With five defenders smothering him at the top of the penalty box, Didier Drogba, the former star player for Chelsea in the English Premier League, calmly slid a lead pass to his new Shanghai Shenhua team-mate Cao Yunding, who was dashing full-speed through the box.
The nifty pass caught the defenders and the goalkeeper off-guard. With a near-open net, Drogba's team-mate hesitated, perhaps perplexed by how easy it had seemed, then fired the ball past the dumbstruck goalkeeper.
Just weeks after scoring the equalising goal and converting the game-winning penalty kick for Chelsea in the Champions League final, Drogba made an unconventional move by signing with Shanghai Shenhua FC, a middling club in the scandal-ridden China Super League.
Since his first match for Shanghai on July 22, Drogba, who is originally from Ivory Coast, has quickly emerged as a sensation here. He is tied for most goals on his club - despite having played a third of the games of the player with whom he is tied - and he has drawn record crowds of nearly 25,000 fans - up from an average of 15,000 last year - to home matches at Shanghai's Hongkou Stadium.
"Drogba has helped make the Shanghai Shenhua team competitive overnight," said Ma Dexing, the editor in chief of Titan Sports online, China's largest sports Web portal. "He is upping the level of the entire league because everyone is vying to be better than Drogba."
Whenever Drogba appears in public, he is swarmed by thousands of fans who cry out one of his Chinese nicknames, among them the African Andy Lau, a reference to the popular Hong Kong movie star, and the "Devil Beast," a racially inflected epithet that locals here use without malevolence.
"The Devil Beast is such an incredible force," said Chen Huiming, an amateur player in downtown Beijing, as he slipped on his cleats to compete on the capital's Dongdan outdoor field. "It's almost like he can score on command, he's so strong and agile."
Despite the continued excitement, rumors began surfacing in late August that Drogba's
Asian honeymoon might be coming to a premature end. The Oriental Sports Daily and other sports media outlets said that a shareholder struggle at the Shanghai club could jeopardize the financing needed to keep Drogba. Both a Shanghai Shenhua spokesman and a representative from Drogba's management company repudiated the claims, but speculation has continued.
Even before this recent bout of rumors, Drogba's Asian adventure was the topic of much controversy in Chinese soccer circles. First, there was his exorbitant price tag: more than $300,000 per week. Many commentators questioned whether the money would not have been better spent on nurturing domestic talent.
"I didn't come here with the idea of making a lot of money," Drogba, 34, said in response to accusations of greed. "I came here because of the completely different challenges from what I've seen in Europe."
But a chorus of domestic commentators complain that the acquisition of Drogba is just a superficial face-lift for a government-controlled administration that has been marred by a barrage of embarrassing scandals.
In June, a court in China's northeastern Liaoning province sentenced two former top league executives to 10-1/2 years in prison each for accepting bribes of roughly $190,000. Ten other high-level officials were sentenced at the same time, each receiving punishments that ranged from heavy fines to up to six years in prison.
"Ants are too small to look up and see the trees above them," said David Yang, a Sports Illustrated China commentator, referring to an ancient Chinese proverb. "Drogba is like an ant - even if he wants to help make the league cleaner, he can't even see the corrupt trees that grow around him."
The culture of corruption has indeed proved crippling for Chinese soccer. Though the country has a surging number of young people eager to play the game, the education system provides few opportunities to experiment on the field.
In the midst of such deep-seated and systemic problems, the Chinese soccer has become increasingly dependent on foreign star power to bolster the league's credibility. Since 2011, dozens of world-class players have come to China, including the Argentine midfielder Dario Conca, the Paraguayan striker Lucas Barrios and Drogba's Shanghai teammate Nicolas Anelka.
The nifty pass caught the defenders and the goalkeeper off-guard. With a near-open net, Drogba's team-mate hesitated, perhaps perplexed by how easy it had seemed, then fired the ball past the dumbstruck goalkeeper.
Just weeks after scoring the equalising goal and converting the game-winning penalty kick for Chelsea in the Champions League final, Drogba made an unconventional move by signing with Shanghai Shenhua FC, a middling club in the scandal-ridden China Super League.
Since his first match for Shanghai on July 22, Drogba, who is originally from Ivory Coast, has quickly emerged as a sensation here. He is tied for most goals on his club - despite having played a third of the games of the player with whom he is tied - and he has drawn record crowds of nearly 25,000 fans - up from an average of 15,000 last year - to home matches at Shanghai's Hongkou Stadium.
"Drogba has helped make the Shanghai Shenhua team competitive overnight," said Ma Dexing, the editor in chief of Titan Sports online, China's largest sports Web portal. "He is upping the level of the entire league because everyone is vying to be better than Drogba."
Whenever Drogba appears in public, he is swarmed by thousands of fans who cry out one of his Chinese nicknames, among them the African Andy Lau, a reference to the popular Hong Kong movie star, and the "Devil Beast," a racially inflected epithet that locals here use without malevolence.
"The Devil Beast is such an incredible force," said Chen Huiming, an amateur player in downtown Beijing, as he slipped on his cleats to compete on the capital's Dongdan outdoor field. "It's almost like he can score on command, he's so strong and agile."
Despite the continued excitement, rumors began surfacing in late August that Drogba's
Asian honeymoon might be coming to a premature end. The Oriental Sports Daily and other sports media outlets said that a shareholder struggle at the Shanghai club could jeopardize the financing needed to keep Drogba. Both a Shanghai Shenhua spokesman and a representative from Drogba's management company repudiated the claims, but speculation has continued.
Even before this recent bout of rumors, Drogba's Asian adventure was the topic of much controversy in Chinese soccer circles. First, there was his exorbitant price tag: more than $300,000 per week. Many commentators questioned whether the money would not have been better spent on nurturing domestic talent.
"I didn't come here with the idea of making a lot of money," Drogba, 34, said in response to accusations of greed. "I came here because of the completely different challenges from what I've seen in Europe."
But a chorus of domestic commentators complain that the acquisition of Drogba is just a superficial face-lift for a government-controlled administration that has been marred by a barrage of embarrassing scandals.
In June, a court in China's northeastern Liaoning province sentenced two former top league executives to 10-1/2 years in prison each for accepting bribes of roughly $190,000. Ten other high-level officials were sentenced at the same time, each receiving punishments that ranged from heavy fines to up to six years in prison.
"Ants are too small to look up and see the trees above them," said David Yang, a Sports Illustrated China commentator, referring to an ancient Chinese proverb. "Drogba is like an ant - even if he wants to help make the league cleaner, he can't even see the corrupt trees that grow around him."
The culture of corruption has indeed proved crippling for Chinese soccer. Though the country has a surging number of young people eager to play the game, the education system provides few opportunities to experiment on the field.
In the midst of such deep-seated and systemic problems, the Chinese soccer has become increasingly dependent on foreign star power to bolster the league's credibility. Since 2011, dozens of world-class players have come to China, including the Argentine midfielder Dario Conca, the Paraguayan striker Lucas Barrios and Drogba's Shanghai teammate Nicolas Anelka.