Women’s Asian Cup: ex-champions North Korea seek return to glory days after doping ban
Three-time winners’ game on Tuesday will be their first since 2010 final, but major wins at U-17 and U-20 level show they will be a threat
Three-time champions North Korea return from the sidelines at the Women’s Asian Cup on Tuesday hoping a win against Uzbekistan can propel the secretive nation’s previously scandal-hit set-up back towards the top of the regional and global game.
The group-phase clash in Sydney will be North Korea’s first at the championship since losing in the 2010 final to Australia, a defeat that precipitated more than a decade in the shadows as a result of doping bans, disappointing results and the global pandemic.
The tipping point came at the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany, when five North Korean players tested positive for prohibited substances, shattering the country’s status among the sport’s elite.
Officials attempted to blame the violations on the use of deer musk gland, a traditional Chinese medicine, to treat players who had been struck by lightning, but Fifa banned the team from the 2015 World Cup and the tournament’s preliminaries.
That excluded North Korea from the 2014 Women’s Asian Cup and their absence from the tournament stretched for another four years when the team lost out in the 2018 preliminaries to neighbours South Korea by the slenderest of margins.
With the continental championship doubling up as Asia’s qualifier for the Women’s World Cup, that failure meant the North Koreans were kept largely on the sidelines of the senior women’s game until the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.