.jpg)
Picture the scene.
It is Brazil’s first match at the 2010 World Cup; night has fallen; it is so cold that the Official Fan Shop has sold out of blankets at 400 Rand a throw.
And here I am on a corner looking for North Korea fans.
The following walk by me:
Around 50,000 fans in yellow Brazil shirts, clutching vuvuzelas; a couple of men in kilts; a life-size Ronaldinho cut-out; a random French supporter carrying a tricouleur with “Paris Partout” scrawled on it; a couple wearing red Vancouver 2010 Olympic mittens.
But evidence of North Korean sympathies?
Not a trace: the ice-cream vendor selling magnums at 20 Rand each in the glacial cold is doing better business than me.
Then I see it:
A mainly blue woolly Korea hat on the head of an eight-year-old boy.
It happens to be a South Korea hat, but by now I’m in no mood to be picky.
I hare after the poor child, whose name turns out to be Ziyaad Aberdeen.
Yes, indeed, Ziyaad would be cheering for Korea.
“He loves Asian culture and Chinese and Korean food,” his dad, Nazeem Aberdeen, explains.
“And he doesn’t like Brazil.”
For some minutes after I take my seat in the stadium, it appears that young Ziyaad - along with a few members of South Korea’s 2022 World Cup bidding team who I know are also there, might be the only spectators in the 54,331 attendance to be backing the underdogs.
Then, several rows in front of me, I spot them: a 50-strong phalanx of North Korean fans, wearing identical red baseball caps and waving small red and blue North Korean flags.
They have a cheerleader to co-ordinate them and, at strategic moments in the game, they clack together two oblong pieces of wood, producing a noise that sounds like the clicking of very loud chopsticks.
At half-time, with the score 0-0, giving Korean supporters every reason to be in good heart, I battle my way down to them and try to engage in serious conversation.
“This is anthropology not journalism,” mutters a colleague - and, in truth, my chat with Pak Pong Chol, who tells me he lives in Pyongyang, never gets much beyond rehearsing the names of the famous 1966 North Korean team, who sensationally beat mighty Italy on the country’s only prior appearance at a World Cup.
Because of this, North Korea is the only country in whose lexicon of football mythology that year, 1966, looms larger than in England.
It came as little surprise to see that the slogan on the North Korean team bus carrying a rather solemn set of players to their World Cup debuts – in contrast to the Brazilians who arrived at the stadium singing vigorously – was “1966 Again! Victory for DPR of Korea!”
No pressure then.
In fact, a 2-1 defeat to the perennial aristocrats of world football represents a better start to their campaign than they managed at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough 44 years ago.
Then 22,568 Teessiders saw them go down 3-0 to the Soviet Union, giving little hint of the heroics that were to come.
If the North Korean footballers of the present can generate anything like the affection felt by the people of Middlesbrough for their 1960s forerunners, they will be worth considering for the next Nobel Peace Prize.
After my exposure to them on one bitterly cold Johannesburg night, I doubt such a feat is within their compass.
However, their whole-hearted play, their micro-managing coach Kim Jong-Hun, whose touchline gestures were worthy of an orchestral conductor, and some of the fans, who consented to being photographed with curious Brazilians and journalists, may help to modify some of the most negative perceptions of their much-criticised state.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal? Bring them on.
David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He is reporting for Insideworldfootball.biz from South Africa and tweeting at www.twitter.com/dodo938