China coach hails ‘warriors’ after gritty win
Print Edition
CHINA coach Chang Weiwei hailed his team as “warriors” after a hard-earned 1-0 win over Cameroon on Saturday took them into the quarterfinals of the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
“Today all the players were wonderful,” said assistant coach Chang, who was in charge of the team for the game in Edmonton due to the suspension of head coach Hao Wei.
“They put on a spectacular performance, they were resilient and brave. They were like warriors for 90 minutes.”
A series of wasted opportunities meant that the Chinese, who took the lead in the 12th minute courtesy of Wang Shanshan, had to battle until the end to make sure of the win and Chang conceded his team had to be sharper in front of goal.
“All the players worked very hard — defense is team work, it is about the work of 11 players, but there is room for improvement in attack,” he said.
China, runner-up in 1999, reached the last eight in 2007 but did not qualify for the finals four years ago in Germany and Chang said Hao deserved credit for bringing the team back into the elite of the women’s game.
“Under coach Hao we have witnessed tremendous progress of the national team — he selected a lot of young, energetic and enterprising players, who have become more mature and sophisticated players,” he added. “I think they can reach even higher levels.”
China will face the winner of the game between the United States and Colombia and player of the match Ren Guixin said the team would now play with more freedom now the pressure of reaching its goal of the last eight had gone. “We are in the top eight now, we have a huge burden lifted off our shoulder — we believe in ourselves and we will be even more aggressive in our next match,” she said.
Cameroon head coach Enow Ngachu said that if China does face the US, it could pull off a surprise against one of the tournament’s favorites.
In the day’s other match, twice champion Germany crushed Sweden 4-1 in Ottawa with Celia Sasic scoring in each half.
Anja Mittag and Dzsenifer Marozsan also found the target for another of the pretournament favorites.
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