On the soccer field, the men's football is unlimited, the women's football is also valiant, such a scene has long been commonplace.
If the genders were reversed, with women at the helm of men's soccer and women navigating women's soccer, could this be accomplished at the top level?
"In my opinion, whether you're navigating men's or women's soccer, it's no different than soccer itself, the essence is no different."
Six years ago, 28-year-old Chan Yuen Ting became the first female coach in the world to lead a team to win a top-flight league title when she won the Hong Kong Premier League title with the Oriental Dragon Lions men's soccer team. In the same year, she was honored as the AFC's Best Female Coach and was selected as one of the world's top 100 female figures in 2016.
Now, Chen Wanting unloads her glory and returns to the top league, this time she will be greeted by the Women's Super League, facing a vibrant and energetic Jiangsu Women's Football Team.
In the face of a brand new team, Chen Wanting ushered in her debut in the top league of women's soccer, and her coaching career set sail again. 33 years old, what are her new feelings about the new team? What are her goals for the future?
Bleachers: 2022 Women's Premier League, the first phase is over (first 5 rounds of the league) and the team is in second place in the league, are you satisfied?
Chan Yuen Ting:
The team is growing and improving and I am very happy and satisfied. However, the league is long and every game is crucial as we get deeper into the competition, and I want to take all three points in every game and move towards the top five in the league.
Bleacher: Last season's runner-up, now in second place, why set the target so low?
Chan Yuen Ting:
This was the expectation of most of the team. When we met the day before the league opened, I suggested a way for everyone to write down their goals and expectations for the team, with the team's expectations uniformly anonymous. The coaching staff went back and did the math, and some players set out to win the championship and others to stay in the division, with over 80% of them expecting a top five team.
Now this goal was voted by everyone, which means that each of us has the responsibility to work towards it. It's second in the league now, it's just the beginning, we'll see how it goes after 15 rounds.
Bleacher: Taking over the Jiangsu team in March this year, the team was runner-up in the Women's Super League last year, once the division of the league championship, is the pressure great?
Chan Yuen Ting:
There is pressure, Jiangsu Women's Football is very famous, I feel very honored to accept the invitation and have the opportunity to work with them. In addition, this year we have several key players leaving the team (Wang Xiaoxue, Yao Lingwei, Peng Shimeng), and the team as a whole is getting younger. Personally, as a coach, I can't leave the pressure at any time. Whether we finished first, second or third last year, the most important job for me is to do a good job at the moment and bring the team to the best this year.
Bleacher: So how much of the team's potential do you think is being tapped now?
Chan Yuen Ting:
This is hard to calculate, I hope it's 50%.
Bleachers: it feels so low.
Chan Yuen Ting:
Setting it lower only means the team has more room for improvement. In the next second and third phase, I hope the team can improve even more. Now I've been in the team for just over a month, 80% of my time is spent in matches, training and breaks, I haven't had enough time to pass on my soccer philosophy to the players. I still need some time and hopefully the training and intervals will be longer after that to play the kind of soccer I want to play.
Bleacher: So you took over for a month or so and were you busy with the game?
Chan Yuen Ting:
Yes, as in I arrived at the team shortly after going to the National Championships in Kunming and made my debut 2 days later. Frankly, there was little time to make adjustments, and after the tournament, I returned to Nanjing for a week of rest and recuperation before coming to Haikou for the Women's Super League. During the week in Nanjing, I talked about some offensive and defensive transition stuff.
Although there is not enough time to train, the tournament shows the truest side of the players. They each have their own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, and after I collect them, I can tailor my coaching to each player's characteristics and make a detailed division of labor so that they can play better on the field. I have gotten to know the players very well through the 6 games of the tournament.
Lookout: the first round of the Women's Super League, look at your first six U21 players, on the contrary, like Xu Huan, Wu Chengshu and Li Mengwen and other international players are sitting on the bench, why this arrangement?
Chan Yuen Ting:
Because after coming back from the Asian Cup, they need to rest and recover, in Nanjing, through the heart rate belt test and my observation, I can understand their real-time condition, at first let them start to play the full 90 minutes, which is not very reasonable, need to give a certain amount of recovery time.
Bleacher: Indeed, like international player Wu Chengshu waited until the third round to make his debut, his form is getting better and better, scoring 4 goals in 5 games, temporarily ranking first in the domestic scorer list; meanwhile, the team's youngster Ou Yi Yao also scored 3 goals, how do you think about their performance?
Chan Yuen Ting:
Before I coached the Jiangsu team, I knew Wu Chengshu was a player with great timing in front of the goal, and I used to witness her ability on TV, both in the national team and in the club. After coming back from the national team, she has been training with the team for only two weeks and has already shown me her excellent goal-scoring ability and sense of smell in front of the goal, in short, she will be a very important player for us.
Next is Ou Yi Yao ('01), the National Championship from Kunming, her attitude in training and playing has been a surprise, her creativity in front of the field, her cleverness, initiative and aggressiveness in attacking are all very good. 3 goals in 4 rounds of matches, I'm very happy for her.
Bleacher: I noticed a few details in these matches of the Women's Super League, one is that when you are shouting to your players, sometimes you are not too fluent in Mandarin, and a few phrases of Cantonese will pop up, will this affect your communication?
Chan Yuen Ting:
It's true that sometimes I lose my tongue, or the players don't understand me after I've finished speaking. But I told them, if I lose my tongue, please tell me and teach me how to pronounce this Chinese better. Interestingly, the players said that they may have been with me for a while, and now they are turning into Hong Kong-Populist themselves (hahaha~).
I'm still learning this Mandarin, and I feel quite a bit better about myself than I did before, I don't specifically practice it, I just sometimes write down some words into my phone if I can't remember them, so practicing over and over again might help. Like I kept mispronouncing a word before, "embarrassed." I can't say this word correctly, but now I'm slowly getting better at pronouncing it, don't you think? (Smiling face~)
Bleachers: During the game, when a player is going to his team's bench to serve a sideline ball
