Koreas May Clash in China for Cup Qualifier
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
With the upcoming World Cup qualifier between the two Koreas looking to be moved from Pyongyang, China is now emerging as a likely candidate for an alternative venue.
The March 26 fixture has been surrounded by uncertainty after North Korea refused to allow South Korea to display its flag and play its national anthem at Kim Il-sung Stadium, forcing the South's Korea Football Association (KFA) to submit the matter to FIFA for arbitration.
FIFA is expected to announce its decision sometime during this week, although moving the game to a third country or forfeiting it to give the South an uncontested win seem as the only logical options.
Should the international football body decide to move the match to a neutral location, neighboring countries such as China, Japan and other Southeast Asian nations are seen as natural candidates.
Television station SBS, which holds the broadcasting rights for the match, cited an unnamed North Korean football official Saturday to report that the North wishes the match to be moved to the Chinese city of Shengyang, which is close to its border. South Korean officials, on the other hand, seem to prefer a match in Shanghai.
``We haven't changed our basic stance that the match should ideally be played in Pyongyang," said a KFA spokesman. ``It seems that a North Korean representative revealed their intentions of moving the match to Chinese cities including Shenyang.''
South Korea, looking for its seventh consecutive World Cup berth, is placed alongside North Korea, Jordan and Turkmenistan in the third stage of the Asian qualifying rounds and opened its campaign with a 4-0 drubbing of Turkmenistan last month.
Its next opponent in the home-and-home tournament is North Korea and the scheduled match in Pyongyang would have marked the first time since 1990 that the two national teams play each other in the North's capital.
The North had been suggesting the South use the ``Korean Peninsula Flag," a white flag marked with a blue map of the peninsula, and the traditional Korean song of ``Arirang" for the Pyongyang match, but the KFA refused the offer.
Hosting an international football match in the Hermit Kingdom has often been a complicated matter. In the regional World Cup qualifying tournament in 2005, North Korea was forced to move a Pyongyang match to Bangkok after the crowd at Kim Il-sung stadium showered the opposing Iranian players with bottles and chairs in its first home match.