During the week I sat down for minestrone and a few too many coffees with the
good-humored Australian men's national football (soccer) team manager Pim
Verbeek, formerly of South Korea, Feyenoord Rotterdam in the Netherlands and
some club gigs in Japan.
The Dutchman has settled in well in Sydney since arriving in a blaze of
publicity in December last year and is about to take a well-earned break from
football and decamp back to Holland for some rest and recreation before the
final round of World Cup qualifiers in Asia. The draw for those games takes
place Friday in Kuala Lumpur.
Verbeek can afford to smile a bit. The Socceroos finished top of
their group - ahead of Iraq, China and fellow surprise qualifier Qatar - with
the luxury of being able to lose their final match against the Chinese. No one
expected China to pull it off.
In fact, Verbeek himself was confident his C-team of Olympic hopefuls, European
discards and A-League players would fully have the measure of the People's
Republic at home and in front of a parochial crowd. But on Sunday night in
Sydney, the Socceroos crashed to arguably their worst performance in six World
Cup qualifiers to date, losing 1-0 to China, a result which flattered the hosts
(it should have been 2-0 save for a successful penalty that was called back for
encroachment and inexplicably missed on the second attempt.)
Verbeek was not too worried about the loss and was quick to point out the
Chinese were fielding their strongest lineup. "They beat our Olympic team but
the way they carried on afterwards you'd think they'd qualified for the World
Cup," he said.
Perhaps sour grapes, perhaps partly true, but not even Verbeek could deny the
Chinese their rare moment in the sun. They do have the knack of turning on some
decent football when the pressure is off. It's when the pressure is on that
they fall to pieces. (Exhibit A: Shao Jiayi's awful penalty effort in Kunming
in March that could have won the game for the home side against Australia. The
man hasn't been seen in the red national strip since.)
Verbeek believes it's not technical standards, nor training methods that are to
blame for China's continued underperformance in international football but the
"unbelievable pressure" the players are under from the Chinese media and
homegrown fans both in China and abroad.
Outgoing China coach Vladimir Petrovic agrees. After the side's 2-1 loss to
Iraq in Tianjin, which eliminated the world's most populous nation from the
world's biggest sporting event, he didn't hedge his words: "We have young
players who needed to calm down a bit ... nerves cost us the two games. The
players had too much pressure on them."
They'd better learn to handle the pressure soon, because with an Olympic
football tournament on home soil in August, the expectations for a medal of
some color will be immense. Immense, but ultimately misplaced.
Can they do it? It's not beyond the realm of possibility for China to win a few
games of football to go along with the truckload of metal it'll take home in
the panoply of other Olympic sports, but it would be an extraordinary
occurrence. The fact is that since the golden years of 2002 to 2004, when it
made the World Cup finals and the final of the AFC Asian Cup against Japan,
Chinese football has been in free-fall.
For such a populous country, which leads the world in manufacturing,
construction, and just about any field of human endeavor you care to name, just
how hard can it be to field a competitive team of 11 football players?
On the evidence, friggin' bloody hard.
Over at Goal.com, my friend John Duerden postulates that a "lack of leadership
and vision" from the Chinese Football Association is to blame. "Incompetence,
corruption, a neglect of grassroots football and over-reliance on foreign
talent have all played their parts. Standards across Asia are rising and China
is falling behind."
I would also add that the Chinese are making the same mistake Australia used to
make in its football before another Dutchman, Guus Hiddink, turned up in his
white chariot in 2006: thinking good football is commensurate with effort. You
couldn't find a fitter football player on this earth than a professional
Chinese player, but they don't know how to take their time on the ball; to sum
up, evaluate and make the right decisions.
It's still a problem that bedevils Australian football, but the Socceroos are
getting better at taking their time. It will take a generation to get it right
but one day there's no reason why Australia and, eventually, China can't play
the sort of desultory, selfish, smart brand of football that won Italy the last
World Cup.
But for now, in Asia the Chinese have taken over the Australians' mantle as the
most thuggish in the 46-member Asian Football Confederation. Anyone who doubts
that can take in Exhibit B: Sun Jihai's flying Shaolin Soccer job on Luke
Wilkshire in Kunming. (It can be found on Internet video site YouTube.)
And China's under-23s are no shrinking violets, either, as anyone who was at
Queen's Park Rangers' (QPR) training ground in March 2007 for their "friendly"
will attest. Exhibit C (also available on YouTube) has been called the "Battle
of Harlington" - a 30-man brawl that resulted in a Chinese player being knocked
unconscious and taken to hospital with a broken jaw. The Times of London
described the melee as "... a serious mass confrontation with comic undertones
as several of the China team attempted sub-Bruce Lee maneuvers in front of
fewer than 150 people at a chilly training ground near Heathrow."
It's an unwelcome reputation, but the Chinese fully deserve it. They are their
own worst enemy. It's a blight on their football that a country that reputedly
invented the beautiful game is a byword for football butchery.
Certainly they suffer in comparison to the Japanese (and to a lesser extent the
South Koreans), who are limited by the same physical attributes as the Chinese
but are renowned for a patient, highly technical style of combination football
that places a premium on working the ball out from the back and getting it to
the strikers without chancing it in the air. Too often the Chinese, like
Australians in the past, resort to the old British habit of the long ball.
China may just snatch a medal in football at Beijing, but, in my opinion, a
dais finish would arguably be one of the worst things that could happen for the
sport's future in the Middle Kingdom. It's time to start anew, to clear out the
procession line of Serb journeymen coaches, clean up the Chinese Football
Association, change some unhelpful attitudes and get things right at the
grassroots.
No medal, even gold, can hide the rotten state of the Chinese game.
Jesse Fink is a leading football writer in Australia. He is the author of
the critically acclaimed book 15 Days in June: How Australia Became a
Football Nation and has won various awards in Australia for his sports writing.
This is his first article for Asia Times Online.
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