Less than one month before the start of the Asian Cup, the national football team has once again become the focus of fans' attention with outrageous rumors such as "Li Ke and Wu Lei fighting", which is really laughable. In the end, a number of celebrities also revealed the real reason why Li Ke left the national team, it turned out that the naturalized midfielder was late for the first training session when he arrived in the United Arab Emirates, which was not the first time Li Ke was late, so coach Jankovic chose to kick him out of the national team in order to take military discipline seriously, and recruited Xu Xin.
As a result, many fans are worried that the big game is imminent, will Jankovic's action affect the strength of the team? I think the impact will be but not big. First of all, although Li Ke is a naturalized player that Jankovic has valued very much, Li Ke has been given the opportunity to play in the previous national team warm-up matches and the round of 36 matches against Thailand and South Korea. But Li Ke is currently positioned as a rotation player. In the first two games of the round of 36, Li Ke was basically one of the worst players in the team, and there were endless doubts.
And Li Ke left, and Xu Xin, who replaced him, although his state was not much better than him, at least Xu Xin could plug and play, and he was also familiar with the national team. During the Asian Cup, I think the main midfield combination of the national football team will be captain Wu Xi and Wang Shangyuan, and the captain of the Jinmen Tigers, Wang Qiuming, can also compete for the main force if he recovers from his injury. In other words, whether it is Li Ke or Xu Xin, the national team has only replaced a substitute player selected by the fourth, which does not affect the overall strength.
Some people also said that Jankovic was a little too strict to kick Li Ke out of the national team because he was late? Will it hit the morale of the whole team? If it is usual, the author may also think so, but considering that a major competition such as the Asian Cup is about to start, Li Ke's late arrival will indeed make the coach very annoyed. And according to many celebrities, this is not the first time Li Ke has been late for training with the national team. has repeatedly made casual mistakes, and Jankovic really needs to punish him with a more severe punishment if he has a problematic attitude, so that the entire national team players can have a sense of seriousness and urgency that the big game is imminent.
In fact, it is not the first time that Jankovic has been so strict, as early as 2022, when he was still the head coach of the men's football Asian Games team, Jankovic was intolerant of being late for games, late for training, late for meetings, and late for meals, among which late training is the most intolerable kind of lateness. So it's not a whim on a whim for Jankovic, or that he's deliberately targeting naturalized players.
And kicking an international player out of the national team when training is late is not uncommon in world football. For example, our close neighbor and the South Korean men's football team, when Hong Myung-fu led the South Korean Olympic team, he was also "late = left". Imagine if there had been no such serious discipline, the South Korean team would have won a historic bronze medal at the 2012 London Olympics.
What's more critical is that the national team also gave Li Ke enough face and left a way back, and did not announce in the announcement that Li Ke left the team because he was late for training, and even the media broke the news before that he left temporarily because of "family reasons", if Li Ke can reflect well in the future, he still has the opportunity to return to the national team, and when Li Ke plays for the country in the future, he may work harder to prove himself, which is a good thing.
Li Ke left the team in this turmoil, and there is another detail worth paying attention to. That is, Wu Lei and Zhang Linpeng, who are one of the captains, once pleaded with Jankovic for him, which also shows that the current atmosphere of the national team is still quite good. There is no estrangement because of the SIPG Gang or other club players, everyone hopes to play well in the Asian Cup, after all, this may be the last continental competition for veterans such as Wu Lei and Zhang Linpeng.
Li Ke's departure may also be a warning to other international players, and anyone who does not train well may be abandoned. From this point of view, this incident may also be helpful for the national football team to improve morale. In any case, I hope that the national football team can overcome external interference and prepare seriously for the game, and strive to complete the set goal of reaching the top 8 in the Asian Cup.