The Chinese women's football team started the road to rebuilding with a defeat.
The haze of losing the Paris Olympic quota has not yet dissipated, the position left by Shui Qingxia is still blank, and the troubled Chinese women's football team has regrouped and taken the first step in reconstruction.
In the early morning of December 3, the "Rose Army" lost 0-3 to the world's No. 1 host in the first friendly match of the training camp in the United States, and once again felt the huge gap with the top teams.
The two warm-up matches for the training camp in the United States were originally finalized early for the women's football teams of the two countries to prepare for the Paris Olympics. However, the Chinese women's football team was eliminated early in the Olympic preliminaries, which brought the team's Paris Olympic cycle to an abrupt end, and the lineup and goals for the training camp in the United States were also forced to be updated.
U20 national youth women's football coach Wang Jun leads the interim coaching staff of the Chinese women's football team.
Appointed by the Chinese Football Association, U20 National Youth Women's Football Coach Wang Jun led the interim coaching staff and recruited a number of fresh faces, including the four main U20 National Youth Players, to inspect newcomers and prepare for next year's U20 Women's Asian Cup.
Facing the U.S. team playing at home, this "Rose Army" obviously does not have the strength to compete with it. In terms of individual skills, physical confrontation and teamwork, the hosts have a clear advantage. If it weren't for the Chinese team's goalkeeper Xu Huan to make many wonderful saves, the score might have been more than a three-goal gap.
The imperative rebuilding project has begun with the renewal of the lineup. In the 20-member squad of the Chinese women's football team to visit the United States, the 33-year-old captain Wang Shanshan is the only player over 30 years old. The average age of the team is only 23At 4 years old, he is well below the 27 he was when he went to the World Cup this summer5 years old and 27 years old when competing in the Asian Games.
Xu Huan made many wonderful saves to prevent the American team from expanding the score.
After the dream of Paris, the next return of the Chinese women's football team to the international stage will not be until the 2026 Asian Cup. This means that for the next two years or so, the "Rose Army" will be in an embarrassing situation where there is no major tournament to play. However, from another point of view, the Chinese women's football team has also gained enough time to find the coordinates of reconstruction and accelerate the upgrading.
In the long "window period", the Chinese women's football team aiming for revival needs to focus on solving many problems - the pending new coach candidates, the low level of the league, the unperfected overseas retention mechanism, and the still barren talent soil ......Each of them is linked to the future.
Post-00 Zhang Linyan will shoulder the heavy responsibility of the offensive core of the Chinese women's football team.
For the Chinese women's football team, the outgoing 2023 is undoubtedly bitter. After losing the World Cup, the Asian Games and the Olympic preliminaries, then coach Shui Qingxia said more than once that it was not a day's work for the Chinese women's football team to catch up with the world, and it would take a generation or even several generations to continue to work hard.
We are not afraid to start from scratch, we are afraid to never start. Catching up is always our goal. As Shui Qingxia said, in a series of brutal defeats, the aura of the 2022 Asian Cup champion has been completely "zeroed". The road to revival to catch up with the world and get out of the trough requires a new generation of women's football to speed up.
Author: Gu Miao.
Text: Reporter Gu Miaotu: Visual China Editor: Chen Haixiang Responsible Editor: Shen Lei.
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