Dunno whether to laugh or cry actually...
From Football365:
China crisis
The Sun’s Justin Allen has been to China. The Sun’s Justin Allen has been to China to conduct a
SUN INVESTIGATION of Chinese football. Why? Well, frankly we don’t have a clue. But what we do know is that he really, really doesn’t like China.
The piece is so riddled with stereotypes and sweeping generalisations that we are a tad surprised that it is not accompanied by a video of Allen doing the ‘Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees…’ song.
Here are our ‘favourite’ lines:
* ‘The Land of the Dragon seems to be full of lazy, jealous Chinese footballers and vastly overpaid millionaire mercenaries strolling about in half-empty stadiums.’
* ‘The Chinese come across as lazy generally – surely a by-product of a communist regime that has ruled their land since 1949.’
* ‘For years, their government has done and thought everything for them. Only here have I seen people shamelessly
sleeping on the job … like two workers at an airport help desk in the city of Changchun in the middle of the afternoon in full view of passengers.’
* ‘Hulk would probably get away with driving one along the pavements here as it is a daily hazard for pedestrians to avoid being hit by mopeds speeding along pathways. But even that is not as shocking as hearing people clearing their throats from the pollution by spitting into the street.’
* ‘But they certainly swap flocking to their noodle cafes for the Camel Sports Bar in Shanghai to watch Premier League football.’
They probably get a rickshaw, the lazy, lazy b***ards.
Lazy when I’m hatin’…
Other revelations from Allen’s INVESTIGATION include the shock that ‘the gulf in quality between the permitted five foreign imports and six Chinese players in each team was embarrassing’. Thanks Woodward. And that ‘in Shanghai – China’s biggest city with a population of 24million – Sven Goran Eriksson’s SIPG average just 25,346 fans…meaning their 56,842-seater stadium is 55 per cent empty’.
Astonishingly, a league launched only 12 years ago and only handed serious investment last year is not as firmly established as the Premier League. Presumably because they’re lazy.
What Allen does not mention – oddly enough – is that SIPG were only formed in 2006, were only promoted into the Chinese Super League in 2013 and have increased their average attendance from 10,161 in just three seasons. That sounds an awful lot like a success story to us.
It doesn’t take a great deal of investigation to find that average attendances across the Chinese Super League have more than doubled in the last ten years. Personally we think that Justin Allen comes across as lazy generally.