Chinese women's football team, the 1996 Atlanta Olympic silver medalist who failed to squeeze into the semi-finals at the 2000 Sydney Games, are eyeing a medal at the coming Athens Games.

"Although it's a difficult job, our squad will try their best to win a medal and regain the glory of the yesteryears," Xue Li, vice president of the Chinese Football Association said here Wednesday.

Xue said, "Our baseline is set on the semi-finals, and win a medal if we are lucky enough."

The Chinese team won its ticket for Athens after all-victory matches in Japan where they emerged as Asia's No.1 for the Athens Olympic games, conceding no goals throughout the qualifying tournaments.

The qualifying matches in April was "encouraging", Xue said, but this is by no means to say that the Chinese team has come back with the power and confidence it possessed years ago when it had such veterans as Sun Qingmei and Sun Wen, who were awarded FIFA's "Miss Football of the World" respectively in 1991 and 1999.

The current team is a quite new one compared with the former team which was hailed as "steel roses" in China. Over 60% of the lineup to Athens are newly recruited. Only four players had foughton Olympic fields, while eight had been to Olympic games as substitutes.

Xue said the world women football arena is quite different fromtwo years ago, and the Chinese team will have a much tougher job to win even a bronze medal.

As a FIFA official said, there are two strong women teams in the world before the 2003 Women's World Cup, namely the United States and China. Now there are six to seven strong teams like the United States, Germany and China.

Denmark, the 2000 Sydney Games title holders, was deprived of achance to defend their fame at Athens. Nonetheless, Xue said, the opening match on August 11 might still turn out to be a hard fightfor the Chinese girls as the German team, which was the 2003 World Women Cup champions, will try to show the world that they deserve the title at the World Cup and might be equally strong at the Olympic arena.

The German team, with only two of their 2003 World Cup members retired, have fought their way to Athens without losing any of their seven matches.

The Mexican squad, a dark horse which has downed Canada, the semi-finalists at the 2003 World Women Cup, is yet another major obstacle on the way to quarter-finals for the Chinese team.

The US team, bronze medalists at the 2003 World Cup, are widelyregarded as favorites for the Olympic title, while the Swedish, who got their tickets to Athens with all wins on the qualifying tournaments like the World Women Cup gold winners, might be another team with a gold dream in Greece.

All of the nine teams are strong in one way or another, according to Xue. Therefore, the Chinese must fight hard to win each of the match and go as long as possible.

"I am happy to say that we have a very capable coach, Mr. ZhangHaitao, the youngest coach Chinese football teams ever have," Xue said, adding the achievement the Chinese girls made since he was appointed as coach of the team shows that he is the right one for the position.

The stunning victories of the Chinese women team at the Asian zone qualifying tournaments is a manifesto of the potential of the38 year-old, she noted.

Source: Xinhua