China's women's soccer team won the group stage of the Women's World Cup against Haiti on the evening of July 28th, with a score of 1-0. This victory earned China's women's soccer team 3 points, which is as valuable as getting gold. At the same time, the Chinese women's soccer team retained the hope of advancing to the knockout stage of the World Cup.
The Chinese team went through twists and turns in this game, much to the concern of their fans. In the first half, Zhang Rui was sent off with a direct red card for stepping on an opponent, resulting in one less person on the field for the women's soccer team. At the critical moment in the second half, Zhang Linyan stepped forward, broke through to the penalty area with the ball and managed to create a penalty kick. Wang Shuang then scored from the penalty kick, which was the only goal in the whole match. In the end, China won the match with great difficulty.
At the end of the match, the officials named Wang Frost as the best player of the match, as she scored the only goal. However, the performance of Zhang Linyan, who created the penalty kick, was equally outstanding. In fact, two minutes after Wang Frost scored from the penalty spot, Zhang Linyan was knocked to the ground by an opposing player with a strong break into the penalty area. However, despite the intervention of VAR, the referee still did not award the penalty.
The potential of the future core players of Chinese women's soccer has been shown in Zhang Linyan, who is only 22 years old. There is no doubt that after Wang Frost, she will become another world-class player of Chinese women's soccer. Despite her height of only 1.54 meters, Zhang Linyan's growth process, in addition to being trained by Evergrande Youth Training, has many fascinating stories.
Earlier in 2016, while participating in a U16 tournament as a representative of Evergrande's women's soccer team, Zhang Linyan unfortunately suffered a fracture in her right foot, which prevented her from walking for more than four months. At that point, soccer superstar Lionel Messi, who is playing for Barcelona, sent her an autographed jersey to encourage her to recover soon and return to the green field.
The story was never told to the outside world, Messi did not make it public and Zhang Linyan's family never revealed it to the outside world. It was not until years later, when Zhang Linyan helped the women's soccer team win the Asian Cup, that her father announced in an interview that the story had been kept secret. According to her father, the story was about a jersey signed by Lionel Messi.
In contrast, fans are already familiar with the story of Zhang Linyan and David Beckham. Right after the women's soccer team won the Asian Cup, Beckham made it a point to congratulate Zhang Linyan on his personal social media account, praising her for realizing her aspirations and mentioning that the two had crossed paths nine years ago.
In the 2013 Football Night program, David Beck participated in the recording of the program as a promotional ambassador of the Chinese Super League, while Zhang Linyan also participated in the program as a young player. At that time, Zhang Linyan asked Beck Jr. a question about how to keep a good mindset in competitive sports.
Next, at the age of 12, Zhang Linyan raised the microphone and spoke in a very dominant tone about her dream of leading the Chinese soccer team to once again surpass the era represented by Sun Wen. Sun Wen had led the women's soccer team to a second place finish in the World Cup, and Zhang Linyan's wish was to win the World Cup with the Chinese women's soccer team.
