Moment of truth arrives for tournament's co-hosts

Hiddink discipline can give South Korea first finals win

Soon after Guus Hiddink became their coach, South Korea lost 5-0 in swift succession to France and the Czech Republic. Frustrated fans dubbed him Oh Dae Young – Mr Five-Nil – and their ambitions for 2002 did not extend beyond being the perfect co-hosts.

In barely a year, the picture has changed dramatically. Hiddink's side go into their opening fixture, against Poland in the Asiad Main Stadium today, buoyed by the fact that only the world champions, France, with an 88th-minute goal, have beaten them in an eight-match sequence that includes a draw with England and a 4-1 thrashing of Scotland. They have also won over the sceptics and are riding a tide of patriotic fervour.

Amid the cafés and bars of this bustling, sprawling port, which is home to four million people and becomes a high-rise neon playground by night, posters exhort the public, in English, to "Be the Reds!" If the slogan lacks grammatical accuracy, the sight of hundreds of floor staff in a huge city-centre department store wearing South Korea replica shirts, emblazoned with the words "Fighting Korea", demonstrates how eagerly it is being heeded.

Hiddink may have been too successful in altering perceptions and performances for his own good. After berating the media for an alleged bias towards baseball, he now argues that they are creating artificially high expectations. As he points out, all their Group D opponents, Poland, Portugal and the United States, stand above them in the Fifa rankings. And, as no Korean needs reminding, they have never won in the finals, in 14 attempts spread over five tournaments.

But he is not immune to the national mood and spoke yesterday of South Korea reaching the second phase for the first time, thereby avoiding the indignity of being the first host nation not to do so. "When I took over 18 months ago, I thought it would be very difficult to make the last 16. But the team has come a long way lately. Our chances are much greater now."

The only Korean victory in the World Cup finals remains the North's triumph over Italy at Middlesbrough in 1966, a Maoist miracle which ensured that, in the wider world, the scorer Pak Doo-Ik is still the best-known player from the Peninsula. The South's introduction to the tournament 12 years earlier had been a shattering 9-0 defeat by Hungary hours after they arrived in Switzerland in a state of exhaustion after a 60-hour trek by train, sea and air.

Despite their subsequent emergence as a power within Asia – they launched the continent's first professional league in 1983 – a 5-0 drubbing (that scoreline again) by Hiddink's Dutch side in 1998 led many to question whether anything had been learned in four consecutive visits to the finals. He remembered them as "disorganised, slow and lacking tactical awareness".

South Korea's football had always been insular. The Manchester United brand is conspicuous by its absence compared with Japan, while the K-League banned foreigners until recently. The realisation dawned that they needed a coach to instill a more worldly approach. Having ended his playing days with Washington Diplomats and San Jose Earthquakes before managing PSV Eindhoven, Real Madrid, Valencia, Fenerbahce and the Netherlands, Hiddink was a shrewd choice.

There was no overnight transformation; he has sifted through nearly 60 players. Gradually, though, they became more "European" (exemplified on a superficial level by a profusion of bottle blonds and redheads in the squad), more willing to take initiative and less cautious for fear of making mistakes. They also adjusted to a fluid, Dutch-style 3-4-3 formation, learning to interchange positions and cover for a player breaking upfield.

Running parallel to this crash course in the modern game was a "power training" programme run by Hiddink's compatriot, Raimond Verheijen, that enhanced their stamina and upper-body strength. Berti Vogts, the Scotland manager, had charge of Germany when they beat South Korea 3-2 at USA 94 and he detected a major improvement when his new team were pummelled in Pusan last month.

Likewise France's coach, Roger Lemerre, who warned that South Korea could now match the top nations, physically and technically. "When a team with their strength of spirit are at home," he said, "they're hard to beat." Youri Djorkaeff gave the frontline perspective: "They're not the same team as when we beat them 5-0. In 12 months the difference is amazing."

The testimony of Hiidink's players is equally telling. Choi Yong-Soo said: "I confess I didn't know how to play football before. All I had was a desire to play." Kim Nam-Il added: "I've got a tough role, as a hunter for the opposition playmaker, so I've paid great attention."

There is still naivety in their play. Hiddink bemoans a tendency to become "excitable" in front of goal and to resort to flicks and tricks when a game is nowhere near won. However, Ahn Jung-Hwan's exquisite goals against the Scots, one with each foot, were a reminder of the skill the Koreans possess, to which tactical discipline has been harnessed.

Poland may have been cheered to hear that the Perugia player will probably start on the bench, though perhaps they should be concerned that Hiddink has even better strikers. Jerzy Engel's team looked sluggish in their warm-up matches, the coach blaming one poor display on exhaustion after their training camp in Germany and another on jet lag and lack of sleep. Yet he promised yesterday: "We will not lose to Korea."

Someone will, soon, with the Americans prime candidates if the Poles live up to Engel's defiance. If and when it finally happens, Mr Five-Nil should become Mr Second Round, fuelling hopes that South Korea can spark more name-changes before the tournament is over.

Creditable showing vital for Japanese game's advance

By Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo

The Japanese national football team take the field in their first match against Belgium today, and it is difficult to overestimate how much is at stake.

There is the understandable pressure on any home team to perform well and to prove that Japan deserve the place allocated automatically to it as tournament host. Then there is the discreet, but powerful compulsion to outperform Japan's co-host and great rival, South Korea.

There is even a financial imperative – one Japanese think-tank calculated that, if Japan gets to the last eight of the tournament, the World Cup will generate millions of pounds more in economic benefit than it would if the team were to be knocked out in the first round. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the future of football in Japan rests on the team's performance.

For all the enthusiasm on display at this month's matches, the roots of football in Japan are still shallow, and the future of the sport depends on a shrinking pool of corporate money. Despite a continuing and 10-year-old economic slump that has drastically reduced sponsorship, Japanese firms have continued to support the J-League, despite a long-term decline in spectators, as football loses out to baseball and sumo. The World Cup has the potential to make the sport as big as it was 10 years ago, in the heady early days of the J-League, bringing in the crowds and securing sponsorship for the next few years. But for that to happen, one thing is essential – a strong showing by the national side.

In practice this means getting through to the second round, and on paper this looks a reasonable possibility – Group H, in which Japan find themselves pitched against Russia and Tunisia, as well as Belgium, is not the tournament's most difficult. Japan are Asian football champions, although ranked only 33rd in the world.

Four members of the team play for European clubs, including the Portsmouth goalkeeper, Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi, and the charismatic midfielder Shinji Ono of Feyenoord. But the team's World Cup form is poor. In their only appearance in the finals, in France in 1998, the team lost all their matches and scored only one goal.

Japan's hopes rest with two difficult and controversial men, the first of them the team's French coach, the 47-year old Philippe Troussier.

In Africa, where he worked with teams such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, he was known as the "white witch doctor". In Japan he has gradually rebuilt confidence on the field, and entertained the Japanese press with an on-going soap opera in the form of his relationship with midfielder Hidetoshi Nakata.

Nakata is Japan's Beckham, its single authentic football superstar – handsome, unevenly brilliant, temperamental, and a staple of Japanese magazines who speculate discreetly about his sexuality. For foreign coaches in Japan – in baseball as much as football – the typical problem is bringing out the individuality of key players whose group-oriented society makes them reluctant to stand out. Ironically, Troussier's struggle with Nakata has been to harness his mercurial talents to those of his more workmanlike team-mates.

Since signing up to play in Italy, first for Roma then Parma, Nakata's status in Japan has surpassed that of his manager, leading to very visible tension between the two.

"Imagine I am the conductor of a symphony orchestra," Troussier has said. "Then along comes Jimi Hendrix to play the guitar. Of course, he's the best in the world, but I say to him, 'Hey Jimi, I don't need you to play a 20-minute solo in this symphony orchestra. You have a specific role, just like everybody else, and when it's time to do your job you must be ready'. That's all I want."

The team's recent form has been mixed. They defeated Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia, but suffered a deserved 3-0 defeat by Norway. Injury and illness have threatened key players, including Ono who was reported last week to have suffered from appendicitis but who is now said to be fit.

Japan need their name players because more than a stunning victory they need to put on a good show. The team are not going to bring off a miracle, but perhaps its great challenge is not to win, but to make the rest of Japan care.

* Japan's first two matches could attract one of the biggest domestic television audiences in the country's history. About 65 per cent of all households in the densely populated Tokyo region are expected to tune in to public broadcaster NHK for the opener against Belgium this morning, while another 68 per cent are forecast to watch the Japan-Russia game on Sunday.