Chapter Seventy-Five: The Fall

The Yun Jia Tianyu 89 age group team, which ended the group stage with three consecutive victories, was not the most dazzling team from Yun Jia Tianyu in this tournament. The Yun Jia Tianyu U-17 squad drew everyone’s attention with their remarkable performance. Placed in a group alongside football schools from Dalian, Shanghai, and Shandong, they still managed to secure three straight wins. Among them, the Argentine boy Messi, not yet fifteen but already shining in the Yun Jia Tianyu U-17 team, was a beacon on the field. Though much shorter than his peers, in football skill he was a true giant.

In three matches, he scored five goals and assisted four times. His one-on-one dribbling success rate reached seventy-five percent; thirteen shots yielded five goals, and his pass completion stood at sixty-three percent. His five goals included a close-range finish, two long solo runs, one long-range shot from outside the box, and a breakthrough inside the penalty area. Aside from not scoring with a header, it was difficult to find any technical flaw in him.

The Argentine Messi became the brightest star of this invitational tournament, overshadowing all others.

“Perhaps, many years from now, we’ll realize this invitational tournament was held for one reason: to let all football fans in the country know Messi,” Yun Jia Tianyu’s owner, Pei Wei, stated confidently in an interview. “He will become the tournament’s monument, inspiring every young Chinese player to strive to become the next Messi.”

As everyone predicted, the Yun Jia Tianyu U-17 team blazed through the competition, sweeping aside all obstacles and claiming the final championship with an unstoppable seven-match winning streak. Messi, with nine goals, swept both the top scorer and best player awards, turning the tournament into a personal showcase.

It is said that after the match, several clubs inquired about this not-yet-fifteen-year-old’s value, but all were rejected by Yun Jia Tianyu’s owner. He had worked hard to bring this boy from Argentina; if not for a diagnosis of growth hormone deficiency at age eleven and his original club, Newell’s Old Boys, unwilling to pay for treatment, Yun Jia Tianyu could never have acquired this prodigy who had joined Newell’s at seven.

Rumor has it that, behind closed doors, Pei Wei slammed his desk and cursed: “Do domestic clubs really think they can buy Messi? Except for Yun Jia Tianyu, no club in the country can foster his greatest potential! This kid is my secret weapon — and they want to poach him already? Not only does no one have the money, but even if they did, I wouldn’t sell!”

Of course, Pei Wei vehemently denied ever saying anything to harm Yun Jia Tianyu’s relationship with other clubs, but those who knew him well understood: only he could utter such words among all the football club bosses in China.

In this invitational tournament, Yun Jia Tianyu was the biggest winner. Of the five squads they sent, three won championships and four reached the finals, once again proving Yun Jia Tianyu’s reputation as the nation’s top youth academy was well-deserved.

Yet for the Yun Jia Tianyu 89 age group, this tournament was a failure; theirs was the only team among the five not to reach the final.

They lost to Shanghai in the semifinals. In that match, Ding Yu once again deployed Long Bisheng as the main attacker, but Shanghai’s tactics were spot on. Instead of trying to neutralize Long Bisheng’s height advantage, they concentrated their defense on the other creative players, using fierce pressing to prevent the wingers from delivering comfortable crosses. Although Yun Jia Tianyu managed to create some chances through direct long balls from Hu Gantang and Dai Guangming in the center, the success rate was much lower, and Shanghai’s Chongming Island Football School team successfully stifled their attack.

Once aerial balls could no longer reach him, Long Bisheng became almost irrelevant on the pitch. Though he had solid fundamentals, his footwork was average at best. He could shield the ball, but often stalled the attack, and when he did pass quickly, it was as if the team was playing with one man down.

When Yun Jia Tianyu’s offense stalled and fell into chaos, Shanghai seized the moment, scoring twice in quick succession in the 25th and 31st minutes of the first half. In the second half, after Ding Yu changed tactics and substituted Long Bisheng, Shanghai switched to a defensive strategy. Though Yun Jia Tianyu managed a fine combination in the box finished by Dai Guangming, it wasn’t enough to avoid defeat.

Facing this result, Ding Yu could only sigh. The head coach of Chongming Island Football School was Xu Genbao, a former Yun Jia Tianyu coach who had helped Shanghai win its only professional league title. The tactics that specifically targeted Yun Jia Tianyu were likely his handiwork.

Compared to Xu Genbao, Ding Yu still seemed inexperienced — and he was in the open, while Xu Genbao worked from the shadows.

In the third-place playoff, Long Bisheng sat on the bench for the full ninety minutes. Yun Jia Tianyu edged out Shandong 2–1 thanks to goals from Zhou Wei and Li Yajun, claiming third place. As the youngest squad in the tournament, the Yun Jia Tianyu 89 age group had the weakest performance.

This result left everyone feeling ashamed, believing they had let down Yun Jia Tianyu Football School. Yet on the way home, Ding Yu remained cheerful, as if the loss hadn’t bothered him at all.

Long Bisheng, feeling he was to blame for the defeat, kept his head down on the bus. Dai Guangming and the others didn’t know how to comfort him; after all, Yun Jia Tianyu’s loss to Shanghai truly came in the first half, and it was the striker Long Bisheng who failed to deliver.

The tactics he had relied on for two years were quickly seen through in just over a single match; the blow to Long Bisheng was immense. Against Meixian, he had been unstoppable — no one could match his leap or heading ability. But against Shanghai, his height and heading were useless. When the team’s long-ball strategy failed, he became a bystander.

This led him to question his future again, to doubt whether he could become a true professional player. He excelled when attacking aerial balls, but when the game shifted to the ground, his weaknesses were immediately exposed. He could hold up the ball but couldn’t deliver a killer pass, lacked individual dribbling skills, and couldn’t force a shot in the box — all these revealed his greatest technical shortcomings.

His gloom persisted even after returning to school. Ding Yu noticed all of this, but chose to say nothing.

When Ding Yu had substituted Long Bisheng, he knew it would deal the boy a blow, but how deep that wound would go remained to be seen. He hoped Long Bisheng could weather this setback, so as to fully digest the lessons of defeat.

The confusion Long Bisheng faced was the very reason why the old-fashioned, target-man center forward is disappearing from modern football.

Football once had no shortage of such strikers, especially in England. Their main feature was to simplify the team’s tactics: just send the ball high to his head, long balls, aerial duels — simple, but effective.

But when such strikers met defenders who could match their height and aerial ability, they would vanish from the match. Their footwork was often crude, “all head and no feet” as they say. When their greatest advantage — heading — failed, their value on the pitch dropped to zero. In modern football, with tall, physically imposing defenders everywhere, it’s no wonder such forwards have nearly vanished in top leagues.

The center forwards still thriving in top leagues today, besides height, all possess excellent foot skills. They can set up teammates, break through on their own, or bring energy to the side with great movement — just like Jan Koller of Dortmund, Europe’s tallest striker, who also has fine footwork and often scores beautiful goals from the ground in the box. Were he just a clumsy header, he’d never have made it at Dortmund.

After more than two years of training, Long Bisheng’s heading ability had gradually come to the fore. But if he could not improve his footwork, his highest achievement might be to scrape by in some lower-league team.

Now it remained to be seen whether he could pick himself up after this failure, analyze the reasons for his poor performance, and train accordingly. If he could not, then Ding Yu would see no point in investing further energy in him.

After all, he was not yet thirteen; his potential was still largely untapped. If he could overcome this setback and continue to train hard, even if he had no talent in footwork at all, he could still become a competent target-man striker.

Such strikers are at least valued in the lower leagues of English football.