{"id":54370,"date":"2026-01-07T20:16:50","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T04:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=54370"},"modified":"2026-01-07T20:16:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T04:16:50","slug":"afc-u23-asian-cup-2026-korea-republic-and-iran-settle-for-draw-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2026\/01\/07\/afc-u23-asian-cup-2026-korea-republic-and-iran-settle-for-draw-video\/","title":{"rendered":"AFC U23 Asian Cup 2026: Korea Republic and Iran settle for draw [VIDEO]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; RIYADH, <strong>Korea Republic and Iran settled for a goalless draw in their AFC U23 Asian Cup Saudi Arabia 2026 opening Group C match on Wednesday.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The 2020 champions Korea Republic will face debutants Lebanon on Saturday while Iran will have their hands full against 2018 winners Uzbekistan.<\/p>\n<p>The teams started strongly but play soon turned scrappy, with Korea Republic thinking they had opened the scoring in the 19th minute but midfielder Bae Hyun-seo was ruled to have scored from an offside position. <\/p>\n<p>Iran could have broken the stalemate in the 35th minute but an unmarked Reza Ghandipour &#8211; with only keeper Hong Seong-min to beat &#8211; fumbled his close range header.<\/p>\n<p>Lee Chan-ouk headed over the bar in the last minute of time added on as Korea Republic failed to turn their dominance into goals with Iran not having a single shot on target going into the break, the-afc.com reported.<\/p>\n<p>Lee again started the second half by heading over the bar from the edge of the box after latching on to a cross from Kim Do-hyun.<\/p>\n<p>The Korea Republic strike force seemed unable to get their game together, with an unguarded Kim Tae-won ballooning his shot from outside the area in the 66th minute.<\/p>\n<p>At the other end, Ghandipour found space in the middle of the 18-yard box but his diving header to the right was way off target before Mohammad Khalifeh pulled off a superb save from Hong Seong-Min in the dying minutes to close out the match.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Last-minute misses shape the stalemate! | Korea Republic - IR Iran | Highlights | AFC U23 Asian Cup\u2122\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/eY9mP0JZ2oM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; RIYADH, Korea Republic and Iran settled for a goalless draw in their&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":54371,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[157,84,139,86,133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afc-u23","category-c47-featured-news","category-irans-u23","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-c14-youth-teams"],"views":1165,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54372,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54370\/revisions\/54372"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}