Tonight at 19:35, the Chinese national football team will face Vietnam in a warm-up match. Before the game, “Xinmin Evening News” published a comment saying that it hoped the national football team would perform well and not give Fan Zhiyi a chance to dominate the game.
Shanghai media believes that 20 years ago, the match between the Chinese team and the Vietnamese team would not interest fans because of the huge disparity in strength between the two sides. What national football fans care about is never winning or losing, but how many wins they win. But now that times have changed, the confrontation between the Chinese and Vietnamese teams can still cause ripples in the football market and the Internet. There is one person who plays a very important role. He is Fan Zhiyi, the former captain of Shenhua and the National Football Team.
“After losing to Thailand, we will lose to Vietnam.” These seven short words uttered from his mouth in 2013 made every subsequent China-Vietnam football match full of excitement. During the Spring Festival of 2022, the national football team lost 1-3 at the Hanoi Arena in the top 12 of the world preliminaries, completely losing the chance to enter the Qatar World Cup. After the game, Fan Zhiyi’s profile picture and his famous phrase “I don’t have any face left” broke the Internet, becoming one of the most embarrassing moments in Chinese football in recent years.
Although Fan Zhiyi has tried almost every method since then to help himself and his juniors in the national football team reduce the pressure, in the final analysis, the competition on the green field is about strength and the results are what matters. Whether Fan Zhiyi can be prevented from becoming the “protagonist” depends on the performance of the national football team.
Ten years ago, the Thai team, which was dominated by youth team players, gave Camacho’s Chinese team a 5-1 game in Hefei, which also forced Fan Zhiyi’s famous “national football critical review”; ten years later, another A Southeast Asian team with mainly young players comes to challenge. After tonight’s game, can Fan Zhiyi still dominate the screen? I hope the national football players can give a negative answer.
