China internationals should be allowed to retire, publicly

But Zhang Linpeng's decision to do it between two immediate games was still rash

Well, everybody breathed a sigh of relief when China finally beat Singapore 4-1 at home after an almost mischievous 2-2 draw away after going 2-0 at halftime with a penalty chance blown away. Still, China needs to beat Thailand at home on 6 June to avoid complex mathematic calculations on the last day (11 June), given the results of the fixtures on the last day, South Korea v China and Singapore v Thailand, are pretty much a given.

I say the first game was mischievous as it was a slow-motion crash that had too much sense of deja-vu. Penalty misses, of course, are a great indicator of the momentum going the other way. But the score at the time was still 0-1. It was 0-2 at half-time. The hosts had to count on an extremely lucky deflection to stiffen the sinews. But it did not take long for them to even things up with China having switched into a formation that is almost 4-1-5. A number of players, not least Wu Lei, were visibly out of gas. Zhang Yuning was only subbed out at the 80th minute and Elkeson who was subbed on was visibly out of form and shape. Wu Lei and Fei Nanduo stayed on the pitch for the entirety of the game, despite no fewer than three strikers being available on the bench.

Also had to fight to the bitter end was Zhang Linpeng, who after Wu Xi's quasi-retirement from the National Team assumed the captaincy. But Zhang's first game under Ivankovic was his first in more than two years as a full-back for either club or country, despite Li Lei's presence on the bench. He was partly to blame for Singapore's second goal but was clearly out of strength and should have been replaced by Jiang Shenglong, the tallest player in the squad.

Fully knowing the shitstorm that was gathering, Zhang immediately announced he was quitting the national team after the game and let it be known (by other channels) that he was playing through an anaesthesia shot. The shitstorm reassembled from targeting the team to zooming in on him personally. His wife posted a Douyin clip to support the husband but Xu Genbao, his childhood and adolescence mentor, joined the chorus in disabusing him of the idea and made a difference. Zhang did not feature in the home leg.

Much of what Zhang did was no doubt the result of undiminished adrenaline, but beneath it with Wu Xi's private withdrawal resurfaces an old but still unresolved problem - can a member of the Chinese national men's football team retire, and above all publicly?

The answer seems no. And it seems to have to do with the fact that Chinese football is bad. Plenty of professional, and international Chinese players retire publicly. Divers, gymnasts, badminton players do all the time. One might argue it generates less controversy because they retire completely, unlike footballers who retire from the national team but still play on the club side. But there are past instances where table tennis players went out of the national team without completely ceasing playing, as these national teams continue to win without them. But in football, there seems a belief - more than a belief, a consensus - a few individuals are indispensable to the national team that plays the sport that requires the most participants.

This is of course nonsense - I cannot fathom why Zhang Linpeng is necessarily better than Hu Ruibao as a centre-back or Yue Xin and Dong Yu as a full-back - just listing names from the top of my head. Of course, Ivankovic did not have that much time to prepare this squad, as we said before. But he should in June. The bad news is there are no friendlies that can be arranged before what might be the deciding moment.