Delusions of Grandeur Pt. 1

So where was I? Oh yeah, the hype that surrounded the Cinderella run of the South Korean men’s team in World Cup 2002.

Well, for starters, you have to understand how little this country knew about soccer; the Busan Icons generally don’t have more than a few hundred supporters in the stands when they play at home, yet it’s a city of more than 4 million people.

Having only enjoyed the freedoms of a democracy for the past 18 years or so, it’s very easy for Koreans to slip into a fad or jump in the crowd anonymously. For most of their existance, they’d been told what to eat, what to wear, what to say, what to believe, and to this day, that’s a habit that’s hard to break. So when you’re told you must wear red shirts, clean up your streets, offer help to foreigners, you do what you’re told. Check out the Red Devils official website, but I think it’s only in Korean so far.

Things progressed quite smoothly, actually. There were only three games played in Busan, all in the group stages; France vs. Paraguay, South Africa vs. Uruguay, and Korea vs Poland. Getting tickets for the latter was impossible, but I managed to swing tickets for the other two games. Some of my friends got tickets for the 3rd place match in Ulsan (which ended up being Korea’s swan song, but who knew?).

For the Poland match, I was thoroughly impressed; the team wasn’t the least bit nervous, despite a packed stadium crowd, and Poland was outplayed for much of the game, so when the final score ended up 2:0 in favour of the home side, it was truly just. The BBC always has the best coverage of any game, so check it out.

The streets of Pusan were mad, however–this was the first recorded win by South Korea in a World Cup. EVERYBODY took too the streets, and amazingly enough, cleaned up all the streamers and junk after the madness subsided. This was in large part because of the media surrounding the event; local and national papers went to great pains to stress out the importance of keeping the city clean.

The stadium went on to host the two other games previously mentioned, but turned out a loss when both games ended up selling perhaps 50% of the tickets available. Something Fifa should understand when deciding where to hold the tournament is the popularity of the sport on a nation to nation basis. The average Korean isn’t exactly loaded, and the tickets were overpriced to begin with. When you saw matches hosted in Korea on the TV, they put huge banners over the entire front row sections, as most of those tickets went unsold.