Tai Po win Hong Kong Premier League after Lee Man’s 15 minutes of madness
Drama on final day of league season as leaders Lee Man are left shell-shocked by BC Rangers, handing Tai Po second title in their history
Tai Po won the Hong Kong Premier League on Sunday, as Lee Man’s final-day collapse brought the season to the most astonishing of conclusions.
The league leaders had been expected to waltz to the victory they needed at BC Rangers to wrap up a second straight title, instead 15 minutes of madness left them on the wrong end of a 3-0 defeat.
That turned Tai Po’s 3-1 win over North District into a title party, and not the largely fruitless endeavour it was supposed to have been.
With 74 minutes gone at Tsing Yi Sports Ground, and Lee Man down to 10 men after a 51st-minute red card for Ryoya Tachibana, Guilherme Biteco, the Rangers midfielder on loan from Tai Po, squeezed a shot through the weak defences of Lee Man goalkeeper Chan Ka-ho.
“He still has a feeling for Tai Po, so him scoring and them winning the league is beautiful,” Maxwell Ansah, the Rangers midfielder, said.
There is no love lost between Rangers and Lee Man. When Norman Lee Man-yan, the latter’s president, invested in Rangers for the 2016-17 campaign, the club’s name was changed to Lee Man Rangers, before a host of players switched to the newly formed Lee Man for the following campaign.