July 21, 2008
Soccer coached yanked three weeks before Olympics
About a week after sacking men's national team coach Vladimir Petrovic and, more remarkably, three weeks before the Olympics, China removed its men's soccer (football) Olympic head coach Ratomir Dujkovic on Thursday. The Chinese Football Association (CFA) has replaced him with Yin Tiesheng, who led the men's under-20 national team in 2004 and has also coached the CFA's Qingdao team.
Dujkovic, who is Serbian, has not been fired by the association, according to this Xinhua story, but moved to another job. No reason has been given for the change and Dujkovic has not made public comment.
This is the third elite-level coach the CFA has removed from a post in four months; it has now completely overhauled its head coaching lineup for both men's and women's teams. The CFA let national team men's coach Vladimir Petrovic (also Serbian) go last week after a failed World Cup qualifying run. In March, it fired women's coach, Elizabeth Loisel of France, by e-mail after political conflicts with team officials.
Image: FIFA.com
For more China sports news, check out China Sports Today.
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Fire the foreign coaches who built the teams so that Chinese coaches can take the credit, and if the Chinese teams don't do well, the damage done by the foreign coaches was too great to repair before the games.
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Either that, or the Chinese Football National Team is a bunch of knuckleheads who couldn't find the goal even with no opponent on the field.
In contrast, the Chinese Basketball Association has had the same foriegn coach since the '04 Olympics (Jonas Kaslauskas) - and then before that, Del Harris.
Your little conspiracy theories and attempt to make everything politicized is tiresome. Sometimes coaches do bad jobs. Dozens of Chinese coaches have been fired. Dozens of foreign coaches have not been fired.