The first Arab and African team to score a quadruple World Cup
The harsh defeat, and especially the poor performance of the Algerian national team, against the Belgium national team, sparked a revolution of public anger that caused many to attack coach Halilhodzic, accusing him of ignorance of the world of training and considering him a curse on the national team. They pushed him to revolutionize the selection of players, convinced that the squad that lost to Belgium would never win, because Feghouli’s teammates demonstrated a terrible failure in attack, and their supporters doubted the possibility of presenting a World Cup worthy of the stars present in the country. The team, including Fawzi Gholam, Sofiane Feghouli, and especially Rais Wahab Mbolhi.
Halilhodzic found no solution other than fielding a different lineup, because any result other than victory and any performance without convincing would mean the end of the honeymoon between the national team and its Bosnian coach. We found in the main lineup Nabil Bentaleb in the place of Safir Taider and Abdelmoumen Djabou, while Riyad Mahrez, who was a starter against Belgium, was dismissed, and Yassine Brahimi was employed, and other radical changes that paid off, after about half an hour, as Karl Free passed the ball. A stray, Islam Soleimani ran after it and the Korean goalkeeper settled in it. Only two minutes passed until the Greens got a corner, which Gabo executed and Rafiq Halich scored with his head. The South Korean national team was not breathing until Islam Soleimani presented a ball on a plate to Gabo, who killed the match with three clean goals in one half, as he did one summer against the Chilean national team in the Oviedo stadium, during the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
In the second half, the Koreans made great efforts, hoping for a remontada. They scored a goal that terrified the hearts of the Algerians. They wasted other chances and took control of the match. M’Bolhi emerged as an impenetrable block that blocked all of South Korea’s chances, until the Greens treated the match’s followers to the best shot of the match through short passes that ended between the duo of Feghouli and Brahimi, with Yassine putting it into Korea’s net. Despite Korea’s goal, another a quarter of an hour before the end, they prevailed. It remained for the Greens, who were able to score a complete quadruple that still eludes the African and Arab teams.
With their victory against South Korea, the Greens achieved the third World Cup victory in their history, and strongly revived their chances of qualifying for the second round. They revealed that coach Halilhodzic was the reason for losing the match against Belgium, which was in hand, because of his wrong choices. This was the first and last time that the Algerian national team met, representing the continent of Asia, before the incident was repeated in the year 2026, with the presence of an Asian team in the Algeria group, which is the Jordanian national team.
