Football: The immortal legend on the green field

When I returned to the door of my shop, it was not yet 7 o'clock and the shop was not open yet. I guess my father Shen Yuanchao must have celebrated with some drinks last night and must have drunk too much.

Shen Bin didn't want to disturb his father's rest, so he locked his bicycle outside the store, entered the stadium alone, and sat down in a seat in the audience.

Shen Bin recalled his experiences over the past two days, thinking about one day putting on the national team jersey and competing in the international arena. All these beautiful hopes for the future are pinned on one thing... He can still continue running on the green field!

The conditions for him to continue playing are: he performs particularly well in this game, the team can sign a formal contract with him without charging training fees, or he finds a new club.

He no longer has any illusions about finding another club because his father has hit too many walls in the past year.

As long as they pull him onto the field to practice, and as long as the coach pays a little more attention, they will discover his fatal flaw, and it is hard to predict what will happen next. Maybe he will be ridiculed, or he may roll his eyes and be indifferent, or even be humiliated...

He lowered his head in pain, trying to forget the unpleasant experiences that suddenly came to his mind.

At noon, Shen Bin did not return to the team, but had lunch with his father.

At 3 pm, Shen Bin went directly into the stadium to join the team.

The weather is still so dry and hot that people feel like they are being baked in an oven.

There was almost no wind. If there was wind, people might be able to get by better, but when the wind passed, it was annoying. As soon as the slight coolness dissipated, the heat wave would cover the sky and surround people tightly. Even the air you breathe seems to have a smell of roasted earth.

At noon, Wan Anlong asked the organizing committee to send someone to sprinkle water on the lawn. It was not known whether the stadium staff were lazy or the land was too dry.

Anyway, when the young players stepped on the grass, they could feel the sand collapsing due to lack of moisture through the composite rubber on the soles of their shoes.

When people fall into the straw and get up again, all the exposed parts of their heads, faces and bodies will be covered with tiny particles of sand, which may not be cleaned even by patting and brushing them several times.

These little things are absorbed by the sweat on the body, not because they are fully absorbed by the water and stick to the body, because dry places like the hem of the sweatshirt are not very sandy...

Veteran coach Guo Jiangping stood on the field with his hands behind his back, holding a whistle, and watched his two assistants arrange the players to do basic movements such as passing the pole without the ball.

As the young players line up to complete their training sessions, they tell each other some harmless jokes or make fun of someone's recent misdeeds.

After they have finished their training, neither too seriously nor too casually, they will continue the conversation by picking up the previous topic.

Occasionally someone would play a prank on someone, and the person being pranked would laugh and curse, and then everyone else would laugh happily for a while.

It was a scene of total harmony.

After several training sessions, the players were already sweating. Those who couldn't stand the hot weather had already taken off their jerseys and were walking back and forth on the court with their backs bare.

When Guo Jiangping saw this, he signaled the team members to stop and rest.

The team members immediately returned to the shaded area beside the field to wipe their sweat, wipe their faces, drink water and rest. A few lazy guys even lay down on the grass and closed their eyes comfortably.

Guo Jiangping also returned to his seat at the edge of the venue, drank a few sips of water, stared blankly for a long time, took out his notebook from his trouser pocket and continued to ponder his endless worries.

He did not go over to talk to the players. He was not like his two assistants, who could talk to the players.

In the more than 30 years since he became a coach, he has always adhered to one principle: a coach should have the dignity of a coach. He can be a father, but not a brother.

He can have heart-to-heart talks with his teammates, but he will never sit with them and drink and make noise.

The team members had more or less heard about this old coach who attached great importance to "the dignity of the teacher". Some of them were even disciples of Guo Jiangping's disciples, so they did not dare to come over and make noise.

Ever since Chen Tao, the only one in the team who was selected for the 84-year-old national youth team, looked down on everyone, he was kicked into the grass by the old man for not putting in enough effort during training, and no one dared to put on airs in front of him anymore.

Don't you think about who Chen Tao is? He is a talented player who was selected for Jia Xiu's national youth team.

In the Asian U17 Championship qualifiers Group A held in Seoul, South Korea at the beginning of the year, when the Chinese team was trailing South Korea 0-1, Chen Tao scored a golden goal in stoppage time.

The South Korean national youth team, one of Asia's top teams, was dragged into a penalty shootout, and the two teams had to go into a penalty shootout. Both sides scored three goals and missed one in the first four penalty shootouts, and the score on the field came to 4 to 4.

In the fifth round, the penalty kick taken by Lee Dong-guk of the Korean youth team hit the crossbar and bounced out of bounds. All the pressure came on Chen Tao, who played last. He withstood the pressure and scored the key penalty kick, thus eliminating South Korea in the Asian Youth Championship and advancing to the Asian Youth Championship held in Japan in September.

Because the national youth team broke the embarrassing record that national teams at all levels would always lose to South Korea, it received widespread attention from domestic media.

Several main players like Chen Tao, Zhou Haibin, Zhao Xuri and others quickly became popular in China. After returning to China, head coach Jia Xiuquan also received an invitation from the Shangdu Shenhua Club to serve as the head coach of the Shangdu Shenhua Football Club.

There is no way around it. Except for the adult team, the salaries of coaches of other echelons of the national team are pitifully low, so it is not difficult for Jia Xiuquan to make the choice.

The Football Association has fully demonstrated their ability to get things done at this time. There is still one month left before the registration deadline for the Asian U17 Championship final, and the national youth team has not yet decided who will lead this "super platinum generation."

There are big differences of opinion within the Football Association now. Most people think that the contract of German coach Krauchen should be settled as soon as possible, and it is more reliable to have Krauchen lead the team. The opposing party also has good reasons, that is, the funds for hiring Krauchen have not been in place yet, so it would be better to invite a domestic coach to make the transition first and talk about it after the Asian games. Based on the current strength of the national youth team, there should be no problem.

It's no wonder Chen Tao is so arrogant. With his outstanding performance in the qualifiers at the beginning of the year, no matter who becomes the head coach of the U17 team, it's a foregone conclusion that he will be selected again. But the old man still didn't treat him specially. He didn't dare to say a word when he was kicked over by the old man. He just got up and continued to train obediently...

The small notebook was filled with a bunch of messy numbers and symbols, as well as a series of scribbled words of varying thickness.

These are what Guo Jiangping has been thinking about recently, what kind of personnel combination and what kind of tactical arrangement can make his team go further.

Go further?

He couldn't help but glance sideways at Shen Bin on the court. He was banging his sneakers upside down on the grass while talking to two familiar teammates.

He sighed helplessly. He still didn't know whether he made the right decision or the wrong decision to recruit this kid who should have been in the U15 team.

Say that he was wrong. Shen Bin is not only a rare left-footed player, but also has agile feet, delicate techniques, simple movements, broad vision, and a flexible mind. The day before yesterday, he played a guest role in organizing the offense in the middle, and was very experienced whether it was splitting the ball or making a straight pass. According to his assistant, the team "is alive."

At the beginning, he arranged Shen Bin as the left winger, but he felt that Shen Bin's full potential was not brought out, and Shen Bin's biggest weakness was exposed, because this little guy had two fatal weaknesses. The first was that he was weak in confrontation. There was no way to deal with this. After all, Shen Bin was three or four years younger than other people in the team. Even a one-year age difference would show obvious differences between young football players. The other weakness was more fatal to the player: he had no speed!

Modern football places particular emphasis on speed, especially on the wing positions, requiring players to be able to move up and down when attacking or defending. Shen Bin's speed is not slow while dribbling the ball, and his relative speed is not slow.

But when running without the ball, he always gives people the feeling that he is half a beat slower than other players, which means he has no absolute speed.

He discovered Shen Bin's problem during the first training session. At that time, he thought it was because Shen Bin had not had systematic training for a long time, or because he was younger than others.

But during subsequent training and confrontation exercises, Guo Jiangping discovered through careful observation that Shen Bin always gave people a weird feeling when he was running without the ball, and something was not right.

With doubts, he arranged Shen Bin to play as a center forward and center back. He played well in both positions, which made him, who has been dealing with football all his life, admire him.

Alas, to become such a jack-of-all-trades player, in addition to having high talent and aptitude, one must also rely on hard acquired efforts. Shen Bin must have suffered a lot for this. I don’t know how many times more sweat and tears he shed than others!

However, what a pity! No matter how hard this little guy tries, he has no future. Football is not something that can be achieved by hard work alone. His innate conditions will limit him very much. In layman's terms, he is a "waste material" who works hard.

“He has no future!”