2 and 2: Spain – Korea Republic U20 World Cup (Round of 16)
If you are unaware that there are more World Cups played besides the typical one that everybody hears about and acts like they get excited for then you are missing a lot of extra world soccer/football. So far this year alone there has been the UEFA U21 Cup, Women's World Cup, U17 World Cup, and U20 World Cup. I'm sure I missing some other major ones, but I don't want to make this post too long. U20 stands for players under 20 (depending on when their birthday is, some of the players could possibly be 20, but made the cutoff date before turning 20.) and the U20 World Cup is happening right now. The only match I've been able to watch so far, and I will apologize for being a couple days late on this but most of you probably didn't see the match, is Spain vs Korea Republic in the round of 16. Korea Republic put up a very good fight, but fell just short.
Something else you should know about this other youth World Cups is that the top 2 teams that were not the top 2 teams in their group get to advance. So they are called the third place teams.
KOREA REPUBLIC
- Seemed like Korea was lucky to even be there. Having only won one match in group play and that was good enough to move on in the third place spot. So you would think a team like this against a team like Spain wouldn't put up much of a fight right?
- Looked to make the most of it. They didn't perform lights out, but they absolutely did the best they could and had several good goes at the goal. I think that had something to do with the fact that Korea didn't really have much to lose so why not go for broke. So much so that they took Spain through a scoreless draw through 120 minutes and into a PK shoot out where they fell 7 to 6. Typically PK Shoot Outs don't go past 5, but Korea was determined to advance to the Quarter-Finals, but fell just short.
SPAIN
- Looked to put the game away quickly. The almost did several times, but Korea just kept holding them off from scoring. Spain started out pretty much the way any Spain team does and racked up quite a few shots within the first several minutes and pretty much dominated the control of the ball. So much so that the GK for Spain didn't even touch the ball till 15+ minutes into the game.
- Think that they might of underestimated Korea Spain being Spain though were able to easily manage the game. Well for the most part. Spain is one of my favorite national teams because of their technical skill and the U20 team teams showed much of that same brilliance for the most part, but I think because they are younger had quite a few missteps and on a couple occasions almost slipped up enough to let Korea Republic score.
McBeth