Asian Champions Elite (3)
Before the AFC Champions League final between Jeonbuk and Yokohama even kicked off, most experts predicted a fierce, razor-thin contest.
Jeonbuk had been rolling through the league and continental competition so convincingly that saying so had become almost tedious, while Yokohama—though stumbling a little in domestic play—seemed to have decided to throw everything at the club competitions. Whenever a big game arrived, their form shot up as if by magic.
The green monster that simply crushed whoever stood in front of them, versus the side that only found its ghostly peak when the stage was biggest. With the two of them meeting on the highest stage Asian club football had to offer, everyone expected either a brutal slugfest or a chess-like tactical duel laced with the patience of go.
Twelve minutes into the match, the stands holding Yokohama’s supporters filled with a restless murmur.
Had they just conceded to a rabona from the opposing fullback—someone who wasn’t even a striker?
That wasn’t quite it. Eating a goal always stung, but none of them had seriously expected a clean-sheet victory against Jeonbuk anyway.
No—the problem was the player sitting on the pitch, arguing with the referee.
“Huh? What the hell is Jun-yeong doing right now? He didn’t even get touched—why is he arguing with the ref from down there?!”
“Th-there’s no way! Our Yokohama’s second-line core, the icon of honesty, Jun-yeong-san… pulling a Hollywood dive in the final? And with acting that terrible? Don’t lie! Don’t you dare lie! Kuso!”
Yokohama’s supporters blinked, eyes flicking between the big screen and Seomun Jun-yeong.
The replay looping on the board showed nothing more than a duel between Seomun Jun-yeong and Baek Yi-an.
“Ah… no matter how many times you look at it, that doesn’t look like a foul by Yi-an.”
“Right. Baek Yi-an is the kind of player who fouls smartly, so I wondered if he’d pinned him with a thigh or snuck a hand out of the referee’s sight—but it really doesn’t look like it. He just went down on his own.”
In club competitions that weren’t national-team matches, most commentary teams tried to stay neutral. But this was still a Korea–Japan clash, and blood ran thicker than water.
So the Japanese commentators kept rewinding, trying to find something that would shield Seomun Jun-yeong.
“No matter how you slice it, this just looks like a Hollywood dive… and yet, the way he’s clutching at the pain, it does seem like something actually hurts.”
Even with a Korean side on the other end, you couldn’t invent contact that wasn’t there.
No matter how many times they replayed it, the result stayed the same. Seomun Jun-yeong, dazzled by Baek Yi-an’s footwork, had lunged, slipped, and gone down in a straight slide.
The longer the video ran, the less anyone believed Baek Yi-an had fouled him—and the uglier Seomun Jun-yeong began to look. Eventually even the supporters threw up their hands.
“…What? So he really just pulled a garbage Hollywood dive? He thought that kind of acting would open the door to Asia?”
“Jun-yeong-ssi… even when his form dipped in the league he always looked professional. How does someone end up this pathetic? Kuso!”
Unless their eyes were broken, anyone could see Baek Yi-an had done nothing to harm him. Even if he was the team’s first-choice winger, Yokohama’s fans weren’t generous enough to swallow a spectacle that ugly.
“And with that, Seomun Jun-yeong is carried off the field on a stretcher. Yokohama will have no choice but to burn a substitution right away.”
“Exactly. We can only hope the injury isn’t serious. Caster, what’s your take on what just happened?”
“Well, cases like this do exist. There used to be a player named Kim Jun-gyu who once protested to the referee that a fan had hit him with a thrown rock during a match. Turns out he’d partially torn his Achilles—his head was so scrambled that the sudden pain felt exactly like something striking his skull. This might be something similar.”
“If that’s the case, then it wasn’t a Hollywood dive—he genuinely felt like he’d been hit.”
“Of course. Seomun Jun-yeong has to be that kind of player. Otherwise the only remaining explanation is that Baek Yi-an’s sheer presence crushed him into attempting a dive that never should have happened. I played professionally myself once. I’ve looked ugly, and I’ve looked bad. Looking bad is still better than looking ugly.”
Oh-oh-le-le~ Oh-oh-le-le~ Oh-oh-le-le~ Oh-oh-le-le~
Oh-oh-le-le~ Oh-oh-le-le~ Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi!
“The moment the referee rules that nothing happened, the stadium floods with Jeonbuk’s chant! The Yokohama fans—who can claim to be the originators of the ‘Oh-le-le’—can only stare in blank disbelief!”
Jeonbuk’s fans had no choice but to roar.
They say that far from home, nothing warms the heart quite like the bond between fellow Koreans.
Even after his own team had just conceded, senior Seomun Jun-yeong had kindly dragged out the clock for Jeonbuk’s sake before being carried off the pitch on the stretcher the team doctor brought over.
He had definitely said he was our high-school senior.
I didn’t know the full story, but… a senior helping out a junior. Something like that, right?
This is what a proper senior–junior relationship should look like, isn’t it?
Of course, no matter how much time he burned, it would all come back as added stoppage later—but either way, he had done a fine job of disrupting the match’s rhythm.
Still, when he went down without me even touching him, I genuinely thought he was pulling some half-baked dive and considered recommending an acting academy. I never expected him to actually leave the field…
They’d called him a key piece, and yet they were already subbing him off—so he really must have been hurt.
I wondered how they planned to cover the hole left by Yokohama’s first option, but Coach Kual seemed content to simply plug in a player who could run the same role Seomun had been carrying.
They’d already been carved open by one proper counterattack while running their existing system, and still no adjustment. I couldn’t begin to understand the decision—but did I really need to overthink it?
If the other side wanted to walk out insisting they hadn’t been wrong, I was more than happy to welcome them.
Time rolled on to the thirty-sixth minute of the first half.
Yokohama’s center-back Saito recovered the ball high up and managed a forced clearance that only gifted us a corner.
The taker was Andres. For a second I wondered if I should go up myself, but we already had more than three attackers parked inside the box, so there was no need to add another body.
In situations like this, hanging just outside was usually smarter anyway.
“Hey! I’ll take this guy!”
See? I wasn’t even planning to contest the header, but at my height I still pulled Yokohama’s attention like a magnet.
After I’d done that much work, whether it was Yoon Seung-hwan or someone else, they were obligated to finish it. Anyone with a shred of conscience would put it away once the table had been set.
With that thought, I drifted a little wider and watched the penalty area.
“Hey, Baek Yi-an! It’s coming to you!”
“Huh? Why me?”
The instant Andres struck the ball, Yeon-woo hyung’s shout nearly blew out my eardrums.
As far as I knew, our set-piece playbook never called for a direct ball onto my head. We weren’t some third-rate amateur side that ignored prepared routines and just floated it at my skull on a whim.
Did that even make sense?
A dry laugh almost escaped me—until I saw the flight of the ball and Andres standing there with both hands planted on his shiny bald head. Then it clicked.
Ah. He just mishit it.
Well, nothing to be done about that.
You might think professionals who eat and breathe football shouldn’t butcher a simple corner, but people are allowed one mistake in a lifetime, right? If the mistakes pile up, sure, you get to experience your league dropping from first division to second—but this was Andres’s first, so my generous self decided to forgive him.
“Tch! No matter how hard I shove, he won’t even budge!”
Guess I’ll have to give this guy a little nudge.
He wasn’t some fan whining for a jersey—he’d just been glued to me the whole time, yanking at my shirt. I didn’t remember his name.
But I knew one thing for certain.
“Think you can last longer than Seomun Jun-yeong?”
“Eh?”
Thud!
“Gyaaaaah! Kuso!”
Anyone will go down if you casually stamp their thigh. The unfamiliar, searing pain dropped him flat, and just like that I was free of the pressure.
I already held the aerial advantage thanks to pure height—and now I had no one on me?
Yeah. I really love this kind of thing.
Players staring at me with the despair of men who’d met an unstoppable force, and me in the middle of them with all the space in the world to do whatever I wanted with the ball.
It didn’t matter where I aimed. I could bury it straight into the net myself. Or, if things got tight, dropping it onto a teammate’s foot wasn’t a bad option either.
But the fear of wasting this precious chance made me hesitate for a heartbeat—and after that flicker of thought, I chose the familiar flavor.
“Yoon Seung-hwan!”
“Huh? Nice! Yi-an, right onto my—urk!”
Crack!
The ball smacked into the still-babbling Yoon Seung-hwan’s head and ricocheted the wrong way past the diving keeper, vanishing into the far side of the net.
True to the original novel’s protagonist, he jammed home almost anything that touched him—and he’d done it again.
I snorted, scooped up the nose-bleeding Yoon Seung-hwan, and started moving toward our special celebration.
“Argh! You bastard Baek Yi-an, my nose is bleeding! I was supposed to meet Ji-yoo after this—”
“Hey! Referee! Baek Yi-an! That guy hit me!”
“My friend, are you trying the same stunt as Seomun Jun-yeong? Pull a half-hearted act and you’ll be looking at a yellow card yourself.”
“I’m serious! He hit me! I saw it with my own eyes! I got hit! I didn’t do anything—why are the calls only this strict with me?!”
With chaos erupting from both sides at once, the corner of my mouth curled up on its own.