President revels in host nation's success

A damp, grey Sunday in Seoul could not dampen the feelings of euphoria as South Korea celebrated its team's entry into the last four of the World Cup after what President Kim Dae-Jung called the happiest day in the country's history.

As the nation is 5,000 years old, that is quite a claim; but it is very much in the President's interest to build-up the feelgood factor at present. With two of his sons facing on charges of corruption and his Millennium Democratic Party losing heavily in recent local elections, Kim made sure he was guest of honour at Saturday's victory over Spain in the MDP's regional stronghold of Kwangju. He is not eligible for the presidential election next December, when it has been seriously suggested that his party's best candidate would be Chung Moong-Joon, the head of the Korean World Cup organising committee.

A more popular choice at present would probably be Guus Hiddink, the 56-year-old who has transformed the country's football fortunes in 18 months. The largest of the many banners at the Kwangju stadium on Saturday paid homage to the Dutchman, and the best-selling item after the ubiquitous "Be The Reds" T-shirt is a Hiddink mask. The country's official supporters club, the Red Devils, again arranged for hundreds of white cards to be held up among the red-shirted crowd; after the message spelling out "Again 1966" for the match against Italy last week, Saturday's was "Pride of Asia". There was not a Spanish supporter to be seen at the ground and Germans are hoping to have more success in obtaining tickets for tomorrow's semi-final at the 64,000-capacity Seoul stadium.

An estimated 6 million Koreans watched public screenings of the matches. There are more than 300 large screens at sites up and down the country, and it was estimated that 850,000 people turned up at one venue alone, in the capital's main square. Thousands of policemen were on duty, but behaviour has rarely been worse than boisterous. In an unusually serious incident, two passengers were killed in a crash involving an apparently drunk van driver.