It’s heartwarming to know that ‘there is someone who will cry for me’. Director Bento was similar. At the moment of farewell, after giving him his last hug, his eyes reddened too. The reason why I tried to leave without looking back was because coach Choi Tae-wook cried so much. One night in December 2022, this is the scenery of Incheon Airport.In fact, Director Bento seemed far from ‘human smell’. He doesn’t come up with a good laugh scene. He was so blunt and always had an angry look on his face. He was left with no expression, only staring at the ground. He wasn’t the type to steal people’s hearts with cool words like coach Hiddink. I used the interview to throw a message and distanced myself from the public mind. His words were always hard and dry. He had nothing to resonate with.
The emotions that burst out at the moment of parting on the last night in Korea were so different. What Director Bento left behind is not only ‘build-up’, which is comparable to building a house in soccer, but also makes us look back.
Coach Hiddink, who controlled the psychology of the players and induced tension as a team, is what people call charisma, but Bento is not that type. Rather, I wonder if it was not the coach who captured the hearts of the players by informing them that individual players are sometimes more important than football.메이저놀이터
#In the recent documentary ‘National University: Road to Qatar’, there is an interesting back story. Last January, when we were preparing for the 8th round of the World Cup qualifier against Syria in Dubai, the team meeting scene caught my eye. Director Bento says this in this spot.
“My duty is to be your supervisor. But as a director, he is also a person. So I think we should look at you as a person first before looking at you as a player.”This is my thoughts after sending Lee Dong-jun and Lee Dong-kyung, who accompanied the national team at the time, to sign a contract with a German club. I did it from apology. The decision was made without consulting the players. However, he explains that he had no choice but to allow the two players to leave the national team and go to Germany for an important moment in their football lives. At the time, the national team was in a mess as Hongcheol left due to Corona 19 confirmation, and Jung Woo-young (Freiburg) could not go out due to accumulated warnings. In that situation, it was a car preparing for the war in Syria. Ahead of the decision to qualify for the 10th consecutive World Cup finals, the decision was made to prioritize players over teams.#In January 2019, I surprised people with a similar choice. Ahead of the Asian Cup round of 16, coach Bento invites Lee Chung-yong to Seoul. I asked him to come to his sister’s wedding. It was a schedule to come back after attending a wedding for a while, but it is not easy to give permission like this before an important game. Especially in the culture of Korean football. It taught me that family is just as important to players as the national team. We looked back at our football’s old custom of leaving important family matters behind for the sake of the team. It was the message that individual players are the most important and should be respected the most.The scene where Bento made other coaches accompany him to his press conference after taking office was also different from the past. While the coach listened to the coach’s story together, the coaches used it as an opportunity to check the direction our soccer was going. I wonder if the attitude of companions trying to break down the hierarchical wall between the coach and coach caused coach Tae-wook Choi to burst into tears at the last moment of parting.