Letters from Shanghai: Limitations arise and the Asian Champions League dream is lost

By Andrew Crawford, writing from Shanghai

All good things have to come to an end eventually and the long shot that was Shanghai Shenhua belatedly saving their season and qualifying for the Asian Champions League is now off the table after the team was humiliated 4-2 by the high-flying Guizhou Renhe on Sunday.

Despite the hype and the astounding levels of investment, there will be no big weekday night fixtures against the best club teams in Asia in Shanghai for the second successive season. Instead, Shenhua will have to settle for mid table obscurity and the hope that their rapidly aging star players will still have enough magic left to make things right in 2013.

This isn’t to say that things haven’t been fun along the way. Stretching from early July until October, a team that had previously been flirting with relegation suddenly burst into life and began scoring boatloads of goals whilst going unbeaten over eleven games.

With Didier Drogba in fine form and manager Sergio Batista throwing out his teams in nakedly attacking formations, the crowds began to return and optimism was running riot. Shenhua could’ve still made it into the Asian Champions League, if the goals kept flowing.

The trouble was that goals did indeed flow- but on both ends of the pitch. With Shenhua overloading the forward line, Batista effectively surrendered control of the middle-third of the pitch to the opposition. Unsurprisingly almost every game since the Argentine arrived has become a shoot-out with Drogba playing a starring role as the new gunslinger in town.

Batista obviously has form in this department- his relatively unsuccessful stint as manager of the Argentine national team saw him throw out as many attacking options as he could squeeze into a line-up but managing Shenhua has also meant that he has to be pragmatic with his formations.

In an ideal world, he would probably like to bench Nicolas Anelka, who has scored three times in twenty-two games. In comparison, Drogba has eight in ten appearances, but the Frenchman is untouchable. 

Having been made club captain upon his arrival in January, Anelka’s clout and astronomical wage packet means no.39 remains a fixture in the team along with Drogba and the hard-working Australian forward Joel Griffiths.

Gio Moreno, another expensive mid-season attacking acquisition also has to start (although he has done well since arriving in Shanghai) meaning Shenhua have no more spots for foreigners in starting XI, hence the experienced centreback Moises does nothing but twiddle his thumbs on the sideline.

Whether it’s because his hand has been forced or he simply prefers being aggressive with his tactics, Batista had managed the situation well until his team went to Guizhou province and the pacy, counter-attacking Renhe side ruthless exposed Shenhua’s short comings.

In short, things got messy- Dai Lin, Shenhua’s only senior Chinese centreback, was responsible for two of Renhe’s goals as a makeshift backline with an average of age of twenty-two was eaten alive as Guizhou, uncontested in the middle of the pitch, poured forward in numbers.

After ninety minutes of watching his young defence get humiliated by the better organised Renhe team, Drogba’s face at the full-time whistle said it all. The Ivorian’s hard work since his arrival had been for nothing and the handful of remaining albeit meaningless games are going to drag by very slowly.

Twenty-four hours later however, with Shenhua having just flown back into Shanghai with their tail between their legs, another local team was experiencing an entirely different set of emotions.

Shanghai East Asia, who had been playing in the Chinese second tier for five years finally achieved their promotion to the CSL the previous week with a 3-0 victory away at Harbin Yiteng, the team from China’s most northern city.

Their first home game since assuring themselves of top flight football had a carnival atmosphere as fans filled the stands to celebrate history and were rewarded with a gutsy 3-2 victory over Chengdu Blades, a former CSL team that has recently fallen upon hard times.

The arrival of Shenhua’s little brother to the top table of Chinese football has not gone unnoticed by the city. Shanghai has not had a true local derby since 2007 since Shenhua’s chairman Zhu Jun merged the biggest teams in the city together and the anticipated rivalry between Shenhua and East Asia has already become a talking point.

The youth academy that owner Xu Genbao set up in 2001 forms the nucleus of the team and almost all of its Chinese players are graduates from the coaching programme.  Having led the league since the third week of the season, a team made up of players in their early twenties is now going to get its chance in the big time, seven years after East Asia started out life in the Chinese third division.

Moreover, Xu, a Shanghainese native who played as a left-back in the first Chinese national team to qualify for an international tournament (the 1974 Asian Cup), is seen as royalty in the city having also won the league with Shenhua in 1992. This alone gives him and the East Asia strong grass roots support, especially when compared to the increasingly unpopular Zhu.

There is one more month left of Chinese football in 2012; Shenhua have three games left on the calendar, East have two. Neither Shanghainese team can wait for this season to end and the new one to begin but for entirely different reasons.

Letters from Shanghai is a series by Andrew Crawford, based in China. You should follow Andrew on Twitter at @shouldersgalore. Comments below please.