The ghosts showed up at Goyang Stadium this past Friday. They arrived wearing yellow and green, moving with the easy confidence of champions who know exactly who they are, and they left South Korea's national team in pieces on the grass—five goals to nothing, the kind of scoreline that doesn't just hurt; it excavates.
Now Hong Myung-bo stands at the edge of something profound. His team, bruised and questioning, faces Paraguay on Tuesday night with more than pride on the line. The FIFA rankings loom over this friendly like a sword—South Korea sits 23rd, precisely at the cutoff for Pot 2 in the World Cup draw. Ecuador and Australia are rising behind them, hungry. One slip here, one failure to respond with purpose against a Paraguay side that just clawed its way back into the World Cup for the first time in sixteen years, and suddenly the Taegeuk Warriors find themselves staring at a bracket from hell come next summer.
This is where character reveals itself, in the aftermath of humiliation. Brazil did to South Korea what great powers do—they exposed every weakness in Hong's three-back system, turned Seoul World Cup Stadium into a training ground, made grown men look like they were playing a different sport. The question isn't whether South Korea can forget that night. The question is whether they can transmute that pain into something useful.
Paraguay arrives as the perfect test, because they're nobody's pushover anymore. They beat Brazil in South American qualifying. They beat Argentina. They beat Uruguay. They accumulated 28 points and finished sixth in the most ruthless confederation on earth, earning their spot at the big table through blood and grit. Ten days ago in Japan, they fought back from giving up an equalizer in the 94th minute to salvage a 2-2 draw, with Miguel Almirón and Diego Gómez providing the steel. This is a team that knows how to suffer, how to grind, how to make opponents earn every inch.
Son Heung-min walked off that field Friday night looking haunted. The captain, the talisman, the man who's supposed to carry this team through the darkness—rendered invisible against Brazil's ruthless press. He scored in both September friendlies against the United States and Mexico, showing the form that makes him one of Asia's finest exports to European football. But now comes the reckoning. How does a leader respond when the foundation crumbles? Does he retreat into safety, or does he attack the moment with everything he has left?
The tactical chess match matters here. Hong's three-back experiment failed catastrophically against Brazil's speed and technical superiority, the kind of failure that makes coaches wake up at three in the morning reconsidering their entire philosophy. Will he retreat to a traditional back four, admitting the experiment was premature? Or will he double down, insisting the system works if only his players execute better? Paraguay's compact, physical approach—the South American way of making every duel a test of will—presents a different puzzle than Brazil's samba sophistication. This match might tell us more about Hong Myung-bo's coaching than any result could.
Oh Hyeon-gyu, who scored against Mexico and has been framing his competition with Son as a "learning opportunity," represents the future trying to push through the present. Against Paraguay's battle-hardened defense, shaped by qualifying wars in La Paz and Buenos Aires, he'll need to find spaces that don't exist, create chances from nothing. That's what emerging stars do in moments like these—they refuse to be diminished by context.
The history between these teams suggests Tuesday night will be tight, contested, probably ugly in the best way. Three wins for South Korea, two for Paraguay, with four draws scattered across their meetings—including that 2-2 result back in June 2022. Paraguay hasn't beaten South Korea since 2001, but they've made life miserable in the interim, the kind of opponent that turns football into a war of attrition.
Here's what matters: South Korea needs this win more than Paraguay does. The Paraguayans have already accomplished their mission—they're going to the World Cup. They can treat this as a training exercise, a chance to fine-tune. South Korea has everything to prove and nowhere to hide. They're wounded, desperate, backed into a corner by their own failures and the cold mathematics of FIFA rankings.
That desperation might be exactly what saves them. Sometimes a team needs to be broken before it can be whole. Tuesday night, in front of their own fans, with the memory of Brazil's clinical demolition still fresh, South Korea gets their chance at redemption. Whether they seize it or let it slip away will tell us everything we need to know about who they really are.