Mexico Gets Another Shot at South Korea
Last January, Bora Milutinovic, the coach who holds the key to Mexico’s fortunes in the 1986 World Cup, had the following to say about his team’s progress to that point:
“It’s been a case of two steps forward and one step back,” he told London’s World Soccer magazine. “Some wins and ties, and the occasional defeat.
“Of course there has been criticism--and I would be worried if there hadn’t been any, because that would mean that nobody cares.
“But what matters most to me are the results, and they’ve been reasonable enough.”
Maybe so, but perhaps only because Mexico plays regularly in Los Angeles, where it has not been defeated since Feb. 26, 1980, when it lost, 1-0, to South Korea at the Coliseum.
Tonight, that 12-game unbeaten streak could very well come to an end since South Korea again will provide the opposition when the two World Cup teams meet in an exhibition game at the Coliseum at 8.
Milutinovic’s players have come to look upon Los Angeles as a sort of home away from home. No matter whom they play, the crowd is always on their side and, for almost six years, they have managed to remain undefeated.
Milutinovic, it seems, needs only to bring his team north of the border to blunt criticism at home.
A few weeks ago, for example, Mexico’s players were met by hundreds of angry fans at the Mexico City airport when they arrived home from a disappointing tour of the Middle East and North Africa. Mexico, unaccountably, had been beaten by Libya and Egypt, tied by Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, and had won only against lowly North Yemen.
It was not an auspicious series of results for a team that next summer will play host to the world’s best, and there were calls in Mexico for Milutinovic’s resignation.
But after Milutinovic had brought his team to Los Angeles and earned a 1-1 tie against 1978 World Cup champion Argentina Nov. 14, the criticism subsided.
For the South Koreans, meanwhile, this has been a year of mounting successes. After more than 30 years of stumbling about in the backwaters of international soccer, they at last are back on the world stage as one of the 24 nations that will compete in the World Cup finals in Mexico May 31-June 29.
It has been a long road for the South Koreans, whose only previous World Cup experience was in 1954 in Switzerland, where they found themselves on the receiving end of 9-0 and 7-0 defeats by Hungary and Turkey, respectively.
Since then, South Korea has failed to reach the finals until now--a particularly humiliating state of affairs given rival North Korea’s stunning success in the 1966 World Cup in England, where it ousted heavily favored Italy from the tournament in one of international soccer’s greatest upsets.
But this time the North Koreans will watch from the sidelines. South Korea has put together a strong team that swept past Nepal, Malaysia, Indonesia and Japan in the qualifying rounds, winning seven of eight games--the lone loss was a 1-0 defeat in Malaysia--and outscoring its opponents, 11-2.
The South Korean team, which arrived in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving Day and which has been training daily at Heritage Park in Cerritos, is en route to a four-nation tournament in Mexico featuring the World Cup teams of Mexico, Hungary and Algeria.
The squad is anchored on defense by 24-year-old Kwang Rae Cho, familiar to North American Soccer League fans as a former member of the Portland Timbers and Chicago Sting, and on offense by Soon Ho Choi a powerful, 6-foot 2-inch center-foward who could give the Mexican defense all kinds of trouble in the air tonight.
Should tonight’s game be rained out, it will be played Wednesday night at 8, weather permitting.
World Cup Notes All but one of the 24 finalists for next summer’s World Cup have been determined. Iraq became the latest country to qualify when it beat Syria, 3-1, at Saudi Arabia Friday. The game was played in a neutral country because of the Iran-Iraq war. The first game in Damascus had ended in a scoreless tie. . . . Australia and Scotland will play Wednesday at Melbourne, with the Australians needing to win by at least three goals to earn a trip to Mexico. Scotland won the first game at Glasgow, 2-0, and is expected to have little trouble advancing to the finals. . . . The draw for the tournament will be held Dec. 15 in Mexico City, at which time the 24 countries will be divided into six groups of four and assigned to cities for the first round of play. . . . Six countries will be seeded, meaning that they will each be placed in separate groups so as not to meet in the first round. The decision on which countries to seed will not be made until next week, but they are expected to be the four semifinalists from the 1982 World Cup in Spain--Italy, West Germany, Poland and France--along with Mexico as the host nation and Brazil as a three-time World Cup champion.
