While the ball is rolling merrily on the mainland, women's soccer in Hong Kong

IMMEDIATELY after the training session ended, two young men approached Gao Hong, the famous goalkeeper of the Chinese national women's soccer team. They asked her to pose with them for photographs. She readily agreed. Mission accomplished, the pair grinned as they walked off the Aberdeen pitch.

The smiling Gao and many of the other 22 top football players from China who came second in last year's Women's World Cup finals are not surprised by the warm welcome and media attention they have received during this weekend's visit for the Millennium Women's International Soccer Tournament hosted by Hong Kong. Within hours of their arrival, they were honing their skills at a local pitch.

Athletes such as Gao, skipper-cum-team-leader Sun Wen and forward Liu Ailing are those best known to local fans. Back home, they are models to aspiring women football players, some of whom have complained in letters to them about the shortage of training facilities in less developed areas.

'Many people were opposed to women doing this sport more than a decade ago, but more and more people have accepted it and even paid attention to women's tournaments after China won in various major international competitions like the World Cup,' says 32-year-old Gao, who acts as an elder sister to most members of the team.

'My grandmother strongly objected to me doing it at first.' The contrast could not be stronger between the craze for women's soccer on the mainland and the disinterest in Hong Kong in women participating in the male-dominated sport.

While the mainland's passionate players are setting their sights on a gold medal in this summer's Olympic Games in Sydney, Hong Kong has little chance of even competing, says the president of the Hong Kong Women's Football Association and long-time campaigner for more support for the sport, Veronica Chan Yiu-kam.