North Korea's spell in South Africa has made for intriguing theatre, writes KEITH DUGGANin Johannesburg
TODAY THE footballers from Korea DPR will play their final match of the World Cup against Ivory Coast before they retreat behind the curtain.
No team in South Africa has been as enigmatic. They have managed just one goal – albeit against Brazil – then suffered a 7-0 defeat at the hands of Portugal, whose players seemed to have great fun inflicting this defeat on one of the most notorious and hermetic nations on earth.
The loss was doubly unfortunate for the Koreans in that the Portugal match was one of the very rare instances when a football match was broadcast live in their totalitarian homeland.
It cannot have greatly pleased Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s Dear Leader. The general fear was that the Korean team would be forced to pay the consequences for their collapse once they returned to the homeland. It was left to Tiago, Portugal’s tricky midfielder, to respond that he did not feel guilty.
“I think it is difficult for them,” he said sheepishly. “I hope they win their next match.”
The appearance of North Korea in a World Cup for the first time since 1966 has been a moving theatre of smoke and mirrors.
At the first press conference – Fifa’s power is such that even a country as recalcitrant and isolated as Korea bows to the obligatory press meeting – coach Kim Jong-Hun was asked whether he picked the team or if it was in fact Kim Jong-il. Silence.
He then had to deny that members of his team had absconded when someone noticed that only 19 names appeared on the team sheet instead of the usual 24.
“The management of the team are my responsibility and there were never any members missing,” Jong-Hun said stiffly. “All the team members have always been with us, we’ve been together every day, eaten, trained and slept together.”
They have also travelled around in a bus with the slogan “1966 Again”, a reference to the stunning run by North Korea’s most famous team to the quarter-finals of that year’s World Cup. Hopes were high for this latest emergence from obscurity to lead to similar glories.
Their fans number just 300; a rumour soon swept Johannesburg that they were, in fact, Chinese actors paid to cheer on direction of the Korean fan choreographer.
“The cheering is choreographed because that is normal practice in Korea DPR and South Korea,” says Simon Cockerell of Koryo Tours travel company, one of the relatively few westerners to have attended a football match in the hidden Korea.
Kim Jong-Hun has become the most famous blue raincoat at the World Cup but little is known about the inscrutable coach.
He has received a People’s Award for his contribution to football and has also accused the South Koreans of poisoning his players after a defeat in Seoul last year.
Here though, he has recited the party line and dismissed suggestions that his team’s failure against Portugal would lead to recriminations.
(Korea aren’t exactly afraid to exert their superiority over opposition teams when possible. In 2005, they beat Guam 21-0.)
The 1966 team’s remarkable journey to the quarter final was ended, coincidentally, by Portugal, who won 5-3.
For years afterwards, it was said that the Korean heroes were dispatched to the gulags not so much for losing as for partying and womanising after their win over Italy.
However, at least seven showed up looking hale in a 2002 documentary about their heroics (unless, of course, they were paid actors . . .) and they animatedly denied that they had received anything other than a rapturous welcome.
As to what will happen to the latest team from Korea DPR after they bow out today, who knows?