Week 12: Leaving a man behind in Seoul, a broken jaw and a bit of samgyeopsal

As usual, Seoul Station was the meeting point early Saturday morning as we prepared to make the two and a half hour train trip to Ulsan for the second round of the Korean league.

Early starts have become commonplace on Seoul Gaels championship outings and today was no different, with most of us booked in for the 7am train. Yet, as we were about to make our way down to the platform, ten minutes before departure, we noticed that our treasurer Brian Keane was nowhere to be seen. One quick phone call revealed that Keano, the man who had made the booking and had the group ticket in his possession, had only just woken up at his home.

After a moment’s panic we decided we had no option but to jump on the train anyway. Keano could get the next one when he arrived. In any case, such is modern technology, he was able to send us a picture of the ticket so there was no problems.

Located on the South East coast, Ulsan is the seventh most populous city in Korea with a population of just over one million. The city also hosted three games in the 2002 World Cup in Korea. We had visited there last year for Daegu na Fianna’s round of the Korean league and again they had chosen the city to host round two on Saturday. The trip there was comfortable. We were seated in carriage one, “the movie carriage” although, curiously, the big screen in the middle of the carriage was left idle for the journey’s duration. Unlike the previous round, we arrived at the venue well before our first game.

I had already stocked up on fresh bananas, roasted almonds and pecan nuts the night before and just needed to buy some water and energy drinks for the day ahead. It’s been getting hotter and hotter here as we enter the summer months and soon it will be the beginning of rainy season. After seeing Dunny’s tank top sunburn from the previous week I had made sure to bring a large bottle of sunscreen factor 50 which I applied in layers at the beginning of the day.

Again we had two men’s teams and two ladies’ teams competing. We travelled with about 16 men and 20 women. Requiring a minimum of nine players to make a team, it was a tough day for many of our players who had to play for both the A and B team, with some clocking up close to one hundred minutes of football throughout the day. While it was a tough day for them, player-coach and Wayne Rooney lookalike, Jamie Lynch took the prize for having the most arduous day of all. Following a mistimed tackle in the first game he had to be whisked off to a nearby hospital where it was later confirmed that he had suffered a broken jaw. At the time of writing he has already undergone surgery and we hope he will be back in action as soon as possible.

On the field, each team played four games, a game each against Busan A and Busan B, one game against Daegu and one game between ourselves. Starting at around 11am our players had to play one or two games about every ninety minutes, with the competition finishing up around five o’clock.

It was a successful day with our Men’s A team winning all four games, our B team winning two and drawing one, and our ladies’ A and B teams winning two games and one game respectively.

As we usually do at the end of a long day of football some of us found a sauna in the downtown area, about ten or 15 minutes by taxi from the pitch, where we could rotate between the hot and cold baths on offer. By eight o’ clock the guys were ready to eat some samgyeopsal (grilled pork belly) and drink some soju and beer at a nearby restaurant. The majority of girls, unsurprisingly, made it out much, much later and we met up with players from the other teams as another eventful round of the Korean league came to a close.