World Cup LockerRoom/Tom Humphries: We were on the shuttle bus the other night. I should tell you that if you are a journalist you don't actually go to the World Cup, you go to the shuttle buses that chase along after the World Cup and for a month you pursue the World Cup. It's like sex, endless pursuing, a little bit of action, one side going home in tears. Maybe not.

Anyway we were on the shuttle bus and there was an American in our midst. There is something about the interior of buses that makes Americans talk even louder than usual. Now this American was up to 11 on the volume dial. As he was broadcasting to the entire Asian-Pacific region I presume he won't mind if I quote the odd extract.

I should say before doing so that I am a bleeding heart liberal where Americans are concerned. I like them and I believe they are worth preserving. I am a bleeding heart liberal and I believe, goddamnit, in freedom of speech in all circumstances except when Americans are talking about foreign countries or soccer. I'm sorry but I just think Americans should be prohibited about talking about those things until they know more about them. If you'd been on the shuttle bus you'd agree.

Anyway he shouted on and on about Hakan Sukur, about the Italians and Vieri, about John O'Brien of the USA and Ajax, about this that and the other, a clownish cavalcade of senseless opinions shared with a bus filled with soccer hacks in a bad mood.

Finally he got on to the Koreans. He hoped South Korea went no further in this World Cup because, well because, "they're noisy, they're smelly, they're loud and they're unprofessional". It was at this point I spotted a Brazilian journalist catch the eye of a Dutch colleague and with his right hand make a gesture which suggested that the American was afflicted with a chronic addiction to masturbation. It was at that point that I became a South Korean myself.

A couple of years ago at the Sydney Olympics I tried being an Australian for a while and it went well apart from the surfing. This, though, is the first time I have actually become a non-English speaking person. Very few readers will be surprised to discover that English is not my first language but will be impressed to know that I can now be found driving a taxi most daytimes in central Seoul (hard times in this newspaper) and boring passengers to death with my views on the national team.

I have become so Korean that I am thinking of actually doing what one American soldier did back in 1983. He defected to the North and has never been heard of again.

Imagine walking off across the demilitarised zone and off into the grim, starving north of the country wearing a Be The Reds T-shirt and carrying video footage of recent scenes inside and outside stadiums here. In Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, they have been staging an old fashioned spartakiad in the massive May Day Stadium (rumoured to hold 150,000 people), with thousands of soldiers and thousands of children pressed into service for gymnastic displays and great exhibitions of marching and flag waving.

Nothing which the powers north of the border pull out of the hat, though, can stop the people there from wondering and imagining, from hearing whispers and picking up snippets of what is going on at the other end of the peninsula.

Those with longer memories will recall 1966 and the glory of the North Korean journey through that year's World Cup. Others, the older ones, will recall 1954, the year after the Korean War ended and the gap between the two Koreas was beginning to widen.

South Korea needed to beat Japan to qualify for the finals but they were too stubborn and proud to allow the Japanese even come to Seoul to play the first leg there. Instead both legs were played in Tokyo. They won 5-1 the first day to wrap it up.

IT'S ALL a long time ago. And since then no economist, no politician has ever brought millions of happy people out onto the streets.

Imagine what it feels like to be a South Korean at this point in the nation's history. There is a sense of unity and pride here that Irish people could never truly identify with. In Ireland there is the view that the great little nation is always somewhere at the centre of the thoughts of the world, an idea that a culture or a country can be validated by having rock stars getting married in the villages and major franchises being opened in the towns.

The permeability of an overexposed culture and the hubris that comes with an outwardly sunny disposition leads quickly to the "greatest fans in the world" syndrome wherein acting like all other fans only better able to hold yourr drink is considered a major triumph for which the planet should be grateful.

In South Korea there is no such feeling, there is philosophical humility and a certain diffidence and the vague knowledge that for the rest of the world Asia is one large, impenetrable mystery, with tricky languages and weird customs and a history of nasty wars. In South Korea, too, there is a heartbreak we can understand, a border guarded by two million troops but a sense that nobody cares or really differentiates between Asian nations.

And now the region is on a cusp. Japan's economic influence is on the wane and China is being prised open as a huge market and, somehow, South Korea has elbowed its way to the forefront of the global economy and is now acquiring the sense of confidence and identity it needs.

There is a new flexibility, a new sense of emancipation and liberty. The football team have all been exempted by act of parliament from the two years military service that is mandatory here. The head of the football association, the flamboyant Chung Mong-Joon (also of the Hyundai Corporation), is expected to be a popular candidate for the presidency in November. Guus Hiddink is about to provoke a change in the law which will allow South Korea to give him dual citizenship. Mostly, though, it's that feeling that the place you come from is somehow making its way on the global stage. Being the rankest of outsiders and yet making a World Cup semi-final in your own capital, it means knowing that the world is watching, that you have the attention and the passing curiosity of the planet. It means having arrived and having done so in a state of delirium.

It's a good time to be Korean, the perfect time to be the reds. Noisy, smelly loud and unprofessional. We're happy that way, pal.