PAJU, South Korea, The South Korean women's national football team began preparing for an upcoming regional tournament Wednesday, with an eye toward ending a 17-year title drought.

South Korea will compete in the East Asian Football Federation (EAFF) E-1 Women's Football Championship this month. They will face Japan on July 19, China on July 23 and Chinese Taipei on July 26. The team with the best record after round-robin action will be declared the champions.

Head coach Colin Bell gathered 23 players at the National Football Center (NFC) in Paju, some 30 kilometers north of Seoul. He'd named a 24-player squad last Thursday but forward Moon Mi-ra was dropped on Tuesday after testing positive for COVID-19. She will not be replaced.

Bell was able to secure the release of two Europe-based players in Tottenham Hotspur FC Women midfielder Cho So-hyun and Madrid CFF defender Lee Young-ju.

Because the EAFF tournament isn't part of the FIFA international calendar, clubs aren't obligated to release their international players.

This will be the eighth edition of the EAFF tournament, and the Taeguk Ladies won the inaugural competition in 2005 as the hosts. They were the runners-up to Japan in 2019, also on home soil.

"We always want to win every game. That's the attitude," Bell told reporters after Wednesday's training session. "We know that's maybe not possible. But that is the attitude, the expectation that we always prepare to win every single game."

The coach also highlighted the importance of fitness and conditioning, saying his players have tended to lose focus in late moments of matches and that has to change going forward.

"We have to increase the intensity of training and the intensity of the games at this level. Otherwise, we cannot compete at the highest level," he said. "We need the competition against these top teams to prove to ourselves that we are capable of competing, which we are. But we also have to start winning these games. But we can only win these games when we bring ourselves up to the next fitness level."

Bell pointed to a string of recent matches where South Korea pushed heavily favored opponents hard and claimed that the results could have ended in South Korea's favor if his players had been better conditioned.

There was that 0-0 draw against the United States in October last year, which snapped the Americans' home winning streak at 22 matches. South Korea led China 2-0 after the first half of the final at the Asian Football Confederation Women's Asian Cup in February this year, before allowing three consecutive goals for a heartbreaking loss.

Then on June 26, South Korea held Olympic champions Canada to a scoreless draw in Toronto.

"If we are fitter and mentally stronger, we can win these matches," Bell said. "And that's what I'm trying to preach to my girls. We are good enough, but we need to reach that fitness level to be able to have more positive football actions longer, more in the 95 minutes, a better quality and less recovery time. That is the decisive factor, whether we want to be the most successful women's team ever in Korea or just the same as usual."

Bell, an Englishman who always gets in a few sentences in Korean in interviews, spoke at length in his second language about how he wants his players to battle Japan, South Korea's first opponent and also the highest-ranked team in the tournament at No. 13.

"The Japanese players are very smart, and it will be crucial for us to deny their forward passes," Bell said, while stealing glances at a notebook whose pages were filled with phonetically written Korean words. "We have to maintain the right amount of gaps on defense, and we have to be quick in transition from offense to defense. We also have to communicate well with each other on the pitch."

Source: Yonhap News Agency