SHANGHAI - Miroslav Blazevic might be the most optimistic person in Chinese soccer.

While insiders blame China's decline in the game on the country's limited soccer population, the 74-year-old Croatian believes China has enough talented players and coaches to play top-class soccer.

"Chinese players are more talented than people believe, and the Chinese coaches are not as impotent as people think," Blazevic said during a Feb 22-28 training session with the national squad. "In fact, there are many gifted youngsters in this Olympic team."

The past few years have seen Chinese soccer suffer from scandals and a major slump on the world stage. The Olympic team's poor performance at the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games and the national team's group-stage knockout at the Asian Cup in Qatar dented the dreams of even the most optimistic of fans.

National team head coach Gao Hongbo classified China as a third-grade team and deliberately played down the public's expectations at the Asian Cup. However, Blazevic has taken a different tack and claims the Chinese are promising and what the players desperately need is willpower and to attain that the coach must let them believe in themselves.

"Gao is a smart and talented coach, but he is very young and everyone makes mistakes when they are young," he said. "However, I know he is a wise man and I will share my experience with him. I was glad the Chinese Football Association didn't dismiss him (after the Asian Cup failure), because Gao's good time is coming."

Blazevic became well known in soccer circles after leading the Croatia national team to a third-place finish at the 1998 World Cup. During his first season with Chinese side Shanghai Shenhua, the experienced coach proved his class by taking the young team to the third place in the Chinese Super League and stood out from other candidates to take over the Chinese Olympic team from Sun Wei after the Guangzhou Asian Games last December.

The ever-optimistic Croat believes his work is just as important as that of the national coach as, he says, the young generation is the future of Chinese soccer.

"Olympic soccer is more important than the World Cup," he said. "The young players in the Olympic team are passionate and energetic. They are not big stars, but they will play at the Olympic Games with very clear minds.

"The World Cup is more like a business. All the players are celebrities and we all know what they want from the World Cup."

Blazevic will decide the lineup for the London Olympic preliminaries, which will kick off in June, before a training camp next month. He already has some ideas about the team's composition after the one-week training camp in Shanghai and a tour of Egypt in January.

"We are now at the main stage of choosing the right players and I'm doing this according to my standards," he said. "Those who are fast, agile and able to find their positions in both attack and defense are competitive in modern soccer. We don't have much time before the preliminaries in June. The games are very important, we must make a 100 percent effort to keep ourselves out of trouble."

The Olympic team will play two warm-up games against local clubs Shanghai Shenhua and Shanghai Dongya on Friday and Sunday.

China Daily

(China Daily 02/25/2011 page24)