On paper, South Korea, ranked 63rd in the world, will be overmatched against the 15th-ranked Costa Rica in its football friendly scheduled for Tuesday in Seoul.
Yet Uli Stielike, head coach for the home side, said on the eve of the match that he has confidence in his players to come through against the favored opponents.
“Based on FIFA rankings, it may seem easy to see who will win this match,” Stielike said at a pre-match press conference Monday at Seoul World Cup Stadium, the venue for the match.
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Korea head coach Uli Stielike (Yonhap) |
“Yet I think there’s still a possibility that we will play well enough to win. Our players have all done so well in training that I actually had difficulty selecting the starting lineup.”
South Korea defeated Paraguay 2-0 last Friday in Stielike’s South Korean coaching debut. The German coach put out a surprising starting lineup that was missing some of the country’s best-known players, and the less-heralded faces made most of their opportunities on both ends of the pitch.
Stielike said he will do “a new experiment” with his lineup on Tuesday.
“I don’t want my players to find out about the starting lineup through the media, but I have the starters pretty much set in my mind,” the coach added. “Regardless of who plays in what positions, I am confident that we will win the match.”
Stielike also said he has utmost faith in each of the 23 players on the roster, and he also trusts them to respond to his faith in kind.
After the win over Paraguay, Stielike had said he felt South Korea should have won the match 6-3, lamenting some missed scoring opportunities and defensive lapses in the second half. He said Tuesday he hopes to earn another clean sheet victory against Costa Rica and to make sure Korea takes the upper hand in ball possession.
“One of the problems that emerged from the match against Paraguay was that our players ran out of gas in the second half and lost the ball too easily,” he observed. “The objective for tomorrow is to improve our ball possession.” (Yonhap)
