Trail of the Lion King

It’s FA Cup time again with the sixteen K-League teams joining the remaining National League, Challengers League and University teams in the last thirty two. The draw is seeded, so each game features a top division club.

I hadn’t intended to go to a game as the Seoul match was the only one I could get to and I’ve been there enough times not to get too much of a buzz from watching their fringe players in a deserted stadium.

Someone at work decided that this would be a good opportunity for a ‘teambuilding’ session though and I would have felt more than a little bad-mannered turning down the invitation when they know how much of my spare time I spend going to football matches.

The good news was that we got out of work an hour early and by 6.30pm we were sat on benches outside the stadium drinking straight from litre bottles of Hite. That’s my kind of team-building activity. The tickets had been sorted in advance and some of the younger employees had been sent to the supermarket to buy the amount of supplies that would have been more appropriate for a month long trip.

Refreshments.

As kick-off time approached we found our seats in the East stand. There were a few hundred people there from my company, which is just as well as the attendance was a long way down on that of a league fixture. Yongin didn’t help much as they brought eight fans. Possibly the same eight that I’d seen in their recent away game at Goyang KB.

Unfortunately for Bob, his Mam had put his blue shirt in the wash.

As expected, Seoul had rested a few players. Edilson was out there on the pitch though, playing in the centre of defence and Dejan Damjanovic was on the bench in case it didn’t all go to plan. The first half was goalless and without much action. Yongin had a few chances but didn’t really look like scoring whilst Seoul never got out of second gear. Most of the fun came from watching the activities of the company ‘freshmen’ who appeared to have been practising their chants all week.

Stand up if you love your job.

I got the impression that a few of them had not been to a football game before and possibly wouldn’t be returning until the next team-building event, but they all knew the importance of appearing committed to the cause whilst their bosses were watching and they kept up the singing throughout the match.

 At half-time Seoul must have decided that it had been goalless for long enough and they brought on Dejan Damjanovic. It didn’t take him long to make an impact and once the first goal went in that was game over. Seoul added another three later in the second half making it a successful evening for all bar the Yongin Eight. It was just as well really as I dread to think how the freshmen would have taken it if Seoul had lost.

Everyone who had been good was given a balloon to take home.

After the game a few of us adjourned to the convenience store next to the stadium and continued our bonding over some more cans. There were a few shocks in the round with three National league teams progressing at the expense of their K-League opposition. Hopefully two of them will draw each other in the next round to ensure a lower division representative in the last eight.

It’s been six weeks since I’ve seen Jeonbuk play. A combination of games in the lower divisions, visits to new stadiums in the K-League and a few hiking trips has made it difficult to fit one of their games in. I hadn’t been to the Pohang Steel Yard for a match before though and so this game seemed an ideal opportunity to catch up with the progress of Middlesbrough’s greatest ever Korean ex-player, Lee Dong Gook.

Jeonbuk had lost three-one away at Seoul when I last saw them. Since then though they had done pretty well, with an unbeaten run in the league and they were now topping the table with nineteen points from their opening nine fixtures. Perhaps I’m a jinx.

Lee Dong Gook has been doing pretty well too, going into this game with nine goals from twelve appearances in all competitions. To make things a little more interesting, today’s opponents Pohang Steelers are second to Jeonbuk in the league table and are Lee Dong Gook’s former club and home town. He made his debut for Pohang in 1998 and with the exception of a loan spell in Germany and his time doing National Service, he played here until signing for the Boro eight years later.

Jen and I had been staying in the Palgongsan Provincial Park the night before after having done a bit of hiking and so getting to Pohang wasn’t as difficult as it would have been had we been travelling from Seoul. We got a taxi into Daegu and then a bus to Pohang. The buses ran approximately every ten minutes according to the bloke at the terminal and ours took about an hour and a quarter. It was a lot quicker and more convenient than the train, where the only one that would have got us to Pohang in time for the match left at nine in the morning and wound its way around the countryside for two hours.

As it was, we got to Pohang just before noon. After a quick lunch of gimbap and kimchi mandu we had a wander along to the Jukdo Market.

Jukdo Market

It’s mainly fish with lots of them still alive in tanks. I reckon that I’ve probably been to zoos with less livestock in my time. I thought these octopuses were pretty well trained not to run off. We did see some smaller ones trying to leap out of the bowl of water that they were in.

Remarkably well behaved.

As well as the seafood there was the odd butchers shop, including one with a fridge full of dog on the pavement outside. I’ve not really noticed dog meat very often, although there are plenty of restaurants that serve it, often specialising in a combination of dog and duck. I do wonder what Koreans would think if they saw a ‘Dog and Duck’ pub sign in the UK and whether they would be disappointed at having to settle of a bag of crisps to eat.

There was no doubt to the contents of this fridge though, with at least three large dogs in various states of dismemberment. Some limbs were skinned, others left with the skin on. I’d read that some Koreans can get a bit arsey about foreigners taking photos of dog meat, but nobody gave me a second glance.

Dog meat.

There were also some penis fish. I can’t imagine buying any of those either as I would feel as if I were letting the side down if I took a knife and fork to one of them. I did take a photo though, wondering if it would get me any nearer the top of the ‘fish porn’ searches in Google.

Penis fish

We took a taxi to the Steelyard, which I think is a great name for a football ground and bought 10,000 won tickets that you could use for any part of the ground apart from the South stand which was reserved for the Jeonbuk supporters. We chose the West stand, mainly in the hope that we wouldn’t have the sun in our eyes. There was only one gate open and we had to queue for a couple of minutes before getting in.

There weren’t many empty seats along the side and we ended up near the corner flag, quite close to the back. It was still a good view though, as the lack of a running track and the steep gradient in the stands meant that we were pretty near to the pitch. It’s probably the best designed of all the football stadiums that I’ve been to in Korea, appropriately sized with a 25,000 capacity and with a roof all of the way around. There was a section on the other side of the ground that was fully occupied by soldiers. They seemed to clap and cheer in time with each other, so perhaps it’s something that they cover in basic training.

East stand

Jeonbuk, who were in their usual green shirts, started the stronger of the two teams, with Pohang in their Dennis the Menace kit looking a little nervous on the ball. The visitors had left their two Brazillians, Eninho and Luiz Henrique on the bench. Lovrek started on the left side of midfield and Lee Dong Gook was up front on his own. He came close to scoring after quarter of an hour, curling a shot just beyond the top corner after a one-two on the edge of the box with Lovrek.

Five minutes later, the Lion King missed a far easier chance when he wellied the ball over the bar from a few yards out. It must have felt as if he was back at The Riverside.

Pohang Steelers on the attack.

The missed chances were forgotten a few minutes before half-time though as Lee Dong Gook got his tenth goal of the season when his shot from way out took a massive deflection and left the keeper with no chance. A minute before the break Jeonbuk doubled their lead when Park Won Jae volleyed home from the edge of the box, also against his former club and in his home town.

At half-time we had a wheel of fortune game where a bloke won a car. There had been a similar prize at the Chunnam Dragons match a couple of weeks ago and on both occasions I wondered how the relatively low gate receipts could justify that kind of prize.

That's right, drive it straight across the pitch.

My daughter and I were in the audience for the recording of the real Wheel of Fortune show a couple of years ago. We were in LA and thought that it might be quite interesting to visit a TV studio. I don’t think we got on the telly as we looked to have been carefully placed in the section where the less photogenic members of the audience sit. Still, it was something different.

Lee Dong Gook didn’t reappear at the start of the second half, having been replaced by big lunk Jeong Seong Hoon. I can only assume that he had picked up an injury as it was a bit early to regard the game as being in the bag and to look ahead to the next one.

West stand

Sure enough, fifteen minutes in, Pohang pulled a goal back with a free header at a corner. Jeonbuk’s task was made even harder a few minutes later when Jung Hoon picked up his second yellow of the afternoon. Perhaps him only having two names makes the refs more inclined to book him.

The home fans were really getting behind their team at this point and with the stadium around two-thirds full there was a decent atmosphere. It got a whole lot better as well when Pohang substitute Adriano Chuva equalised and then celebrated by donning a single white glove.

The momentum was all with Pohang by this time, with Chuva and former Northampton, Shrewsbury and Hamilton Academicals striker Derek Asamoah causing plenty of problems. Fifteen minutes from the end Pohang were awarded a penalty and Chuva converted it to give the home team a three-two victory.

3 - 2.

The win took Pohang back to the top of the table, dropping Jeonbuk down into second place two points behind. I’ve seen Jeonbuk three times this season and they have lost each of those games. As those are their only league defeats I think my theory that I may be a jinx could well have something in it.

We got a taxi to the train station where we were entertained by a row between a bloke on a mobility scooter, a pair of identically dressed female twins in their fifties and a fella who looked a little worse for wear. The Police Station was only thirty yards away and the drama was enough for them to come and break it up by taking the easier option of nicking the bloke who could walk. The twins followed as he was led away, haranguing him from a safe distance.

Don't mess with The Twins.

A slow train then took us to Daegu, followed by a much quicker one back to Seoul.

Sangju Sangmu are a new team in the K-League this season. Well, sort of. They are the team made up of players doing their national service and played in the past as Gwangju Sangmu. Gwangju was a bit of an odd place to base an Army team in bearing in mind the history of the uprising and subsequent massacre in 1980 and unsurprisingly the military didn’t have a great deal of support at their old stadium. The move to Sangju seems to have given them a new lease of life though and although it’s early days the locals appear to be very happy to have K-League football in their town.

Jen and I got the bus from Dong Seoul at 11.30am, getting there just before two. Unusually we made a point of trying to sort out our return tickets before we left the bus station and it’s just as well that we did. There were no seats on any of the buses going to Seoul after half past three. With the stadium being about half an hour away from the bus station, that would have meant leaving the game as soon as it had kicked off. Eventually we managed to book seats on a 6.15pm bus to Ansan which is a town south-west of Seoul but on the subway network.

The walk to the stadium turned out to be forty minutes, so in reality we wouldn’t have even been able to stay for the kick-off if we’d been limited to the Seoul bus with empty seats. The highlight of the walk was passing a couple of blokes turning over the soil in their back garden by way of a plough that incorporated a bicycle wheel. Luckily I had my camera with me.

The horse had a day off.

Once we were at the stadium we were directed to the ticket office where a very helpful bloke explained that the tickets were five thousand won each or two for a billion. Buying a pair didn’t seem like much of a bargain.

Sangju Civic Stadium

When we got inside the Sangju Civic Stadium it became apparent that it was a pretty decent ground. Okay, it had a running track and only the main stand was covered, but with a fifteen thousand capacity it was small enough not to seem deserted and there was a pleasant mountain backdrop. I’d estimate that there were about six thousand fans there, with a couple of hundred having made the trip from Seoul.

View towards the main stand

Whilst I quite liked the Sangju stadium, I wasn’t too taken with the home team’s strip. Someone had decided that dressing them up as Sunderland would be a good idea and it never is. It’s disappointing that they haven’t thought of turning out in camouflage gear. Seoul had left their AC Milan kit behind to avoid a clash and were wearing their rather natty Man City away kit with the black and red diagonal stripe on a white shirt.

The game started badly for Edilson, Seoul’s Brazilian centre-half, who looked to have received a crafty shove in the back just as he went for a header. Not only did the push cause him to take the ball smack in his face but he also managed to pick up a yellow card for whining about it. I suspect that he probably forgot his grievances for a while a few minutes later though when his Montenegrin team-mate Dejan Damjanovic opened the scoring for Seoul.

Samgju hadn’t been beaten in the league coming into this game and they soon fought back to draw level. It was quite a fortunate equaliser, with Seoul’s Park Yong Ho heading a fairly tame cross into his own net.

Sangju attacking in the first half.

Seoul were probably the better team for most of the first half with Djeparov putting himself about and Molina playing a lot deeper than usual and down the left. Ten minutes before the break they restored their lead as the unmarked Damjanovic got his second of the game with a free header.

It was end to end stuff for the remainder of the half with Sangju having a goal disallowed for offside, a decision that looked a bit harsh to me and then Molina hitting the post for Seoul with the rebound bouncing just out of reach of Damjanovic.

At the interval we were treated to a few songs from someone who looked as if he’d been at the peak of his career when the South Korean Army were busy fighting their war against the North rather than filling in their Saturdays with football games.

The half-time entertainment.

There wasn’t much in the way of refreshments, nor facilities and I had to go out of the stadium to use the toilet and to replenish my stock of beer. I think the ground is less than twenty years old so you’d think that inside toilets would have been something that the architect might have considered worth having.

When I was a kid, one of my Nannas had an outside toilet at her house in Sunderland and to a ten year old that was quite exciting. I’m over that sort of thing now though and after a few cans I’d rather stadiums had toilets that didn’t involve having to go out and then come back in again. Actually, that reminds me. I bought a house in the Bulgarian countryside a few years ago and that’s got an outside toilet too. Perhaps they are lot more common than I’d thought.

Trap 1 in Bulgaria.

I don’t know whether there were any threats of marches with heavy backpacks made in the Sangju dressing room at half time, but the team-talk had an immediate effect with an equaliser for the home side seconds after the restart as Choi Hyo Jin fired home from the edge of the box.

It stayed at two apiece until the seventy third minute when the Sangju captain, Kim Young Sam headed back over his advancing keeper, leaving Damjanavic to chase the ball into an empty net. It didn’t look to me as if the Seoul striker definitely got a touch, but when you’re on a hat trick you are going to claim it regardless.

Sangju weren’t giving up though and within a minute they were level again. Kim Jung Woo carved his way through the Seoul defence and got his captain off the hook for his earlier mistake with a very well taken goal.

Kim Jee Hyuk punches clear for Sangju

It wasn’t Kim Young Sam’s day though and eight minutes from the end he picked up a second yellow to cap a miserable afternoon. He’d had a really poor game when I saw the Army team at Chunnam a couple of weeks earlier too and I was beginning to wonder if he was keeping his place in the side due to his Dad being a Colonel or something.

There was a bit of a skirmish a couple of minutes later over Seoul not getting a penalty decision. I was disappointed that the squaddies in the home side didn’t all pile in like soldiers tend to do on a night out if one of their number is getting a bit of hassle. The stadium announcer managed to orchestrate some booing from the crowd though and that just about made up for it.

The game wasn’t over at three all and with two minutes remaining Seoul snatched a winner as substitute Hyun Young Min fired in a direct free kick from twenty five yards.

The winning goal.

Sangju finished the game with nine men as Yoon Yeo San picked up his team’s second red card of the afternoon in injury time. We got our bus to Ansan, which stopped at a few small towns on the way before arriving nearly four hours after setting off. With no idea where the subway was we ended up spending almost another hour in a taxi getting back to Seoul.

It was a decent trip though. Next time we’ll look to stay overnight and book our bus tickets in advance.

For my football fix last weekend I thought I’d head down to Gwangyang to watch Chunnam Dragons take on the army team Sangju Sangmu. It’s a fair distance from Seoul, 329km, and the easiest way seemed to be the direct bus from Dong Seoul.

The bus terminal  was pretty crowded and as I hadn’t bothered to pre-book my ticket I did wonder if I was going to struggle to get the bus I wanted. It was okay though and I got a seat on the 10.30am luxury service to Donggwangyang, as that’s the terminal in Gwangyang that’s nearest to the stadium. I took the opportunity to catch up on my sleep for a lot of the journey and four hours and twenty minutes after leaving Seoul I was there.

I had two hours to spare before kick-off and as the stadium was marked on the map that I’d picked up from Tourist Information, I thought I’d see if I could walk there. There was a basic flaw in my plan, however. The maps that most of the Tourist Offices give away in Korea aren’t drawn to scale. There seems to be a desire to include as many landmarks as possible, without giving too much consideration to geographical accuracy. If you imagine a map of the Lake District with Edinburgh shown just behind Skiddaw, and with Ireland looking close enough to reach on a pedalo, you wouldn’t be too far away. Until you tried to get there, that is.

By the time I’d messed about trying to reconcile what I could see with what was shown on the map I’d already used an hour up. I spotted the floodlights in the distance but it looked as if I’d either have to walk in a different direction to cross a river or else I’d be walking alongside a dual carriageway with no path. I took a taxi.

It's over there.

The taxi journey wasn’t without its difficulties either. You’d think that even if two people speak very little of each others language, but one of them had a map and was able to point at the only football stadium in town, then that would be enough. But no, it was as if the driver had never seen a map before and seemed convinced that the drawing of the ground was actually the local steelworks. Eventually he got it and ten minutes later we were there. If he did take the most direct route then I’m glad that I didn’t walk it.

Gwangyang Stadium - The steelworks looks very similar apparently.

It was seven thousand won to get in and you could sit anywhere you fancied. The only player that I recognised was the Chunnam goalie and captain, the former national team keeper Lee Woon Jae. It seemed a bit of a surprise when he turned up at Chunnam this season rather than taking a coaching role somewhere, but the move seems to have given him a new lease of life. Both teams had begun the season well, with ten points from their first six games. It was an especially impressive start for the army team who were still unbeaten after their relocation fron Gwangju to Sangju.

We had a bit of confusion before kick-off when the national anthem was played. Everyone traditionally turns to face the Korean flag but unfortunately you couldn’t see it from where I was sat in the East Stand as it was above us and behind the press box. Those who knew of its location turned in the approximate direction, other non-regulars made do with facing the large screen in the hope that the flag might appear there.

So where's the flag?

 The crowd had barely re-orientated themselves and sat down before Sangju continued their good start to the season by going ahead with a goal from Kim Jung Woo after three minutes.

This cross led to the goal.

Both sides settled down a bit after that with a lot of Chunnam’s best moves coming when  Brazilian Weslley and Columbian Javier Reina were involved. Weslley  had a decent chance just before half time but the Sangju keeper managed it block it with his legs.

After the interval I noticed these two fellas combining a bit of childcare with knocking back the soju. Let’s hope they remembered that the kid was in the box when it was time to go.

Family day out.

A Chunnam equaliser always seemed on the cards in the second half, but it just didn’t come and the army team held on for a victory that moved them up into third place. I got a taxi back to the bus terminal and then a bus to Suncheon where I intended to do some hiking the next day.

View from the North-West corner.

For those of you keeping up with the progress of Lee Dong Gook, Jeonbuk won 2-1 away at Daejeon, but he didn’t score. The win kept Jeonbuk in contention in second place, ahead of Sangju on goal difference.

There was an Asian Champions League match at Sangam Stadium last Tuesday between Korean champions FC Seoul and their Japanese counterparts Nagoya Grampus. As you may know, there’s a bit of rivalry between the two countries and so I thought I’d go along and see how it went.

I don’t know very much about Japanese football, but I had heard of Nagoya Grampus. They are the club that Gary Lineker wound down his career with in the days when they were known as Grampus Eight. They are also the club that Arsene Wenger managed before moving to Arsenal. It’s hard to imagine that a club in Arsenal’s position would pluck a relatively unknown manager from an Asian club these days.

Champions League games kick off at 8pm so I had plenty of time to make my way to the World Cup Stadium. There weren’t as many people milling around outside as usual, suggesting that the visit of the Japanese champions wasn’t quite the attraction that I’d thought it would have been. I paid fourteen thousand won for an East stand ticket and another thousand for a programme in the hope that Grampus might have a player or two that I knew of. They didn’t.

Not much of a crowd.

I hadn’t had my tea so I got myself a six inch pizza from the Pizza Hut stall. They only sell one type, the toppings being sweet potato, pineapple and meat that I couldn’t identify. Possibly pork. It was as good as you’d imagine it to be.

It’s free seating in the East Stand and I found a place in the lower tier about eight rows up. The small kid in front of me, recognizing that I might not have been born and bred in Seoul, spent the build up to the game quizzing me on my knowledge of English football.

“Do you know Manchester United?”

“Yes”

“Do you know Park Ji Sung?”

“Yes”

“Do you know Rooney?”

“Yes. He is my friend, sometimes he drives me to the shops in his car.”

“Really?”

“No”

“Do you know Lee Chung Yong?”

“Yes”

“Do you know Chelsea?”

“Yes”

“Do you know Drogba?”

“Yes. He has a horse and he rides it past my house on his way to Starbucks.”

“Really?”

“No”

I thought that I would have a turn at asking the questions.

“Do you know Middlesbrough?”

“No.”

“Do you know Lee Dong Gook?”

“No.”

“Do you know Phil Stamp?”

“No.”

How could he not know of this fella?

Fortunately the teams came out at that point and we could call a halt to the cultural exchange. There was a minute’s silence for the victims of the recent earthquake and those of the not so recent killing of anti-government protesters by the Korean police on April 19^th 1960. I’m not sure if the anniversary of the massacre is remembered with a minute’s silence every year or whether it was included because we were having one anyway.

If the intention was to give the Koreans something of their own to pay their respects to, it didn’t work. I didn’t see anyone bother to stand up and the vast majority of people around me ignored it and carried on chatting amongst themselves.

As the game kicked off a few of the couple of hundred Grampus fans behind the goal lit their flares. It was an impressive sight, albeit something that would get you a three year banning order in the UK.

Grampus fans

FC Seoul had most of the early possession, putting a bit of pressure on the Grampus defence. It was Grampus that opened the scoring though with a scrambled effort against the run of play after twenty six minutes.  Seoul, with all four of their non-Korean players on the pitch, had plenty of opportunities in the remainder of the first half but went off at the interval a goal behind.

Seoul go close just before half time.

Seoul continued to press after the break and it seemed likely that they would equalize before long. The Grampus keeper had a tendency to palm the ball away and it just looked like a matter of time before someone would take advantage. Irritatingly, the 2010 World Cup craze for vuvuzelas shows no sign of fading in Seoul and whenever Grampus had possession the home fans would recreate the sound of the previous summer.

Another dodgy FC Seoul haircut

As the second half progressed the Seoul players got increasingly frustrated with the Grampus timewasting. Molina, in particular, was taking every opportunity to complain to the officials whilst Yeo Hyo Jin gave one Japanese player something legitimate to writhe about by hacking him down in the centre circle.

Molina takes a break from moaning at the ref.

The home team continued to press as time started to run out with Molina curling one a fraction wide from the angle of the box with about twenty minutes remaining. Just as I was looking forward to a frantic last ten minutes Grampus hit Seoul on the break and killed the game stone dead with their second goal of the evening. The two goal victory took Grampus to the top of the four team group ahead of Seoul on goal difference.