Because I've been too busy doing stuff to write about it. This week promises to be a little quieter though, so I am attempting to catch up. First up then, last Wednesday's trip to a Korean football match.
The day
I was invited to go and see our local K-League team, Gangwon FC, play against Incheon Utd. The invitation was issued by Kim Dae Kwan, the captain of Jinbu AFC (more on them in a blog post soon), so not the kind of thing you can easily turn down. Not that I wanted to turn it down anyway. I had been wanting to see Gangwon play since I arrived here.
We set off at the suspiciously early time of 10am, bearing in mind that I live 50 minutes away from the stadium and the game didn't kick off until 3pm. Having been for a quick cup of coffee at Gyeongpo beach, we entered the stadium at the slightly strange time of 11.30am, three and a half hours before kick off. At least it allowed me to take a photo of the virtually empty ground.
Then we swiftly left again, and marched around a festival outside the ground for a while, without ever really stopping to look at anything. Then headed back to just outside the stadium where I met the team (see below) and bought a very fetching Gangwon FC baseball cap (also below). The kid with me in the photo is Kim Dae Hwan's son, Phil. Phil is his English name; often elementary school children here are allowed to give themselves names (hence one friend having a 'Killer' in his class). Phil has a younger sister called Do Hui. She tells me that her English name is Do Hui too. Good attitude that, hanging on to a bit of national pride.
I am essentially at this game as a bit of English practice for Phil. His father only speaks a few words, but Phil has admirable command of English for a 12 year old boy. We spend a good deal of the day talking and he understands an impressive amount of what I say. He even manages to communicate on the phone with me before I am picked up. Given how much I hate making phone calls even in English, let alone another language, I have a lot of respect for Phil, and I don't really mind being a bit of English practice when it gets me taken to football games for free.
We get back into the stadium, with a picnic, at just past 12pm. It is still almost deserted, so it is rather surprising that the entire party proceeds to climb up the steps all the way to the highest, furthest back row of seats to sit down. Let me just clarify this. We are at a football stadium three hours before the game, with nothing to do except eat lunch, and we have chosen to sit to sit right at the back of the bloody stadium. Accuse me of cultural insensitivity or ingratitude if you want, but it just seems bizarre that given the preponderance of nice places to picnic in Gangneung, that you would choose to go to a football stadium so early, unless you were after the best, rather than THE ABSOLUTE WORST seats in the house. Sometimes, Korea is absolutely mental.
And so we eat, and then sit and watch not very much at all taking place on the pitch. A few of the Incheon fans gather and unfurl a banner which is completely incomprehensible (see below). Some of Kim Dae Kwan's friends arrive. They are drunk, and proceed to ply me with beer and soju mixed together, and keep handing me pieces of the most awful tasting dried fish. This wasn't exactly what I had in mind to pass the time with. At least then we get a Tae Kwon Do demonstration (always hugely impressive) and some dancers, though we are far too far away to really appreciate (or photograph) it properly. All the while, the "Orange Army" (below again) begins to gather in anticipation of the big game.
I'll deal with the game separately, but by far the most entertaining thing that I saw during the day was the half time entertainment, in which around 30 schoolboys took on 6 Gangwon FC professionals in one of the stranger footballing spectacles I've ever witnessed. The photo below doesn't do justice to the sight of 30 kids chasing around after a few grown men, with the men doing their level best not to decapitate them with a lofted pass. This was proper schoolboy football, with not a semblance of tactical or positional awareness, just a multi-legged mass of black and white gamely following the ball. Korea (I may have mentioned this before) is mental.
The game itself
The match was good entertainment all in all. Compared to the last professional football match I went to (Municipal vs. Cremas in Guatemala City) the skill level was a lot higher and the football more entertaining. At the risk of making generalisations based on one game (and a bit of first hand experience), Korean football tends to favour an uptempo passing game with the ball largely kept on the floor. It soon transpires that Incheon United are a lot more adept at this than my newly adopted team so it's a huge surprise when GFC take the lead after some terrible marking at our first corner, and pretty much our first venture into the opposition half.
I think that watching football could be entertaining here, as Korean players don't seem to be overly preoccupied with defending. Gangwon suffer less than most owing to the presence of the giant Stipe Lapic at centre back. He's not unlike Nemana Vidic in appearance, and so is literally and figuratively a giant in this league. I lose count of the number of saving tackles that he makes in the first half alone. Sadly, there is little he can do when another Incheon attack finds an unmarked man at the far post and it's 1-1 at half time.
Above and below: first half action.
The second half gets under way and Incheon quickly go 2-1 up. A Gangwon defeat seems inevitable, but the crowd seem to be having a good time. I take a quick swing around the stadium with my camera to capture the atmosphere:
It's actually not the best atmosphere as the ground is at best two thirds full (despite my being told that we were going early as it was going to be a sellout) but there is plenty of noise being made (see below) and everyone seems to be getting into the swing of things. However, the athletics track around the pitch means that the game always feels a little too far away, which is a shame.
One thing I did enjoy about the game was the amount that the referee let the players get away with. In general the game flows a lot better over here and using your body against an opponent is more or less legitimate. This was demonstrated when, on a rare Gangwon attack, our striker is hauled down just outside the penalty area. The ref waves play on to the disgust of the home support, but that disgust turns to delight when the GFC striker gets back to his feet, robs the ball back from the defender that felled him, and heads into the penalty area, where the same defender makes absolutely sure this time and crunches him to the ground again. Incredible scenes, and Gangwon have a penalty with 10 minutes left to potentially rescue a point. I'm going to let my camerawork tell the story of what happened:
Yep, disappointingly the penalty was saved and Gangwon never really looked like scoring again. I was driven home for a nap, and the Incheon supporters left to go and think up some more unfathomable slogans in English. Good day though. Apparently we're going back on the 27th May, and this time we're leaving at 5.30pm for a 7 o clock kick off. Maybe, just maybe, we're learning.
More very very soon,
A
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