By Wang Fan and Shao Zhijie BBC reporters from Singapore and Hong Kong
5 hours ago
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Xue Jiao (left) used to be a Chinese women’s national football team, and her former teammate Wu Haiyan (right) joined the team for this World Cup.
As a former Chinese women’s football player, Xue Jiao’s most impressive match was the 2015 invitational match against the US team. At that time, the Chinese team defeated the world champion 1-0 in Los Angeles, ending the 11-year unbeaten record of the American women’s football team at home.
“Everyone thought we were going to lose… but football is round and without the whistle at the end of the game, anything can happen,” the now-retired left-back told the BBC by phone. when said.
Xue Jiao said that this quality of will that never gives up is the reason why the Chinese women’s football team is called the “clang rose”.
In this Women’s World Cup, she hopes that the Chinese team in New Zealand can also live up to the spirit carried by this nickname-she gradually faded out of the national team after a serious injury in 2018, but there are still many of her former teammates in the Chinese team. She will watch the game from her home in Dalian.
However, the Chinese team is currently facing a difficult task as they lost to Denmark in their group stage opener. They will have to beat Haiti in their second match to retain hope of reaching the knockout rounds before facing Euro champions England in the final.
Still, the Chinese women’s soccer team has historically outperformed the Chinese men’s soccer team, whether it’s the World Cup or the international arena as a whole, a remarkable and intriguing achievement in a country that has long viewed football primarily as a men’s sport.
Regardless of the final results in this World Cup, the Chinese women’s national team will be regarded as heroes at home.
“The girls showed the style of women’s football in this game, showing the pursuit and desire for victory-this is the most precious trait passed down from generation to generation of women’s football,” Huang Jianxiang, a well-known Chinese football commentator, said in the opening game. Said so after the game.
“The Chinese women’s football team is much better-looking than the men’s football team,” said a comment on Weibo, a Chinese social media site.
The Tradition Established by “Clanging Roses”
For many years, that was an intuitive evaluation among Chinese fans. While the Chinese men’s football team continues to disappoint, the Chinese women’s football team has always been the pride of the fans. The Chinese women’s football team is currently ranked 14th in the FIFA world rankings, while the men’s football team is ranked 80th.
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Sun Wen, who wore the No. 9 jersey of the national team in the 1990s, is a representative of the “golden generation” of Chinese women’s football.
The peak of the Chinese men’s football team was in the early 2000s. They entered the World Cup finals for the first and only time in 2002, and then won the runner-up in the 2004 Asian Cup.
Compared with before, the Chinese women’s football team has a much better record in the international arena for a long time. China hosted the first Women’s Football World Cup in 1991, and the Chinese women’s national team was one of the strongest teams in the world in the 1990s.
In that decade, the Chinese women’s football team reached the top under the leadership of captain Sun Wen. They won all five women’s Asian Cup championships in the 1990s and almost stood on the podium of the world champions twice – in the finals of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 1999 Women’s World Cup, the Chinese team narrowly lost to the US team underfoot. Sun Wen is also widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of women’s football. Together with the American star Michelle Akers (Jacques), she was named the best women’s football player of the 20th century by FIFA.
In China, the Chinese women’s football team is called “Kang Qiang Rose” by fans who love them, which comes from the name of a Chinese pop song in the 1990s. This nickname has been eulogized by Chinese fans to this day.
The key to their success, Xue believes, is hard training and the close emotional bond they develop along the way – a tradition passed down through generations of women’s soccer.
Xue Jiao remembers that their training time was longer than most teams—sometimes they practiced three times a day, each lasting two to two and a half hours, from morning to night.
This kind of hard work will continue on the court, “Even if you think the ball might go out of bounds, we will definitely chase it until the last moment,” Xue Jiao said,
The real “national football”
Entering the 21st century, after a generation of meritorious players such as Sun Wen retired, the Chinese women’s football team experienced a period of low ebb. Now their performance in international competitions has not returned to the peak in the 1990s, but compared with the men’s football, their performance is still better, so many people in China say that the women’s football is the real “national football”.
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There are many football fans in China, but they are often disappointed by the performance of the men’s national team.
However, the patriarchal tradition in Chinese society makes it so that when people talk about football, they still mainly focus on men’s football.
In 2016, the Chinese Football Association issued a medium- and long-term plan for the development of football in the country. The vision proposed by President Xi Jinping is to make China a world-class football power within 35 years. Most of the resources and strategies are still focused on men’s football.
“These national football development programs are basically framed in terms of men,” said Simon Chadwick, a professor of sports and geopolitical economics at the Skema Business School in Paris.
Xue Jiao said that the results of men’s and women’s football at the competitive level cannot be compared on one dimension, but she admits that there are still some “boy-preference” factors in Chinese football and other aspects of Chinese society, which makes her feel that “female It is relatively difficult for children to play football.”
“The economic disparity is particularly large, and attention is not at the same level,” she said. “Let’s talk about attendance. When they play games, the entire stadium may be full. When we play games, it may be some Family, friends, and a few fans went to watch, and I felt that the psychological gap was quite big.”
Moreover, the most profitable is the men’s football. According to the government-backed Shangguan News website (formerly known as Shanghai Observer), the average income of China’s women’s professional football league is 60 to 90 times lower than that of the men’s football team.
Will reform work?
However, this gender gap has worked in women’s football’s favor in several ways. The public noise and bad scandals that often plague men’s football rarely appear in women’s football, and this has become more obvious during the preparation cycle for this World Cup.
Since November, at least 13 senior officials have been detained or investigated for corruption and match-fixing.
This new round of “football anti-corruption” is mainly focused on the men’s football league and the men’s national team – one of the people involved is the legendary player and former national team coach Li Tie.
According to Mark Dreyer, who has studied China’s sports industry for many years, the huge amount of money involved in men’s football may be accompanied by more temptations to get people involved in cheating violations. Dreyer is the author of Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to Be the Best.
Professor Chadwick believes that in terms of management and governance, party-state officials have relatively little intervention in women’s football, which provides them with more room for development.
“The government has often made unpredictable and sometimes harmful interventions in football,” he said, “and the Chinese government and the governing authorities of Chinese football only focus on the men’s football, not the women’s football.”
The performance of the Chinese women’s football team seems to have picked up in recent times. Under the leadership of Shui Qingxia, the current head coach and the first female head coach in the history of the Chinese women’s football team, they won the women’s football Asian Cup last year and returned to the top of Asia after 16 years.
But when the Chinese Football Association released a reform and development plan for women’s football last October, many began to worry that it might be a sign of increased government intervention that could derail the team.
Dreyer believes that the bottom-up law of football development is in contradiction with the traditional top-down system of Chinese society.
“All these (instructions) come from the government and are filtered down through layers of people who basically don’t know anything about football,” he said. This contradiction between bottom-up and top-down.”
After retiring, Xue Jiao is currently working as a football coach in a middle school in Dalian. She did not comment on the country’s football development plan, but expressed the hope that in the future, she can do football youth training work in the city where she was born, “starting from a baby”.
Regardless of current results, attention is crucial to women’s football, she said.
“I also hope that more people will pay attention to us whether it is the league or the national team in China,” she said.
2023-07-28 05:17:36
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