Coach Cho Young-shin pledges to win in the semifinals with irregular close defense against Qatar

(Nagoya = Yonhap News) Reporter Jang Hyeon-gu = Coach Cho Young-shin of the men's handball team, which achieved its primary goal of advancing to the semifinals at the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, expressed his determination to overcome the semifinal opponent Qatar with an irregular and close defense.

The national team will compete with Qatar, which defeated China in the quarterfinals on the 26th to edge Iran, for a ticket to the finals at 5:30 p.m. on the 28th at Entrio, Inazawa, Aichi Prefecture, Japan.

Korea returned to the semifinals of the Asian Games for the first time in eight years since the 2018 Jakarta/Palembang Games, where it won a bronze medal.

Korea lost to the strongest Bahrain in the Group B stage, but defeated its rival Kuwait 26-23 to establish a bridgehead for advancement to the semifinals. They drew 26-26 with Iran and defeated Kazakhstan by 22 points.

Coach Cho said on the 27th, "As we prepared for this tournament for four months, our team's organizational skills have improved," and added, "We have systematically worked out our strength and stamina, and being able to stand on par in defense against players from the Middle East who are physically large and have excellent speed became the basis for achieving our first goal."

In particular, after defeating Kuwait in the first game, which was a must-win in order to advance to the semifinals, the players struggled even more in the second game against Iran under the pressure of having to win, and looked back on the fact that we played the group stage with a tactic of using all 16 players to take advantage of our strengths, such as quick offense and defense transitions and pressure defense.

Regarding Qatar, our opponent in the semifinals, Coach Cho cool-headedly assessed, “This is a team that is trying to win the Asian Games for the fourth time in a row, and objectively they are one step ahead of us.”

However, he expressed his candidacy by saying, “We defeated Qatar at the Asian Championships in January this year, so we will give everything with that confidence and fighting spirit.”

At that time, in the group stage of the Asian Championships, Korea defeated Qatar 32-31, by 1 point.

Coach Cho explained, "Qatar has a good mid-distance scoring ability, so we cannot compete with them through normal game management. We plan to play an unusually close defense based on our strong stamina and use quick offense and defense transitions. When attacking, we plan to use an outside ground attack strategy that expands Qatar's defense range rather than breaking through."

If the irregular close defense, which has not been used by other Middle Eastern powerhouses, works, men's handball can catch a big fish and secure a silver medal.