Regretful to bid farewell to Paris, the Chinese women’s football team should turn crisis into opportunity
The Chinese women’s football team, which has reached the finals of the last two Olympic Games (Rio and Tokyo), regrettably failed to qualify for next year’s Paris Olympics. However, the national team with a reasonable age structure and overseas players continues to make progress after “going out”. The development potential of domestic leagues shows that the future of the “Steel Rose” is still worth looking forward to. Football managers and practitioners should have the determination to turn crises into opportunities and lay a solid foundation for the new cycle.
On the evening of the 1st, in the Paris Olympic preliminaries held in Xiamen, although the Chinese women’s football team played the best technical and tactical performance in the three group matches, they only ranked third in the group after a 1:1 draw with the South Korean team, failed to advance to the next stage of the qualifying round, and regretfully left Paris in advance.
In these three games, they lost to North Korea, beat Thailand, and drew with South Korea, which reflects that the Chinese team’s problem is that it is in slow shape and has insufficient tacit understanding. Perhaps due to player injuries and other factors, the coaching staff was unable to find a starting lineup with relatively fixed main positions. As a result, the forward line partners continued to change in each game, and there was insufficient tacit understanding between them and insufficient scoring ability.
In the second half of the match against the South Korean team, when captain Wang Shanshan returned to the familiar forward position from the center back and equalized the score with a header, one can’t help but think, if the “post-2000” center back teammates can step up, the 33-year-old Wang Shanshan perhaps there will no longer be a need for a guest defender, so she can play a greater role on the front line and fight for the right to participate in the last Olympics of her career.
This regret means that veterans such as Zhang Rui and Wang Shanshan who have entered the later stages of their careers will not have many opportunities to play for the national team in international competitions, while Zhang Linyan, Shen Mengyu, Tu Linli, etc., who are in the rising stage, will have many opportunities to play for the national team in international competitions. Young players need to continue to improve themselves in the European leagues and take up the backbone of the national team.
Without the Olympic Games to play in, the Chinese women’s football team will lack the opportunity to compete with high-level European and American teams, which is a big loss. But on the other hand, with the reduction of national team training sessions, the domestic league is expected to receive a stable schedule and support. Practitioners should also see new development opportunities to improve the technical and tactical content and venue facilities, event operations, and spectatorship of the Women’s Super League. This will attract more fans to watch games and allow young players to grow in the league. At the same time, the capable national players also have more energy to experience in high-level European leagues. By competing with the world‘s top players, they can better adapt to high-intensity and fast-paced games. After returning to the national team, they can improve the overall strength of the team.
As head coach Shui Qingxia said after the game, youth training will be the main direction of development in the future. If the gaps and deficiencies in youth training are known and the details are really attended to, the Chinese women’s football team will go in the right direction in the future.