“If you go into battle, you have to win. “I will do my best to stand at the very top.”
Choo Il-seung, coach of the Korean men’s national basketball team, who arrived in Hangzhou, the battle site, made a bold statement.
The Korean national basketball team, including coach Chu Il-seung, appeared at Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport on the afternoon of the 23rd.
Korea, which belongs to Group D in this tournament, will begin the 2022 Hangzhou Asian Games men’s basketball group preliminary schedule, starting with the game against Indonesia on the 26th. Afterwards, they will face off against Qatar (28th) and Japan (30th).
Korea is aiming for its first gold medal in this competition nine years since the 2014 Incheon Asian Games. The assessment is that there is some possibility as the power of competing countries has weakened.
Coach Chu Il-seung, who met with reporters at Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, said, “When a player enters a game, he must aim to win, and when he enters a battle, he must win,” adding, “I will do my best to be at the top and top. Also, among the veteran players, there is one who won a gold medal (in the Asian Games). It seems like those players are leading the mood by spreading the word well to their juniors. “I think it’s a very positive effect,” he said.
However, there is also bad news. Above all, there were many changes스포츠토토 to the squad due to injuries. Moon Seong-gon and Song Kyo-chang left the show due to ankle pain and knee injuries, respectively, and Yang Hong-seok and Byun Jun-hyung came on board instead.
Coach Chu said, “There have been changes in players due to recent injuries. Still, in the case of (Yang) Hongseok, he tried it last year, and the same goes for (Byun) Junhyung. In the grand scheme of things, we didn’t want to make that many changes. “We are trying to adapt to the new players,” he explained.
So which team is coach Chu Il-seung most wary of? He said, “As expected, this is the last Japanese game in the preliminaries. “From then on, each game is important,” he said, nodding, “We are focusing on China, Iran, etc.”
Since the host country is China, if there is a match against China, there will definitely be concerns about biased judgment.
However, Coach Chu said, “There doesn’t seem to be a trend these days of giving an advantage to the home team. We went to Japan for training a few days ago, and it was completely different from our previous judgment standards. “I tried to hear it accurately,” he said. “I felt a lot of those things during the evaluation match against Japan. (Rather) if our players have preconceived notions and are sensitive in this area, it will not have a positive effect on their performance,” he emphasized.
This time, the national team included ‘young blood’ like Moon Jeong-hyun and Ha Yoon-ki. Although there may be concerns about their lack of experience, coach Chu Il-seung instead focused on their ‘passion’.
Coach Chu said, “In the past, there were a lot of things like young players being pressured by their seniors and not being able to play on their own, but that’s not the case with players these days. He said he did what he had to do. “I’m looking forward to things like this without being intimidated,” he said, expressing his belief that “(when the atmosphere gets overheated), the veteran players will be able to control it well on the court.”
The Korean men’s volleyball team, led by coach Lim Do-heon, was confirmed to have failed to win a medal even before the official opening ceremony of the competition was held. After suffering shock losses to India and Pakistan, they were headed to the 7th-12th place ranking match. Men’s volleyball, which succeeded in winning medals 14 times in a row from the 1966 Bangkok Games to the 2018 Jakarta-Palembang Games, has now suffered the humiliation of ‘no medals’ for the first time in 61 years since the 1962 Indonesian Games in Jakarta. This alerted the men’s basketball team, including coach Chu Il-seung.
Coach Chu said, “After the players arrived, they communicated with each other while receiving news like this. “There has been a preconceived notion that we are the weakest among Southeast Asian countries, but that should no longer exist,” he said, adding strength to his voice.