CUP CRAZINESS RUNNETH OVER.

Byline: PAUL OBERJUERGE

SEOUL, South Korea - It figured to be an exotic World Cup, the first in Asia, the first divided between two countries and two cultures, and by a wide tract of sea. We knew it would be weird.

But not like this.

Defending champion France humbled by its former colony, Senegal, held to a scoreless draw by no-talent Uruguay and the Left Bank in mourning as Les Bleus wonder if they will score a goal before they exit the tournament.

Pre-Cup favorite Argentina a loser to archrival England and also on the edge of first-round dismissal and an early return to the economic chaos that is Buenos Aires if things don't fall just right next week.

Italy stunned by Croatia just when Romans were musing over their preferred second-round opponents. South Africa on the verge of surviving the first round, against all odds, along with Spain, heretofore known as the globe's biggest World Cup choker.

Meanwhile, nine days in, there is plenty of off-the-field goofiness.

Seemingly irresolvable ticket snafus that leave thousands of empty seats at nearly every match, infuriating organizers in Japan and South Korea who blame a mysterious distribution company based in England.

Security so pervasive you don't feel right entering a room without passing through a magnetometer, and you feel lonely if a man with a gun isn't within your field of vision.

The freaks who run North Korea pirating video and showing portions of matches to their starving citizens. Slovenia sending home its only decent player because he sassed his coach. And that coach being banished from the sidelines Saturday because he sassed officials.

A Brazilian getting fined for faking an injury. A Turk red-carded for kicking the ball at the legs of the Brazilian who faked the injury. And, to date, no recorded incident of English hooligans burning down a town. Or even faking it.

Then we come to the strangest part of all, at least to our parochial tastes, the United States' three-goals-in-36-minutes outburst vs. Portugal that led to an improbable victory, and set up an even more improbable Big Game with the South Koreans, of all people.

Now, the U.S. and South Korea historically have been to soccer what the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Montreal Expos are to baseball. They play the game but for no apparent reason.

Then each went and won its opener and expectations shot through the roof, and now each is thinking quarterfinals in this 32-nation extravaganza, even if they won't admit it, and the queer part of it is ... that isn't an unrealistic goal.

At least for the team that wins when they play, Monday afternoon here, Sunday night (11:30 p.m.) in California.

The South Korean populace, 48 million newly minted soccer fans, has picked up on the significance of the game, and beating the Americans is Job 1 from the East Sea (the Japan Sea, if you live in Japan) to the DMZ.

Latent anti-Americanism in the South Korean population, fueled by a sense of being an American military outpost for 50 years (OK, got us on that one), is out in the open. The Koreans have dredged up that Winter Olympics thing with speedskater Apolo Anton Ohno, and resurrected a bad-taste joke Jay Leno made about Koreans kicking and then eating their dogs, and now the American embassy in Seoul is planning to shut down the day of the match, and the government is sending 7,000 police to Daegu, site of the game, to make sure fans don't get out of control.

All of which prompted U.S. goalkeeper Kasey Keller to complain, ``We shouldn't be held accountable for the actions of a speedskater and a talk-show host.''

Most of the American players, though, aren't worried, having been impressed by the politeness of all the Koreans they've met at their four-star hotel in the swank part of town.

``The people are very friendly,'' U.S. forward Landon Donovan said. ``I go to the mall next door and people say, 'Oh, you Donovan,' and they're just very happy. They're just not, like, rowdy and saying, 'You guys are going to lose.' They're just happy to see soccer players. People wave at us all the time on the bus, they're just excited by it all.''

Then again, they could be waving at the First Armored Division that leads the U.S. team bus wherever it goes. President Bush should be cocooned by such security.

So, here in the Korean half of this scrum, we wait for the Mother of All Matches, glancing nervously at the people we thought were our allies, wondering if that slogan ``Korea Team Fighting!'' is more than a bad translation and pondering if it might not be diplomatic to just, you know, let them have that Monday match and see if we can advance by beating Poland on Friday.

And so it goes. In 30 languages to 195 countries and billions of viewers.

The World Cup is a kaleidoscope of the human condition - unpredictable, emotional, irrational, parochial - and the behind-the-curve grasp of it by the average American is a loss to all of us. This is one wild, wacky event, and as the globe gets smaller it becomes ever bigger.