As the ‘golden hair’ exploded and the ‘captain’ flashed, Korean soccer also smiled for the first time in a while.
The national soccer team, led by coach Jurgen Klinsmann (Germany), won 1-0 in a friendly match against Saudi Arabia held at St. James’ Park in Newcastle, England, on the 13th (Korean time). Striker Cho Kyu-seong’s (25, Midtjylland) header, scored in the 32nd minute of the first half, became the winning goal. Their previous record against Saudi Arabia was 5 wins, 7 draws, and 6 losses.
It’s ‘6 games out of 5’. Klinsmann, who set anchor in March of this year targeting the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Asian Cup to be held in Qatar early next year and the 2026 North and Central America World Cup, failed to win in the previous five A matches. Korea, which drew with Colombia (2-2) and El Salvador (1-1) in March and lost to Uruguay (1-2) and Peru (0-1) in June, also lost 0-0 in its first away game against Wales in September. It was disappointing to draw.
The five-game winless streak in international matches is the highest since the Korea Football Association implemented the national team full-time coach system in 1992. The burden of the Saudi game grew even more as public criticism grew stronger as he broke his promise to stay in Korea, spent most of his time at home in California, and focused on attending overseas broadcasts and international events rather than the national team’s own work of identifying and managing players. . Coach Klinsmann showed that he did not care even though he took care of the opposing player’s uniform for his soccer player son during the away trip and caused disharmony over participation in the event match, but the atmosphere was so serious that the expression ‘guillotine match’ appeared. did.
Anyway, Director Klinsmann sighed. The attacking combination that took charge of the ‘spear’ of the national team, which established a 4-4-1-1 formation, was dazzling. Captain Son Heung-min (31, Tottenham), who doubled as the lone top player Cho Kyu-sung and the second top player in a ‘free roll’, showed flashes of movement despite his less-than-perfect physical condition.
Son Heung-min, who moved all the way from below the halfway line to the front line, created space by disrupting and destroying the opponent’s defense, and Cho Kyu-sung’s pattern play of actively attacking was quite impressive. In particular, Cho Kyu-sung scored his 7th goal in the A match 10 months after scoring the first multiple goals in a single World Cup game in Korean soccer history in the second match of the 2022 Qatar World Cup group stage against Ghana in November last year, giving Coach Klinsmann his first win.
But the disappointment was bigger. The frustration at the lackluster performance did not go away. The national team attempted 18 shots that day, harassing Saudi Arabia with 9 of them on target, but their decision-making power was very poor. It was never a performance worthy of a passing grade.
Of the six games played under Coach Klinsmann, there was no game in which more than three goals were scored. The only time he scored two goals was against Colombia in March. No one has yet seen the ‘offensive soccer’ of Coach Klinsmann, who said, “A 4-3 win is better than a 1-0 win.”온라인카지노
Meanwhile, Japan, which scored 18 goals in 4 A matches since June and recorded 4 consecutive wins, and coach Paulo Bento (Portugal), who led Korea until the Qatar World Cup, defeated Costa Rica 4-1 as soon as he took charge of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). One piece of news makes Korean soccer even more miserable.
