The supercomputer developed by the statistics company “Opta” has predicted that the South Korean national team is the favorite to advance to the final of the 2023 Asian Cup. The computer simulations gave South Korea a success rate of nearly 60% before the match, compared to Jordan’s 21.7%.
According to the computer’s simulations, the “Taeguk Warriors” won 55.9% of the 10,000 simulations before the match, while “Al-Nashama” clinched just over 1 in every 5 simulations (21.7%). This comes as a surprise as Jordan went from being an unlikely candidate to advance from the group stage to being one of the top 4 teams in Asia.
This will be the third encounter between Jordan and South Korea in the Asian Cup, with the previous two matches ending in a draw, including a 2-2 draw in the group stage of the current tournament held in Qatar until next Saturday.
South Korea has suffered two defeats out of three in the final match (in 1980 against Kuwait and in 2015 against Australia), with the other loss coming in the third-place playoff against China in 2000. Jordan has become the 16th country to reach the semi-finals of the Asian Cup, and the first new team to reach this stage since Australia and Uzbekistan did so in 2011.
Neither of these two countries has won the tournament, although Australia reached the final in 2011, losing to Japan in the edition held in Doha. South Korea has drawn in 4 out of its 5 matches played in the continental tournament so far.
Jordan won 3 matches in a single edition of the Asian Cup for the first time in its history, also scoring 10 goals in a single edition of the tournament for the first time, one more than in the previous two editions combined.
Son Heung-min has scored 7 goals in the Asian Cup since his debut in the 2011 edition, and the players with the most goals in this period are Almoez Ali of the Qatar national team (10 goals) and Ali Mabkhout of the United Arab Emirates (9 goals). The captain of the English club Tottenham, who played every minute of his national team’s matches in the tournament so far, was on the field for 601 minutes, including all the extra times during the team’s five matches, making him the player with the most appearances in this tournament for the “Taeguk Warriors.”
