The Slanch Report

52 minutes into their soccer match, Chinese athletics took a sharp nosedive from respectability when Tan Wangsong kicked Belgian soccer player Sebastien Pocognoli directly into the nuts. Apparently Pocognoli’s wang wasn’t enough of a chanteuse for the Chinese and thus this necessary step had to be taken. Wangsong’s was the first of two Chinese red cards in the game, in which they eventually lost, the second coming when the team captain elbowed someone.

These types of incidents are not unknown amongst the Chinese soccer set though, in fact, they are almost common. The Chinese take a lot of pride in soccer, despite their team only qualifying for one World Cup, (Japan/Korea) where they were held without a goal for the entire tournament. After losing to Brazil in an Olympic game, there was a mini-riot outside the stadium until police came and broke it up, so this craziness is not just left to the players on the pitch.

“Most of the men’s soccer players are poorly educated,” Xu Guoqi a professor at Kalamazoo College and author on a book regarding Chinese soccer said, “One soccer player even tried to stab somebody to death in a bar fight.”Among the other poor activities on the men’s soccer team include in March 2007, a former goalkeeper for the national team, Liu Yunfei, being arrested on drug charges. Another goalie, An Qi, was caught with a prostitute in a hotel in 2005. But then again, who amongst us HASN’T been caught with a Chinese prostitute at least once?