Taiwan Steel on Sunday celebrated with the Taiwan Football Premier League trophy, despite a 3-1 loss in their final match of the season, while Taipower claimed second place and Tatung’s Ange Samuel scored on a breakaway to claim the Golden Boot with 20 goals.
Ahead of all four of Sunday’s matches players, coaches and fans observed a minute’s silence prior to kickoff in honor of Argentine great Diego Maradona, who died aged 60 on Wednesday last week, following a directive received from FIFA.
Already assured the title, Taiwan Steel manager Lo Chi-chong fielded a second-string team against defending champions Tatung in Taoyuan.
Photo courtesy of the CTFA
Lo used Chen Wei-jen as a lone striker, while leading scorer Marc Fenelus was moved into a midfield role. Third-choice goalkeeper Jiang Zhi-hsien was also given a start.
Tatung opened the scoring ahead of the half-hour mark when midfielder Huang Wei-min burst inside and blasted into the net, before Fenelus equalized five minutes later with a powerful header for his 19th goal of the season.
Burkinabe forward Ben Ouedraogo scored on a breakaway for Tatung a few minutes after halftime, before Ivorian striker Samuel beat the off-side trap and slotted past Jiang to wrap up the victory and end Taiwan Steel’s 12-match winning streak.
Photo: AFP
“It has been a long campaign and consistency in our performances is the main reason we won the title,” Taiwan Steel skipper Wu Chun-ching said after receiving the trophy. “Our team signed several top-level players ... but early in the season we had setbacks and did not get the desired results. In the second half of the season we had more solid teamwork, and were much better in transition from defense to offense, so we went on the winning streak and became league champions.”
“In the early months, some of the new acquisitions would not cooperate with their teammates, playing their own way, so without teamwork our performances suffered,” Lo said. “We asked them to communicate better and drilled them on the tactics, and they gradually let go of the self-centered play. It was the main reason we improved from our early woes and won the title.”
Samuel’s goal was his 20th of the season, handing him the Golden Boot for the top scorer in front of Fenelus and Taichung Futuro’s South Korean striker Joo Ik-seong, who both scored 19.
Elsewhere, Taipower claimed second place by defeating Hang Yuan 3-1 in New Taipei City, while Futuro finished in third place, despite falling to a shock 1-0 loss to Ming Chuan University, who finished bottom and are relegated to the second division.
National University of Sport edged the Red Lions 2-1 in Hsinchu as they finished in sixth and seventh place respectively.
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
The Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburg Penguins on Wednesday put a squeeze on the penalty box in Game 3 of their NHL playoff series — with 11 players cramped inside their designated punishment areas. Each could have snapped a team photo after a melee broke out in the second period of the Flyers’ 5-2 win over the Penguins in their Eastern Conference first-round series. “It was a party in there,” penalized Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler said. The celebration extended into the joyous locker room after the Flyers took a 3-0 series lead. Penguins forward Bryan Rust slammed Travis Konecny to the ice behind the
RSS