Asian Cup Qualifiers:
Japan 0 - 0 China

Date: Feb 13, 2000 Location: Kobe Universiade Stadium Japan 0 0 1H 0 0 2H 0 0 China Scoring Cautions Tie Li Enhua Zhang Hong Qi Seigo Narazaki, Naoki Matsuda, Ryuzo Morioka, Koji Nakata (Shunsuke Nakamura 67), Hiroshi Nanami, Shigeyoshi Mochizuki, Hidetoshi Nakata, Junichi Inamoto, Shinji Ono (Toshihiro Hattori 57), Masashi Nakayama, Naohiro Takahara Jin Jiang, Feng Xie (Gang Chen 65'), Enhua Zhang, Chengying Wu, Zhiyi Fang, Tie Li, Jihai Sun (Ming Li 45'), Mingyu Ma (Si Shen 54'), Xia Yao (Hong Qi 45'), Shengqing Qu, Maozhen Su (Yunfeng Hu 80')

Japan's national team match against China in March 2000 was a rather dull and insignificant match in may ways, but it was a watershed mark for Japan's national team, in that it was the first time that Phillippe Troussier used the members of the U-23 team as his primary source of talent in a full national team match. At the Carlsberg Cup, early in the year, Troussier had given his veterans one last chance to perform. When they failed to do so, he abandoned all but a few "bit part" contributors, and began building a new team which would remain basically the same from this match through the 2002 World Cup.

On the other side of the pitch, Bora Multinovic was in the midst of a similar building process, and the team he assembled played very tough, physical defence and committed few if any mistakes, creating a stalemate that was somewhat boring to watch, but reflected the fact that both Japan and China were moving to a higher level of quality. The match ended in a scoreless draw.