Park Ji-Sung: Manchester United's Unsung Hero

You’d be hard pressed to find a single person who had anything negative to say about Park Ji-Sung, the Manchester United midfielder who netted the winning goal Sunday against Liverpool at Old Trafford.

In many ways, Ji-Sung is the model professional. You never see him complaining. He always gives 100%. He rarely has a poor game. He loves the club he plays for. And, best of all, he’s got an incredible work rate which, when you add all of his attributes together, he’s the type of player you always want on your team.

Except Sir Alex Ferguson doesn’t play him all the time. It seems that Fergie only picks Ji-Sung for those big matches when he needs Ji-Sung to pull something special out of his bag of tricks either by scoring a goal or being a chief contributor by creating decisive assists for his fellow teammates.

Ji-Sung is such a valuable asset to Manchester United that I’m sure some managers would love to have eleven players just like him. You can’t fault the bloke. He’s improved by leaps and bounds from the time when he first joined United in 2005. And you get the sense that he’s always learning and fine-tuning his game much to the benefit of himself and the team around him.

He seems like a humble, hard working man. Quiet, observant and respectful. He is, without a doubt, the model professional. Someone who is impossible to hate and easy to admire.

But yet, at the same time, he’s probably the player that soccer fans know the least about in terms of his personal life. And that’s a good thing. Park Ji-Sung does his talking on the football pitch. It’s now time for this unsung hero to receive the praise he deserves and to let us do the talking for him.