Singaporebrides | Fine Dining
March 2014
What A Match!
You’ll remember Derrick Poh, 31, Lifeskills Educator and Josephine Cheang, 27, Admin Executive, who scored the Grand Prize in our Most Memorable Moments contest, for being the football crazy couple. Read on to find out how they met their match in each other, and fulfilled their goal of celebrating with a fun football-themed wedding, and guests who were game enough to attend in jerseys on 5 October 2013.
How did the two of you meet?
We met online! It was unexpected because both of our friends asked us to try using this now defunct website and we responded to each other’s initial email and decided to meet up. We were friends for about 6 months before we decided to try being an item.
What was the proposal like?
Josephine: It was unexpected. He proposed to me on a football field! He had disguised it as a friend’s birthday celebration and told me that that friend wanted to celebrate it by playing a football game. There were close to 15 people involved and all kept it a secret! When he scored, he brought me onto the pitch and onto the centre circle to propose! The rest of the team mates revealed that all important question on the underside of their shirts, and after I said “Yes”, magically, the numbers on the back of their jerseys formed the date of our wedding – 5, 10, 20, 13. Moreover, I was expecting the proposal to come on other significant dates like birthdays or our anniversary but he selected his friend’s birthday on 11.11.11 which totally caught me off guard.
Bet the planning team got a kick out of the surprise! Tell us how the football theme carried through in the wedding planning.
We started planning in early 2012. There were a lot of things that we needed to secure quickly because we had already decided on the date. A couple of the things we looked out for early on was for a church venue for the Holy Matrimony as well as the hotel for the banquet. We settled on those nearly 1.5 years in advance.
Because we didn’t want our gate crash to be a normal sort of gate crash, we planned a very special project. We had planned it to be – you guessed it – in the form of a football match and it was a game between two clubs, the brothers’ “Men United” and the sisters’ “Real Tekan”. We filmed it two weeks prior to the actual day. Every tackle in the game symbolized a tekan by the sisters and the scoring of the goal by the brothers symbolized the gate crash! Our friend then took the raw footage and made it to look just like how a football game is televised on TV in Singapore. The whole process actually took a year of planning and execution because we had to rent a green screen studio to replicate the studio shot.
So did you hit all your football themed goals?
Our entire wedding was focused on the Football theme, because besides God, this was our other common passion. Every aspect of the wedding was linked back to the theme, we marched out in our specially printed football jerseys and we even had Derrick’s brother build a life size replica of a goal post to act as a photo backdrop as well as to display our wedding pictures!
Table numbers were also displayed using the jersey numbers of players from both our favourite teams – Arsenal and Man United, instead of the usual hotel display. And to make it very memorable for everyone, guests were strongly encouraged to come dressed in the jerseys of their favourite football teams! The sisters even prepared personalized chocolates with our football caricature on it!
The day was very tiring for us as we had the Holy Matrimony at 11am, followed by the tea ceremony, before heading down to the hotel for the Banquet at 5pm. But thank God that everything went smoothly, the service by Grand Park City Hall was impeccable and our team of friends who helped us really did a fantastic job as well.
I’m sure your family and friends must have had a lot to say about your wedding.
We had set out to make our wedding memorable, not just for us, but for the guests and we were very happy that months after our wedding, we still have people coming up to us to tell us how fun our wedding was.
Food was very tasty, the football videos that we filmed was well received, even by non football fans. And a lot of the guests felt that this was a very different and creative wedding. We are just glad that all our efforts had paid off and that the guests were entertained and enjoyed themselves.
Were there any moments that were particularly special to you?
The marching in in our football attire was special, as well as seeing the guests all decked out in their football jerseys. Some of them specially went out of their way to borrow jerseys from their friends, and I know it’s especially difficult for ladies to find the female cut. But they did! Others with extra jerseys went around asking if anyone else needed, some even brought the extras on the actual day to pass to anyone just in case they didn’t have. That was what made it special. We love all these friends who had made our day so so special.
Her Gown: Bridal Concept
His Suit: Bridal Concept
The Venue: Living Hope Methodist Church, Grand Park City Hall
The Caterer: Neo Garden
The Florist: Annie of Beaucreation.com
The Makeup Artist and Hairstylist: Carmen Chan
The Photographer: Ting of Lightedpixels Pixies, Kenji Kwok and Glen Tan
The Videographer: Reddot Studio
Image credits:
Pre-wedding images by Kenji Kwok
Gatecrash game images by Glen Tan
Actual day images by Lightedpixels Pixies
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