Majority of Korean Netizens Oppose Verbeek’s Resignation

The Dutch head coach of Korea’s national soccer team Pim Verbeek is getting support from Korean netizens.

There was much criticism of the Korean national soccer team for its dull performance throughout the 2007 Asian Cup, but the team won praise for its fighting spirit after it beat rival Japan last Saturday. With the Korean team’s victory, public opinion of Verbeek is quickly getting more positive, accordingly.

Since the early morning yesterday when the news of Verbeek’s voluntary resignation came out, some 900 opinions flooded into the bulletin board of the Korea Football Association (KFA) in just several hours. Eighty percent of the netizens who posted their opinions opposed Verbeek’s resignation.

A netizen, Kim Young-kyun, said, “The Korean team still did a superb job with its second-stringer players without Park Ji-sung, Lee Young-pyo, Seol Gi-hyun and Kim Nam-il,” and praised Verbeek’s achievements, saying, “In particular, our defense got much better and the team discovered new talents such as Oh Beom-seok, Yeom Ki-hoon, Kim Jung-woo and Lee Keun-ho.”

In an opinion piece titled “Now is not the time for Verbeek to resign,” another netizen Park Su-young said, “No team played against the Korean team without having trouble scoring, and even Japan, with one more player, failed to penetrate Korea’s defense,” and added that the Korean team under Verbeek holds greater hope in the long term.

On the portal site Daum, a board designated for an “online petition drive against Verbeek’s resignation” was set up and some 3,000 netizens signed up. In addition, a yes or no poll on Verbeek conducted by another portal site Naver, had 37,289 participants, and 72.0 percent of the polled, 26,853, replied against Verbeek’s resignation as of 3:30 p.m. yesterday.

kimsk@donga.com