Brothers, We Will Do It for You!

"We do what our older brothers did not. "

Korean soccer had to watch its team ranked just third in the 2002 Asian Games, Busan. This time, the future of Korea, teen soccer players challenge the top position of Asia.

Korea, which won the championship four years ago in 1998, beat the home team Qatar 1-0 in its first game of the 33rd Asian Youth U19 (i.e. less than 20 years of age) Championship, which is hosted by Qatar. Kim Dong-hyun (Chonggoo High School) shot a goal, bringing Korean team a victory. Korea is in Group A, and having its preliminaries.

By this victory, Korea records a total of 4 wins and 1 tie with Qatar.

The shooting of Kim called the game for Korea. At `8, middle defense Lim Yoo-hwan passed the ball deep into the opponent`s side to Chong Jo-kook. Then, Chong made a centering out of it, which Kim, dashing toward, made a volley shot off, scoring a valuable game-winning goal for Korea.

Korea had a hard time during the game. The temperature reached up to 30 degrees with high humidity. In addition, Qatar citizens gave a warming cheering to its home team. Thus, in the beginning, Korea was a little taken aback. But Korea succeeded in keeping Kim`s goal and recorded the fist win.

On 19th, Korea will take on Uzbekistan, and on 22nd, on Thailand.

In the meanwhile, Uzbekistan, which is in the same group as Korea, won a shutout game over Thailand 4-0, positioning itself 1st in the group ahead of Korea by means of the rate of earned and lost goals.

In this championship, 12 teams, divided into three groups, take on each other in the preliminaries. After the preliminaries, top two teams of each group (i.e. 6 teams) and the other two best teams of the rest will move onto the tournament. If a team advances to the final of this championship, it will automatically get the ticket to the World Youth Championship, which is scheduled to start in March of 2003 in the UAE.

Jong-Koo Yang yjongk@donga.com