A Successful Year of Failure: Jiangsu Suning’s 2019 recap, Part 1
It’s time again for yearly summary in many area. If you look at the final table of 2019 CSL, Jiangsu Suning finally overtook Shandong in the 4th. It was a small step from 2018’s 5th here. It was a huge step for the team to run an unbeaten streak of 13 matches, recovery from chaos and come a long way to be here, breaking both unbeaten and winning streak record in this club’s 26-year history.
Also this is the club’s best season in term of goals: 60 in total from 11 players of ours and 1 friend in Shenhua. Alex Teixeira, after leaving Donetsk Shaktar in 2016, had his personal record in his career, 18 goals in 30 matches. He became the club’s all-time best striker and left our 2000s’ legend Gilberto far away. Even if Teixeira joins Corinthians or Vasco Da Gama tomorrow, I don’t see anybody can replace him in near future.
Eder, the symbolic star of Suining-Inter partnership, kept his great run since joining in last year. He and Teixeira combines the best duo across the league. Although being absent in last few matches for healthy issue that the club refused to comment, Eder still scored 12 goals including quite a few deciders.
On the Chinese side, Xie Pengfei, with 8 goals, is best in his career too. He was leading the Chinese scorer table for almost half season and called up into national team for the first time.
With 26 caps this year, our senior midfielder Wang Song has the most caps in Chinese professional top-flight. The true legend had 4 goals this year, including the one trashed Guangzhou Evergrand in Nanjing Olympic.
Our young stars, Zhang Lingfeng and Gao Tianyi both opened their CSL bank accounts this year. As the gold generation is fading into their 30s, we pay more attention to these players of future.
With all good from late season, this is still a year of somehow failure. The team failed once again to enter Asian competition although it claimed the 4th. None of top 3 won the CFA Cup, so Shanghai Shenhua, an underdog side is getting the ticket instead of us. Olaroiu’s team is nowhere close to the CSL championship in Suning’s 4th year after acquirement. “3 years for CSL, 5 years for Champions League”. The dream of our boss Zhang Jindong, is for our Women’s team to implement. (Actually our girls almost implemented both, 1 year earlier than boss expected.)
2019 has been a big year off the pitch. In Feb, the electronic giant Samsung was announced to be primary sponsor of Suning club. The partnership brought in big money, as well as its brand influence and marketing potential. A few days ago, I took their survey and suggested a more integrated marketing of Suning Club and Samsung. For example, the official jersey could have Samsung’s logo by default, pre-season friendlies could be named by Samsung, too. The partnership is totally a good thing to Chinese football, I can’t wait it to expand to more area in 2020.
Gareth Bale is our honourable mention. In July, the Walsh golf star was linked with Suning and super closed to the golf park outside Suning’s training base, which we have a timeline for the drama. The deal was turned down in the last minute by Florentino, the boss of Real Madrid. The result was swing and roundabouts for us.
At last, June the 21st is unavoidable when recalling Jiangsu Suning’s 2019. By offering the very first victory to Shenhua in Nanjing Olympics, many fans consider the glory of our home stadium was buried. Direct conflict between fan groups and club lasted two months. The performance on pitch is also affected. Even with the unbeaten streak in late season, and victory over Beijing Guoan and Guangzhou Evergrand, the crowd in Nanjing Olympics keeps shrinking. As there are more professional clubs in Jiangsu province, it’s a lesson Suning have to learn about to build a strong and equal relationship with its supporters.
This is the first part of our summary for Jiangsu Suning’s 2019. In the next part, I will interview our community fans, Terry, redaiert2 and Gang Yan to walk through our 2019 squad one by one for ranking, review and expectation. Stay tuned with us.
