Masterful Defense
We're not just about scoring
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Masterful Defense
This was the most dominating 1-0 victory I’ve ever seen.
Shanghai Shenxin didn’t have a single shot on goal. We had 32 shots to their 0, had a 3.00 xG to their 0.00, and dominated possession.
I’m not sure how we managed to only score a single goal after that dominating performance.
Younes Delfi added to his legendary status by scoring the only goal of the match. We hammered the Shanghai goal time and time again, but just couldn’t get another breakthrough.
I’m just happy that their counterattacks all fell flat.
The Taiwanese Kid
This was the debut for Miguel Sandberg, another striker who we think has a lot of potential.
Despite his name, Sandberg is actually a Taiwanese national team player. He’s Taiwanese-Swedish, was born in Sweden, and yet chose to represent Taiwan internationally. He’s 21 years old, is clearly the best player on Taiwan’s national team, and is probably the best player in the history of Taiwanese football.
We poached Sandberg from Västerås SK for only 520,000 RMB, which is a bargain - not even 100,000 Euros. He was in our under 23 team all last season. I decided to bring him up this season due to that Taiwanese nationality, which counts as Chinese for registration purposes.
Sandberg didn’t play particularly well in his first match, missing a number of easy scoring chances. We think he’ll be good if he continues to get game time, though.
Shijiazhuang
We’re heading over to Hebei to face Shijiazhuang Gongfu next.
The press pointed out to me that I’ll be squaring off against a goalkeeper named Teng Shangkun. This requires a bit of explaining.
We had a major goalkeeping crisis early last season. The 15-year-old Wu Ping was the best goalkeeper on the club. The problem is that he didn’t have the skill or experience to play for the first team squad, and he also had a horribly depressed and negative personality. I went into the market to buy any Chinese goalkeeper I could find — and, well, I accidentally bought about 60 of them.
I originally purchased the then 31-year-old Teng Shangkun, thinking that he’d be our first choice goalkeeper. We got him for 1.5 million RMB, which seemed like a relative bargain. However, we then picked up Li Changyi and Liu Shaoziyang, rendering Teng Shangkun (and a number of other goalkeepers) useless. He wound up joining Shijiazhuang on a free transfer.
We’ll see if this comes back to haunt us or not. My scouts have assured me that Teng Shangkun is nothing to be concerned about. Still, you never know.
Please note that you can find the latest standings and selected statistics on this splash page.