Future football stars

Football academies were set up by leading football clubs so their coaches could run trials to discover and train talented boys from as young as eight as potential players for their first team.

This means that in Britain there are at least 9,000 boys at any one time attending academies after school who think they are going to be a famous footballer. 【小题1】 One eight-year-old was selected for Chelsea Academy and he went from being top of his class at school to being the boy who was messing around at the back. His mother asked him why he wasn’t trying hard at school any more. His reply was that he was going to be a footballer and be rich, so he didn’t need to. In the end, he only lasted a year in the academy. 【小题2】 And he wasn’t so discouraged that he never played football again.

【小题3】 Any sport where only a few can get to the top has many talented failures. These people are very good and do their best but finally it will not pay off because they are just not outstanding enough. In football, this effect is big because the number of players chosen by academies is so huge. 【小题4】

This doesn’t put off all the boys who are spotted by the big football clubs and are desperate to join the academies. 【小题5】 They get to play as much football as possible. The skills become part of them, as they are with professional players, so they are automatic and the boys don’t have to think about them when they’re on the football field.

Tokyo Games send message of hope amid pandemic

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games drew to an end on Sunday evening.【小题1】. 【小题2】, with the near-empty 68,000-capacity stadium in the Japanese capital offering an alarming reminder of the challenges posed by COVID-19.

【小题3】. In his speech at the closing ceremony, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach told the athletes, “In these difficult times, you give the world the most precious of gifts—hope.”

“For the first time since the pandemic began, the entire world came together. Sport returned to center stage.【小题4】. This gives us hope. This gives us faith in the future.” said Bach, a former Olympic fencing gold medalist. “The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 are the Olympic Games of hope, solidarity and peace,” he added.

During the Games, which ran for 17 days, 339 medals were awarded in 33 sports, with skateboarding, surfing, sport climbing and karate making their Olympic debuts.【小题5】 .

Fierce competition to be faster, higher and stronger continued to the final day of the Games, when Team USA made a comeback to surpass China in the number of gold medals.

“Some day, there’ll be no Americans left in the NBA,” said 12-year-old Xing Tao, who joined his school team two weeks ago after watching Yao Ming in a televised NBA game, “The players will all be Chinese, like Yao.”

To China, Yao is a home-grown superstar who helped make the world’s first basketball league closer to Chinese players. To the NBA, the 2.23-meter center offers an opening of a different sort into the world’s largest new market. Yao’s NBA first appearance against the Indiana Pacers in October reached 287 million families in the US. That game might have been a bit of a letdown to Yao’s fans: He played just 11 of the 48 minutes, had two rebounds (篮板) and got no points. Comparing that with his performance on December 19, also against Indiana, Yao won 29 points and 10 rebounds. “This was one of the most exciting games I’ve had,” Yao said after Houston’s 95-83 victory. The NBA has to be excited about his on-count success. In all his games, he’s averaging 12.7 points and 7.7 rebounds, quite good for a new star. “Yao Ming has brought the NBA closer to the Chinese,” said NBA spokeswoman Cheong Sau Ching, “That makes the dream seem practical for other people in China and proud to be Chinese.”

The 22-year-old Yao is not the country’s first player in the NBA: Wang Zhizhi broke down the Dallas Mavericks in November 2003. But Yao’s combination of modesty (谦虚) and skills make him a favorite back home.