South Korea's 2-1 win over Czechia in Guadalajara was not a story of a better team finally clicking. It was a story of a side that already controlled the ball working out, after going behind, how to make that control count.
The scoreline moved against the run of play and then settled back in line with it. Understanding how South Korea recovered means looking past the goals to the structure underneath them.
Control without end product
For an hour at the Estadio Guadalajara, South Korea had everything but the decisive moment. They finished with 62% of the ball and completed 464 passes to Czechia's 242, according to ESPN's match report. The territory was theirs; the breakthrough was not.
Czechia were content with that. Their plan leaned on long throws, aerial deliveries and direct play, ceding possession in exchange for set-piece moments and quick releases to Patrik Schick. It was a low-risk approach built to frustrate a passing side.
It nearly worked. The first goal came from exactly the source Czechia had prioritised — a long throw from Vladimír Coufal that Ladislav Krejčí met unmarked to head past Kim Seung-gyu on 59 minutes, as Sky Sports detailed.
Why the equaliser came so fast
What could have become a long, anxious chase lasted eight minutes. The speed of the response is the first tactical clue to the comeback.
Going a goal down did not force South Korea to abandon their game; it sharpened it. Hong Myung-bo's instruction, by his own account afterwards, was to hold the line: "At 1-1, I told the boys to keep playing the way we've been playing," he told Sky Sports.
The equaliser flowed from that patience. Lee Kang-in threaded the pass, Hwang In-beom checked back inside to deceive goalkeeper Matěj Kovář, and clipped a finish inside the post on 67 minutes. It was a goal manufactured in possession, not in panic — the reward for not chasing the game.
Hwang's evening earned a footnote of its own. As Yahoo Sports noted, his goal-and-assist made him only the third South Korean to manage both in a World Cup match, after Choi Soon-ho in 1986 and Hong Myung-bo — now his head coach — against Spain in 1994.
The substitution that swung it
The decisive call was a bold one. With the game level, Hong withdrew captain Son Heung-min and sent on Oh Hyeon-gyu, a change confirmed by Yonhap-sourced reporting.
Replacing the team's talisman in a tied World Cup opener carried obvious risk. The logic was a fresh, direct centre-forward against tiring legs — a player to attack the spaces a settled Czechia back line had defended for an hour.
It paid off inside minutes. Hwang carried the ball to the right and delivered low; Oh arrived to finish past Kovář on 80 minutes for the winner. The move that had created the equaliser — width, a low cross, a runner attacking the near post — produced the goal that won it.
Hong framed it as vindication of his squad's depth. "Oh Hyeon-gyu coming on and scoring the winner shows that every single player is ready to make an impact whenever they are called upon," he said, per the SABC report.
What the comeback tells us
The most instructive part of this win is what South Korea did not do. Trailing on the hour, they neither lost their shape nor over-committed; they trusted the possession game that had already pinned Czechia back and waited for the finishing to follow.
The substitution then did the rest, swapping a deep-lying threat for a penalty-box one once Czechia's defence had been stretched and fatigued. It was an adjustment of personnel and emphasis rather than a wholesale change of plan.
That distinction matters for a side that fancies its chances of topping Group A. Teams that can win without their best player on the pitch, by leaning on a clear identity, tend to travel well in tournaments — and it is the kind of resilience worth weighing before you make your matchday predictions.
Kickoff XI is an independent publication and is not affiliated with FIFA.
