SEOUL– Already missing a few key players due to injuries, South Korea will be without their top defensive midfielder Jung Woo-young for a friendly match against Paraguay on Friday.
South Korea’s head coach Paulo Bento announced Thursday that Jung, who played in two previous friendlies against Brazil and Chile, was in no condition to face Paraguay, without elaborating further.
“He’s not going to play tomorrow. We will see what player will replace him in tomorrow’s game,” Bento said at an online press conference. “We’ll see how he’s going to recover for the last game (against Egypt next Tuesday).”
Hours after Bento’s presser, the Korea Football Association (KFA) announced Jung had injured his left ankle and left calf muscle, and that it had cut Jung from the national team as a precaution. The KFA added it will not select a replacement player in Jung’s absence.
Jung, 32, was absent from the team’s on-field training session earlier in the day, and only did some off-field work instead. He has been the mainstay in midfield for Bento for the past four years.
South Korea will host Paraguay at 8 p.m. Friday at Suwon World Cup Stadium in Suwon, some 35 kilometers south of Seoul.
This will be the third of four friendly matches that South Korea scheduled for this month in their preparation for the FIFA World Cup in November.
South Korea lost to Brazil 5-1 last Thursday and then defeated Chile 2-0 on Monday. After Paraguay, South Korea will bring Egypt to Seoul at 8 p.m. next Tuesday.
Bento’s defense was already missing starting center back Kim Min-jae, who didn’t get called up after undergoing ankle surgery. Among those who were selected, Kim’s longtime center back partner, Kim Young-gwon, only played in the Brazil match and missed the next game with undisclosed issues. Left fullback Kim Jin-su hasn’t played yet while recovering from a hamstring injury.
Up front, forward Hwang Hee-chan, who scored South Korea’s first goal in a 2-0 win over Chile, reported to his mandatory military training on Thursday. He earned an exemption from conscription after helping South Korea win gold medal at the 2018 Asian Games but still must complete three weeks of basic training.
Bento said in an ideal world, he’d like to have Hwang with the team for the entirety of the current run of four matches in 13 days.
“We already had some problems with other players but we need to find the best solution,” the coach said. “There will be possibilities for other players to play. So we will try to do our best as usual in the next game, improve certain things from the game against Chile, and keep doing the things we did well in the last game.”
Bento assembled a larger-than-usual, 29-man roster for this month, to guard against injuries in the grueling stretch. As much as he’d like to give some players a look in competitive settings, Bento also said, “I cannot promise that all the players are going to play.”
“Since the beginning (of training camp), with 29 players in the group, they knew that maybe not all are going to have minutes,” Bento said. “It’s a training camp to prepare for the World Cup with some important absences. We must analyze everything, take the best decision for the starting XI, check at the same time what some players can bring to the team and what conditions they are in.”
Kim Min-jae’s absence on the backline has been particularly felt in the first two matches. Even 10-man Chile threatened to score against the shaky South Korean defense on Monday, but Bento, as he had done so immediately after that game, defended his team.
“There is no perfect game. If people are thinking that we will have many, many games without conceding any opportunity, they are not thinking in the right way,” Bento said. “Teams are going to (force) us to make mistakes. They’re going to create some problems for our team. We need to have the personality to insist on our way of playing, and try to create as many opportunities as we can, and be able not to concede too many opportunities to the opponent.”
As for devising a backup plan in case Kim can’t play at the World Cup, Bento said he will cross that bridge when or if he gets there.
“We are too far from the World Cup to start thinking about that kind of things,” he said. “If you talk about Min-jae, of course, he’s an influential player for us. This doesn’t mean that the other ones are doing in a bad way. We trust in the other players as well.”
Source: Yonhap News Agency