A Tragedy To The National Football Team of South Korea And My Takeaways From This
Few days ago, I stayed up late to watch the semi-final match between S.Korea and Jordan. I was so much disappointed by the result because the team lost the game by 2:0, a catastrophe that the team was finally out of the tournament and to go home.
I somehow expected that the game would be challenging but never expected this shocking result. The biggest question mark in my mind now is why we got to have this result in the Asian Cup whereas we successfully went through the qualifying round after Portugal to become top 16 in The 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar.
Why Jurgen Klinsmann in the first place?
When Jurgen Klinsmann came to S.Korea a year ago, I recall that the mood among the general public including me was not bad at that time.
I noticed, however, that something weird was happening to the team as I watch them playing in the Asian Cup. Simply put, it was the totally different team in comparison with the team during the FIFA 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The team lost scores so easily whereas it scores so hard. Thus I started to figure out what had actually happened to the team, and finally found the facts that are well explained in the article below.
To my surprise, Klinsmann’s career as a coach had never been successful when KFA(Korea Football Association) appointed him as a head coach of the S.Korea national football team. He had been notorious for ruining many prominent professional and national teams such as Hertha Berlin, German and US national football teams before.
Then it came to my mind so big that why KFA appointed him as the head coach of the national team in the first place. I still can’t find any rational behind this whereas there are many rumors but nothing sounds reasonable at the moment. One of them says that the president of KFA insisted to appoint him for unknown reason. Anyway one thing very clear is that he was and is not the right person for this leadership position.
Apart from all, it was extremely hard for me to understand him when I saw his interview when he returned to S.Korea few days ago, in which I couldn’t find any hints of responsibility or maturity that are essential for a good leadership.
Philosophy, Strategies and Tactics
Drilling down more in details in regard to the team play, I realized that the team had a huge weakness- it had no tactics at all.
Generally speaking, the coach(a.k.a leader) is supposed to reflect his/her philosophy, strategies and tactics accordingly onto the team and this is usually called the color of the team, apart from how well the team plays.
You might not notice that by watching the highlight video of the match between S.Korea and Jordan above, but the truth is that the distance between the last defense line and the forward line was so wide, allowing too much spaces for the opponent to easily penetrate (please refer to the photos below). It seemed like that no one was directing the team but players were just playing on their own individually.
The performance of the team was totally different from the time when Paulo Bento was heading the national team during the 2022 World Cup when he was pushing hard his philosophy of ‘build-up football’ and one best case was the group match against Uruguay as below.
At this time Uruguay had the most powerful midfielders in the world, and since the team stuck to the Bento’s tactics that the team should possess the ball as long as possible by implementing his build-up football philosophy, the team’s play was equivalent to or even better than that of Uruguay. Even though it was a tie game by 0:0, I was really content with the result.
I think the whole thing was due to the absence of suitable tactics, which in turn was attributed to the absence of philosophy and strategies by the coach (leader) Klinsmann. Because there was no tactics at the team level, the team didn’t function properly as one team, but was instead purely relying on few star players such as Heung-Min Son, Kang-In Lee or Minjae Kim, and this was why the team had struggled to survive and win the games so hard against Saudi Arabia and Australia by holding out as much as possible through the overtime. But this luck ended when the team was playing against Jordan.
One thing I want to stress
Since I’m just an amateur fan and this is my personal opinion only based on the track records that Klinsmann has showed so far, I think the future can be different (and has to be different) if he changes and finds a way to improve. I really hope so because I don’t want to see a tragedy happen again during the FIFA World Cup in 2026.
Takeaways
- Once again I realized that it is extremely important to find a right person for a leadership position because the performance of the team differs tremendously by the leader.
- A leader should have his/her own philosophy, strategies and tactics regarding how he/she runs the team.
