Jim McGuinness has described the scene in his new dressing room at Beijing Sinobo Guoan as being like an Irish wakehouse!
McGuinness last week made the shock move to China to take up the post as assistant manager to Roger Schmidt in Beijing.
Until then, McGuinness had been working at Celtic FC in Glasgow, but accepted the offer from new manager Schmidt. Their tenure got off to a winning start on Saturday as Jonathan Soriano’s double gave them a 2-0 win over Chinese Super League leaders Guangzhou Evergrande.
Beijing draw their squad from many corners of the globe with several different nationalities, now added with the arrival of German Schmidt and the English-speaking McGuinness.
“The language barrier at the club is really interesting,” the Glenties man, writing in his weekly column in The Irish Times, said.
“In fact, it’s not really a barrier: just a different means of communication. There are three or four Chinese interpreters at the club and they are always at hand. But there is also a Portuguese for the two Brazilian players, a Spanish translator and a Turkish translator for the others.
“So you have a lot of voices at team meetings and even in the dressing room. But it becomes the norm really quickly. Nobody blinks. Then you have German and English being spoken also. So Roger will say something and then everyone else will begin to chat away in translation.
“It’s a bit like being in a wake house and somebody starts a decade of the rosary and then the other voices start up. But what fascinated me is how quickly everyone settled into that way of communicating. This is just the way things are done.”
McGuinness has been a long-time admirer of Schmidt’s methods and had no hesitation in linking up with the former Bayer Leverkusen manager.
McGuinness said:” What struck me was that every single thing we did was associated 100 per cent to how he wants his team to play.
“I would suggest few managers in any sport do this. Every single second is channelled through what will happen in the game and every drill and message revolves around that.
“I was able to watch him go from his first hour and build to the first game. Everything he did and said was about putting his philosophy in place. You get a feel for that very quickly.”
