Former England international goalkeeper, Ian Walker played for Tottenham Hotspur, Leicester City and Bolton Wanderers. In 2012 he moved to China to become goalkeeper coach of Shanghai Shenhua, before crossing the city divide to join Shanghai SIPG in 2014. In Walks the Walk he talks football and China. Follow him on Twitter: @IanWalks1
With Tim Cahill having just signed for his old club Shanghai Shenhua, he takes a look back at a couple of other big names' experience at the club...
I was taking a break in Spain when I heard Nicolas Anelka had signed for Shanghai Shenhua. We had been teammates at Bolton and had kept in touch, so I dropped him a line to see how it was going. He replied asking whether I’d fancy coming out to China to coach the team’s goalkeepers if something came up? I drove up to Madrid, got a Chinese visa and flew out without a contract.
My first indication that things weren’t going to be plain sailing at Shenhua came on the day I landed. I was due to watch the club’s game against Tianjin the following day, when I learned that the coach, former France international and Monaco and Fulham boss Jean Tigana, had been sacked.
The information had obviously not been satisfactorily relayed to Tigana, however; apparently he had got on the team bus ready to go to the stadium, despite being told not to. So Tigana is sitting at the front of the bus and all the players are sitting at the back… but the driver won’t move until he gets off!
Apparently he turned up at the stadium as well. I don’t know what it was over – whether it was money, or that he was simply upset at being let go – but it was bizarre.
For me, though, it’s always just been coaching the goalkeepers – that’s what I enjoy. So a few days later I went into training to say hello to all the players, and Nico tells me that he’s basically going to be the manager, and was going to bring in his own coaches. We all met that night, and that was it.
Fast forward a few months to when Didier Drogba came in and everyone was buzzing. The whole football world in China was buzzing, because it was huge – he had just won the Champions League, scoring the winning penalty.
And he was just what you’d expect: doing extra training; helping the Chinese players improve; displaying that will to win. People say players just come here for the money, but you would see him in some of the games – especially when it was a dubious result where the referee had maybe given the other team a couple of goals – and he’d go absolutely mad. He really wanted to win.
Club president Zhu Jun threatened to play himself up front alongside Drogba against Manchester United. Didi refused to play.
Behind the scenes it was a different story. When players arrive in a new city, clubs will put them up in a hotel. Shenhua put Drogba in the Peninsula. He had been staying there for maybe a month when he got a phone call from his agent or credit card company saying, “You’ve got a bill here from the hotel for 16 grand.”
It was ridiculous, putting a player up in a hotel they couldn’t afford and then sending his credit card company the bill. So straight away he started laughing. ‘What’s going on?’ From there, I’m not sure if he even got paid a single month's salary. According to FIFA rules, if you don’t get paid for three months, you can leave. Didi was only at Shenhua for three or four months, so I think you can work that one out.
I don’t know what then club president Zhu Jun was thinking (it has subsequently been bought by the Greenland Group), bringing him over with all that fanfare. But I suspect a lot can be made of Zhu using Drogba to raise the profile of his gaming company – you bring a guy in, you use him to promote a computer game, and then you don’t pay him. Maybe he had no intention of paying Didi all along.
I never really spoke to Zhu much – he talked to me probably twice in two years – but he obviously fancies himself as a player. He was always having five-aside games with his mates at the training ground, and even started himself in a friendly against Liverpool a few years back.
He threatened to do the same while I was there, playing himself up front alongside Drogba in the Manchester United friendly. Didi wasn’t having any of it, and made it known that if Zhu tried it on, he would refuse to play.
Anyway, it was a real shame letting Drogba go. Everyone at the club was a little bit deflated after he left. You get someone like him in who could give so much – he enjoys it, he wants to stay, he wants to win and for the club to do well – then the president just treats him like that. It’s just crap – rubbish for the whole league, rubbish for Chinese football.
Anelka soon followed him back to Europe, and in the end I left Shenhua for the same reason – I didn’t trust them to pay me. But things went well for the near two years that I was there. And just before I left, my protégé, Wang Dalei, was sold to Shandong Luneng for RMB30 million. I’ve been told that it’s a record for an Asian goalkeeper, and he is China's regular number one, so I think I did alright for them.
For more Ian Walker columns, click here.
0 User Comments