At noon on Saturday, the harbour players participating in the AFC Champions League had arrived in Thailand to prepare for the match, and only a few players in the team led by Japanese coach Takayuki Kaneko had played in the AFC Champions League, while most of the other players had only played one FA Cup match for the first team last year. Despite this, everyone expressed their desire to qualify for the main tournament.
"A lot of the players this time are my teammates who I've fought together, and I'll fight with them to the end and win the game!" A sentence by Lei Wenjie at the pre-match press conference made people's thoughts drift back to Tianjin in September 2017. That year, the Shanghai All-Yun Men's Football Team, which was based on the 97-98 players of The Harbour Club, defeated Zhejiang on penalties in the final and successfully defended its title. After that, Wei Zhen, Chen Wei, Chen Binbin, Lei Wenjie and others have played in the Chinese Super League, but there are more people who have not yet won too many opportunities in the first team.
20 people went to Thailand, 13 were Haigang 97-98 players, there may have been more, but at the last moment, out of preparation for the Needs of the Chinese Super League, including Chen Wei, Chen Chunxin and so on stayed in Shanghai. Among the 13 people who set out with the big troops, Lei Wenjie is considered to be an "old senior", and in the 2018 Chinese Super League away to Beijing Renhe, he scored a goal for the team, becoming the first U23 player in the Harbor team to score. In last year's AFC Champions League group stage, Ravenje also made his debut against Jeonbuk Hyundai. How to use Ravenje this time, but it is a suspense, last year's AFC Champions League game, he was put in the back line by the then coach Pereira, but now that the team has enough personnel in the center back, whether Ravenje will play the old line of full-backs and even forwards is worth paying attention to.
Hu Jinghang is naturally a member of the group that has attracted much attention. As the main player of the national Olympic Team in the 97-98 age group, Xiao Hu has always played well in the national team, and he was loaned to his hometown team Wuhan last season, and has not yet made an appearance after returning to the harbor this year. In the Harbour team that has spent the AFC Champions League, Xiao Hu's ability and experience in the competition are at the top, while center-back Yu Hao started in the 2018 AFC Champions League group stage away match against Melbourne Victory.
In addition to the above three people, including Nie Meng, Gao Haisheng, Zhang Yunkai, Wei Lai, Zhang Enge, Xiao Mingjie, etc., have appeared in the Youth Super League and the FA Cup respectively. As for Fu Huan and Jia Tianzi, they are the "veterans" of this harbor team, and the "one before and one after" play of the two on the field will become the key to whether the whole team runs smoothly.