FIFA World Cup 2010 South Africa - Portugal vs. North Korea: North Korea team performance review
North Korea fielded a 5-4-1 to take on the Portuguese in a must win match for both sides if they were to stand any chance of qualifying for the knock out stages. North Korea fielded an unchanged side that gave a solid performance against the Brazilians in their previous match and even managed to score one late goal but they eventually lost that match. Prior to this when North Korea and Portugal met, DPRK took an early three nil lead but Portugal overcame that deficit and managed to win that match five goals to three. Jong, who is dubbed the peoples Wayne Rooney in DPRK managed to hold his tears in this time around, but after the match was over he surely had a hard time maintaining that level of composure.
From the get go, the Koreans were put under constant pressure from the Portuguese, who were out to prove a point as they kept the Koreans under a constant bombardment with their amazing attacking line up. One of the few decent chances for Korea fell to Cha Jong-hyok who took a shot that was driven to the Portuguese goal from twenty five odd yards out and it gave Eduardo a scare, but the shot whistled past the post to the relieve of the Portuguese. The next chance fell to Pak Nam-chol who had to just head the ball in from point blank range to give DPRK the lead, but he somehow managed to sky his shot. When a player misses chances like that he knows it’s not his team’s day. However, soon after that miss, Raul Meireles managed to beat the offside trap and slot home Portugal’s first goal. It was fairly obvious that the Koreans were now mentally considering themselves down and out, since their performance was all downhill from there onwards.
The first half ended with the score being one nil in Portugal’s favor, but whatever it was that the coach said to the North Koreans at the half time interval, it had to be along the lines of “just roll over and die”, because after allowing just one goal in the first half, the Koreans performance after the first half made it seem as though they were amateur school children playing against a world class team, actually maybe amateur school children could have performed better then the Koreans. There were absolutely no shots from the Korean side, no passing, no defending and no team chemistry what so ever to be witnessed by them. They managed to let six goals pass them in one half. The previous goal scoring record in this world cup, being four goals to nil, was nearly doubled today by Portugal. Had there been a few extra minutes to play they might have even beaten the all time record which currently stands at ten goals to one.
The DPRK Manager, Jong Hun Kim, used all three of his subs with a double change at the fifty fourth minute, when Pak Nam-chol and Mun In-guk were replaced by Kum-il Kim and Yong-Jun Kim and then Song-Chol Nam replaced Cha Jong-hyok at the seventy sixth minute. Neither one of the substitutions made any significant impact what-so-ever to the way things were going on the pitch.
What went wrong for the Koreans after the solid performance against the Brazilians is hard to say, at the end it may have just been the fact that the Portuguese had a much stronger urge to go through and were greedy for the win, as compared to the Koreans and their weak will. Know though, they will be out of the world cup and will have to wait another four years till they can try their luck again.
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