The Season
Shangdong Luneng and newcomer Changchun Yatai both had a good spell early on while defending champions Dalian struggled early on. During the mid season, Changchun finally cannot kept up with the pace of the top league and gradually drops to forth in the league. Meanwhile, a record 13 league win in a row saw Shandong Luneng Taishan gaining an unassailable lead at the top. With Shandong the clear winner, the interest in the second half of the season was the race to the second place and the fight against relegation.
In the end, Chongqing Lifan was relegated with 2 games to go while the race for second went all the way down the wire before Shanghai Shenhua clinch the second spot with a last day win over Liaoning while Beijing slips.
Read more about this topic: 2006 Chinese Super League
Famous quotes containing the word season:
“The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)