Trail of the Lion King

My main plan for the day involved watching Paju Citizen play Cheonan in the Challengers league. That game wasn’t due to start until seven in the evening though and so I had enough time to take in the early kick-off game between Jungnang Mustang Chorus and Namyangju United as well.

It’s a one hour ride from Yeoksam to Yangwon subway station. Then if you come out of exit two and turn left, it’s another five minutes walk past the Jungnang Camping ground.

On the subway.

I’d been to see Jungnang play earlier in the year. It was their second game of the season, their first ever season, and life was looking rosy for them. They won that game to make it two victories from their opening two fixtures and I suspect at that time they thought that they would be on for a decent season.

They’ve slipped a bit since then though and you could make a case for them being the third worst team in the third tier. The good news for them today was that they were playing a side that are generally regarded as the second worst team in the league, Namyangju. The visitors had lost all of their previous fourteen games, with their last victory coming as a consequence of being able to face Seoul Martyrs, undisputedly the worst team in Korea.

I arrived just as the teams were lining up for the handshaking. The weather was much nicer than the last time I’d been here, it had snowed then whilst today was a sunny autumnal day.

View from the far corner.

There were about a hundred people watching, mainly old blokes, but the odd family or group of kids. There weren’t any of the fans that you might class as ’ultras’ and so we had no singing or drums. In fact, the only real crowd noise that we got was a collective “Aaiiisshh“ whenever Jungnang missed a reasonable chance.

That’s about half of the crowd.

The opening exchanges were fairly even with both sides showing plenty of intent to get the ball into the opposition box. Namyangju, in black and white stripes, hit the bar after ten minutes whilst Jungnang, in yellow shirts and black shorts, replied in kind a little later.

Jungnang on the attack.

As we approached the half-hour mark Jungnang broke the deadlock when Yoon Pil Joo took advantage of a sloppy Namyangju backpass and rounded the keeper before rolling the ball into the empty net.

A few minutes later the home side doubled their lead. A deep cross towards the back post found some player whose name I don’t know in plenty of space and he finished well as a Namyangju defender desperately tried to get close enough to get a foot in.

Two – nil.

Kim Jong Chul was the pick of the Namyangju players. He’s a slightly overweight striker who you just know will have been the best player at every team he’s ever played for since being a small child. Sometimes though, that’s not enough to make it to the top.

Star of the show for Jungnang was one of their defensive midfielders. I don’t know his name so I’ll just call him Doh Rhee Vah in tribute to one of the less lauded members of the Boro’s Carling Cup winning team. Neat and tidy, he was always there to take a pass or put a foot in. He’s cleverly dyed his hair orange so that when combined with his yellow shirt he can ghost in unnoticed against the autumn foliage backdrop and nick the ball away from an opponent who won’t have seen him coming.

Kim Jong Chul practices his horse dance as Doh Rhee Vah appears from nowhere to steal the ball.

Namyangju kept the score down to two until the sixty fifth minute. A free-kick was floated into their box and it bobbled around for longer than it should have before Jeong Seong lashed it home. Yoon Pil Joo then added a fourth with fifteen minutes to go by cutting in from the left and curling a right-footed shot into the far corner. Someone else got a fifth. I’d given up keeping track by that stage.

That’s how it finished. Jungnang gave their flagging season a timely boost whilst Namyangju extended their losing run to fifteen. The good news for them is that in two weeks time they will get another crack at a Seoul Martyrs side that were beaten 17-0 later in the day. Imagine trying to keep up with the scorers in that one.

And so with my attention turning to Paju v Cheonan I strolled back down to the subway station for the journey across town.

Tags: challengers league, doriva, horse dance, jungnang Mustang chorus, korean football, namyangju, soccer

This entry was posted on October 29, 2012 at 5:10 am and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.