WORLD SOCCER 45

PLAYER

BIOGRAPHY

D

on’t be fooled by the broad

smile that seems etched

upon his face. If the

explosive Tottenham and

South Korea forward is now established

as a Premier League, Europe-wide and

Asian sensation, it’s mainly through the

efforts of his alter ego – the single-

minded competitor who has pursued

his career dreams with rare tenacity.

Dedication, thy name is Son. Making

the grade as an elite player was all he

ever wanted from life and on joining the

Hamburg SV academy at the age of16

in 2008 – initially on a Korean

federation exchange programme, then

on a permanent basis – he was

determined not to waste that all-

important first stint in Europe. A

workaholic in every sense, he treated

every day at the HSV youth facility in

Ochsenzoll as a God-given opportunity

to graft and get ahead. Pure energy,

pure obsession.

“While some of the boys [at the

academy] played table tennis in the

afternoon after training, I’d go back

onto the pitch to work on my shooting

technique,” Son recalled in an interview

with theHamburger Abendblatt

newspaper. “Some used to advise me

to switch off from football from time to

time. My answer to that was to secretly

carry on training. Football always has

been everything to me. I love the

game, I breathe it, I dream of it.”

WORLD SOCCER 45

Son

SHINES

Words:Nick Bidwell

The Tottenham forward is enjoying the best season of

his career, and he’s put in the hard yards to get here

Germans generally take great pride

in the intensity of purpose they bring

to a football pitch. But here was young

Son thoroughly outdoing them in the

application stakes. “Even when he

wasn’t supposed to train, he’d join in

with the sessions of other groups,”

HSV academy colleague and friend

Alexander Lukesch told German news

websiteWatson.de. “He’d be doing

push-ups, running laps and went as far

as to do extra work on his own. A lot of

us were thinking: ‘it’s already dark’, and

after two training work-outs, you need

to rest. He’d go to bed early, get up at

daybreak and train like someone

possessed.”

It says everything about his desire to

make a pro splash that in his five years

with HSV (2008-13), Son had little

taste for nightlife. His was an existence

based almost entirely on the training

ground, stadium and home. Nothing

else mattered. Not surprisingly for one

with his eyes fixed on the prize of a

full-time contract, he proved an

assiduous absorber of the German

language. Thanks to daily lessons from

a Berlitz School tutor, he quickly got to

grips with the grammar of this most

complicated of tongues, topping up his

linguistic skills with a heavy schedule of

TV programmes, including his favourite

cartoon,SpongeBob SquarePants.

What Son was essentially doing in

those formative years in Hamburg was