The Marmot’s Hole

Well, this is another football post in the midst of all the other, perhaps more important, issues.  I do have interests that don’t involve “the beautiful game”, that actually involve what might be considered more serious topics, but those interests would most likely be of no interest to the Marmot’s gang.

Anyhow, the Korean Football Association is at it again.  Just this week, they issued an analysis of the Korean National Team’s World Cup performance and guess whom they hung most of the blame on?  As you could see on the bottom of Thursday’s The Korea Times front page the following bold headline:

Football Association Criticizes Advocaat

Without even reading the rest of the article, the following thought was first and foremost in my mind: nice of the KFA to be its usual cowardly self by criticising its former football coach after he’s been gone for more than a week. 

Also nice of the KFA to reveal the quantum stature of its balls, again, by publicly airing its criticism in the media instead of sitting down with Advocaat sometime last week, right after the World Cup ended, to go over its “analysis”.

Last month, in various posts here on the Marmot Network, I leveled many a harsh criticism at various factions involved with Korean football: the football “culture” here, the hideously high expectations by Korean footballing “experts” the nation over, the delirium of Koreans over their football fever (when it’s really just a fever of nationalism), the maiming of the FIFA web site (twice), and the poor play of the KNT itself.

And I wasn’t alone in my assessments of football in this country, either.

However, I never had the opportunity to levy any seething words at the KFA, whom I vilify as the number one culprit of football lunacy in this country, but I knew if I waited, they would blunder and blubber and the chance would present itself.  And so it has come to pass…

The KFA’s complaints can be found in English on The Korea Times web site (www.koreatimes.com), but I’ll go over them here now, as well. 

The association’s chief complaint about Advocaat is this: he changed the team’s defensive alignment from its usual four-man backline to a three-man backline.  By employing this new strategy, without having tested this new alignment in any of the pre-tournament friendlies, the KFA argues that confusion reigned amongst the players, most especially in the Togo match.  Furthermore, the KFA alleges, Advocaat deserves blame for Korea’s lack of aggressiveness against Togo once the Sparrowhawks went down a man not long after the restart.

Since Advocaat was given, and is being given, no quarter in which to defend himself, we have to rely on the, ahem, astute analyses of Young-moo Lee, chairman of the KFA technical committee, and Hyun-ho Shin, a member of said technical committee, for glimpses into why Advocaat employed the strategies that he did.

Chairman Lee, a universally-renowned footballing expert based on his four FIFA World Player of the Year awards, indicated that Advocaat “may” have been insecure about the four-back alignment because of its poor play in friendlies leading up to the Cup.  He added that, “the Togo game was very dull…because…of the system.”  Additionally, he claimed that, “the players…were confused in their new roles {brought upon by the new three-back defense} and failed to focus on the play.”

Now in Russia at RPL team Zenit St. Petersburh, Advocaat’s response: muffled because of a swollen tongue due to drinking too much vodka when he thought it was soju

Committe member Shin, a stalwart defensive midfielder who coached Brasil to two of its World Cup titles, stated that Korea “should have pressed harder” when Togo were a man down, groaned that it was “regrettable for Advocaat to have ordered players to make a safe play at the end of the game”, and lamented that Advocaat seemed to have been “satisfied with just a victory, but he should have thought about goal difference.”

Advocaat’s response: unintelligible due to satisfaction at his new team’s 10-0 squeaker at the weekend when Zenit were playing it safe against four-man Spartak Moscow

A third committee member, unidentified, unqualified, and last believed to have been drowned in the splashdown of Lil’ Kim’s missile testing two weeks ago, was heard to say, just before missile impact, that Advocaat was also being blamed for unfavourably (Korean opinion, of course) “influencing the match official in the Switzerland v. Korea match”, for ”bribing FIFA in order to get Korea’s world ranking to drop” more than twenty places, for inspiring Materazzi to “insult that ultimate of Japanophiles, Zinedine Zidane” so Zizou would lose his cool, and for “causing last weekend’s torrential downpour that so paralysed the peninsula.”

Advocaat’s response: abstruse due to the St. Petersburg mafia’s concern that a NK spy, on Lil’ Kim’s orders, had infiltrated Zenit’s managerial staff to find out the extent of Advocaat’s influence on North Korea’s not having qualified for the World Cup

Okay, so let’s go over this:

1. changed defensive alignment: granted, there are many people in sports that advocaat advocate a manager’s always sticking by his guns or his familiar strategy.  Live by the sword, die by the sword, so to speak.  But there are also many others who argue that a manager should be flexible and adapt his team, his strategy, and his formation as it becomes necessary.  If, indeed, Advocaat so thought that a change in defensive formation was necessary because of its poor play, then he only had two choices: change the formation or change the players.  His decision, obviously, was to change the system (the decision not to change the players will be dealt with below).
2. player confusion due to the changed strategy: such stupidity hardly even deserves a response.  These players are members of a national team.  They’ve been playing football all their lives.  You don’t play football as well as they have for as long as they have without being able to adapt to changes in conditions, strategies, formations, sports drink flavours, and groupies. For the love of Beckham, this makes England’s whingeing about the heat of Germany look plausible. 
3. the lack of aggressiveness v. ten-man Togo: To most observers with any footballing sense, Togo were, even a man down, the more dangerous side for large parts of the second half.  Once Korea took a one-goal lead, Togo were desperate to level and snatch a point.  And given Korea’s shaky backline, such a scenario was very possible.  Advocaat’s strategy to protect the lead was sound at the time because allowing Togo to draw level would have been devastating to Korea.  Remember, the Taeguk Warriors had never won a World Cup match not played anywhere in a country not named Korea.
4. bribes, insults, unfair influencing, and natural disasters: hey, we all have our fetishes.

For the KFA to place all the blame on a man who’d only been in charge barely longer than one human gestation period is about as much as we’d expect from a footballing association that has employed more national team managers in the last four years than there are ex-USSR satellite countries. 

Because Advocaat had only nine months at the helm, he never had time to get to know the full gamut of each player’s strengths and weaknesses.  One of the complaints by Paolo Coehlo, now three managers removed from the chopping block, was that the KFA never allowed managers enough time to get to know the players fully, that there were not enough friendlies with strong teams to develop completely team strength and unity, and that the KFA didn’t negotiate strongly enough with various world professional clubs to allow Korean national team members more time together with the national team for friendlies, continental competitions, and World Cup qualifying.

In my opinion, if Advocaat did indeed choose a three-man backline as opposed to replacing some players amidst his four-back in order to keep continuity, it’s because he didn’t have enough time to get to know his players.

For this, the blame is squarely on the KFA.  Yet, this is the KFA’s style.  They treat their national team managers, aside from King Guus, as a dog might treat a bone or fleas.  Hell, during the ‘98 World Cup, they even treated real Korean footballing legend Bum-geun Cha–a man who had (has) done so much to raise the level of international respect for Korean footballing prowess while a national player, a profession footballer in Europe, and while KNT manager–like a piece of used dental floss.

As long as the current generation of jackasses is in charge of the KFA, don’t expect too much from the Korean National Team.  The KFA never have the temerity to look in the mirror for reasons why things go wrong, they always point fingers at everyone else, and they try to take all the credit when there is any modicum of success.

*Additional thoughts: The whole FIFA ranking process is as grand as ever.  Granted, FIFA has tried to change their ranking criteria to reflect more accurately a national team’s more recent form as opposed to its form from last century, but it’s still flawed and continues to mean as little as I wrote a month ago that it meant.  For Korea to be ranked behind such luminaries as Togo, Guatamala, Canada, Honduras, Israel, and Guinea is a joke. 

On the other hand, that Korea is ranked in the latter part of the 50s and behind such luminaries is hilarious, if only because watching Koreans react to *sigh* another blatant attempt by the international community *sigh* to keep them down is ferociously funny.

Reason number 1 why I never take the FIFA rankings seriously (and why you shouldn’t, either, Korea): Brasil has ranked first for something like a decade straight (don’t take it too literally, people), yet they’ve only won the World Cup once in that time.  To me, if Italy is not currently ranked first, then the rankings are a joke.  It’s like ranking Arsenal the number one team in England though Chelsea have won two straight EPL titles.

Get over it, Korea.  Oh, and play some friendlies against strong international squads–and on foreign soil, to boot.  The next forty World Cups are not going to be played in Korea, so you might as well get accustomed to playing football away from the peninsula and in hostile environments.  There may have been a strong Korean contingent in Germany, but I don’t imagine too many Koreans are going to be in South Africa in ‘10 or in Brasil (or Argentina/Chile or Colombia) in ‘14, so get used to playing in front of crowds that will hate you, throw things at you, and taunt you mercilessly for any number of reasons.

Oh, and the KFA still sucks…