-Conversation with Xu Xin: Harbor joining and the national team's heart road
In a recent interview, soccer celebrity Yuan Ye had an in-depth conversation with Xu Xin, who talked about his initial intention of joining the seaport and his journey of representing the national team for a year.
--Harbor, the starting point of dreams
"Choosing the seaport is not by chance, long before joining Shandong, I had considered joining the seaport, only in the end, because Hao went to Shandong, I chose Shandong. After the expiration of the contract, and Shandong failed to reach agreement on the renewal of the contract, I want to challenge myself, so I chose the harbor. After all, apart from Shandong, Seaport is the strongest team in China. In European leagues, player mobility is also the norm. For a team, personnel changes are the only way to improve competitiveness and stimulate everyone's potential." Xu Xin said.
"But one thing is clear: leaving Shandong was not due to money issues. I never put personal treatment in the first place. If it was just about money, I probably wouldn't have chosen Evergrande when I returned home, when Huaxia Happiness and Tianjin Quanjian had substantial contact. If I had gone to those clubs, the treatment might have been higher and the pressure of competition would not have been so great. I chose Evergrande because it is a championship team and has the strength to win the title consistently. Now Taishan and Harbour are big clubs in China, and I am happy to develop and compete at such big clubs."
--Grateful to Shandong, unforgettable years
"In any case, I am very grateful to the Shandong club, thanks to Hao, thanks to every teammate of the Taishan team, every staff. 2021, I played 21 games for the team, only one did not play, and that was because the league won the championship early, I was in order to prepare for the F.A.C.A. Cup. This year, I put in my best efforts in Shandong, and the team won the double championship, which was a really happy year. The only regret is that I didn't get to play on Shandong's home field and didn't have zero contact with the fans."
--National team: challenges and growth
"This year in the national team is very difficult. We saw the gap with the strongest teams in Asia. In the past, when we played in the Asian Championship at Evergrande, we were very confident that our strength was not worse than our opponents. But at the end of this 12-team tournament, we must recognize the gap with the opponents, objectively speaking, the gap is not small. In the matches with Japan, Saudi Arabia and Australia, we will feel very powerless. We are also thinking about what caused this gap, perhaps we are definitely not just poor in one point, it must be all-round."
-- Reasons for falling behind: league pace, psychological pressure
"There are a lot of areas where we are behind, such as the pace of our league, we play slowly in the league and obviously the pace is different when we get to the national team. Also, we used to be competitive in Asia, like the players involved in the 2015 Asian Cup, when the national team was stronger and in better shape than it is now.
Another point is that due to the long period of concentration and not being able to see their families, this will definitely have some impact on the players' state, and everyone will be in a very irritable mood, which will lead to their own strength not being able to be brought into play. Another thing is the pressure. Sometimes ability is one thing, but psychology is another. Putting on the national team uniform is too much pressure. We really want to play well, but there is no way. We can't reach our ability, and when we are on the field, we can't play as well as we should be able to, and sometimes we feel that we are playing at maybe 30% of our ability."
