LUCAS DE LA CALShanghai Correspondent
Shanghai Correspondent
Updated Monday, February 5, 2024-14:49
At the end of 2022, the Spanish
Pedro Morilla
(51 years old) managed to make a mega city in central China heavily punished for carrying the burden of being the epicenter of a pandemic that had then left almost six and a half million deaths worldwide. , he would be immensely happy: his soccer team, the Wuhan Three Towns, coached by Morilla, had won the Chinese Super League.
It was one of the greatest sporting feats remembered in the Asian giant. In less than two years with Morilla on the bench, the team went from crawling through the second division to being
champion of the highest category
.
"The people of Wuhan deserved that joy after everything they went through. The shame is that there were no big celebrations because everyone was with Covid, including practically our entire staff," Morilla recalls.
The end of the league coincided with the sudden opening of a country that had had an extreme policy of confinements and movement restrictions for almost three years, thus managing to protect itself from the deadly shock of the pandemic.
"From one day to the next, the Chinese Government decided that there were no longer any controls. Suddenly, the first large massive wave of infections arrived. With three days left to finish the championship, we went to Dalian (in the northeast) with
11 casualties per "Covid
and six players took the field with fever. Still, we won 1-2. The last matchday was suspended directly because neither of the two teams had players available for that match."
We find Morilla in her homeland, Seville. He has been away from the bench since September of last year. He reached an agreement to terminate his contract with the Wuhan team, which, like most Chinese clubs, has many financial problems. But in recent days
his name is being heard very strongly to take the reins of the Chinese national team.
"It would be a project that I would like to direct, without a doubt. I am sure that, with the help of my technical team, we would ensure that China competes in Asia at the same level as other teams such as Japan and South Korea. Also obtain a place for the World Cup ", which is the great ambition. Here there is good raw material to produce a squad of 22 players who represent the country well and get out of the current losing dynamic."
China, which occupies 79th place in the FIFA rankings, has not been to a World Cup since Korea and Japan in 2002. But President
Xi Jinping
himself is personally sponsoring a plan - investing more than 112,000 euros in soccer academies with 10,000 students. in each one and an army of foreign trainers - so that the Asian giant is capable of winning the maximum international competition before 2050.
Pedro Morilla directing the Wuhan Three Towns.
Morilla has a good lineup in Asia
. There are several offers that are coming to him from that continent, economically far above any other proposal to train in Spain or Europe. But in addition to talking about football, the Sevillian coach answers
Crónica
's call at the end of January because it has been exactly four years since the Chinese Government ordered the closure of Wuhan and a group of 21 Spaniards were repatriated. Morilla was one of them.
"It took us all by surprise. There were rumors about the virus circulating, but we couldn't even imagine what would happen. We went to bed normally on January 22 and the next day they
called us from the club saying that the city had closed by land and air
, which could not be entered or exited. We were trapped there," says Morilla, who was then sports director of the Wuhan team. His move to the bench did not come until the following season, when the club was promoted to the second division.
"Until they put us on a plane, we were locked in the urbanization. We spent all day listening to the Spanish media, they wanted to know what was happening in China, to understand how it was possible to quarantine a city where 11 people live. millions of people".
Flight PLM8371 took off from Wuhan at 9:15 a.m. on January 31, 2020, a day after the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a "public health emergency of international concern."
There were 120 people on that plane, almost all of them British except the 21 Spaniards.
The United Kingdom had chartered a flight to take its people out of the confined Chinese city.
The plane would make a first stop at the Brize Norton military base, near Oxford. The trip would then end at the Torrejón de Ardoz military base, in Madrid, to drop off the Spaniards who had been trapped in an unknown city in central China, besieged by a virus that, officially at that time, had left 8,000. infections and 200 deaths.
Covid had already spread to twenty countries. But in Spain, according to some scientists and many commentators, there was no need to worry. "Spain is not going to have, at most, more than a few diagnosed cases," Fernando Simón, then director of the Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies, said in a press conference that day.
"
It was like being inside a movie.
All the television stations broadcast our arrival in Torrejón live," Morilla recalls. The returnee bus left the base escorted by 12 police vans, two ambulances and a helicopter. The Spaniards completed two weeks of quarantine at the Gómez Ulla Hospital in Madrid.
The Spaniards from Wuhan during the quarantine at the Gómez Ulla Hospital.
In September 2020, after spending the subsequent confinements in Spain, Morilla returned to Wuhan.
"My first landing in China was in 2019. Initially, they called me to join the U-16 team.
They wanted me to train future players for the senior team
, to tour the country to find the best kids, the promises. But in the end that project did not work out and I was just offered to take over the sports management of Wuhan Three Towns, a newly created team that had just been promoted from the fourth category to the third. When the club, two years later, rose to the second division, the president asked me to take the reins as coach.
Morilla already had experience as a coach in Spain after coaching Granada, Talavera and in the Betis youth team.
"It was a great feeling to win the championship. We were the second team in the city and in the end we managed to get a transfer of fans. When we were at the top of the standings,
we received a lot of pressure from the local government
because they knew what a morale boost it would be for the city later. of what had been experienced there with the virus".
When the Sevillian took the Wuhan team to the top, the Chinese Super League had already left behind the boom years, when multimillion-dollar clubs paid fortunes for world-class footballers, spending even more money than the big teams in Europe.
But the excessive accumulated debt, accompanied by the real estate crisis - large bankrupt promoters owned important teams -, a tax increase on foreign signings, a salary cap announced in December 2020 and the deadly blow of the pandemic, took ahead of many teams.
The foreign superstars left
, although the teams continue to bet on people from outside who try to enhance what is inside.
"In China you have to work hard from the bottom up. Now there is too much change, they are very results-oriented and thus they do not find the necessary stability to later strengthen their national team.
They have very little patience.
They lack the dynamics and work to take advantage of the good raw material there is," says Morilla.
The coach is convinced that he could, with time and good resources, make the national team of the second largest economy in the world take a gigantic leap in quality. If he sat on that bench, he would be the second Spaniard to occupy it after the disappointing period (2011-2013) of
José Antonio Camacho
.
The former Spain coach was one of the first to open the way in China for Spanish coaches. Later, other renowned players such as Rafa Benítez, Gregorio Manzano and Quique Sánchez Flores arrived. Last season, another Spaniard,
Javier Pereira
, former Levante coach, followed in Morilla's footsteps by winning the Super League with Shanghai Port.