Japan & Korea: The Beautiful Shock
The pre-tournament favourites — France, Argentina, Portugal, Italy — left the competition in the group stage. All four. The defending champions, one of the greatest squads ever assembled at a World Cup, failed to score a single goal in three matches and were eliminated. Their captain returned the Jules Rimet replica trophy before completing the journey home. The shock was so comprehensive that "shock" barely covers it: this was the restructuring of the footballing order in real time, the exposure of complacency and tactical rigidity under conditions that the European and South American powers had simply not encountered.
South Korea were the beneficiaries and the protagonists of the tournament's most improbable narrative. Coached by Guus Hiddink, who had transformed the team's fitness levels and tactical organisation over two years, they defeated Spain (on penalties, after a goal controversially disallowed), Poland, Portugal (convincingly), and Italy (in controversial circumstances that produced accusations of referee interference). They lost in the semi-final to Germany and the third-place match to Turkey, finishing fourth — the greatest achievement by an Asian nation at any World Cup, achieved on home soil, before crowds of such intensity that the atmosphere in the stadiums became a tactical factor in itself.
Ronaldo's tournament was the story the broadcasters wanted, and he provided it completely. The man who had shaken on the pitch the night before the 1998 final, who had disappeared from the subsequent two years with injury, who had returned to score thirty-six club goals the previous season, arrived in Japan visibly ready. His tournament built steadily: eight goals in seven matches, each one delivered with the pace and directness of a forward who understood that goals were sufficient justification for everything. The final against Germany — two Ronaldo goals, Kahn finally beaten after five clean sheets — was the denouement a scriptwriter would have ordered.
The co-hosting arrangement between Japan and South Korea was imperfect in the ways that dual hosting always is — the distances, the competing national interests, the logistical complications — but it also produced a tournament with a character unlike any previous edition. The shift in the game's centre of gravity, the demonstration that African and Asian and Middle Eastern football was capable of competing seriously with European and South American dominance: that message, delivered in Niigata and Ulsan and Suwon, took twenty years to arrive fully but arrived.
MATCH FOOTAGE
2002
Brazil 2–0 Germany
2002
Brazil 1–0 Turkey
2002
Germany 1–0 South Korea
2002
South Korea 2–1 Italy (AET)
2002
Germany 1–0 USA
2002
France 0–1 Senegal