Picking pie over mooncake (how un-Chinese can you get?)
Credit to Author: ROMY P. MARIÑAS| Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2019 16:14:21 +0000
China has eaten humble pie, apparently because the dish tastes better than mooncake?
An under-achiever in world football, the economic and political giant of more than one billion people is now the mother country of nine naturalized footballers with reportedly internationally competitive skills.
As of August 22, according to Xinhua, the Chinese Football Association, through its president Chen Xuyuan, said in a news conference that the CFA had registered a total of nine naturalized players with or without Chinese heritage on record.
The latest recruit is Brazilian-born forward Elkeson, whose Chinese name is Ai Kesen and who has been named to the Chinese squad to become the first naturalized player without Chinese ancestry to wear the Team Dragon jersey.
We presume that the CFA would field a number of these foreigners-turned-Chinese citizens to suit up for the team from the mainland that would square off with the Philippine Azkals early next month in Bacolod City.
That game is a qualifier for the third round of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and China is expected to top the group where it is bracketed with the Philippines, Syria and Maldives.
The Chinese futbuleros should win it — they could do no less — because failure means that it is in the same league as their counterparts in the national basketball team, a bunch that was humiliated in the recent FIBA World Cup in China where it was just a rung or two above Gilas Pilipinas–a greater embarrassment by finishing dead last among 32 teams.
For the record, the Philippines has not beaten China in international football, but bankrolling the Team Dragon is not a problem, partly because Chinese President Xi Jinping is supposedly a big football fan.
Currently, China is ranked by FIFA the No. 71 team in the world and the Philippines, No. 126.
To the Philippine Azkals’ credit, the squad has no naturalized Filipino in its line-up for the October match at Panaad Stadium, only Filipino-foreigners with at least a parent as Pinoy as he or she can get.
The Chinese has done an Andray Blatche, who has not made a significant difference where the Philippines’ latest FIBA World Cup campaign was concerned.
Let’s hope that the foreigners whom Beijing has anointed as Chinese citizens deliver, but we are betting on the Azkals to turn the ping pong tables on the visitors.
At least, we don’t buy people from places far, far away to sing the Philippine National Anthem in… Brazilian.