Kicking Off Controversy: Unpacking the Agony of China’s Crushing Football Defeat
World Cup Qualifiers: China’s National Football Team Lost to Japan
Guangming Online commentator: Chinese football had another tough night. On the evening of September 5th, Beijing time, the Chinese national football team started the journey of the World Cup Asian qualifiers. In the first game, they lost 0-7 to Japan away from home, setting many records: the biggest score loss to Japan; the most goals conceded in a single game in the World Cup qualifiers; the biggest score loss in the World Cup qualifiers.
The defeat was tragic and attracted the attention of almost the entire network. For a time, the hot search list was full of the national football team, and jokes and emoticons about the national football team were flying everywhere. Regardless of whether they knew football or not, many people actively or passively participated in watching.
Because the score difference is too big, many technical analyses become meaningless. As former international player Fan Zhiyi said: “From the bottom of my heart, I don’t know how to encourage the Chinese team. You say we should play defense and counterattack, what is our point? You say we should press forward, what is our advantage? I can’t say.” Indeed, if the strength gap is too obvious, then the successive analysis is obviously of little value.
Because of this, there are a lot of emotional expressions on the Internet. For example, a common statement is: “They play so badly, wouldn’t it be better to disband?” This statement is of course unreasonable, but if you think about it carefully, it seems to have some logic – yes, why can’t football ”get over it”? Isn’t it better to “let it go”? Or at least people can reduce their attention to it and stop being “hurt”, right?
But as the saying goes, ”The Chinese national football team has abused me thousands of times, but I still treat it like my first love”, people just can’t easily reject football. As the world’s number one sport, the world’s most commercialized, market-oriented, and widely covered sport, it is no longer just a game. It is like a culture, and also like a prism, reflecting the ecology of a place regarding market operations, competitive sports, people’s quality, and even education.
This is why people cannot reject football. Its charm lies not only in the quality of the game, but also in the fact that people can project social issues. Just like after a defeat, people can summarize many experiences of failure, from on-field morale, tactical matching, player selection to “why children don’t want to play football” and “where is our youth league” and so on. Each of them seems to make sense, but each one feels incomplete.
In a sense, the fact that football is “difficult to get through” just shows that there is no shortcut to it. You can neither bypass it nor take a shortcut. Football is like a game played with open cards. The rules are already laid out, and it depends on whether you use them.
Before the game, some media calculated the value of the players of the two teams: the Chinese national team’s value was only 6.15 million euros, while the Japanese team’s value reached 195 million euros, 30 times that of the Chinese team. This can be calculated with mathematics. Of course, there are some richer connotations behind it, such as whether there are overseas players and whether a delivery mechanism has been established.
In the comments about the Chinese national football team, a common saying is “there is a long way to go”. It is true that football is not as simple as just 90 minutes. People are obsessed with football and hope that we can “get over it”. This belief is correct. People hope to “get over it” not only football, but a modern sport and the social mechanism and mentality that match it. Football is a test paper that examines everything without disguise.
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