Читать книгу Football Extreme - Rob Crossan - Страница 15
ОглавлениеHow the world’s most secretive regime ended up in Middlesbrough
In these days of international TV, sporting rights syndication, inter-continental transfers and global branding in football the concept of the beautiful game as a culture shock is becoming increasingly implausible. Just as players from Togo and Paraguay ply their trade in the Premier League, so international tours by British teams to the likes of Malaysia and Japan are an increasingly mundane pre-season routine in the footballing calendar.
Gone are the days when teams located anywhere east of Vienna were described by commentators as an ‘unknown quantity’ during international tournaments. But some things, however, don’t change. North Korea, as the world’s most isolated regime, is one of the few places left on earth where it can be assumed that the population’s knowledge of the outside world is close to non-existent – and that includes the footballers.
Indeed, the exposure to the outside world that the 2010 team had received ahead of the South African World Cup was scarcely more advanced than that of their 1966 equivalents. Yet while the current crop played games in the cosmopolitan hubs of Johannesburg and Cape Town, the squad that travelled to England in 1966 headed to Middlesbrough – a town where the locals and their visitors experienced a mutual culture shock that simply couldn’t be repeated now.
DID YOU KNOW?
The first non-white England player was a chap called Frank Wong Soo, who had a Chinese father and an English mother. He made his international debut on 3 February 1945, a full 33 years before Viv Anderson became the first black footballer to play for England.
Since the Korean War of 1953 the People’s Republic of Korea had completely isolated itself from the outside world. To the point where other nations in their World Cup qualifying group refused to even recognise them as a country – a situation that led to both legs of their 9-2 aggregate thrashing of Australia taking place in Cambodia.
Arriving in the UK, the team headed up to Middlesbrough on a train. Archive footage shows swarms of confused locals in flat caps and winkle-pickers asking the shell-shocked players for autographs. ‘The people of Middlesbrough supported us all the way through,’ recalled Rim Jung Song. ‘I still don’t know why.’
With an average height among squad members of five foot five and with training taking place in the humble surroundings of Billingham Synthonia FC, the first game at Ayresome Park, home of Middlesbrough FC, against the Soviet Union, ended predictably – with the vastly more physical Russians demolishing the Koreans 3-0 in front of an unprecedented crowd of 22,000.
The second game was a vast improvement. Perhaps taking inspiration from the Dear Leader Kim Il Sung, who had advised the players before their departure for England to ‘…run swiftly and pass the ball accurately’, they held Chile to a creditable one-all draw.
The final game looked to be North Korea’s swansong – a tie against a fearsome Italian side. The game itself was the moment that the people of Middlesbrough, who had turned out in incredible numbers to support the most ultimate of all underdogs, got the match they wanted. Against all the odds, Pak Do Ik scored the only goal of the game to send his country through to the second round.
Nobody in the crowd at Ayresome Park that day could quite believe it. ‘They played good football,’ recalled one fan. ‘They were like a team of jockeys.’
So a team that almost had almost been refused visas to enter the UK by the Foreign Office travelled to Goodison Park in Liverpool for a second round tie against Portugal, a team which included the mighty Eusebio. Thousands of Teessiders travelled down for the match, which saw the North Koreans soar into an incredible 3-0 lead before Portugal’s greatest ever player led a second-half comeback to win 5-3.
Never again will England see an international team with such little exposure to the world beyond their own borders. While Ayresome Park, venue for that incredible win over Italy, may now be a housing estate, there is one small reminder of that incredible goal by Pak Do Ik. The front garden of one of the new houses contains an actual-sized bronze boot. It’s a sculpture by the artist Neville Gabie, and it marks the exact spot where the ball was struck to hit the winning goal – a goal that made an industrial northern English town fall in love with a team that may as well have come from another universe.
