World Cup Diary

The South Koreans are wired, but try getting a score sometimes.

By Andy Mead
Special to SoccerTimes

SUWON, South Korea (Friday, June 14, 2002) -- Retraction -- In my last report, I made an offhand remark that I did not think that, while attending a match every day, Lamar Hunt was not having to bother with shuttle buses. I was wrong.

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure to wait in line and ride to the Brazil-Costa Rica game with the owner\operator of Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew, Kansas City Wizards and Dallas Burn who also is a principal of MLS’s marketing arm SUM which owns World Cup broadcast right in the United States. Lamar is roughing it on the trains, taxis, and buses with the rest of us.

Internet -- South Korea has the largest percentage of households with broadband (ISDN, DSL, cable) Internet access in the world. At least that's what the English-language newspaper here said. The country definitely is wired. I have found free access at a post office in Dokha and a tourist information center in Daegu.

Some of the train stations have coin-operated PCs (500 won or 40 cents for 15 minutes). "P.C. (sic) game" and Internet rooms can be found virtually everywhere. The going rate seems to be 1,000 won for an hour. I am listening to National Hockey League playoff’s Game 5 between the Detroit Red Wings and the Carolina Hurricanes as I write this.

Cell phones - I think everyone over the age of three in South Korea owns a cell phone. The phones here are smaller than the ones I've seen in the States and they are often worn as if they were pendants. The newer ones even seem capable of sending and receiving color images. The nation’s cell network seems to be years ahead of ours.

Results - One frustration I have experienced is that each game seems to be run as a self-contained event. At a couple of the early games, I remember seeing scores from earlier in the day run briefly at halftime. Since then, nothing.

This has been particularly annoying the last three days. I would think that somebody might appreciate that 40,000 people at a World Cup game might care to know what happened at other games in the event. I understand not running the scores of simultaneous matches during a game (which is a farce, since the teams definitely know what is happening), but the least they could do is run the score from the other game at the end.

Of course, nothing prevented the 26,482 mostly South Koreans watching the U.S.-Poland match at Daejon Stadium from finding out when their national team scored the game's only goal in Inchon to defeat Portugal 1-0 and move to the second round. The response from the Korean fans was deafening.

If you have questions, e-mail me at footy@ibiblio.org and I’ll try to answer them.

Andy Mead is editor of the Emerald City Gazette. Subscription information can be found at http://www.mindspring.com/~andymead/ecg/.