On May 23, the national soccer team will play two warm-up matches with Myanmar and Palestine on June 16th and 20th. China Youth Daily pointed out in an article that Jankovic is facing two difficulties, namely the injury problems suffered by a number of players in the back position and the staffing problems in the forward line.
Henan's main back Wang Shangyuan was injured in the match between Henan and Dalian Ren. After the game, Henan team officially announced that Wang Shangyuan right ankle ligament damage, joint cystic degeneration, edema, is expected to be out of action for three weeks. Previously, the national soccer team's main back Wu Xi in late April in the "Shanghai Bund derby" in the toe fracture. The injury report shows that the recovery period is about 8 weeks, which means that Wu Xi and Wang Shangyuan will not be able to participate in the national soccer team training in June and two A-level warm-up matches.
The second dilemma is how to match the frontline combination. So far, Jankovic's choices have been relatively limited: 32-year-old Hong Kong striker Wu Lei scored six goals and ranked second, 28-year-old Tian Jin Menhu Barton scored four goals and ranked third, and the top 20 scorers scored three goals, with local players only 37, 36, 33, 33, 30 and 34 years old. With Zhang Yuning temporarily unavailable, it is inevitable that the forward line combination of the national soccer team for the next two international A-level matches will encounter the problem of "aging".
As the final stage of the 2026 World Cup will be expanded to 48 teams, the 12-team Asian qualifying tournament will be upgraded to an 18-team tournament, and the number of places for teams to qualify will be almost doubled, increasing to 8.5. Although Asia's 11th-ranked Chinese national soccer team in this qualifying tournament "out of the line" of the possibility of increasing compared to previous sessions, but faced with the "yellow and yellow" dilemma, both the middle-generation players and the new generation of players lack sufficient competitiveness! Therefore, in order to qualify for the qualifying round, we still need to have favorable conditions, i.e. "right place, right time, right people".
