Che's Boys?

Last night, we went to see Sydney FC play against the Urawa Red Diamonds in the Asian Clubs Champions League - a strange offseason competition that they got into by winning the 2005-06 season even though they didn't do so well last season. In the first stage, they have to play teams from China, Indonesia and Japan.

This team is from Japan, probably from a place called Urawa. I know almost nothing about them (and can't really get much info from their website because of tragic monolinguism) except that they're the richest club in Japan, have a wages bill for players of $15 million and Sydney was expected to lose this game. (They didn't!! It was a draw!! hurrah!! But that's not the point of the post.)

One of the good things about the game was that about 1000 Japanese fans seemed to have flown in to be there at one end of the ground in their red shirts (the local Japanese fans were scattered throughout the stadium).

They were great to watch because, like every other group of Japanese fans I've ever seen, they take it all terribly seriously and are very um committed to helping their team's performance any way they can. They all seemed to wear ALL the team regalia - shirts, scarves, badges. They had three times as many banners as the Sydney fans in the Cove (even though our fans had two very fetching banners with half of the Harbour Bridge on each side that they passed over their heads until they joined in the middle. Excellent work!). They sang a dozen different songs in at least two languages IN UNISON for several minutes at a time. They had coordinated arm gestures. They had drums. In the second half, the front three rows took their red shirts off and waved them above their heads. If fans can really help a team, the Red Diamonds should have won 6-0. (Which makes me think my footy watching strategy of sitting down most of the time, paying attention to the game and occasionally shouting out useful suggestions like "pass it that way, twit" is likely to be just as effective in motivating the teams I support)

Anyway, one of the Urawa Reds banners just didn't seem quite right. It was an enormous picture Che_Guevara (like on all those tshirts from the Korda photo) with "BOYS" underneath. It could have meant Che's Boys or Red Boys.

Either way it seems strange to think of the richest club in Japan endorsing the Cuban revolution. Wonder what would happen if they took that banner to games in the US.