The wrong place at the wrong time
Posted on May 15, 2012 12:07 am
Smoke bombs thrown onto the field. Ho-hum. Hooligans in the streets? Yawn. There are American soccer players who have seen far worse, like tear gas in the stadium. The players who have experienced that are those who played for the U.S. national team on a trip to South Korea in 1987.
The U.S. team visited South Korea in the spring of that year to play in the President’s Cup tournament. It played Egypt, South Korea and Thailand in its round-robin group in the first round of the tournament. It arrived in South Korea just as a string of pro-democracy demonstrations (ultimately successful ones), broke out on college campuses across South Korea. One of those campuses was at Dong-A University in Pusan, a few blocks from Kudok Stadium, where the United States played South Korea on June 12. Here is a description from the Los Angeles Times of some of that day’s events:
“Tear gas fired by police to quell anti-government protestors in Pusan, South Korea, Friday interrupted a game between the United States and South Korea in the 16th President’s Cup international soccer tournament. The first half had just ended in Pusan, South Korea’s second-largest city, 205 miles southeast of Seoul, when the tear gas drifted across the field from nearby Dong-A University.
“Officials said that more than 20,000 students protested on 37 campuses, 17 in Seoul and 20 in provincial cities across the country. About 1,000 spectators at the soccer game hurled objects at the police and leaped to the field.”
The United States team was headed for the locker room anyway when the tear gas drifted into the stadium, but not everyone completely avoided it. “It stung your eyes,” says Bruce Murray. The United States team was never really under major threat, and the game eventually was completed (South Korea won, 1-0). However, Saprissa at its worst has never involved tear gas.
The Americans had another case of unfortunate timing on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1991, but managed to get out of the way of events in time. The United States national team’s trip to Moscow to play the Soviet Olympic team nearly coincided with a coup d’etat attempt in which Communist hardliners tried to overthrow the government of Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.
The United States lost to the Soviet Olympic team, 2-1, at Lenin Stadium in Moscow on Saturday, Aug. 17, and flew on to Austria on Sunday. By Monday morning, the coup was in full swing, with the plotters claiming that they had taken control of the country, which to a good degree was true. Although the U.S. team was safely out of the country, two members of the American delegation, USSF president Alan Rothenberg and his wife, had stayed behind in Moscow to do some sightseeing. They got out on Tuesday, but not before they’d seen a few sights that had not been on their schedule, such as tanks surrounding Red Square (above) and trolley cars overturned to block traffic.
In the end, the coup attempt failed, but it came within a whisker. Public backlash against the coup ended up giving the cause of democracy in the Soviet Union a big boost.
The U.S. national team has had a few other brushes with history, such as being in Berlin in 1990 when a portion of the Berlin Wall was being torn down and being one of the sacrificial lambs for Mussolini’s demonstration of supposed Fascist might at the 1934 World Cup. The tear gas in Pusan may have been the most uncomfortable of them, however.
An even more astonishing trip than the one to the USSR was the one to Croatia just before the wars in Yugoslavia broke out to play the, at that point unrecognized, Croatian “national team”. No other country would accept the invitation beause of the political implications, but the USSF, as well as the US Embassy in Yugoslavia, honestly seemed oblivius to the political implications and found themselves as part of the center piece of a massive separatist extravaganza.
Agreed. I should have included this one. I was puzzled by this game in 1990 and remain so. Why did we play it? I presume that it has caused lasting ill will between the USSF and the Yugoslavian (now Serbian) FA.
I don’t know about lasting ill will, but in the short term it certainly infuriated the Yugoslav FA and the Yugoslav government.
I don’t know why we played. From what I’ve read the team was already going to Europe and looking for more games. And the Croats were determined to get someone to play them. I guess none of the players had any inkling that they were participatig in anything more than a typical friendly. And no one at the US embassy indicated anything to the team either. I suppose it could have been “just some soccer game” to the folks at the embassy.
I read quite a bit about this match….somewhere…a while ago. For the life of me I can’t remember where.
Highlights!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz32HAllsKU
Watching those highlights it occurs to me that the answer to the question “Who is the first person to ever score a goal against Croatia?” is…..Troy Dayak. You’ll stump pretty much everyone with that one.
(OK…it was not sanctioned by FIFA but…at least as far as the Croats are concerned that was their first match)
Surprisingly (although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised), there’s a whole Wikipedia article about the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia_v_United_States_(1990)
This article points out the interesting fact that the secretary of the Yugoslavian FA at the time was a Croat who railroaded through their approval. At the USSF end, maybe it fell through the cracks due to the fact that Hank Steinbrecher, who had been named as the successor to Keith Walker as secretary, didn’t take office until the next month.
And yet Bora, a Serb, agreed to coach the USMNT not too long after that — I wonder what the politics were there?
We had Bora, and Milutin Soskic, and a bit later Preki. It’s interesting that way.
During the European Championships in Spain in 1980, the players in the England vs Belgium match were taken off the field during the first half because tear gas being used to quell rioting England fans drifted across the pitch and affected a number of players.
Particularly affected was England goalkeeper Ray Clemence who required significant treatment before he could be passed fit to return to the game.
The rioting began after Belgium scored, equalising Ray Wilkins’ earlier opener for England.
The game eventually restarted and was played out, finishing in a 1 – 1 draw. The England fans were penned in and surrounded by very mean looking riot police for the remainder of the game. They had serious looking batons and they convinced the England fans that they were prepared to use them.
This was one of the first serious incidents to involve hooligans following the England team. The English had been gaining a reputation for domestic crowd violence since the 1960s, and some of that had spilled over, sporadically into European club matches…. most notably the European Cup Final of 1975, when Leeds United supporters, angered by their team being beaten by Bayern Munich, smashed up the Parc des Princes Stadium in Paris, the venue for the final.
The FA were caught by surprise in Spain in 1980 though. Trouble had not followed the England team before and they were unprepared for this outbreak. This incident was the start of more than two decades when the hooligan problem blighted England on their travels around Europe.
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The initial demonstration was obviously over a lack of groceries. Protesters were heard to chant, “Dong-A Need Food!”
Gedde Watanabe was unavailable for comment.
“No more yanky my wanky!”
I know about being at the wrong place at the wrong time in Korea. Yes, I was there for WC 2002, but preceded by the Ohno controversy and one of our soldiers accidently killing two school girls by driving over them with a military vehicle.
I remember that Croatia thing.
Great work as always, Roger.
I first saw the US play, by the way, in Manizales, Caldas, Colombia in 1983. I took a 12-seater from El Dorado International in Bogotá and landed an hour later on a strip dug into the side of a mountain. The cab drive and people at the hotel thought that I was one of the US players.
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