Jeonbuk Hyundai head coach Dan Petrescu said he wants to “give a good performance” to the home fans in the Final A match.
Jeonbuk won 2-0 against Seoul in the 33rd round of the Hana OneQ K League 2023 at Seoul World Cup Stadium on Aug. 8.
With the win, Jeonbuk (14 W, 7 D, 12 L, 49 points) moved up to fourth place in the league standings and qualified for Final A. The team’s last win was in 2012. Jeonbuk has never finished a season outside of Final B since the split system was first introduced in 2012, a record they have maintained this season.
Jeonbuk needed a win to advance on their own. A win would put them on 49 points, independent of the match between Ulsan and Incheon, and would mean that Seoul would have to win against Incheon to advance to Final A instead of Jeonbuk. If Jeonbuk drew without scoring a goal, even if Incheon lost, they would not advance due to their superior goal difference of 38 goals.
In the end, Jeonbuk secured their place in Final A with a win, while Seoul, who fell short in the final minutes, ended up in Final B after Ulsan and Incheon drew 0-0.
Speaking to the media after the match, Petrescu said: “We knew it was going to be an important game for both teams, but I’m happy we got over the hump. We want to show the good performance we showed today in front of our home fans.”
When asked about Na Sang-ho rattling the Jeonbuk goal in the last minute of the first half and leaving the bench for the locker room, he said, “I didn’t expect it to be offside because it was at the end of the first half. I went straight in to think about what changes we should make to start the second half. I didn’t see the video assistant referee (VAR),” he explained.
Asked if he expected a difficult situation since his arrival, Petrescu said, “I expected it,” and added, “In any club, you can have difficult moments and good moments, so I kept my options open. I was expecting these difficult moments to come at some point,” he said.
“The one thing I didn’t expect was for a club to lose five players in the middle of the season when they weren’t even on break, which I thought was a bit unfair, but I expected all the other difficult moments.”레고토토
As for his goals in Final A, he said: “The goal is to get as high up the leaderboard as we can and win as many games as we can. I think it’s encouraging in terms of team morale that we can win today and play in the top split.”
Jeonbuk currently has five league games after reaching the top division, as well as the FA Cup, where they reached the quarterfinals, and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Champions League (ACL).
“Every game in every competition is important, but we want to compete consistently in the ACL, and we want to win the FA Cup, where we reached the quarterfinals. For the league, we aim to get as many wins as we can in the remaining five games and finish where we started,” he said.
On Ahn’s move to the left wing, he said, “We talked about it in training. He’s normally a right-back or right-wing-back, but he said he would be more comfortable on the left side if he played one space up, so we accepted it and started him.”