A Spilled Catch and a Captain's Red Card: China Loses to Tajikistan for the First Time
China's men's team lost 1-0 to Tajikistan in Chongqing on Tuesday — the first defeat by the Central Asian side in the teams' 29-year history. Captain Wei Shihao was sent off for elbowing an opponent, sealing a third straight friendly defeat in which China failed to score.
For nearly three decades, however badly Chinese football lurched, one fixture stayed safe: the men's national team had never lost to Tajikistan, an unbeaten run reaching back to the sides' first meeting in 1997. It ended on Tuesday night at Chongqing's Longxing Football Stadium, where a friendly finished 1-0 to the visitors. As The Paper's match report put it, the list of opponents China had never lost to has "lost another name."
The window had been unraveling for a week. After opening with a 3-0 win over the Maldives, China fell 0-3 to New Zealand, then 0-5 to Palestine. The Tajikistan match was meant to stop the slide; instead it completed it — three straight defeats, none of them with a Chinese goal scored.
The goal was a wince of a moment. In the 53rd minute a shot came in from distance; the goalkeeper Liu Dianzuo let it spill through his hands, and Khamonov followed up to tap the ball into an open net. Six minutes later the evening found its emblem: Wei Shihao, the captain, already booked after a first-half scuffle, swung an elbow at a Tajikistani opponent with the ball out of play, collected a second yellow card, and left China with ten men for the final half hour.
The journalists who travel with the team reacted within minutes of the whistle. "A complete mess," wrote Chen Yong. "What was that gesture for?" asked Li Xuan, one of the best-known reporters on the beat. "The team's form was poor, but going a man down is more dangerous." Pei Li cut to the question circulating fastest in the stands: was such a player "bad, or simply foolish — a brain the size of a raisin?"
The anger had a second target. Shao Jiayi, the former national-team midfielder now in charge, had promised supporters a "perfect answer" before the window and had taken the blame on himself at the pre-match press conference. On the night, his team sat in a defensive 5-4-1 at home against the world's 101st-ranked side and held 37 percent of the ball in the first half. The squad lists told their own quiet story: China's players were valued at 3.2 million euros in total, Tajikistan's at 5.45 million, with the visitors' goalkeeper alone worth 2 million.
By the final whistle the argument had turned generational. One widely shared post called for the team to release every player over 23 and rebuild around running and effort. On Zhihu, the evening's top question — how, exactly, to evaluate this match — drew the same split Chinese football always produces: execution or system, personnel or coaching. One commentator predicted the red card would follow Wei into his club season and the next international window.
Three years ago these two sides drew 0-0 at the Asian Cup. On Tuesday the visitors were the more composed team for most of the night, and they left with the only goal, the record — and, in the captain's elbow, a debate that will outlast the result.