In this special 10-part series, ESPN's Jayaditya Gupta, who has attended every World Cup since 2002, recalls his favourite matches from the tournament. At no. 8, it's South Korea's first match as World Cup hosts in 2002, when a nation went mad as Guus Hiddink turned a baseball country into one squarely behind football.
The context
South Korea's first match as World Cup hosts, in a group that also featured Portugal and the USA. So they had to get maximum points here.
The match
The hosts began nervously, then gained confidence as they settled down. Hwan Sun-Hong, playing his third World Cup, scored his 50th international goal to put Korea in the lead in the 26th minute and Yoo Sang-Chul doubled that after the break. Poland never really had a chance after that and, though they had a distinct height advantage and used a long-ball strategy, the Koreans were up for whatever was thrown at them. With more than half an hour to go, it was all over bar the chanting.
Also read
32 teams in 32 days: South Korea
The memories
Largely, a nation going mad. In the stadium, a heaving cauldron of red - everyone wore the national team colours, including, helpfully, the Polish fans - and rhythmic, deafening chants of "Tae Han Min Guk"(Korea, in Korean) backed by nonstop drumming. Out in the streets of Busan, Seoul and every other large city, crowds gathered - red jerseys, red face-paint, red bandanas - in front of giant screens.
The wall of sound began when the team came out for the warm-up and ended long after the final whistle, after the team's victory lap and almost until the last drum had been packed away in the North Stand, where the most passionate fans sat (or stood). If the first jointly held World Cup was at times seen as competition between the hosts, South Korea won this round hands down.
Presiding over all of this, like some benign deity, was Guus Hiddink, the coach who led them to the promised land of the semi-finals. He was everywhere: voted Most Suitable Husband by the contestants at the Miss Korea contest, mooted as a possible candidate for the upcoming national presidential elections (there were calls to change the constitution for this express purpose), the subject of an analysis by the Samsung Economic Research Institute of what it called Hiddink Leadership: seven virtues it believed CEOs could learn from. The more Hiddink, a phlegmatic character, tried to downplay expectations, the higher they rose.
You couldn't blame the Koreans; Hiddink had turned, at least temporarily, a baseball country into one squarely behind football. In the days before the World Cup began some of the English-language papers ran headlines with "16?" - a reference to whether the national team would make it to the Round of 16. The opening match blew those doubts away; this win took them to the top of the table, a position they held through the group stage, and momentum (and some good fortune) carried them through to the semis.