The Asian Cup

Following a little bit of reader feedback I should note that despite rant in the next few paragraphs - directed at sports administrators, who are basically a waste of oxygen - the event itself was a total hoot.  You may possibly want to hit "page down" a couple of times.

It should be pointed out that this is a soccer (of which more below) event and not any other Cup type event involving folk from Asia.  It is typical of the arrogance of this "sport" that they try to usurp the name "Asian Cup" as though they are the only one that matters.

When the English tried this stunt with birds - eg Robin for European Robin, Heron for Grey Heron - we refer to it as Jingo .  So this is the:

Jingo Asian Cup.  

It's good to see they have learnt something from their colonial masters.

Now we come to the matter of the sport being performed.  Back in the days when marketing was a matter of some cockney wiv a barrer it was known as Association Football, usually shortened. especially by aforementioned costermongers to "Soccer".  This was good as it distinguished the sport from the following more entertainnig games :

• Rugby Union Football;
• Rugby League Football;
• Australian Rules Football
• Gaelic Football;
• American Football; and
• Canadian Football

However it now seems that marketing people (aka followers of Onan) rule the world and the marketing people in Soccer have told the marketing people in the media outlets of the world that soccer shall henceforth be referred to as Football and all the other sports shall have to be referred to in some other way.  Well, I say to the Soccer Marketing people as the Jets say to Officer Krupke at the conclusion of their song, "Up you!".  It is, as far as I am concerned the

Jingo Asian Soccer Cup

Possibly adding the soccer should delete the Jingo, but it fills the line so nicely.

We had planned to just roll along to a game between the People's Republic of China and North Korea.  However there seemed to be some risk that the game might be a sell out (presumably not due to followers of the team which is upset about the recent Sony pictures release of "The Interview").  I chose to buy tickets on line beforehand which meant I had to battle with a website set up to harvest lots of marketing information about me.  Good luck with what I entered people (apart from the fact that I was buying tickets for 5 people scattered across the Canberra-Queanbeyan Region with an age range of 47 years).

So I have had all that fun before even leaving for the game!  I note that despite having purchased tickets beforehand, I have every expectation that in true Canberra style we will have to queue because

• they will only have enough staff on duty to handle a crowd of about 5,000 and at least 20,000 seems likely; and
• the unemployables (ie security bozos) will in full force and doing stupid things as usual.

Having got the preamble out off the way off to the game.  I - and a fair lot of others - parked in a street about 1km from the stadium and trudged along a bike path through the bush.

 Beside the Stadium the ACT Governnment decided to show off the Australian bush to international visitor in all its splendour.

As foreshadowed there was a fair old queue.  Running a couple of stereotypes, being young and Chinese, most of them were busy taking selfies.

(At half time a middle-age Caucasian family in front of us did things properly by posing as a group and asking another punter to take the photo.)

As expected a good bit of the crowd were wearing red t-shirts.

This was taken just before the kick-off, and having heard the rumours of a sell-out we were surprised at the number of empty seats.  That resolved itself through the first half and by half time I think most seats had bums on them.  The announced crowd was 18,475 from a capacity of 25,011 in this design of the Stadium.  The record for a soccer match was 24,800 for an Olympic Soccer match.

The teams came on on time and lined up for the anthems.  the crowd sang the Chinese anthem very lustily - probably better than most crowds do Advance Australia Fair!  Things were pretty quiet for the North Korea Anthem.

For some reason or another the North Koreans played in red while the Chinese were basically in a white strip.  After kick off the Chinese were pretty quickly into attack and, as a result of a totally inept pass back in the general direction of the North Korean goalie, scored.  The crowd went wild - note the drummer.

Around this point I recalled that the North Korean team had done well at the 1966 World Cup getting to the quarter finals.  Possibly because they beat Italy they were the second most popular tem i the competition, played in the UK, and were nicknamed "the Wongs".  I don't think they have a nicknamed these days - "The Dear Leaders " seems to lack something.

A Chinese player had a snooze and checked his hairstyle.

This is North Korea Fan Central.  The guys who dressed up as generals deserve an award, as should those who painted their faces with the NK flag.

 Not being a professional ethnologist my lay guess is that the generals were not ethnically North Korean.  Indeed most of the folk in this area of the crowd looked to have a semitic ancestry (which probably means they came from Cabramatta).

 I only noticed what the the guy in front of the Generals was doing when I looked at the photograph.  (It's not a well focused shot but it was about 50m range!

A NK player also takes a snooze.  This was after he had a wide open goal but his chip over the keeper's head landed closer to the Genrals than the back of the net.

#11 for the China team looked as though he had got lost in Akwesane on his way ot a lacrosse match.  He did have the snappiest shoes however.

 I left with about 5 minutes to go and trudged off back to the car.  Good to see the mass of buses waiting for the outpouring.

The drive home was uneventful until I was about 50 metres from the start of Whiskers Creek Rd when a bunch of kamikaze kangaros dived across the road.  I managed to stop without hitting  any.  Then another group had a go at the top of our drive, in this case accompanied by a wombat!  Again, no casualties.