Trail of the Lion King

There was no way that my son Tom could spend a fortnight in Korea and pass up the opportunity of seeing the Boro’s greatest ever Korean player, Lee Dong Gook. After all, he’d been there for half of the goals that the Lion King had scored for Middlesbrough. I, on the other hand, hadn’t seen either of them.

So, on a rainy Sunday morning, Tom, Jen and I caught the bus to Jeonju  from Seoul Central City station to see the Jeonbuk v Seongnam game. Tom was pretty impressed with the luxury bus. I don’t think we have buses with a two and one seating configuration in the UK. Certainly I don’t remember ever travelling anywhere over there and having such a large reclinable seat.

He was also quite taken with the service station and the bowls of roast potatoes that you can buy there. I’ve grown accustomed to a lot of the things that he’s seeing for the first time so it’s quite nice to get  the odd reminder of some of the differences.

We got to Jeonju at about two o’clock. As the match didn’t kick off for another five hours we had a wander around the Hanok Village. On the face of it, this is a bit of Jeonju’s history, a place where you can see the old fashioned single-storey houses that most folk lived in before apartment blocks took over. The reality though is that they are being constantly refurbished and upgraded. It’s only about eight months since Jen and I were last there and already since then there are a couple of new Italian restaurants, a Paris Baguette cafe and a few more art and craft places.

Just wait until someone invents 'upstairs'.

We followed up the Hanok Village visit with a wander along the market by the river. There wasn’t much in the way of livestock, a bucket or two of eels, but there were plenty of chicken carcasses displayed in the heat and attracting the flies. We watched a mouse scampering around the boxes of vegetables at one stall whilst the owner stretched out on a bench and caught up on her sleep.

With an hour to go to kick-off we caught a taxi up to the World Cup Stadium. It takes around fifteen minutes from Jeonju centre. After sorting the tickets for behind the goal we got some free beer at the Hite van.  Again, I’ve got used to stuff like that but it’s not something Tom encounters too often in the UK.

Free beer. Really.

We took our seats behind the goal where for the first time since the day before I was able to have a beer with my son whilst watching a football match. Why does it have to be like that? We used to go to rugby games a lot where drinking in your seat is seen as perfectly normal. At the cricket you’d be regarded as a bit odd if you didn’t have a drink in your hand. But football is different. Even once the game became fashionable after Euro 96 things still didn’t change.

Jeonbuk fans.

Fortunately Lee Dong Gook was in the starting line up. It would have been a bit rough if Tom had travelled six thousand miles to see him warm the bench. There was no place for Luiz Henrique but Croatian striker Krunoslav Lovrek was starting on the left side of midfield. It didn’t take Jeonbuk long to take the lead, an own goal from Jeong Ho Jeong putting the home team ahead.

Almost another one for Jeonbuk.

Twenty minutes into the second half Kim Dong Chan made it two with a well-taken finish after Lee Dong Gook had controlled the ball on the edge of the box and played him in. We cleared off five minutes before the final whistle in an attempt to get a taxi to Iksan station. It didn’t work though and we ended up having to walk for about fifteen minutes to the junction of the main road into Jeonju. We flagged one down before long though and got to the station with about ten minutes to spare before our train departed.

The win took Jeonbuk six points clear at the top of the table with eleven games to play whilst the defeat for last seasons Asian Champions League winners Seongnam dropped them to second from bottom.

After watching the game between Suwon City and Mokpo in the afternoon, Tom and I decided that we would take in a second National League match. Ansan is only sixteen kilometres from Suwon and so we just hopped in a cab. We could have got the subway but there are fourteen stops between Suwon and Gojan stations and I suspected that it would have taken all of the hour that we had to spare between the games.

The taxi wasn’t much quicker mind, taking forty minutes, and it was certainly more expensive at twenty two thousand won. It did have the advantage of efficient air-conditioning though and there are times when I’d happily pay a lot more money than that for forty minutes in the cold. Conveniently there is an enormous Lotte supermarket underneath the Wa Stadium and we called in and picked up a couple of litre bottles of Cass each. The novel opportunity, for Tom at least, of being able to drink whilst watching a football match was one that couldn’t really be missed.

One day all supermarkets will be like this.

It was just after kick-off time when we got to one of the stadium entrances. It was locked. Nothing unusual there though, as there is often just a single gate open. What was a little more worrying was that we could see the pitch and there weren’t any players on it.  I did wonder if I’d got the time or the date mixed up. We’d already seen one game that afternoon, so with a couple of litres of beer in hand it didn’t seem like that big an issue.

We walked further around the stadium and as we got to the other side we could hear the sounds of a football match in progress. Players shouting, a ref’s whistle, the murmuring of the crowd and enough drums to start a marching jazz band. It seems that, like the Suwon Big Bird, the Wa Stadium has a practice pitch next to it. Just before we got there we noticed an open gate to the main stadium so we went in for a look around at the slightly more impressive neighbour.

Big, but not much going on.

It’s very nice really, although a little excessive for a National League team with a few hundred fans. Ten minutes or so after kick-off we made our way into the practice pitch and were directed around the running track to a stand that ran the length of the pitch. It was only about four seats deep but it probably held five or six hundred people. It was just about full and the only option for Tom and I was to stand at the back. It was all working out pretty well. If we could stand at the Boro and drink from litre bottles of beer whilst watching the game then you’d get no complaints from us.

The view as we came in. Hallelujah are in white.

We had five drummers to our right, just by the long jump sandpit that was keeping the younger fans busy. They kept up a steady beat throughout the game and led the chants. I joined in with “Hallelujah, Hallelujah” as due to me not being much of a church-goer, I don’t often get a chance to do that.

Five drummers drumming

Hallelujah was formed by Christian missionaries apparently and  like all good missionaries have been moving about a bit, spreading the word about the benefits of keeping faith in the big fella. Particularly if you have a decent winger putting the ball into the box for him. Ho-hum. They were booted out of Iksan by stroppy Buddhists and then had a spell in Gimpo before settling in the promised land of Ansan a few years ago.

The score was nil-nil as we arrived and it was still that way at half-time. The football was a lot better than we’d seen earlier in the day at Suwon, with a lot more movement off the ball. Surprising really as Hallelujah are struggling near the bottom of the table, whilst Korail aren’t a great deal better off. Perhaps both teams crapness made the other look good.

Not much brotherly love in that challenge.

Korail took the lead ten minutes into the second half as Lee In Kyu knocked the ball home at the back post. Hallelujah were never out of it though, or at least not until five minutes from time when Korail clinched the points with an Ahn Byung Gun header. At the final whistle the Hallelujah players dropped to their knees and had a collective prayer session. No doubt thanking the Lord that there isn’t any relegation from the National League to the Challengers League.

Thank you God for keeping the rain away. And the stroppy Iksan Buddhists.

Tom and I got  the subway from Gojan back to Yeoksam. It didn’t take much more than an hour and so I’ll probably nip back at some point to watch Hallelujah play in the main stadium. Maybe even combine it with getting a few groceries in.

My son Tom is visiting me at the moment. It’s not the best time of year for a holiday in Korea with the rainy season having dragged on for longer than is usual and with the dry days being hot enough to make you want to dodge from one air-conditioned building to another. Still, you have to be somewhere and I understand that the weather in Teesside isn’t too clever at the moment either.

Like me, he is happy enough to watch football in most conditions and so we decided to take in Suwon City’s game with Mokpo in the National League. For those that don’t know, the National League is the second of the three divisions. Suwon City are actually the reigning champions, defending their title because there is currently no promotion and relegation. There is speculation that the match-fixing scandal will change this and that from next season it will be four-up and four-down between the top two divisions. That strikes me as an unneccessarily large step for what are currently leagues of sixteen and fourteen teams respectively. It will be interesting to see what happens if one of the clubs owned by a large corporation ends up in the bottom four. I’d expect that some West Ham style cheating from the Korean FA will take place to allow the status quo to be maintained.

It took us quite a while to work out where Suwon City play their games. Googling them or looking on various websites gives different venues. According to the source, they either play at the Suwon Civil Stadium, or the nearby Kyunngi-Seat stadium, or the practice pitch next to the Suwon Big Bird World Cup Stadium. In the end we gambled on the practice pitch but we got Jen to write down the names of the other grounds in Korean just in case we had to made a tour of Suwon by taxi.

We took the subway to Sadang and then the 7001 bus to Suwon. Tom seemed to have charmed a couple of old biddies on the way there in a way that I never seem to these days. Perhaps I’m too old for them

Seoul subway

Getting the bus is far quicker than doing the whole journey by tube and there is a stop  right next to the Bluewings stadium. We stayed on board though and went a bit further into town in search of some air-conditioned lunch. Tom didn’t seem too keen on still-wriggling squid legs or a few silkworm pupae, so we had a pizza and then wandered back up towards the Big Bird stadium. There were signs along the road that appeared to date from the 2002 World Cup. Korea is developing at such a pace that I was surprised to see them and I doubt that they will still be there in five years time.

This way to the Big Bird.

We had a look around the outside of the Suwon World Cup Stadium. Tom was pretty impressed by the open-air exercise equipment, speculating that it would be quickly weighed in for scrap value in the UK. The practice pitch is shown on the maps of the area near the main stadium and so it wasn’t too difficult to find. There was a single stand, a running track and a couple of tents for the players to get changed in.

The players were led out a good fifteen minutes before the kick-off time. They have to be, there is that much for them to do these days. They were presented to some old bloke out of the crowd, they posed for photos with the mascots, kicked footballs in to the stand and as has become compulsory stood with one hand in the air and made a solemn promise only to take bribes if it’s definitely worth their while.

"We promise not to spend our bribes on hookers and fast cars"

There were probably two hundred or so people in the stand including what looked like a couple of kid’s football teams. It’s a free afternoon out after all, albeit one without air-conditioning.

Suwon were in red and blue stripes with red shorts whilst Mokpo wore blue shirts and white shorts. The Mokpo players looked a lot taller overall than their Suwon counterparts. Away keeper Cho Sang Won must have been at least 6’4“ and he had a couple of ugly looking centre halves of a similar height in front of him. I doubted that Suwon would have much joy at set pieces.

View towards the main stand. Actually, it's the only stand.

I was wrong of course. Twenty odd minutes in a Suwon corner was flicked on and then scrambled home from about three yards. The Mokpo coach was sat a few feet away from us in the stand and he wasn’t too pleased. 

The football in general was quite poor with players going to ground easily, misplaced passes and little movement off the ball. There were plenty of niggling fouls too that disrupted any flow that might have developed.

Hand of God?

At the interval the subs warmed up on the pitch and it looked as if each side had nine or ten of them, which seems a little excessive to me. Although I’ve no idea how much, if anything, players at this level earn. If you aren’t paying them anything then I don’t suppose it costs much more to have an extra few bodies on the bench.

In the second half we got more of the same, the highlight being a well deserved equaliser from Mokpo’s Hong Deok Jong. The Suwon goalie got his fingers to the shot from the edge of the box but it was too well placed to keep out.

A Suwon defender wellies it upfield.

The game finished one each with the point not being enough to move Mokpo off the foot of the table whilst Suwon remained on course for the end of season play-offs.

Going to the match, any match, is quite difficult in Korea at the moment.  The rainy season is scuppering the baseball and in what seems to me to be really inconsiderate timing the second and third division football teams are on their holidays. Despite starting and finishing their seasons at roughly the same time as the K-League, the teams in the National and Challengers leagues knock off to the beach for six and eight weeks respectively in the summer.

So what does that leave? Not much really. I think if the weather had been better then I’d probably have looked to get up a mountain somewhere. Ice hockey would be the perfect solution. An arena with the air conditioning set cold enough to stop ice from melting? That sounds just about perfect. But, no, it’s a winter sport so I’ll have to wait until the weather is just as cold outside as inside and it doesn’t seem anything like as attractive in those circumstances.

Sometimes though, something crops up that makes a particular game irresistible, and that was the case with the Sangju Sangmu’s visit to Seoul.

South Korean football is going through a crisis at the moment with around a hundred top-flight players under investigation for match-fixing or gambling on their own games. So far, forty odd have been indicted, with ten being banned for life and one getting ten months in chokey. More players are being lifted each day, with most clubs being affected either through having taken part in a fixed game or by having subsequently signed a player who did.

However, even amongst misery you can usually find a positive and this week it came from Sangju Sangmu. The military team is one of those teams most involved, with fifteen of its players either under investigation or already banned. Three of those players ruled out are goalkeepers, leaving them with just last season’s Jeonbuk keeper Kwon Soon Tae.

Now, when you are the only remaining goalie on the books, you’d be careful wouldn’t you? You’d keep your fingers away from the bacon slicer or dogs with large teeth. You’d probably try not to strain your back whilst reaching for the remote control for your telly as David James once managed to do, or to sever a tendon in your foot by dropping a jar of salad cream on it in the way that another former England goalie, Dave Beasant, once did.

Salad Cream - Banned from Kwon's fridge

Kwon Soon Tae was able to keep himself out of his local Accident and Emergency department, but he just couldn’t resist picking up two yellow cards and an early bath in the game against Daejeon. This meant that not only did an outfield player have to take over in goal for the remainder of that game, but Kwon’s one match suspension would ensure that an outfield player had to start between the sticks in the following game away to Seoul. That’s some silver lining to the match-fixing scandal.

I love it when an outfield player has to go in goal. Really love it, as Wor Kev might say. And so there was no way I was going to be anywhere else on Saturday evening than the World Cup stadium to see some hapless bloke with his gloves on the wrong hands getting smacked in the chops with a football.

"I'd love it if Lee Yoon Eui had to dress up as a goalie and flap his arms around, just love it."

Just in case an outfield player in goal wasn’t enough excitement for one day, Jen and I decided to walk to the stadium from our apartment in Yeoksam. It’s fourteen kilometres as the crow flies apparently. Not that the way a crow would get there is particularly relevant as we decided to make it a bit more interesting by setting off in the opposite direction and walking to the Olympic Stadium first before joining the Han river. It took the distance up to something around twenty kilometres. Or at least it would have done if the river hadn’t been swollen by the recent rain. Whole sections of path were under water and we frequently had to detour through apartment complexes, over bridges or under roads.

This fella was determined to exercise his dog.

More than once we encountered a dead-end and had to retrace our steps before realising that a twenty minute trek had moved us no more than a hundred yards further along the path. At half past six we came up against one blockage too many and after five hours of walking called it a day. We still had six kilometres to do, but didn’t want to risk missing a single moment of comedy goalkeeping.

We'd had enough by this time.

It was as difficult to get into the stadium as it had been to walk to it. We wanted to sit in the away fans section behind the goal, but the woman in the ticket office told us that it was sold out. As if. I’d have been more likely to have believed her if she had tried to claim that her dog had eaten all of the tickets. There are around twelve thousand seats behind that goal, probably enough for the entire town of Sangju to attend the game if they fancied it. Eventually she stopped her nonsense and sold us two tickets. As expected there were no more than a hundred away fans in total.

Lee Yoon Eui was the unlucky outfield player who was going to play in goal. To make it even more interesting he was making his league debut. His only previous professional appearance had been a twenty five minute run-out as a substitute in a League Cup game against Busan earlier this season. Still, it’s better than digging foxholes or firing at innocent passenger planes that you have mistaken for North Korean fighter jets.

Look out, it's a North Korean fighter plane.

In the pre-match warm-up, Lee didn’t look as if he had ever seen a football before. The goalie coach threw a few easy balls for him to catch, but the concept of jumping in the air and collecting the ball at the highest point possible was something that Lee looked to be struggling with. They moved on to a bit of shooting practice and perhaps not understanding what he was meant to do, the debutant keeper successfully avoided almost every shot that came in his direction. Maybe it was his military training kicking in. By the time the teams had completed the warm-up I was fully expecting a ten goal or more victory for Seoul.

Prior to kick off, the players stood in line whilst the captains each made a short speech, the gist of it being, I think, that they would only bet on the horses from now on and that they wouldn’t take much in the way of bribes until the fuss had died down a bit.

Once the game kicked off, I’d been expecting Seoul to be shooting on sight. They didn’t though and it was ten minutes before Lee had to make a save. Even then, it was a fairly tame effort straight at him. We had more of the same for the first half hour with the Seoul players obviously not realising that all they had to do was to place the ball a yard wide of the keeper. Maybe they had taken advantage of the generous odds and backed a nil-nil draw.

Lee grew in confidence and started coming for and collecting crosses in a way that he didn’t look capable of doing in the warm-up. His kicking was good too, as you would expect, and for a while it was as if the game was being played with two proper keepers.

Half an hour in, veteran Seoul defender Edilson gave away a penalty and Sangju had the chance to take the lead. Kim Jung Woo took the spot kick and put the visitors a goal up with the sort of casual chip that would have resulted in him doing guard duty all week had it been saved.

0-1

Sangju saw out the rest of the half with some decent defending and a little luck as they survived a goalmouth scramble or two. I couldn’t believe how reluctant Seoul had been to pepper the Sangju goal with shots. The second half began with a bit of excitement as Lee gave away a free-kick by picking up a backpass. Again Seoul seemed to think that they were facing Gordon Banks and failed to grasp that just hitting the target would probably have been enough.

Ten minutes into the half, Seoul finally made the breakthrough. Lee Yoon Eui got caught in no man’s land, something which as a soldier you would think he would be trained to avoid. Dejan Damjanovic was able to slide the ball past him and off the post into the net. Maybe the goal gave the Montenegrin a bit of confidence as ten minutes later he scored his second of the evening. This time it was with a shot from the edge of the box that Lee dived over in the manner of someone trying to make as big a splash as possible by bellyflopping into a swimming pool.

As there were still twenty five minutes remaining I fully expected a few more goals. Lee had been found out and all Seoul had to do was hit shots that required him to dive. They didn’t though and seemed content to sit back on their lead. Ten minutes from the end their complacency backfired as Kim Min Soo curled a direct free kick over the Seoul wall to level the scores.

2-2

That’s the way it should have stayed too. However, the ref added five minutes of injury time and with seconds to go Bang Seung Hwan got the winner for the Seoul after heading home a corner from a couple of yards out. It was the sort of cross that a proper keeper would have just plucked out of the air. Unfortunately Sangju didn’t have a proper keeper and it cost them the point, possibly all three if you considered the earlier errors.

In the circumstances, Sangju and their fans didn’t seem too down-hearted. It was a game that they expected nothing from and that’s exactly what they got. I’d been hoping for some comedy goalkeeping and in the end I got what I’d been expecting too. Providing he can keep a tight grip on the salad cream, Kwon Soon Tae will be back between the posts in the next game for the military team and Lee Yoon Eui can go back to spending his Saturday afternoons weeding the parade ground.

The main reason that I write this blog is so that I don’t forget stuff that I’ve done. Or rather, so that when I have forgotten stuff that I’ve done, I can read back through the posts and refresh my memory. I find that I’ve generally got about a week to get the write-up done before I start to forget all but the most basic details though. After a fortnight I can usually recall that I’ve been to a particular city and watched a football game, whilst after three weeks I usually remember very little more than the fact that I’ve got an outstanding blog post to do. Outstanding that is in terms of it not being done, rather than as a gauge of its potential quality.

So, a month ago Jen and I went to Busan again. It’s taken me this long to write about it mainly because I had some time back in England between now and then and I got sidetracked by my other life, the one that involves kids, parents, a bit of hiking and wild camping in The Lakes and almost as much hiking but with not quite so wild camping at Glastonbury.

I saw this fella at 6am near Angle Tarn.

As excuses go for not updating the blog it’s better than ‘the dog ate my homework’, although not as good as ‘I idled away my time in the UK photographing my daughter’s pug dressed up as a bee’.

He loves it really.

I’m back in Korea now though and a rainy Sunday afternoon seems the perfect time to try to remember what went on at the last match. Here goes. We got the train to Busan on the Friday evening, that bit’s easy. I suspect we probably shared a couple of bottles of screw-top red wine too.

We got knocked back from the first hotel we tried, just outside the station, as although they had rooms, they didn’t have one for all three nights of the bank holiday weekend. Fortunately we got fixed up around the corner in a scruffy looking hotel that had probably got its prices right at thirty thousand won a night.

Oddly, it's not mentioned in the guide books.

Rather than rattle on about the entire weekend, I’ll just give you what I’ll describe as highlights but in reality are actually the bits that I’ve remembered. I’ll finish off with the football game, so just scroll down to the bottom of the page if you’ve been desperately waiting for over a month to find out the score.

Jen had some sort of teaching conference thing going on, I’m not sure if she was attending, presenting or both. I do listen when she tells me stuff, but retaining the information for a month was always going to be unlikely. Anyway, all it meant was that I had a bit of time to kill. The first day I occupied myself by watching a succession of schoolkids games in a tournament at the university where whatever it was she was doing was going on. That was ok, particularly as I was working my way through a few bottles of New Zealand beer.

A pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

The next day I met up with fellow Boro fan Alan and his wife Se Young. They had the great idea of visiting the Memorial for the War Dead in Jungang Park. It’s quite a trek up to the monument but we went most of the way by bus which in the heat is probably the best way of doing it.

Memorial for the War Dead

After that they took me to a Uzbekistani restaurant where we overdosed on lamb dishes and worked our way through a variety of different strength Russian beers. It was so good that Jen and I went there later that evening after she‘d finished the teacher stuff and then we returned once more the following evening before we caught our train back to Seoul.

The lamb was ok too.

On the bank holiday Monday, Memorial Day, we had a bit of a wander around Amnan Park and then along a coastal footpath to Songdo Beach. Busan’s beaches tend to be very popular, particularly the ones further East, Gwangalli Beach and Haeundae Beach. Songdo was much quieter though and a lot better for it I thought. There were plenty of areas to fish and next time I’m in Busan I’d like to have a go.

Jen and I enjoying a picnic lunch.

So, the match. Or rather some of the match As you may have noticed it wasn’t actually in Busan, but about half an hour’s drive away in neighbouring Changwon. Alan had very kindly offered to drive us all there and had I followed his directions on where to meet we would have seen it all. Unfortunately I went to the wrong subway station and we didn’t get to the Changwon Football Centre until about ten minutes before half time.

Changwon break towards the Busan end.

We made our way around to the away supporters section as I know a few of the lads who were sat there and I  worked my way through a few more of the New Zealand beers. I can‘t actually remember if anything of note happened in the remainder of the first half, but it was scoreless at the interval. It’s strange how some things do stick in your mind though and the frogs in the toilets is one of those things. I’ve no idea how or why, but that’s like lots of things in life. Obviously I took a photo.

Deer, pugs and frogs. What more could you want in a football blog?

The second half started badly for Busan with Changwon winning a penalty a few minutes after the restart. I’m not sure if it was deserved or not as I was concentrating more on the beer and the frogs, but Song Geun Soo tucked it away to put Changwon a goal up.

One - Nil.

And in truth, I can’t remember much more about the second half action. We sang a bit and gave the Changwon goalie plenty of stick but I don‘t think Busan came too close to scoring. Or maybe they did. Changwon didn’t get any more though and so the penalty was the difference between the teams at full time.