China's Under-23s Reach Their First Asian Games Football Semi-Final in 28 Years
A 3-0 win over Thailand in Nagoya put Chinese men's football in an Asian Games semi-final for the first time since 1998 — with South Korea, and two decades of underachievement, waiting on Tuesday.
China's under-23 footballers beat Thailand 3-0 in Nagoya on Saturday to reach the Asian Games semi-finals — the first time any Chinese men's team has got this far at the Games this century, and the first since 1998. In a footballing country, that sentence alone carried the story to the top of the search boards, ahead of anything the table tennis hall produced all day.
The goals came the low-drama way. A first-half own goal forced by sustained pressure set the tone, Hu Hetao drove in a second shortly after the restart, and Zhang Yuning, the 29-year-old striker included as an over-age player, came off the bench to finish the third. Seven thousand five hundred spectators, most of them red-clad travelling Chinese, watched it happen.
The celebrations said as much about the context as the score. The squad lifted their coach onto their shoulders on the pitch; one photo doing the rounds showed a defender attempting an overhead kick late on, with the game already won. A running count posted by one commentator has this U23 side at ten matches in two tournaments this year with eight clean sheets — the sort of defensive record nobody associates with Chinese men's football.
Perspective, though, arrives on Tuesday. The semi-final opponent is South Korea, the tournament's most decorated team, and a generation of Chinese sides have gone out at exactly this stage. The draw is harder still because of a suspension: winger Wang Yudong, the 19-year-old who has been the team's attacking headline, missed the quarter-final under a two-yellow-card ban accumulated in the group stage. Striker Zhang Yuning put the mood plainly afterwards: pressure, he said, is just another word for motivation — "let's get on with it."
The deeper story a Chinese reader brings to this result is the gap between this team and the senior one. While the under-23s were winning in Japan, the senior national team was preparing a friendly against New Zealand in Chongqing — a side fans have spent the week demanding be rebuilt, after years of stagnation the Asian Games run has thrown into relief. The under-23 team is run separately under China's Olympic programme, and its relative vigour — young, cheap, unburdened — is exactly what the selectors keep failing to replicate upstairs. Whether Tuesday's semi-final ends in a medal or not, it has already settled one argument: the kids, it turns out, can play.