Original title: "Little Rose" started the journey of Chinese football in the Year of the Dragon.
Starting from the third day of the first lunar month, the U20 Chinese women's football team, the U17 Chinese women's football team, and the U16 Chinese men's football team, three "small national brand" teams, have been trained in Kunming Haigeng Base, Suzhou Taihu Base, and Xianghe National Training Base.
The U20 women's football team will fire the first shot of the Chinese football national team in the Year of the Dragon: On February 20, the U20 women's football team ended its physical training at the Kunming Haigeng base and transferred to the Wenjiang base in Chengdu for technical and tactical drills. The team will depart for Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, on February 28 for the final stage of the 2024 U20 Women's Asian Cup. At 16 o'clock on March 4, Beijing time, the U20 women's football team will face the first opponent in the group stage, the North Korean U20 women's football team.
Compared with the previous youth training system teams with frequent changes in training personnel, the U20 women's football team, which has gradually "upgraded", has always remained relatively stable regardless of the coaching staff, players, and main lineup. This is a big reason why the U20 women's team has avoided ups and downs in the past year. In the 6 Asian Cup qualifiers in the two stages of 2023, the Chinese U20 women's football team won 6 consecutive games, scoring 31 goals and conceding 0 goals. In December, they played two warm-up matches with the Australian U20 women's football team, losing 1 3 in the first game and winning 3 1 in the second game. In the warm-up match with the South Korean U20 women's football team in January this year, the team drew 1 1 with a goal in stoppage time, and the team's mentality and technical and tactical ability were constantly tested in actual combat.
"Overall transformation", "front-court pressure", "local coordination" and "three-dimensional attack" have been the tactical guiding ideology of the Mesozoic head coach Wang Jun for many years. Compared with the rapid development of women's football in the world today, China's "Little Rose", which has a large gap between the abilities of "physical confrontation" and "quick decision", can only keep up with the development of world women's football by adapting to high-intensity and fast-paced games.
The U20 Women's Asian Cup is the best yardstick to test the color of the "little rose" of the Chinese women's football team. There are a total of 8 teams in the finals of this year's U20 Women's Asian Cup, and the Chinese U20 women's football team is in Group B with the U20 women's football team of Japan, North Korea and Vietnam as the third pot. According to the format, two teams from each group will advance to the semi-finals and qualify for this year's Under-20 Women's World Cup in Colombia.
The Japanese U20 women's football team and the North Korean U20 women's football team have the common characteristics of abundant physical fitness, the difference is that the Japanese team has delicate technology and sufficient field control ability, and the North Korean team has strong impact and tough style. If the Chinese U20 women's football team wants to qualify from the group, the first match against the North Korean women's football team and the second match against the Japanese women's football team (19 o'clock on March 7) need to score at least points.
The last time the Chinese women's football team participated in the U20 World Cup was in 2018, and the current international players Zhang Linyan, Shen Mengyu, Chen Qiaozhu, Wang Linlin, and Dou Jiaxing were all the main players that year. In other words, the two hard-fought matches in this year's U20 Asian Cup will give a clear guide to the trend of the Chinese women's football team in the coming years, after all, after losing the qualification for this year's Paris Olympics, the Chinese women's senior women's football team will have no major tournaments to play in the next two years.
The U17 women's football team, which is "smaller" than the U20 women's football team, faces an equally difficult challenge in the Year of the Dragon: on April 7, the 2024 U17 Women's Asian Cup will be held in Indonesia, and the eight U17 women's football teams from Indonesia, China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines are divided into two groups to match, and the group draw ceremony has not yet been carried out, and the top 3 teams will finally qualify for the Dominican U17 Women's World Cup.
The Chinese Football Association announced on January 25 that Australian Gary van Egmund was appointed as the head coach of the Chinese U17 women's football team, and Van Egmund "enlisted" with the U17 national women's football team to participate in the first phase of this year's Women's National Championship to feel the actual atmosphere (in the same group as Shandong Sports Lottery, Zhejiang Hangzhou, Changchun Volkswagen, 3 strong teams), and will continue to lead the team to participate in the second phase of the Women's Football Championship after the end of this Suzhou training camp (March 10) to accumulate experience.
In view of the fact that the national football team, which challenged the Singapore team away on March 21 and is currently in a turbulent period of changing coaches, and the national Olympic team (in the same group as Japan, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates) that will compete in the U23 Asian Cup in Qatar on April 15 is difficult to achieve a breakthrough in foreign football at the men's football level, the two "little roses" of the U20 women's football team and the U17 women's football team naturally shoulder the heavy responsibility of letting fans see the "dragon flying and phoenix dancing" of the Chinese women's football team - for the depressed and depressed Chinese football, open the window of hope and breathe fresh air. It's a precious new atmosphere. (China Youth Daily, China Youth Network reporter Guo Jian).
China Youth Daily, Beijing, February 19.
*: China Youth Daily.