|
|
|
| June 2, 2002 | Sunday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 20,1423 |
Fan slams media, denies row
SOGWIPO (South Korea), June 1: China’s veteran defender Fan Zhiyi lashed out at China’s increasingly unruly and aggressive sports media on Saturday, accusing them of fabricating a story about a row between himself and striker Hao Haidong.
After a training session on the southern island of Cheju, Fan reprimanded several dozen Chinese reporters and urged them not to disrupt China’s preparations for its debut at the World Cup finals.
“This kind of information can influence the mood of a player and the whole team,” said Fan, clearly piqued by the reported clash with Hao. “If reporters want to spread kind of information, please keep it to a minimum.”
Fan, China’s former captain, was thought to have settled a long-running feud with Hao, one of Asia’s top strikers, when the two embraced after China qualified for the World Cup finals in October last year.
Some 400 Chinese sports reporters have come to South Korea to report on China’s Group C matches against Costa Rica, Brazil and Turkey,
even though only 150 have accreditations, Chinese officials say.
All media in China is officially controlled by the state but a host of privately funded sports newspapers and magazines have opened in recent years, and competition for a market of some 80 million Chinese soccer fans is fierce.
Denied access to news conferences and training sessions, many reporters without press credentials have been loitering outside the team’s training camp and hotel hoping for an interview or sometimes just an autograph.
Fan said the team had been hounded by Chinese reporters, one of whom slipped past tight security at their hotel and asked him for a photograph.
“The bigger papers are alright, it’s the small ones that are the problem,” Fan said. “Only about a hundred have accreditations, what are the others up to?”
“I don’t know what they were trying to do but I just wanted to warn them,” he said. “This kind of behaviour is not only a loss of face for them but for the Chinese people.”—Reuters
|
|
|
|
