A fierce derby had just ended, and the manager was not as strict with the players as before. Everyone needed to relax, whether it was the players or the manager. Therefore, Chen Jian was able to sit in front of Twain, enjoy a midnight snack with him, and experience the colorful nightlife of Spain.
"Should I congratulate you for drawing with the powerful Barcelona, or regret that you didn't win the game in the end?" Twain said to Chen Jian with a smile.
"Regret," Chen Jian replied.
Looking at the man in front of him with a lot of gray hair, Chen Jian could not help but sigh at how time flies.
When she first met him, he was in high spirits and was at the peak of his success. He didn't look tired at all. Looking at him again now, he vaguely looked like an old man.
Xia Yang became a foil. Tonight was a conversation between Twain and Chen Jian.
"Haha, actually, when I let you jump out of Nottingham Forest, I didn't think I would be able to get you back one day."
"I also didn't think I could be where I am today after leaving Nottingham Forest."
Both men sighed at the impermanence of the world.
Today, Chen Jian was not only the core of RCD Espanyol, but also the main player of the China national team. That was why Twain looked for him, because there was no problem at all in applying for a work permit. As for the national team ranking … The English Football Association had already abolished that thing.
The China team was still second-rate in Asian football, and Chen Jian was one of the few bright spots in the team.
The person who was the least optimistic in the talent show had put on the national team's jersey and fought for the country, and those who had better results than him were now doing some kind of work somewhere.
"I think I have to thank you for what I am today, Mr. Twain. So when I received your call, I decided to transfer to Nottingham Forest. "
Twain smiled. To be honest, when he held the phone and asked Chen Jian loudly if he dared to give up everything and come to Nottingham to start from scratch, he was encouraging Chen Jian, but he did not really think that Chen Jian's future would be so beautiful. Chen Jian's achievements today exceeded his initial expectations, and he was very pleased. At least he changed a person's fate, and it was a change in a good direction …
"The mountains do not turn, the water does. After a round, we are back together again. China is very particular about fate. Chen Jian, you and Nottingham Forest are fated. "
Xia Yang listened to the conversation between the two and rolled his eyes in his heart. What fate? No one knew whether Jian's choice this time was good or bad. He was able to perform so well for RCD Espanyol because RCD Espanyol's manager, Manzano, was willing to let a Chinese player be the core of the team. Can Nottingham Forest do that? Your core is George Wood, whose technical characteristics and style are similar to Chen Jian's! Chen Jian would only be a supporting character, a foil. Would he be able to play as well as he did in RCD Espanyol? The reputation that I've worked so hard to accumulate, I better not lose it all when I get to Nottingham Forest. I'll thank God and Xie Yalong then …
While Mr. Xia was distracted, the two people at the table had already talked about what would happen after they went to the Forest team.
"I saw the derby, you are the core of Espanyol. I'm going to lay my cards on the table for you first. There's no way you can be the core of Nottingham Forest. Because there's George Wood … "Tang En spread his hands.
Chen Jian did not show an attitude of "I'm willing to be a substitute as long as you let me go to Forest". He just said, "I don't think Mr. Tang came to me personally to ask me to be a substitute, right?"
After fighting in La Liga for more than three seasons, Chen Jian had matured a lot and also made him more confident.
Tang En looked at the Chinese player in front of him and liked him from the bottom of his heart. Although some of the Spanish media would call Chen Jian a "smaller version of George Wood," in Tang En's view, this person was probably more like a "strategist." In terms of intelligence and outstanding awareness, he was probably better than George. After all, there were many people who helped George along the way to help him. Without the help of himself, Dunn, Albertini, and the others, George would be a blockhead, while Chen Jian basically relied on himself to fight alone to get to where he is now.
"It's too extravagant to let you be a substitute, ha!" Tang En laughed happily. "In my plan, you'll be partnered with Wood. The two of you will be Forest's' double core. '"
"Dual-core?" Chen Jian lowered his head and thought about it. He was thinking about how he should cooperate with Wood. He was no longer the child who would be excited just to play in a match.
He unintentionally played the game of guessing the manager's intentions again. But this time, he could not figure out how he should cooperate with George Wood, whose style was similar to his own.
So, he raised his head and looked at Tang En.
"Both of you are good at long passes, but you're better at short passes than Wood, while Wood's long shots are better than yours." Tang En did not reveal everything, only pointing out the differences between the two of them. "It's too difficult for an opponent to target both of you at the same time."
Chen Jian already had a blurry picture in his mind of how he and Wood would fight side by side. It was only at this moment that he began to get a little excited — he had always been determined to become a professional player, and his goal was to become George Wood. When he was constantly using Wood's training schedule to hone himself in the youth team, Nottingham Forest's number 13 also became his idol. Now, it was finally possible for him to fight side by side with his idol!
That was an incomparably wonderful future!
The meeting with Chen Jian was mainly to promise him his position in the team — certainly not as a substitute, and for now, it seemed that he would be a main force. The people in Spain were good at long nights, and Chen Jian, who had stayed here for more than three years, was more or less used to it. But the 50-year-old Tang En was not Spanish, and he had only stayed in Spain for four days, so he was not used to it. As the highlight of this round of the league tournament, the Barcelona derby was naturally arranged at the last time. When the game was over, it was almost twelve o 'clock, and now it was almost one o' clock in the morning. Tang En could not stand it anymore. They had met and spoken, so what was the point of staying? Anyway, there would be opportunities for contact in the long run.
Tang En and Chen Jian said goodbye. At the time of parting, Tang En reminded Xia Yang to step up the pressure on RCD Espanyol, and Chen Jian promised to have a showdown with the club, expressing his intention to go to Nottingham Forest.
Early the next morning, Tang En flew back to England, ending his trip to Spain.
※ ※ ※
Not long after, there was news from Barcelona. The local media reported that a number of clubs were interested in Chen Jian and hoped to take him away from RCD Espanyol during this winter break.
Seeing such news, Tang En knew that Xia Yang had already started to act.
He did not care. Anyway, it was up to the independent professionals to do it.
David Kerslake had joined the team's coaching staff ahead of time as an assistant manager to carry out the preliminary work. He was responsible for summarizing the team's situation and submitting it to Tang En for him to analyze and make decisions.
Now it had been a week since Kerslake joined the team, and the team's internal report was basically formed.
In the two weeks that he was away, Nottingham Forest had one win and one loss, and their results barely hovered around the sixteenth place.
This was a really low starting point. Since Nottingham Forest returned to the English Premier League, this was their lowest ranking. It was no wonder that a group of people from the outside world were not optimistic about the Forest team's prospects this season. They thought that if they were not careful, they would not be surprised even if they were eventually relegated.
In addition, the report that Kerslake gave him pointed out that the current Forest team's fighting strength was worrying, the people's hearts were wavering, and the bench was not thick enough. This made Tang En deeply feel the pressure on his shoulders.
This comeback wasn't going to be a relaxing vacation …
Before that, there was one more thing that Tang En needed to do. And once he became the Forest team's manager, this matter would probably not be very convenient …
※ ※ ※
At the end of November, it was already winter. The weather in Nottingham was the same as the weather in the entire United Kingdom. There were many cloudy days, many rainy days, few blue skies, and even fewer sunshine.
But today was a rare good day. After four consecutive days of rain, the sky above Nottingham finally cleared up. Everyone who went to work early in the morning could see the golden sun rising from the eastern horizon, shining its brilliant rays onto the sky and the earth. The leaves were still dripping with last night's rain, sparkling under the sunlight. From afar, the forest looked like it was hung with strings of golden beads.
Surrounded by such a forest was the Notts County Football Club's training ground. Compared to Nottingham Forest's Wilford, it was half the size, and the training facilities were a little old. As the world's oldest modern professional football club, it exuded a sense of history from the inside out. To put it bluntly, it was a smell of decay, but to put it nicely, it was the glory of history.
Although the training facilities were old, the players on this old training ground were all very young. There was not a trace of the pressure and burden of their long history on their faces.
It was just a warm-up exercise, and everyone was very serious. A man in his thirties, dressed in a hooded training shirt, ran at the front with a whistle in his mouth. He looked like an assistant manager. The man had black hair and an Asian face. It was Dunn, the Chinese who left Nottingham Forest more than seven years ago.
Now, he was the manager of the English Football League Championship team, Notts County.
Outside the barbed wire fence of the training ground, there were some fans, but not many people. There were also only a few media outlets, two from Nottingham, and one from the port city of Portsmouth, Notts County's opponent in the next round of the English Football League Championship.
On this chilly morning, the whistle in the training ground was especially clear and distant, even startling some birds in the forest. In the forest in the distance, along with the birds' flight, there was a white mist rising slowly. It was water vapor that began to evaporate under the sunlight, spreading out and almost enveloping the entire training ground.
Tang En, who was wrapped in a thick coat, took a deep breath. The air in the forest was much better than the air in the city center.
The so-called other thing that he could not do after coaching the Forest team was to meet Dunn here. Although his relationship with Tang Zhijian allowed him to have many opportunities to interact privately, once he became the manager of the Forest team. But once he became the Forest manager, he was bound to become the target of the paparazzi. He did not want the news of his meeting with Dunn to spread like wildfire. It was a secret.
Watching Dunn lead the team as they ran laps to warm up, Tang En smiled. It was completely different from his own style. Dunn was doing quite well here. Although he did not know much about Notts County, just by looking at the players, Tang En believed that it was a team that completely belonged to Dunn. His goal when he left him had been achieved.
But … it was difficult for such a team to improve further. For a small team like Notts County, which lacked financial support, to be able to be brought to the English Football League Championship by Dunn was already a huge surprise to many people. But that was basically the end of it. If they wanted to go to the English Football League Championship, it would be impossible without strong financial support. Even if they were lucky enough to be promoted to the English Football League Championship, they could only quickly return to the English Football League Championship when their opponents had a huge advantage in British pounds.
In 2004, Notts County was on the verge of bankruptcy. At that time, the Notts County fans voluntarily donated money in hopes of saving their beloved team. But in the end, the savior was a team that had nothing to do with them — Chelsea. It was precisely because Notts County were drawn against Chelsea in the FA Cup that they received a large amount of ticket revenue. At that time, the Chelsea Football Club agreed to give all the ticket revenue they received at Stamford Bridge to the Notts County Football Club to tide them over. The TV rights fee and ticket revenue saved the Notts County Football Club from the fate of the world's oldest modern professional football club.
From this incident, one could see the situation of Notts County. The TV broadcast fees and ticket revenue for a game were not worth mentioning in the eyes of the English Football League Championship teams. But it could save Notts County's life. It showed how pitiful the team's budget was …
Dunn's success in the past few years was inseparable from his insistence on building up the youth team from the start. If he did not have the youth training camp to provide him with enough good players, Notts County's pitiful budget every season would not have been enough to buy players from the transfer market. They would not have even been able to get a starting eleven players.
Although he had a good youth training camp, he also faced the same problem as many managers of small clubs. He could not persuade the outstanding young players to leave Notts County to pursue a higher stage. For a club like Notts County to survive, the only way to do so was to sell the young players that they had nurtured and had a bright future. Dunn was only a manager. He could not interfere with the team's business strategy. Moreover, he was in no position to interfere. The team was about to die, so what was the point of keeping talented players? No matter how talented these players were, they were not the kind of international superstars that could lead a team to the English Premier League. While there were still people who wanted them, he should quickly buy them at a good price. At worst, he could just promote some players from the youth training camp to the First Team for training …
And so on.
Tang En shook his head. This was the tragedy of a small club. Wasn't it the same for the Forest team before he took over? Michael Dawson, Andy Reid, and Jenas were all sold when the Forest team was facing financial difficulties. However, compared to Notts County, Nottingham Forest had a strong foundation. Their ancestors were once rich, so it was not too difficult for them to rise again.
Notts County, on the other hand, was poor.
Just like that, Tang En watched all of the Notts County team's morning training from the side of the training ground. Then, he met up with Dunn at noon.
Tang En had told Dunn that he would be looking for him over the phone last night, so Dunn was not surprised to see Tang En in front of him.
"You're definitely not here to treat me to a meal, are you, Tony?" Dunn said to Tang En, who was sitting opposite him in a Chinese restaurant.
"Of course. And this Chinese restaurant is too unorthodox. " Tang En commented on the most famous Chinese restaurant in the Nottingham area as if there was no one else around. He did not care that there was a Chinese waiter standing beside him. This made the Chinese student, who was obviously here to work, stare at the old man in sunglasses.
After the waiter left, Dunn laughed. "You're making this restaurant look like it's not worth it."
Tang En shrugged and did not continue the topic. "I'm here to ask you a question, Dunn." Don. "He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice so that the other could hear.
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