Can Shaolin kung fu save Chinese football?

DENGFENG (China): The young martial arts pupils cartwheeled across a pitch, before football coach Sun Dawei ordered one to deliver him a kung fu kick to the stomach.

“You see I avoid the kick like this,” Sun said, dodging out of harm’s way before grabbing his young charge’s leg and throwing him to the turf.

As tackling and defensive techniques, both would be shortcuts to a red card. But the “Shaolin soccer training base”, set up last year near the home of China’s fighting monks, has ambitions to use traditional martial arts techniques to produce elite football players for Team Dragon.

China’s national team is struggling: the world’s most populous country ranks a lowly 84th according to the International Federation of Association Football (Fifa) and the latest setback to its fading hopes of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia was a 0-0 home draw this week with Qatar, which has only around 300,000 citizens.

But China is investing hugely in football training and has vowed to have 50 million school-age players by 2020, as the ruling Communist party eyes “football superpower” status by 2050.

The vast Tagou martial arts school, a few kilometres from the cradle of Chinese kungfu, the Shaolin Temple in Henan province, has 35,000 fee-paying boarders, who live in spartan conditions and are put through a rigorous training regime.

Some 1,500 of its students, both male and female, have signed up for its new soccer programme, centred on a pristine green Astroturf football pitch where dozens of children play simultaneous five-a-side-games.

A concrete viewing stand is under construction to accommodate future spectators, with cement mixers churning and a crane swinging girders above the children as they practised.

“We are responding to the country’s call,” said Sun, a former martial arts champion who took a soccer coach training course last year.

“What we want to do... is combine Shaolin martial arts with football and create an original concept.”

Sun’s class of 12-year-olds wore red jackets emblazoned with “Shaolin” and the canvas-style shoes favoured by practitioners of Chinese martial arts.

They cartwheeled from one side of the pitch to another, before assembling in formation and running through tightly-choreographed routines of high kicks and punches.

“With a foundation in kungfu, their bodily flexibility and force is a great help when they are playing