Taichung Blue Whale on Saturday trounced Inter Taoyuan 4-0 to clinch the Taiwan Mulan Football League title, while defending champions Hualien City faltered in a 0-1 defeat to Hang Yuan FC.
In the closest race since the Mulan league started in 2014, three teams were in the running for the title heading into the weekend, with Blue Whale and Hualien tied at the top of the table and Kaohsiung Sunny Bank trailing by three points.
Blue Whale entered their home match with fierce offense from striker Lai Li-chin and Japanese midfielder Maho Tanaka. They were joined by two Thai players new to the club this season: forward Pitsamai Sornsai, a former Thai international player, and goalkeeper Nattaruja Muthtanawech.
Photo courtesy of the Chinese Taipei Football Association
From the start, Blue Whale pressured Inter Taoyuan on goal, with repeated shots from Lai and Tanaka. At 16 minutes, Blue Whale were rewarded a penalty kick after Lai was tackled inside the penalty area.
Tanaka, who had scored in each of her previous three games, took the spot-kick with a hard drive toward the left side to record the game’s opening goal.
Second-half substitute Su Yu-hsuan chalked up a late goal with 10 minutes remaining, as Blue Whale cruised to the 4-0 victory and the season title.
Meanwhile, Hualien faced rain and tough opposition at home, as Hang Yuan held them scoreless in the first half.
Ten minutes into the second half, Hang Yuan striker Chen Yen-ping put her team ahead, with a shot from outside the penalty area and over Hualien’s goalkeeper.
Hang Yuan kept up the pressure, and their defense held to deny Hualien chances for a back-to-back title win.
Kaohsiung Sunny Bank beat Taipei Bravo Bear 2-0, with Japanese midfielder Minori Wakabayashi again leading her team and scoring an early header. Lee Hsiun-chin secured the win with a late goal with 10 minutes left.
It was Sunny Bank’s best showing, as they ended the season tied with Hualien at 20 points and were third on goal difference.
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