By Jia Yanfeng It's 1-0! After winning away to Qingdao Sea Cowboys, Shanghai Shenhua is temporarily in second place after the 12th round of the Chinese Super League with 7 wins, 4 draws and 1 loss, getting 25 points. For a team that doesn't have the luxury of people and has many young players as its core team, achieving such a result is commendable.
It is worth mentioning that on this international day, Shanghai Shenhua has also contributed seven international players to the National Football Asian Games: Wen Jiabao, Zhu Chenjie, Jiang Shenglong, Liu Ruofan, Wang Haijian, Zhang Wei, and Xu Hoyang will report to the Asian Games. Like the national soccer team, the Asian Games will also play two games during the training period, two warm-up matches with the South Korean U24 team on June 15 and 19 in Jinhua.
Shenhua is not without twists and turns and troughs in the first stage, but they can adjust quickly. If we count this round, Shenhua took 6 1-018 points in 12 rounds of the league. Head coach Wu Jingui said modestly that it was the result of players' efforts and lucky favor. But Shenhua's 67% winning rate on the road cannot be simply summarized in the word luck.
Including the defeat to Qingdao Hainiu, if you look at the match statistics, Hainiu played well and even outperformed Shenhua in terms of chances created, passing accuracy, and possession, while Shenhua locked up those 3 points with a goal from foreigner Malelai and a solid defense. The reason why Shenhua got so many 1-0 this season has to do with the limited scoring ability of Shenhua's front line, but at the same time, they also managed to get 3 points many times with 1-0, and the defense's performance contributed a lot.
The Manatees are at the bottom of the table with 8 points in the first 11 rounds, while Shanghai Shenhua are at the third place in the Chinese Super League with 22 points. Qingdao Manatees were eager to win a long lost victory, so they seemed to dominate the possession in the scenario, but in terms of actual results, Shanghai Shenhua had more chances to attack effectively.
In this game, the Sea Cowboys exposed two problems, the first is that the foreigners are in good physical condition, but their technical ability is average, and the absence of Kang Gua has deprived them of an attacking point where they can catch the ball to break through the tandem. The second is that there are not many ways to get into the forecourt against an aggressively contracting opponent, and the passing error rate is too high. Looking at the current situation, if the break can't make effective adjustments to the foreigners, then the pressure of relegation will be quite high this season.
On paper alone, the gap between the two teams shouldn't be as big as the league standings, but Qingdao Hainiu, the promotion horse, is clearly lacking in consistency in consecutive matches and clinical mentality in single matches. Shenhua won 1-0 in 6 matches, while Manatee lost 0-1 in the last 4 rounds, which is a couple of obvious confirmations. This shortcoming cannot simply be attributed to a lack of luck.
Of course, for Shenhua, after the first phase of desperate scoring, the subsequent national training and Asian Games will inevitably have a large number of international players, when the test will be more severe. How to replenish the vacancies left by these people is naturally the necessary answer to Wu Jingui's intermittent guidance. After all, in 12 rounds of matches, Shenhua scored only 3 goals against Shamrocks, and one goal in the remaining 11 matches, the biggest guarantee of Shenhua's scoring actually came from the young defense that was about to be shifted.
