The Perugia football club has set out to extinguish criticism through explanations and apologies concerning the personal statements on Ahn Jeong-hwan made by the club's President Luciano Gaucci. Gaucci's son, Vice-president Alessandro Gaucci said in an interview with professional soccer Internet site Soccerage.com, Friday, "Ahn Jeong-hwan was not released because of his golden goal. The problem started with incorrect reports in the Italian press saying that Ahn criticized Italian soccer." When asked, "Do you really want to kick Ahn out of Perugia because he just did his job?" Gaucci answered, "Are you joking?" and added, "We would never send a player away only because he scored against Italy."

On President Luicano Gaucci, who criticized Ahn he said, "My father was hoping Ahn played a great match against Italy. There was a misunderstanding and I just needed to have a phone chat with Ahn to understand that Ahn never said those things." Alessandro Gaucci apologized saying he was "very sorry for what happened" and added, "I hope Korea reach the final, and are also able to win the World Cup." On the future of Ahn he said the decision will be based on technical issues "as we already have a lot of forwards on the team.” Also, coach Giovanni Trapattoni said in an interview with the AFP, "Ahn is a player with great potential. If the club tries to extend his contract to the next season, I will never oppose this."

The Asian Footbal Confederation (AFC) harshly criticized the Italian response to their team's loss. AFC General Secretary Dato' Peter Velappan said, "The whole world is laughing at the behaviour of Perugia, the Italians and their conspiracy theory to argue against their defeat. Asia should stand together to boycott Italy." Velappan also said, "They only sought to commercially exploit East Asian players by signing them on and not giving them ample opportunities to develop. This being the case, the AFC is not really sorry to sever links with Perugia and Italian football."

National Italian broadcasting station RAI said, "Viewers decreased and advertizing revenue also fell because Italy was eliminated from the quarterfinals by FIFA's wrong refereeing. We are considering a lawsuit against FIFA." RAI, which paid E80 million for broadcasting rights expect that the 20 million viewers that watched Italy's game will drop to half and claim that it will occur great losses.

(Lee Han-su, hslee@chosun.com )