Imagine if a day before a major semi-final for England, Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham were involved in a ding-dong that ended with the striker nursing dislocated fingers. And this was a story broken by a foreign newspaper few had heard of, then confirmed by the Football Association hours later. That may give some sense of what happened to South Korea with Tottenham’s Son Heung-min and Lee Kang-in of Paris Saint-Germain in February, the longest month in the country’s long football history.
There’s more and it all started with an Asian Cup semi-final defeat against Jordan on 6 February, which ended chances of lifting the continental trophy for the first time since 1960. That game, as seismic as it was partly because of Korea’s abject performance against an opponent ranked 64 places lower, has been overshadowed by what happened next.
