South Korea’s Ballers Stole The Show

One thing that's always fun at a World Cup is a good old-fashioned clash of styles. With so many different teams, and so many different managers and tactics and players, no two sides play quite alike, and so a central tension of any match becomes the stylistic conflict. Imagine my delight when it took only the second match of this tournament to find what could very well prove the summer's starkest contrast of styles, as South Korea's Real Hooper Shit ran headfirst into the Czechia set-piece wall and, somehow some way, came out ahead 2-1, thanks to the power of having better players playing better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztKvwczBmqk Both of these teams have well-established identities, and given that it was the first match of the tournament for both, there was no reason to veer from the default gameplan just yet. For South Korea, that meant a wide-open 3-4-2-1 formation that gave the side's technical players plenty of space and options with which to work their magic. For Czechia, it meant almost the exact opposite, despite an almost exactly equivalent 3-4-2-1 formation; the Czechs were rigid and compact, aiming to utilize not so much individual brilliance but more the blunt-force instrument of crosses and set pieces.