South Korea vs Iraq

The invitation came quick yesterday when I was having lunch with the rest of my collegemates at Asia Cafe – Heng phoned me to ask if I’d be interested in watching a South Korea vs Iraq football match at Bukit Jalil Stadium for free. Free sounded appealing (it was an RM30 ticket, I found out), and since I probably won’t have anything better to do, experiencing a live sorta international football match would be fun (it’s the Asian Cup.. if you don’t know yet).

At about 5pm Ryui Bynn came to pick me up with his brother, then Heng, then Andy. It was raining when we got there, then after searching for excellent seats in which to view the proceedings, we were at the front-most rows at the ‘Korean supporters’ section.

Exuberant crowd in a sea of red.

Obviously, most of the people there were Koreans, in the largest amount of said nationality I’ve ever seen congregated into a single location. They were all singing chants together – “Hanguo”, “Peace in Korea”, “Hey amigo” (I know I’m not getting them right, but they sounded like that) – accompanied by the beating of a drum that someone brought. And despite us not being Koreans, we were all quite elated to be immersed in the jubilant atmosphere, almost everyone was standing up all the time, clapping their hands and orange, vertical instruments.

Heng even brought his binoculars lmao. The guy in the centre of this pic looks like Barry Ooi down to every feature wtf.

Just a short clip of the crowd, though the audio quality does not accurately represent how lively the crowd was.

And the match.. it was raining, but it still went out.

The four of us as equally elated as the rest of the crowd, photo courtesy from Ryui Bynn’s phone.

There’s Barry-lookalike with the freaky fake mouth mask, and cute screaming Korean girls behind him, who scream at every opportunity when a Korean player was zoomed up close on the huge screen, drawing amused attention from the rest of the Malaysian guys. Also note the guy with the loudspeaker that basically acted as our conductor of loud, united chants.

The match was held goalless up to extra time – I wasn’t exactly a huge football fan like the rest of my friends were, but just watching the match together with the rest of the maddeningly excited crowd was quite an experience, even if this wasn’t Old Trafford. Not to mention watching the match up close was of course completely different than watching it from the telly. The penalty shootout was the climax, which unfortunately, South Korea lost to due to mistakes. The crowd literally waited with baited breath.

It all ended at about 8.30pm, kick-off was 6.20pm. Had our late dinner at one of them Chinese restaurants in Taipan.. overall not a bad night out, especially when you got to be in the midst of thousands of Koreans for a few hours.