjeska, played two seasons at Red Star Belgrade and won the Yugoslav Cup in 1993, then spent the rest of his career in Greece: Ethnikos Piraeus, Paniliakos, a season at Olympiacos, a season at PAOK. He stopped playing in 2002 and went straight into coaching, and it is the Greek years that shaped him — assistant at Olympiacos under two different regimes, caretaker there in 2009, head coach for five months in 2010.

His managerial career divides into two halves, and Port are betting on the first one.

Between June 2017 and October 2020 he was the best coach in Thailand. He won the league with Buriram in 2017 and again in 2018, the second of them with a record 87 points and a run of 15 consecutive victories that still stands. He was Coach of the Year. He took Buriram to the AFC Champions League round of 16 in 2018 and won the Champions Cup in 2019. His overall record at the club was 87 wins, 24 draws and 23 defeats, a win rate just under 65 per cent — numbers this league has not seen from a foreign coach before or since. Port supporters of a certain vintage will remember his Buriram side, because it beat most people, Port included, and did so with a compact, direct, physically relentless style that made the Thunder Castle feel like a fortress in a way it has not since.

The second half is more complicated. He left Buriram in October 2020, spent seven unhappy months at Chennaiyin in the Indian Super League, and then had his second great season, at Hà Nội in 2023: a Super Cup, the V.League Coach of the Year award, and the sack in October anyway. He came straight back to Thailand and took the Prachuap job, which lasted from October to December and seven matches, two of them won. Vojvodina in Serbia followed, eight months and a respectable 13 wins in 29. Then, in January this year, Radnički 1923 of Kragujevac, ten matches, one win, and a parting by mutual consent on 11 April that he described himself as an “unsuccessful mission”.

Across 357 games as a head coach he has won 166, drawn 85 and lost 106. The pattern is unmistakable: give him a squad with real quality and a board prepared to let him run it, and he wins titles. Give him a rescue job, and he tends not to be there long enough to finish it.

What he walks into

Port are not a rescue job. That is the point. This is a squad that finished second and then spent heavily, with a goalkeeper who has already won here, a centre-back who talks like a coach-in-waiting, and forwards — Teerasak, Lucas Tocantins, Kaká Mendes, Peeradon — who between them scored 37 league goals last season. The defence that concedes 2.99-xG-against-1.15 defeats at Sukhothai is a problem of organisation, and organisation is Bandović’s trade; his Buriram sides were built from the back, and won 15 in a row doing it.

The bigger job is the one Sarawut never quite got round to. The summer signings have to be integrated, and quickly. Jude Soonsup-Bell was given a four-year contract and has so far been given cameos; Ruan Ribeiro scored in the ASEAN Club Championship in July and has barely been seen since; Rui Costa arrived from Farense with a reputation and no clear role. Three forwards signed to change the team, all still waiting to be trusted with it. Bandović has spent his best years turning expensive foreign attackers into a functioning unit within weeks, and Port need that trick now, not in December.

And then there is Seksan Ratree. Plenty of people in Thai football call him the Thai Jude Bellingham, and for once the comparison is about the profile rather than the hype: a midfielder who arrives late, carries the ball through the lines and scores goals a midfielder should not be scoring. He is the most valuable young player at the club, and he has spent the first three weeks of the season being played as if he were a useful squad member rather than the point of the team. If Bandović does one thing before the Pattani game, it should be to work out what Seksan is for, and then build the midfield around the answer.

He also walks into a stadium that has been asking, since February, whether the people who run the club are honest with the people who pay for it. He cannot answer that. What he can do is give the Khlong Toei crowd a team that looks like it has been coached, and a reason to argue about football again instead of about the board. The international break gives him a fortnight. Persib Bandung visit in the ASEAN Club Championship on 8 October, Pattani in the league on the 11th, then Kashiwa Reysol in the Champions League on the 14th.

Port have changed head coach more than ten times since 2019, counting repeat spells. The club treats the position the way a certain kind of owner treats it everywhere: as the one variable that can be changed quickly when the others cannot. Sarawut deserved better than to be the variable. Gama certainly did. But if Bandović is given what he was given at Buriram — a good squad and a quiet boardroom — then Port may finally have hired a coach who can make the slogan on the graphics mean something.

One team. One goal. It would be a start.