Bengaluru FC’S ‘surreal’ nightmare in North Korea
NEW DELHI: Top Indian football club Bengaluru FC’S trip to North Korea last week to play Pyongyang’s 4.25 SC in the AFC Cup was more a journey into the unknown and an experience that would stay with the players for long.
Although the 2016 I-league champions, runners-up in the AFC Cup last year drew the return leg goalless after a 3-0 win at home to enter the inter-zone final, the Bengaluru FC squad got a glimpse of a nation in the thick of international controversy.
Bengaluru FC’S former Australia midfielder Erik Paartalu has given a vivid account of the trip in an interview to bbc.co.uk.
As we were checking out a guy told us if we had stood outside the hotel at 6am we would have seen the missile go over our hotel.
ERIK PAARTALU, BFC midfielder
LONELY AIRPORT
“It is one thing going to play somewhere where there may be a war going on, or is an unstable area, but North Korea is a different kettle of fish,” Paartalu is quoted as saying by the BBC.
“Once we arrived it was business; before we left, we were stepping into unknown.
“It was an international airport (Pyongyang), but just one plane was landing. There was confusion with our bags and we had to spend two hours there. In that time, all the shop staff and immigration staff clocked off and all the lights went out. We were inside the airport all alone.”
Apparently the squad members had to hand in their mobile phones on arrival for checks to be carried out.
“The funny thing was a few North Korea memes had been sent around in the group Whatsapp, poking fun at Kim Jong-un. Before we left we had told everyone to delete the messages; we were all sitting there waiting for someone to get caught.
“I was hoping they didn’t have Twitter, I had joked about meeting Kim for a drink,” the Australian, who has also played in China and Korea, was quoted as saying.
With the team’s bags, including kits, boots and balls, not arriving promptly, some players apparently had to buy boots from a seller at the hotel, who Paartalu says charged $150-200 for “fake boots”.
He added: “We had no boots, training kits or balls for the first training session. The boots we bought were cheap quality, some were the wrong size. It was not what you expected from a professional environment. When we got back to the hotel from the first training session, everything was suddenly there.”
Paartalu tells the website only around 9,000 fans watched the game. “During the warm-up the atmosphere was loud and boisterous. There were a couple of hundred kids in red tracksuits clapping and cheering, all choreographed perfectly. But when the game started there was silence…
“It did go through my head, ‘what happens to us if we win?’ It finished a respectable 0-0. I guess for the majority of fans in the stadium it was a draw, they may not even have known what happened in the first leg.”
The game was on September 13 (Wednesday) and the team could not leave North Korea until two days later. On Friday morning (Sept 15) they awoke to news that North Korea had fired another ballistic missile across Japan.
“As we were checking out a guy told us if we had stood outside the hotel at 6am we would have seen the missile go over our hotel, it had been fired from the airport and the trajectory was clear for everyone to see. The boys looked at each other, like ‘let’s get out of here as quickly as possible’.”