Song Jiansheng football commentator for Peking Television said: The overall teamwork and level of the English First Division is still higher than

Song Jiansheng, football commentator for Peking Television, said: "The overall teamwork and level of the English First Division is still higher than our top league. "We only sell our bad players abroad!" Lin Tao, a trade official, joked after Fan missed a close-range header in last Wednesday's friendly against the local favourites, Peking Guo'an.Yet both Fan and Sun looked assured in Crystal Palace's line-up, with Sun scoring the second goal in Palace's 2-1 victory. Palace owe their celebrity in China to the signing last September of two Chinese internationals, Fan Zhiyi and Sun Jihai. But ask him to name all the English football teams he knows, and the list may include a dozen cities, such is the welcome the Premiership has received here. Manchester United arrive in late July for sell-out games while Crystal Palace are on a four-match tour across China. The English connection extends right up to the most perilous job in Chinese football: Bobby Houghton, formerly of Ipswich, Malmo and Nottingham Forest, coaches the national team. It has not been all one-way traffic.

ASK A Pekinger to name all the English cities he knows, and he may manage four or five. Books are for planes, and the last was a biography by Robert Harvey of Clive of India I hadn't realised what an important figure he was. I think, if he had then been given the job he should have been, which was to sort out the United States, history might have been very different.Do you have any heroes?I was never much of a one for heroes, who are people you would like to be. You can admire or defer to people, but I am happy in my own skin.Is there any unfulfilled ambition?The America's Cup I was Britain's last skipper in 1986-87. I have no immediate plans, but it is unfinished business.Interview by Stuart Alexander. And I tend to be a collector of people and moments.What book did you read recently?I read all the time, a couple of hours a day, but mainly magazines and newspapers. Many things are related to ambience, like walking in the hills and coming across a vista.

Both my wife Lauren and I like rambling together, it brings us together again. It could just be a beautiful sunset.And a private passion?Much the same really. Losing King Harald of Norway's yacht almost outside my front door off Cowes We ran aground and pushed the keel up through the bottom. I had to ring him up and tell him the boat was sunk.What is your greatest indulgence?That occasional rush of happiness, which is different to a sense of well being, and which is part of what is already a good day. We lost our rudder and I went home in a helicopter.And the most embarrassing?That's easy. It seems always that one of your first wins is the best one.What is the worst?The Fastnet Race of 1979, when I was sailing for Ireland on Golden Apple of the Sun. We went into that race as leading team and with a clear advantage only to see 15 people lose their lives and two of our three boats did not finish.

Would you rather be sailing this week instead of managing the British team? In many ways, yes I don't find managing as satisfying. But, the reality of age and skills dictates that I do this job and the younger ones do the sailing. What is your best memory?Winning my first world championship in a half-tonner in Trieste in 1976. After the war it was applied to cars: the Sunday Times referred in 1959 to "the grisly enormities of American stock car racing, with an hysterical ghoul of a commentator who revelled in every prang.". MICHAEL SCHUMACHER'S British Grand Prix came to a premature end yesterday when he crashed on the first lap. The word is almost certainly onomatopeoic, first appearing in the Middle Ages (the OED cites Baret from 1580: "The noise of a thing that is broken"), probably from such Scandinavian words as the Icelandic krassa, though there is a German word krach. "Prang" was RAF slang (etymology unknown), originally with wider applications - it also meant to bomb from the air, as well as to fall from it, and also to stand someone up. "But your whole career does change when you win a major."Most of the players will go in there [this week] to make the cut, have a good tournament and get out of there with a good finish.