Seven things we learned from AFC Champions League as Hong Kong’s Kitchee face a fight
Chinese Super League sides Shanghai SIPG and Tianjin Quanjian get off to winning starts but Hong Kong champions have work to do
The AFC Champions League kicked off in the East on Tuesday night and gave us our first glimpse of Hong Kong’s Kitchee in Asia’s premier continental competition.
The Hong Kong Premier League Champions hardly disgraced themselves but still have plenty of work to do, while Chinese Super League sides Shanghai SIPG and Tianjin Quanjian are nicely poised.
Here’s what we learned from match day one:
1. Kitchee can take heart
As only the second team from Hong Kong to make it to the Champions League group stages, Kitchee are in relatively uncharted territory but the record that does exist from Eastern’s pioneering campaign last season makes for sobering reading.
Eastern took one point from their six games and they kicked it all off with a 7-0 defeat by Guangzhou Evergrande.
Kitchee’s 3-0 loss to Tianjin, a team that finished third in last year’s Chinese Super League, is not a disaster considering the difference in budgets, quality of players and individual experience. It is something to build on but they will need to get a shot on target and can’t afford to help the opposition out by putting the ball into their own net, as Paulinho did in the North China Port.