Not all football fans are enjoying the World Cup. The Communist Party of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region have apparently found evidence of imperialist foul play.
And the renegade reds have announced they will not recognise the results of the tournament unless North Korea are granted a replay against Portugal, according to the Moscow News.
They say the team from the “flowering People’s Democratic Republic” was cheated in their encounter with the “blind instrument of NATO” and the seven goals rattled in by Cristiano Ronaldo and chums were “seven daggers in the heart of … the hope of all workers in the triumph of peace and socialism”.
Claims like that are, of course, enough to make a dedicated lover of Soviet football take his ball home and curl up under his Lev Yashin blanket (available from the Dynamo Moscow club store for a mere 1,923 roubles).
Aside from ideological distress, however, the group – a splinter faction unconnected to the Communist Party of Russia – believes there are good reasons for a rematch.
They claim the four Korean players who were said to have tried to defect after the 2-1 defeat to Brazil were in fact captured by enemy agents.
“In the dungeons of the American embassy in South Africa the warriors were put to inhuman experiments,” the statement continues.
And, amazingly, it is alleged, the team was nobbled on match day by the substitution of two players from “gloomy” South Korea who refused to follow the instructions of president Kim Jong-Il, instead “looking lovingly at Western advertising” in the stadium.
The Petersburg communists have been involved in football before. Prior to his transfer to Arsenal they rebuked Andrei Arshavin for “prostituting himself” to the capitalist west as he touted for a move away from Zenit. Needless to say, it didn’t raise many eyebrows.
With North Korea out of the World Cup, having lost every game, it is hard to see FIFA believing the group’s claims or bowing to their sensational stories. After all, it should be enough of an achievement that the secretive regime reached South Africa in the first place.
