South Korea's Son Heung-min, left, leads a warm-up in training with his teammates in Brisbane, Australia, on January 15, 2015. Edgar Su / Reuters
South Korea's Son Heung-min, left, leads a warm-up in training with his teammates in Brisbane, Australia, on January 15, 2015. Edgar Su / Reuters
South Korea's Son Heung-min, left, leads a warm-up in training with his teammates in Brisbane, Australia, on January 15, 2015. Edgar Su / Reuters
South Korea's Son Heung-min, left, leads a warm-up in training with his teammates in Brisbane, Australia, on January 15, 2015. Edgar Su / Reuters

Sport

South Korea race to deal with squad issues ahead of Group A decider against Australia

Son Heung-min, Koo Ja-cheol and Kim Chang-soo available again after missing Kuwait match

Agence France Presse

January 16, 2015

  • English
  • Arabic

South Korean coach Uli Stielike said medical problems are badly hampering his preparations for his side’s final Group A game against Australia on Saturday, which will decide who wins the group.

Stielike, who had to make seven changes for the 1-0 win over Kuwait through injuries and a flu bug, said he would have to consult medical staff before making his final selection.

Both teams are already qualified for the quarter-finals, but Korea must win to prevent the hosts from topping the group.

“I’ve waited every day for the past five days for the medical reports,” Stielike said.

“It’s like a pilot who is flying in the afternoon looking for the weather forecast. Every morning, I’m sitting with our medical department.”

Bayer Leverkusen forward Son Heung-min and Koo Ja-cheol are both back in training after recovering from illness, while Kim Chang-soo appears to have recovered from a knock.

Goalkeeper Kim Jin-hyeon also sat out the Kuwait game with illness, and Lee Chung-yong is out of the tournament with a hairline fracture of his leg.

“For Saturday’s game, I’m sitting here now with a lot of doubts and waiting for the afternoon training,” Stielike said.

“On Thursday, it was the first time for five days that Ja-cheol and Heung-min and Chang-soo did the first training session, so we have to wait as the players consult the doctor, because we cannot take any risk looking at the quarter-final.

“If you look at the details, the statistics, Australia is the best team in the ratings of passes, of challenges, of tackling, of headers, of a lot of things.

“But also, the tournament after this game tomorrow will come into another phase and we will have to look at what happens from the quarter-finals.”

Saturday's other game sees Kuwait play Oman. Both sides are already eliminated.

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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts

Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.

The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.

Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.

More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.

The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.

Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:

November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.

May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.

April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.

February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.

December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.

July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.

May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.

New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.

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