For Li Xiaopeng, picking the lineup of players for this push into West Asia was both easy and challenging.
Four good naturalized players, plus Wu Lei, who has been a mainstay of the front line for a long time.
national soccer team
national soccer team
The attacking end of the five less generals, can be said to be "half of the river mountain lost". In this way, how to fill the vacancy caused by the departure of Wu Lei and others, Li Xiaopeng is obviously a difficult task, especially considering that Wei Shihao due to injury long-term truce, and he was Lippi and Li Tie have high hopes.
During the intensive training in Haikou.
national soccer team
national soccer team
) A total of three warm-up matches were played. As the main center forward Zhang Yuning did not score, but in Li Xiaopeng's tactical system, his position is unshakeable. Around Zhang Yuning, after many attempts, Li Xiaopeng has basically finalized the "Zhang Yuning + Liu Binbin + Dai Weijun" as the core of the attacking combination, supplemented by the back line "Zhu Chenjie + Jiang Guangtai + Zhang Linpeng" solid lineup, the overall framework has taken shape. The next step is to select the most suitable players for the remaining positions.
Seemingly simple "addition" is the most difficult in the absence of players with sufficient strength and characteristics. As a result of the epidemic, the past two seasons of the Chinese Super League (
China Super League (soccer league)
) have adopted the tournament system, especially in the second phase of the 2021 season, where the pace of matches was tight and the players participated in the national team training immediately after the lack of sufficient rest and experienced a three-week-long isolation after the Round of 12 matches against Japan and Vietnam. As a result, most of the time and energy of the leadership and coaching staff of the Football Association were devoted to communicating with the players and helping them adjust their mentality during this national team training.
In the eyes of Li Xiaopeng, in order to compete with the Saudi Arabia team, in addition to technical and tactical preparations, it is more important to be prepared in the psychological and spiritual level, as he said before: "must be able to fight". Everyone understands that the purpose of going to the UAE is to "fight" and "battle". Although the outside world is not optimistic, and some people even predicted that the Chinese team will end the 12-team tournament with four consecutive defeats, the team will not be able to win.
national soccer team
national soccer team
) A source within the team revealed that after the adjustment of the Haikou training, everyone is ready to fight with all their might: "In the words of the players themselves, it's 'the only thing that can save us from ourselves now is ourselves'."
