KPA Weekend Roundup, K League Super Match, ACL Recap, Leicester City Win

The beginning of May is not a good time for us Tavern writers – many of us are students, so we are drowning in work at this time of year. We apologize for the lack of posts and Match of the Days, but I have found a nice pocket of time to tell you guys about some crazy things that have gone on this past week.

This past week was packed full of action, but from the KPA side, there was almost no action. Fortunately we did see Koo Ja Cheol and Son Heung Min start, the latter of whom scored a very nice goal that seemed to keep Tottenham’s slim chances of winning the final alive.. only for Chelsea to score two goals in the second half to give Leicester the title. Though we can be disappointed SHM didn’t get a PL win in his first season, we can still be happy he is starting to refind that form ahead of the Olympics, and with the goal I suspect SHM will be starting the next two games as well.

The Tavern would like to congratulate Leicester City for their incredible run to the Premier League title – at 5000:1 odds… wow. Funny enough, the man who has easily had THE most premier league season, Eden Hazard, would once again decide the PL winner – remember last year, his winning goal secured the title for Chelsea.

In other KPA news Koo Ja Cheol played fairly well in Augsburg’s 0-0 draw with Koln, which also saw Ji Dong Won hit the pitch for ~10 minutes.

Now, this past weekend featured the ultimate K League match – the super match! Featuring arch enemies Seoul FC and Suwon FC, this match may not have been too eventful in terms of goals, but it was quite a game. In fact, I was wondering all game, why can’t all K League matches be like this? The atmosphere was amazing! The players were fired up, so were the fans, and it felt like a proper game of football for once… So far in the season attendance statistics haven’t been very impressive.

We saw a masterclass from Kwon Chang Hoon:

Rest of the highlights:

Thoughts: 1) Kwon Chang Hoon literally made that first goal pretty much on his own. What a boss…  2) Yang Sang Min should’ve done much better on Adriano’s goal, and had he stuck a foot out at the right time we may have seen Suwon win the game 3) Kim Gun Hee has much to learn, but for all his mistakes in this game he DID score two in the ACL.

Speaking of the ACL, Korean teams should be very disappointed that only two made it past the RO16 (though Suwon should’ve made it past the group stages too, but dumb AFC rules prioritizing head to head over goal difference gave Melbourne Victory 2nd place in the group over Suwon). As it stands we have two teams each from Korea, Japan, China, and Australia. Jeonbuk drew Melbourne and Seoul drew Shandong Luneng. Both teams should be confident going forward.

In addition to some unconventional rules, we saw some hilarious refereeing standards. In Pohang v. Urawa, we saw Kim Won Il kick Park Jun Hee on accident in the Urawa PK box. For some reason, the referee gives Pohang a PK.

Suwon handily beat Shanghai SIPG with Kim Gun Hee scoring a PK and a very interesting 2nd goal:

Seoul REALLY had no reason to care about the result and fielded a complete B team featuring Shim Sang Min and Kim Jung Hwan. Unfortunately, they didn’t impress as Seoul lost to Hiroshima 2-1. Of course the goal came from Adriano, the only “usual starter” who actually started.

Jeonbuk needed to avoid a loss to maintain first place. CKH actually decided against heavy rotation and fielded a once again KSW-less side.

 

 

 

About Jinseok 259 Articles
Diehard Korean football fan. https://www.taegukwarriors.com/jinseoks-story/

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