Today, it has been 30 years from the Shanghai team to the Shenhua team.
A few days ago, I happened to see a friend take out the slogan that many team owners shouted a few years ago to measure the weight of this 30th anniversary. Although many of the clubs that shouted this slogan at the time have become history in just a few short years, making the slogan sound a little unrealistic, it is indeed a remarkable achievement to cross the 30 mark in the grand cause of the "Centennial Club".
It's just that frankly, I don't have much confidence to express my opinion on the topic of "can Shenhua become a centennial club". After all, in times like these, everything changes so fast that people are caught off guard. What's more, I don't have much interest in caring about such a grand and ethereal topic. To be honest, most of the people who can read this text now may not be able to catch up with Shenhua's 100th birthday in 2093.
My wish is actually very simple: I hope that in my life, which is not known in the future, Shenhua can follow this rhythm, every five or ten years, so that I can have the opportunity to slowly count the blue memories. After all, I'm Xi to using the rhythm of football to measure the passage of time from week to week.
It's just that these fragments of time still need a way to collect them well. Shenhua's 30 years, or the next 40 or 50 years, the memories accumulated every year will always be different because of something.
In terms of age, I may be on the small side of the Shenhua fan base today. I did start to understand some football in '06 or '07, but to be honest, my memories of Shenhua's 15th anniversary in 2008 are a bit vague.
I will remember the grand Olympic Games and the opening ceremony that year, I will remember the retirement of Liu Xiang on TV, I will remember the amazing performance of Yao Ming with the Chinese men's basketball team, and I will remember Shenhua who went to see many games.
But I really don't remember any grand ceremonies or celebrations to commemorate Shenhua's 15th birthday that year.
If you are impressed, all the memories of Shenhua that year finally stayed on the penalty that was not scored. Then, the goal of Tan Yang, who had previously given away a penalty, seemed to be hanging in the air, leaving the entire Yuanshen at a loss.
Pushing forward a little more, I do remember the excitement after the union and Shenhua in '07. At that time, I took it for granted that I couldn't play two teams with the best players in one team. Of course, I also remember that Wu Jingui, who was still a young marshal at the time, "refreshed", returned, and then "resigned due to illness" when he ranked second in the middle of a season.
It turns out that the immediate perception of the current situation of the team this season came from exactly 15 years ago?
Later, Director Jia came. As another controversial domestic coach in recent years, Jia Xiuquan has also been in and out of Shenhua many times.
Coach Jia is definitely not the coach who is most in line with Shenhua's temperament. I also have a vague memory of Jia Xiuquan's Shenhua in the 2008 season. Before opening the search engine, I did only remember that he was called out of class after returning to Hongkou in the 2009 season.
So, on December 10, 15 years ago, did Shenhua have any celebrations?I don't know if the club celebrated, but it shouldn't be too good to finish as runners-up in the eighth league after getting professional.
Of course, looking back 15 years later, it is true that I have never been so close to the league championship since.
Then, it was Shenhua who repeatedly grabbed the headlines for five years. Gao Lin, Mao Jianqing, Dewey and Ji Xiang are gone, Feng Renliang, Song Boxuan, Wu Xi and Qiu Tianyi are here, Lao Bu is here and gone, Drogba and Anelka are also gone, but Battista is coming and going, and Moreno has also started a legendary ten-year chapter in these five years - of course, no one could have imagined at that time that he would be the one who stayed until the end.
Fast forward to 2013.
The 20th anniversary, which should have been a grand celebration, has become perhaps the most unbearable year in the history of Shenhua. started with a negative score, and although he had a good reputation of "unprovoked", he failed to kick away the haze that shrouded the whole season. Before becoming the legendary captain, Moreno refused to play for a time in the year due to unpaid wages. Batista seems to have really left the coach due to illness, and he was replaced by another controversial local coach Shen Xiangfu in the national name.
I haven't realized this, but if you count it carefully, in the last four anniversaries of the full five, Shenhua has been brought to the end by local coaches.
There were indeed a lot of impressive games in the early stages of the season, chasing three goals in a row in Wuhan and reversing Luneng and SIPG at home. And in the second half of the season, as the news of the team's salary arrears continued to spread, it seemed that everything that happened on the field was no longer important to Shenhua.
Because then Shenhua and Shanghai entered late autumn together.
Although Shenhua, who have been in arrears for a long time, could even finish in the top four if the six points penalized are added at the end of the season, the rumored warm spring city of Yunnan is beckoning to Shenhua, who is deep in the cold of Shanghai. A lot of fans and ** remember the 20th year, but the club seems to have forgotten. ** reported that "Shenhua may leave Shanghai on the eve of the 20th anniversary", but Shenhua's response was always cold and non-commentable.
I went to Hongkou Football Stadium many times that year, but the one I remember most clearly must be the last one.
One day at the end of November, I walked from the side of the staircase I was most familiar with to the outside of the Hongkou football stadium and signed my name on a long, long banner. It seems like the most I've seen in blue in Hongkou on a non-match day.
It was also the only time I went to Hongkou Football Stadium with my parents. My dad said that the two of them have come to see Shenhua together many times after they fell in love, and I don't know if I will be able to do it in the future.
I don't know how much this banner played a role in the final decision of Shenhua to stay in Shanghai, but I think that Shenhua's history did not stop at the 20th anniversary, and I should have made an effort.
So before the Lunar New Year, Zhu Jun left, Wang Dalei and Dai Lin also left, Song Boxuan didn't stay, but Shenhua stayed.
Or, Shenhua didn't stay. After Greenland took over, the word Shenhua was once removed from the club's name. "Abandoning tradition is equivalent to cutting off the spiritual lifeline" - this sentence may be the "quotation" I remember the most in the past ten years, and I actually learned it from the stands in Hongkou.
The word Shenhua is still back after all.
In the first five years of Greenland, there were gains and losses. There has been the humiliation of a sworn enemy winning the trophy at home, and there has been the ecstasy of winning the trophy away from home in the derby.
But in the end, the tears that my friends and I shed in the stands in those years may have been given to 80,000 people. The two away games there in 2017 alone, from madness to ecstasy, were just a few months away.
Then 2018 seemed to be just around the corner.
The 25th anniversary, a quarter of a century, seems to be a little dull compared to the joy of winning the cup in Shanghai in the two years before and after 2018. It's another season led by a local coach, and it's still an old face of Wu's guidance.
What is the league standing?I don't remember, it's certainly not good enough to qualify for the AFC Champions League, and it's not bad enough to fall into the quagmire of relegation. What about the Cup?I remember this very clearly, the away 2-goal lead was reversed by Nantong Zhiyun, who was still in the second division at the time.
As for the AFC Champions League, they did not qualify for the group stage, although they did not win a game, but they only lost one. In the same group, Kashima Antlers and Suwon Samsung met in the East Asian finals, and Kashima Antlers also won the championship. Looking back like this, Shenhua's AFC Champions League season is not too unbearable.
It's just that looking back at this 25th anniversary just five years later, perhaps the most important thing for Shenhua is also not on the court.
It was this year that Shenhua won the 9900 echelon of the Genbao base. There are a lot of rumors in the wind, as if the red team has done a lot of work, but it still can't stop many young people yearning for blue. They have always been obsessed, not only may not only fail to steal the rumored talent echelon, but also the red-blue ratio that cannot be easily reversed even if they win the championship.
Just like this year. There has never been a city where the biggest names in the city have celebrated the cup with the same local team more than the league title.
I remember very well that on December 10 of that year, I had just returned home from a vacation in Japan. It seems to be a China Eastern Airlines flight, and on the newspaper rack at the end of the bridge before boarding, there are two newspapers on the front page celebrating the 25th anniversary of Shenhua.
Of course, one of them is Oriental Sports**. I still remember that the figure on the front page was Wu Jingui wearing red-rimmed glasses and a dark blue scarf.
I was in a good mood at the time, probably because of the vacation that had just ended, or maybe I was full of confidence in Shenhua's future for the first time in a long time.
And then suddenly today.
It seems that these five years have passed a little faster than before. I guess the three years away from the pitch might indeed make a loyal live fan lose the sense of the passage of time.
On December 6, 2019, Shenhua lifted the FA Cup trophy, which was the last time I was in the stands at the Hongkou Football Stadium so far. After that, before this year, I went to the Kangqiao base many times, and I also went to the Suzhou Sports Center, the Suzhou Olympic Sports Center and the Kunshan Sports Center many times, but I never returned to the familiar stands.
However, I have been to the second floor of the Hongkou Football Stadium many times.
It's something I haven't told anyone much: in those three years, on days when I didn't have to rush much, when I passed by this station on Line 3 or Line 8, I would often pretend that I was going to the stadium on a matchday afternoon, walk out of the subway station through the familiar exit, cross the overpass or the side entrance of Lu Xun Park, and walk to the platform outside the grandstand on the second floor.
I would go up to the second floor from the big escalator next to my family or the small staircase next to KFC, and then walk about half a circle to the outside of my stand, look at the lawn, and light a cigarette as if it had been a long intermission. I just didn't expect that the place where the second half started was changed to another stadium in the city.
So, what kind of concept is the home field?What does the team's home stadium mean to the team's history?What kind of construction does the team's history need to be constructed?
Shenhua has made her home to almost every football field and stadium in downtown Shanghai. Even if it is 80,000 people, from the derby away to the current blue home, it is just a new group of people singing and dancing in the stands. Even at the Pudong Football Stadium in May this year, when Yu Hanchao scored the equalizing goal, I sat on the red seat in the home team's stands, and I could find the feeling of being at Shenhua's home stadium in a trance.
So, the home field is just defined by people. It's the same with history.
Whether it is the 30th anniversary of Shenhua, whether it is counted from 1951, history is just the sum of the memories of our group of people.
When I chatted with Mr. Da Meng, who didn't know about the ball radio, about the 30th anniversary of the most veteran domestic teams in recent days, Mr. Da Meng mentioned a very interesting perspective: Guoan and Taishan have relatively clearer cores, but Shenhua doesn't seem to have them.
From being one step ahead to not being crazy, Shenhua's two so-called slogans, which are vastly different, always can't summarize the characteristics of this team.
Even, Shenhua can't borrow some culture and symbols from investors like many teams. CITIC has invested in Guoan for 20 years, and Luneng is the same, while Shenhua has not invested more than 10 years from Shenhua Electric, Wenguang to Zhu Jun, Greenland and today's Jiushi.
Therefore, how to define Shenhua's culture seems to be an important topic to discuss why Shenhua has been unique in the past 30 years.
When discussing the culture of a team, if you stick to it on the pitch, you can draw some ridiculous conclusions. There are few recognizable on-field cultures in competitive sports, other than extreme toughness and ferocity, that can be clearly distinguished from different teams and then defined by almost unique adjectives.
Some people always like to say that the current Shenhua is no longer the Shenhua of the past, and the culture and temperament are different. If you dig deeper into what cultures are different, the answers all point to the same conclusion: victory. There is hardly any culture that defines a team other than wins.
Those so-called fans who shout that Shenhua is no longer Shenhua are pursuing a culture that, in the final analysis, is nothing more than enjoying winning. Of course, who doesn't love the feeling of victory?But competitive sports are always about having fewer winners and more losers, and when we take a longer time span, we will find that the goal of competitive sports is to win, but the fun is not just about winning.
Of course, victory does not define Shenhua, although there have been many championships in the past 30 years, but after all, there are more disappointments on the field. Therefore, finding a cultural "conclusion" for Shenhua's 30 years has also become a difficult question to answer.
But in my mind, I already have an answer of my own.
What is special about Shenhua is that in a fast-changing city like Shanghai, between the many funds and the rivals that come and go, Shenhua is always here, welcoming all changes, accepting all differences, and then making it all a part of itself.
There have been Genbao and Jingui, and there have been several handsome oceans;There have been glorious moments of the five major players, and there have also been young people who are ready to go;Investors also range from private enterprises to state-owned enterprises, and it seems that everyone wants to define what Shenhua is, or use Shenhua to define themselves.
However, Shenhua never tries to define others with itself, let alone Shanghai with itself, but only turns all the people and things that come and goes into an important part of its own culture, and all of them are indispensable. Isn't that the so-called urban spirit of embracing all rivers and rivers exactly like that?
Shenhua may not be a top giant in terms of honor. Even from 1951 onwards, the league and cup championships combined, it is difficult to compete with many giants in the north.
But why is Shenhua different, why Shenhua can always be favored, why even when the wealthy boss wants to merge the team, the brand he gives up is not Shenhua but his own team. I think this is always inseparable from the word Shanghai.
Although all friends who only need to know a little about the history of Chinese football know that Shenhua is the Shanghai team of the year, Shenhua never competes for the name of "Shanghai Team", and even during the period of the undercurrent of the team's neutral name reform, Shenhua did not consider the need to change the name back to "Shanghai Team".
Because Shenhua doesn't need to compete at all, because Shanghai's temperament itself defines Shenhua's culture: open, inclusive, and free, for players, teams, and fans.
Shenhua's status as a team is not entirely from history and achievements, but also from the city of Shanghai. As long as Shanghai remains one of the most important cities in China, Shenhua, which is supported by Shanghainese, will remain one of the most watched teams in Chinese football.
Football is a sport and a culture. I believe that fans in Shanghai or elsewhere who follow Shenhua in the stands or in front of the TV every week can better understand and agree with this assertion.
30 years, also 72 years. FIFA and the AFC are willing to certify not only the present of Shenhua, but also the past that everyone has witnessed and experienced together.
After the implementation of the gender-neutral name policy, some fans and friends said affectionately that now Shanghai and Shenhua will never be separated again.
But perhaps, despite all the obstacles, it is never possible to separate. Shenhua will not define Shanghai, because only Shanghai has Shenhua, because Shenhua has long been an integral part of Shanghai.
For thirty years, it has always been.
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