Letters from Shanghai: The team functions without its star, the media does not.

By Andrew Crawford, writing from Shanghai

The full time whistle had barely sounded when Shanghai Shenhua’s goalkeeper, Wang Dalei turned to the home fans behind him with a face of unchecked elation. Overwhelmed with relief, stalward Yu Tao fell to the ground and remained there for several minutes. A first time visitor to the Hongkou stadium might have thought that Shenhua had gone top of the league but instead, after four dire matches, the home team had managed to record a narrow 2-1 victory- only their third in eleven games.

Yet coming into the game against Renhe Guizhou, things were not as positive. Shanghai had lost their previous match, 1-0 against Henan Jiaye in farcical circumstances and the club was teetering on the edge of the relegation zone. Nicolas Anelka was suspended after picking up a yellow card in the defeat and with Shenhua’s other proven striker, Joel Griffiths out injured, the only fit forward of any note was Mathieu Manset, who had looked awful since joining the club on a six month loan from Championship side, Reading.

The arrival of Renhe in Shanghai was also significant. Previous known as Shaanxi Chanba, in early 2012, the football club was moved almost overnight from northern China to Guizhou at the behest of its owner, Jia Yongge. One of China’s richest men, Jia had decided to move his business operations further down south and in the blunt way that wealthy Chinese go about their lives, Jia simply took the football team with him despite Chanba having some of the best attendances in the country. Indeed, with Shanghai’s equally maligned owner, Zhu Jun, in the stands, last Sunday’s match was a poignant face-off between the two clubs that have probably lost the most in the ungainly scramble for control of Chinese football by various tycoons and cash flush corporations.

Unsurprisingly, Shenhua didn’t start brightly. Huffing and puffing but not doing a lot with their considerable amounts of possession, the home side were quickly testing the patience of their fans. Heckles and jeers were starting to trickle down from the stands and as the clock ticked away to halftime, it felt like it would take something special to save Shenhua from being booed off the pitch by their own fans.

Then, finally, it happened.

Shenhua, having been encamped in Renhe’s half for most of the first forty-five minutes, somehow contrived to fashion a decent through ball into the path of Manset. The barrel chested Frenchman made the most of his raw physicality to hold off a defender and having almost tripped over three times as he made his way into the penalty box, instinctively blasted the ball under Zhang Lie and into the net. Cue absolute chaos in the stands.

Yet this being Shenhua, things couldn’t be that easy and four minutes into the second half, Renhe equalised through an excellent free kick from their captain, Qu Bo. A stadium that had been rocking only a few minutes earlier returned to eerie silence whilst on the pitch, the Shenhua team had to once again find their way back into the light.

The injury ravaged gaggle of youngsters could have folded at this point but instead came roaring back courtesy of the mental toughness of Cao Yunding. The diminutive playmaker has struggled with injuries or being played out of position so far this season but when Renhe gave the ball away on the halfway line with thirty yards of space to run into, the midfielder didn’t have to think twice about what to do next. A burst of pace took him up down the pitch and around the last Renhe defender before coolly sliding the ball under the onrushing Lie. It was Cao’s second goal this season (as many as Anelka) and the midfielder has now scored the winning goal in both of Shenhua’s home wins this season (coming off the bench on both occasions to boot).

With the volume turned back up to maximum capacity in the stands, the home side survived a couple of nervy moments to lurch over the finishing line and record a belated, ugly win that will keep the fans off their back for another couple of weeks.

Amidst the celebrations that followed, Anelka could be seen walking down from the stands and into the dressing room with more TV cameras filming him than his teammates’ jubilant pitch-side celebrations. Shenhua’s season will remain irrevocably about the Frenchman, who is increasingly becoming the ring master of the Hongkou circus but when the cameras and microphones were retrained on the field behind them, there was only one man they wanted to talk to.

With an ongoing lack of creativity in midfield, Cao must now be hopeful of getting back into the starting line-up for the next game and probably should if there is any footballing sense still floating around the Shenhua dressing room. The Bosnian import Mario Bozic is hard working but ultimately limited, and his place in the starting line-up seems to be more about Shenhua not wanting to waste one of their four slots for foreigners in their starting line-up. Meanwhile, Cao, who became the youngest goal scorer in Chinese football (16 years, 242 days) during his days with Shenhua’s cross town neighbours, Shanghai East Asia, might just be the spark to his team needs.

A twenty-two year old Shanghainese native leading his team out of the bottom half of the table would be a fairytale end to a nightmare start to the season, but with Shenhua, no one knows what will happen next week. A lot depends on who is picking the team. Right now, it’s hard to be sure if its the coach, the teams’ star player or the chairman. For most teams, this would be a disaster but for Shenhua these days, it almost feels normal.