South Korea draws inspiration from 2002, but so does Mexico

After months of messages and missed connections, Juan Carlos Osorio finally got an opportunity to sit down and pick the brain of Guus Hiddink in early March.

As the two lounged at a coffee shop in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, there was something Osorio, who at the time was deep in World Cup preparations with Mexico, simply needed to know: How did Hiddink, a veteran of World Cups with three nations, guide South Korea to its astonishing semi-final finish at the 2002 tournament?

Sixteen years later, memories of that 2002 South Korean squad and its world-beating run have forged an unlikely spiritual tie between two national teams based 8,000 miles apart, South Korea and Mexico, as they prepare to meet on Saturday in a crucial group stage game.

For the current South Korean team, the connections to 2002 are obvious: Every World Cup squad from the country since then has tried, and failed, to come even close to reaching that standard, to re-creating that intoxicating feeling.

But the Mexicans are unexpectedly tapping into that nostalgia, too. Something about that South Korean group spoke to Osorio, and he has in the past few months held it up as a blueprint, a human mood board of sorts, for his own team. He has invoked South Korea’s 2002 team in interviews and behind closed doors at Mexico’s training sessions, telling his players that they can do what the Koreans did, casting them as potential world-beaters in the same vein.

“We chatted for almost two hours,” said Hiddink, who was given honorary South Korean citizenship and free flights for life on the country’s national airline because of his 2002 run, which came in the only World Cup in which he was in charge of the team. “I got a very good impression of him. He was very calm, very considering of several things.”

World Cup - Mexico Training - Mexico Training Camp, Moscow, Russia - Jun 18, 2018 Mexico's Marco Fabian during training. Reuters

Hiddink recalled telling Osorio that the keys to South Korea’s glorious summer were “fitness and freshness” — that is, avoiding the drop-offs, both physical and mental, that inevitably plague teams in the gruelling tournament. In 2002, the South Koreans, after failing to win a game in five previous World Cups, notched two wins and a tie in the group stage before dismissing two international soccer titans, Italy and Spain, in the knockout rounds. Overmatched in skill, they nevertheless ran circles around their opponents in the sticky East Asian summer.

The late-afternoon temperature in Rostov-on-Don on Saturday is expected to hit 95 degrees.

Mexico has advanced out of the group stage in six straight World Cups, but stamina has not been a hallmark: It has lost in the first knockout round each time. So Osorio carried out a similar plan as Hiddink’s with his squad, introducing an online platform last winter to stay in touch with his player pool and promote its physical and mental fitness long before the World Cup (a move that some of the players’ club teams did not love).

“We knew if we wanted to have any chance we had to stick like bees to the South American and European teams,” Hiddink said he told Osorio. “So we needed top fitness.”

Son Heung-min, a star forward for South Korea this summer, was 9 during the 2002 tournament. In an interview before the World Cup, he talked about that group of South Korean players and recalled getting “goose bumps watching them run.”

Seeing an entire nation seduced by a team, he grasped, for the first time, the unifying power of the World Cup. The 2002 squad made the entire country smile, a feat he said he wanted to achieve for himself someday.

“At that time, it seemed like they had 12 players because everyone ran so much, everyone helped each other,” Son said. “This is what I think we need right now, this mentality, this physicality.”

Osorio has brought the same message — one of self-sacrifice, of pushing physical limits — to Mexico’s players.

His thinking was, if the South Koreans could reach the semi-finals with their squad of untested players, what could Mexico, with an ostensibly more talented group, achieve with the same commitment to fitness and high-octane play?

“He said they knew how to suffer,” midfielder Miguel Layún said of Osorio’s talk about the Koreans. “That made them a very difficult team to play with.”

Layún added: “He said they knew how to attack, how to defend, everybody the same way. That made them a hard team, precisely because they played as a team.”

When Mexico played Germany at the Confederations Cup last summer, it controlled the ball and still lost, 4-1. When the teams met again in their first game at the World Cup this month, Mexico focused on counterattacking and quick transitions. It swarmed the Germans on defence — looking much like a certain other underdog team from 16 years ago — and upon winning the ball, immediately sprinted downfield in waves toward the German goal.

The result was a stunning 1-0 victory.

Hiddink, who has been analysing the tournament for Fox Sports this summer, said the Mexican players’ making “runs of 40 or 50 or 60 yards” deep into the Germany game was evidence of a superbly fit team.

South Korea, meanwhile, struggled through its first game of this tournament, against Sweden, losing, 1-0. The 2002 tournament seemed to turn a generation of South Koreans into soccer fans. But the national team, particularly in the last decade, has not lived up to its legacy.

“The other teams, they have better qualities than us,” said Son, who said it was an honour to play for his country, while being realistic about the team’s shortcomings. “Mexico has better qualities than us. Sweden has better qualities than us. Of course, Germany, there’s no need to say anything. So to be the same quality, we need to be like 12 players, we need to run more than them, work more than them. Then we have a shot.”