Players of English football club Chelsea jog during their warm-up at a training session in Yokohama, suburban Tokyo, yesterday. Chelsea will play against Mexico’s CF Monterrey in the semi-final of the FIFA Club World Cup 2012 in Yokohama on December 13.
Toyota, Japan: Asian bragging rights will be at stake when South Korean side Ulsan Hyundai face Japan’s Sanfrecce Hiroshima in a potentially feisty Club World Cup clash tomorrow.
The prize for the winners of the match between AFC Champions League holders Ulsan and the J-League winners in Toyota will be fifth place at the intercontinental tournament after their quarter-final defeats on Sunday.
“There’s a big rivalry here and we want to show that Japan’s football is better than Korea’s,” Hiroshima winger Mihael Mikic said.
“We play good football and they (Ulsan) play physical, even a little dirty,” the former Croatia youth international added, adding some spice to the build-up to the game.
The match comes after tensions surfaced between the national teams of the two countries, giants of Asian football, at the London Olympics.
Last week FIFA suspended South Korean’s Park Jong-Woo for two international matches over a post-match political gesture at the Games.
Park, who was also fined, had been excluded from the awards ceremony for his country’s bronze medal win in August after he held up a sign reading “Dokdo is our land” while celebrating the Korean team’s 2-0 victory over Japan.
The Seoul-controlled islands, known as Dokdo in Korea and Takeshima in Japan, are the subject of a decades-old territorial dispute.
On Sunday, Ulsan lost 3-1 to CONCACAF winners Monterrey from Mexico in the Club World Cup quarter-finals and Hiroshima crashed out 2-1 to African champions Al Ahly of Egypt.
The defeats meant the teams lost out on mouthwatering last-four ties against European champions Chelsea and star Brazilian team Corinthians.
Ulsan centre-forward Kim Shin-Wook said the bitter loss, in which Asian Player of the Year Lee Keun-Ho grabbed the team’s consolation goal, made the players even more determined to beat their Japanese rivals.
“We will push forward, we will give everything we can to score,” he said.
Ulsan coach Kim Ho-Gon, named coach of the year in Asia at an awards ceremony last month, said the match offered the team a chance to make amends.
“We would like to improve ourselves and demonstrate to the world Asian football,” he said.
The match will give Hiroshima a taste of what to expect in next season’s AFC Champions League, for which Ulsan failed to qualify.
Meanwhile, Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech, who was the victim of a “phantom goal” in a Champions League semi-final, said yesterday he was delighted to be featuring in a FIFA trial of goal-line technology.
Cech was between the posts during Luis Garcia’s infamous “ghost goal” for Liverpool against the London club in the 2004/05 semi-final. The match, in which the current Blues’ coach Rafael Benitez was in the home dugout at Anfield, ended Chelsea’s quest to become champions of Europe that season. Liverpool went on to collect the crown.
“I’m very happy with the decision and the trial,” Cech said, referring to FIFA’s use of two technologies at the Club World Cup in Japan.
“I’ve been saying for the last 10 years that the game needed it. You can see with history that results in certain competitions could have been different,” he added.
“As a player you would rather wait a bit longer to have a correct decision rather than be disappointed, so I’m glad it’s come in and I hope everything goes smoothly and we will see the benefits of it,” the goalkeeper said, in quotes published on the Chelsea website.AGENCIES
