Urawa Red Diamonds: Crazy Fans, Crazy Ducks.

There are lots of things which have felled football clubs in the past: injuries, finances, the 4-3-3, the invention of the WAG and Sepp Blatter all among the hundreds of thousands reasons football clubs have issues. So many you’d think it’s impossible to find a new reason – though Twitter is creeping dangerously close (see: Bent, Darren & Levy, Daniel). Almost impossible, actually, as Urawa Red Diamonds have submitted a new problem for consideration:

Ducks with bowel issues.

It really gets no better than this:

“We have had problems with ducks for a while,” Urawa’s public relations chief Daisuke Maruyama said on Tuesday. “They leave their mess on the pitch. We’ve taken a number of measures to clean things up, including falcons and putting out cones on the pitch. The things you have to do sometimes!”

The team’s training pitch was littered with hundreds of feathers and mounds of droppings on Monday with bite-sized chunks of grass nibbled off by the culprits. Having lost their season opener 2-0 at champions Kashima Antlers at the weekend, Urawa manager Volker Finke was unamused at the mess left by the birds on arriving for training.

Urawa have been forced to conduct daily duck patrols with officials waving blinking torches to frighten off the visitors, identified as common dabbling ducks.

If you’ve ever seen duck droppings, “mounds” is no insignificant problem. Though on the other hand, dribbling around those “mounds” must do wonders for technique, no?

They’ve accurately dubbed this new war against pesky ducks Project Eagle as they’re, obviously, combating the problem with…errr…falcons.

And on the subject – of Urawa, not duck feces – a few weeks ago I popped into this not quite recent, yet still quite good show (is it Futbol Mundial?) on the club and their fanatical fanbase, one of Japan’s biggest and most recognizable. A fanbase which now includes lots and lots of defecating ducks.

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Category: Asia