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chile_paul

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Well our 100% winning run continues at ease, with Wu Xinghan and Ri Ho-Jin terrorising defences up and down the country. The only noticeable sticky spot was in front of our home crowd against Qingdao, who took the lead in the 1st minute before we'd even got out of the starting blocks after a poor pass from Robinson gifted them possession in our third. We got our act together and started to dominate proceedings but their goalkeeper was in fine form and was all set to deny us, but in the dying minutes of the first half Wu Xinghan launched a beast of a volley that the keeper got a hand to, but only palmed it on to the post and in. This relaxed the nerves and in the second half there was no denying us, it was our new hero Ri Ho-Jin who popped up in the 71st minute to secure all 3 points

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Really cross with myself for this, I totally missed the fact that Ri had negotiated in a contract release clause - and despite offerring to double his wages he took the opportunity to jump ship and move to Saudia Arabia.

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It's not a bad profit on a player who only joined on a free transfer 6 months ago, but in his time with us he'd scored 12 goals in 11 appearances with 5 assists and an average rating of 7.91.

D'oh!!

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This was an unexpected surprise............

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I obviously told Ally that he was mad to have travelled all the way out to China to see a player that I could have easily told him over the phone he didn't have a chance in hell of signing - then again maybe he's trying to get away from the Ranger's fans baying for blood after seeing their side throw away the title and allow Hearts to become the first non-old firm winners of the Scottish Premier League since 1985!

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2 other transfer window moves worth telling you about. I made the decision to let Su Qichen go out on loan (before I knew that Ri Ho-JIn was being pinched from under my nose) and he has got the chance of a lifetime to move to Europe for 12 months to play for newly promoted French side Brest. Exciting 19 year old talent Yu Ou has joined the side as a squad player and to develop to become a long term replacement for Mirahmetjan Muzepper

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World Footballing News

  • Big spending Sunderland finally started to see a return on their investment this season, as a 4th place will deliver them the opportunity of big money pay-outs from the Champions League. However for a side who've spent an incredible £99m on transfers in the last season, on top of several seasons of £30m+ investment, is this really enough. The side had been running away with the title for the first half of the season before being caught and only time will tell whether chairman Mostafa Ettehad will continue to give manager Keith Millen time to win the Premier League
  • In fact Sunderland are immediately showing that they intend to continue to throw money at the transfer market - signing Gareth Bale from Tottenham for £22m. Much had been expected of Bale as a youngster, but having chosen loyalty to Tottenham over the prospects of a big money move to a major European force earlier in his career nobody can blame him at the age of 30 to have one last chance to compete in the Champions League with Sunderland
  • English champions Liverpool also show a willingness to burn money on ageing players in the transfer market with a £21m deal to sign Gueida Fofana from Champions League runners up PSG
  • After 450 appearances for Everton, 34 year old Leighton Baines moves to Tottenham for £2.9m as a direct replacement for recently departed Gareth Bale - not a popular move with the Tottenham faithful who had hoped to see the £22m from the sale of Bale immediately spent on good young talent to propel them to success over the coming years
  • Newcastle pick up Alex Song on a free transfer. Song had joined Liverpool for £21.5m 3 years ago but had struggled to make the first team on a regular basis last season and opted to move to Newcastle for the promise of more regualr playing time. Johann Djourou also moves to St James' Park as the clubs strategy of picking up experienced older players on free transfers continues to take effect. Moving out of St James Park is fan's favourite Steven Taylor, who has retired from playing in order to take up the managers position at Tranmere Rovers!
  • Gordon Strachan steps down as Birmingham manager and retires from football after a long and distinguished career. Ex-Dunfermline manager Jim McIntyre makes the short move down the M69 to pick up the managers position following a successful spell in charge at Leicester City
  • Martin Olsson leaves Chelsea in a move to Vitesse - Olsson had only recently joined Chelsea in a £13.5m move and having only played 8 games for the Stamford Bridge outfit, this certainly looks to be an expensive mistake for manager Remi Garde - who only managed to secure 8th place for the club last season. Neither of these facts are likely to make the manager popular with Roman Abrahamovic
  • Real Madrid's Mesut Ozil is reportedly unhappy at being frozen out of the first team at Real Madrid. Having had a long and successful career working with Mourinho at Real Madrid with 19 competition titles to his name, it appears the 2 have now fallen out. However with a £39m price tag on his head it's not yet clear whether Ozil will be going anywhere!
  • 22 year old Uruguayan central defender Jonathan Bertoldi becomes the 3rd most expensive transfer of all time following his £40m move from Malaga to Man City. With 44 caps to his name already and having had several strong seasons at Malaga he certainly looks like a potential superstar.

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Copa America 2019

A shock result from South America, see's the minnows of Ecuador lifting the Copa America for the first time in their history after a thrilling penalty win after a 2-2 draw with Brazil in which Brazil only managed to put away one of their five spot kicks.

This is yet a further shock outcome for both Brazil (who've slipped down to 14th in the FIFA rankings) and Argentina who between them have failed to win a competition since before 2011 - with Urugay, Peru and now Ecuador lifting the South American trophy in the previous 3 incarnations of this tournament.

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Led by three exciting young talents in the form of Corinthians Carlos Cortez, Atletico Madrdid's Ivan Intriago and Malaga's Raul Zambrano Ecuador certainly look to have a bright future ahead of them.

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Only 4 league games this month, but it's been a disruptive few weeks with players leaving, unexpected friendly games against some of my European parent clubs and an international double header.

Given the loss of our star player, performances certainly could have been worse and we pass the half way point in season with our 100% record intact. The 1-0 win at home to Beijing was tigher than it should have been and that 100% record could easily have slipped away, relying on a goal in the last 10 minutes from Wu Xinghan to secure the 3 points, otherwise it was business as normal, albeit slightly more disjointed than normal.

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Is it too soon to start talking about a full season winning every game????? Shenhua are slipping further and further behind........

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The 2nd qualifying round for the Asian World Cup spaces drew us in a 2 legged knock out tie against Thailand - this certainly wasn't the easiest draw available, but nevertheless we should progress into the group stages easily.......

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Well we made it through, but it was significantly harder than it should have been, and in reality if Thailand hadn't seen a man sent off in the 4th minute of the second leg we might have been faced with the embarassment of being knocked out before the group stages. I've clearly been getting over confident about the strength of this side and its clear that I've still got a heck of a lot of work to do with this side.

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August has been a tough month so far, with some tired legs in the team and a lack of passion and invention with some tired heads as well. Nevertheless those doubters in the Chinese media who were starting to suggest that Shenhua might have a chance of catching us.............

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This team are a fearsome unit when pissed off!

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Just read all the way through, its a really good read, nice to see you plying your trade in interesting places and you're doing amazingly well in China. It did somewhat spoil what I had hoped would be a productive morning though, but I guess thats more my fault than yours.

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Just read all the way through, its a really good read, nice to see you plying your trade in interesting places and you're doing amazingly well in China. It did somewhat spoil what I had hoped would be a productive morning though, but I guess thats more my fault than yours.

Cheers Troy, always great to have a new reader! Productive morning's are over-rated anyway, always better to get distracted by FM!!

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A short month on the footballing front, and it started badly with the end of our 100% record away to Dalian - we took the lead but never really shut Dalian out of the game and they came back to score an equaliser later in the second half. Really poor performance against a team way down at the bottom of the league. The next game was equally poor and for the first time in a very long time we failed to net a goal - we're really missing Ri Ho-Jin now and I'm wondering if I made a mistake letting Su Qichen head off to France. Once again though it wasn't just a failure to score, we failed to dominate the play all over the pitch. A complete contrast then when Shenhua came to visit at our place - maybe they though we were ripe for the taking and therefore had a more attacking philosophy - regardless we tore them to pieces with 3 goals in the first 10 minutes and were 7-0 up at half time.

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Despite dropping 4 points we're still miles ahead of the field and still hold an unbeaten record

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The draw for the World Cup qualifiers 3rd round groups has been made and we have a tough group, albeit one that I'd expect to qualify from.

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South Korea is definitely our biggest challenge, our recent record is played 8, won 1 and lost 7 (including a painful 7-0 loss back in 2011). UAE will be a tough fixture, but one we should win and Tajikistan should be the whipping boys of the group.

Top 2 teams from each group qualify and then go into a final group stage with 2 groups of 5. The top 2 from these groups then qualify for the World Cup with the 3rd placed teams going into the World Cup play-off phases with South American teams.

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We get off to a perfect start to our qualification campaign with 6 points out of 6; including a win in our toughest match up in the group away to South Korea.

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We were helped massively by a South Korean midfielder being sent off in the first minute, we'd literally made one pass from the kick off and he dived in 2 footed and was immediately shown a red. We didn't have things all our own way though - they changed from a 3-4-3 formation to 3-3-3 and for the first 10 minutes completely dominated play and took an early lead despite having only 10 men on the pitch. I made some changes to our own formation though, pulling one of my strikers into a deeper role and setting one of my wingers to a support role rather than attack to flood and control midfield and it started to pay off - Lu Nan was left in an attacking role on the right wing and began to control the play against their left back putting 2 great crosses across both of which Wu Xingnan converted to give us the lead. We then picked up a 3rd before having one of our own midfielders sent off for a lunging 2 footed tackle.

Tajikistan was a much easier tie and we put out a weakened side which ran to a comfortable 4-0 win

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Time for the U-23 side to hit the field of battle now to fight for qualification into the Olympic Games - one of the problems I have with such a yound national side is that I'm effectively fielding a B side in the U-23's as most of my first choices have just played for the seniors. Nevertheless Malaysia shouldn't be a challenge in this 2 legged knock out ahead of the group qualifying stage.

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Indeed they were a push over - we stormed to a very comfortable 3-0 win in Malaysia and then strolled to a comfortable 1-0 win in China. So we're through to the qualifying round proper and it's time for the draw:

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An incredibly tough draw, I've already learnt at my peril not to underestimate Uzbekistan and S Korea will be favourites - the Olympics Games looks a long way away now! Group C is definitely the group I wanted to be in!

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September was another short month, with international fixtures and the re-commencement of the Champions League getting in the way of the domestic league. But, no excuses, it was also a terrible month for our form, with our first defeat in this campaign swiftly followed by a second - taking us to a position of only having one win in the last 5 games. We recovered back at home with a confident 5-0 win against Changchun thanks to a fantastic hatrick from Nicolas D-Assero - but it is our away form that continues to be a worry.

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Despite our drop in form, we're still looking confident at the top of the table and it would take a miracle for anybody else to catch us

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We had a realtively easy match up in the Quarter Finals with Ardija from Japan who were struggling down in 14th place in their domestic league. They'd qualified for the Champions League thanks to a shock 4th place last season, having previously been fighting off relegation each year. Despite making it through to the quarter-finals they were back on normal form domestically and didn't look capable of resisting our strength.

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Indeed, two relatively comfortable victories to distract us from our domestic poor form, see us through to the semi-finals where we'll play another Japanese side - FC Tokyo. A shame we couldn't keep a clean sheet in either of these ties though.

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We were almost over the line in September and with just a couple of fixtures we would be lifting the title. Things didn't go all our own way and in fact we had some disappointing and positively poor results; however our class shone through and we secured the title with 5 games remaining after the 1-1 draw with Shandong. I obviously decided to rest some players after this and give my youngsters a run out in the team, but despite that I was gutted to throw away our 100% home record in the defeat to bottom of the table Hubei!

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Not as good a points total as last season, after the disappointing second half to the season, but still a convincing gap between 1st and 2nd

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So with the domestic campaign wrapped up and the title secured, it was time to concentrate on the continental trophy and focus on becoming only the third club in history to have retained the title. Ahead of us we had a tricky tie against FC Tokyo of Japan who were performing well in their domestic league.

Earlier in the season I would have been comfortable going into this game, but our shaky domestic form had me nervous heading to Tokyo - and indeed it was a far from convincing performance - from the start it looked like we had the edge, taking an early 8th minute lead from an own goal, but they quickly pushed back and started to outplay us for the majority of the game. They equalised and looked like they could easily pick up more but Nicolas D'Assero snuck us back ahead, but only for 3 minutes as they clawed us back again. Ma Qinqtao was sent off just before half time for a stupid and unnecessary challenge and this looked like domming us to defeat, but we managed to stay strong to secure an incredibly valuable 2-2 draw to give us the advantage heading into the second leg.

The return leg was similarly tight and nervy with both teams giving it their all, and heading into the final 15 minutes it looked like it might all be decided on the away goals that I'd scored in Japan.........they understandably started to push forward knowing that they were heading out of the competition, but this left room at the back allowing Karen Martirosyan to score that all important goal for us and Lu Nan then popped up in the 3rd minute of injury time to make the result look far more convincing than it felt!

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Persepolis' convincing away win at Seongnam has secured a 2nd China v Iran final in 2 years!!

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With my place in the Champions League final secured, I was now really aiming for the treble - which would require me to win the CFA Cup as well - last year my preparations for this competition had been severely hampered by the international call ups for the Pan Asian Games, but without this distraction and with a full squad to choose from I was gunning for revenge.

The first round was an away tie to Dalian, who normally would have been a touch match up, but they've had a disastrous season and ended up being relegated and unsurprisingly sacking their manager. Even so, I wasn't going to under-estimate them, especially as most of my defeats this season had come from teams propping up the bottom of the table.

Further to follow

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  • 5 months later...

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