Eastern coach Chan Yuen-ting reflects on bitter lessons of 7-0 drubbing by Guangzhou Evergrande
It was a humbling experience for the 28-year-old and her team as Hong Kong suffered a crushing defeat in their AFC Champions League debut
Chan Yuen-ting said she was hoping to learn a lot as she became the first woman to manage a team in the AFC Champions League – quite what she and her Eastern team took away from a brutal 7-0 humbling across the Pearl River Delta in Guangzhou only they will know.
If “don’t concede a penalty and have a man sent off in the first three minutes when you’re playing a team worth at least 10 times yours” was lesson one, lesson two might have been “furthermore, don’t have another man sent off with almost an hour still to play”.
Watch: Guangzhou Evergrande v Eastern, AFC Champions League highlights
Chan and Eastern – and likely the majority of Hong Kong football fans given that the opposition was from the mainland – had been hoping for a similar brave, backs-to-the-wall performance as that delivered by the Hong Kong national team in their two World Cup qualifiers against China in 2015.
On those nights, almost everything went right for Hong Kong. In Tianhe Stadium, in front of 38,000 and against Brazilian World Cup winner Luiz Felipe Scolari’s expensively-assembled six-times-in-succession Chinese champions, everything went wrong, immediately.
“We have learned a very valuable lesson today,” insisted Chan, just 28 and the first woman ever to coach a team to a title in a men’s professional league.
“Of course losing the game is a very big disappointment, but we learned we need to adjust our mentality as soon as possible [to compete in the Champions League].