Qualification marked a major turnaround for the Chinese in the short time since the veteran Croatian took over at the helm, replacing Aleksandar Jankovic after the Serbian coach’s team had struggled in front of goal at the AFC Asian Cup Qatar 2023.

No goals in three games – two of which ended in goalless draws - saw Jankovic’s side crash out at the end of the group phase as the mood around the Chinese national team took a dismal turn.

With crucial FIFA World Cup qualifiers on the horizon soon after the team’s return to Beijing, Jankovic was removed from his post and the quest for a new coach began with the aim of arresting a worrying trend in front of goal.

Enter Ivankovic. Less than a month before crucial back-to-back clashes with Singapore, the veteran was parachuted into the role with the task of salvaging China PR’s FIFA World Cup dream.

The 70-year-old, however, is no stranger to either Chinese football or the high-pressure international scene.

In 1998 he was an assistant to Miroslav Blazevic when Croatia reached the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup in France while eight years later, and now a head coach in his own right, Ivankovic led the Islamic Republic of Iran to the FIFA World Cup in Germany.

Three years later Ivankovic moved to the Chinese Super League, where he led Shandong Luneng to the title in 2010 before returning to west Asia for stints in club football in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran – as well as briefly in his native Croatia.

The international game lured him back in 2020, Ivankovic taking over in Oman, who he led to the final phase of the FIFA World Cup qualifiers for Qatar 2022, where his team pulled off a shock 1-0 win over Japan in Saitama Stadium.

It is that track record of success, sometimes with fewer resources than at his disposal in his current role, that gives Ivankovic the confidence China PR can make an impact in the upcoming AFC Asian Qualifiers.

“We’re not going to go into any game with our hands up,” he said in a recent interview. “We want to fight against any team from the first minute to the 90th minute and we will try to make some surprise.

“I’m sure we have a team which can do something like that. This is the most important for the players to believe in what we have started.

“We have qualified for this last stage of the preliminary round and this is something that gives big satisfaction for us and I expect it will help the players have more self-confidence and to come to the pitch with the idea of how to beat our opponents.”

The Chinese have been handed a challenging draw in the next round and will begin their quest for a place at only their second FIFA World Cup Finals against Japan on September 5 before hosting Saudi Arabia five days later.

With Group C also featuring Australia, Bahrain and Indonesia, the Chinese will face a demanding task to secure one of the two automatic berths at the Finals but the team’s performances so far under Ivankovic have provided reasons for optimism.

The coach reinstated players who had been discarded by Jankovic’s move to rejuvenate the squad, with naturalised trio Ai Kesen (pictured below), A Lan and Fei Nanduo among those returning for the games that unlocked China PR’s passage to the next round.

In addition to recalling the veterans, however, Ivankovic gave debuts to Shandong Taishan midfielder Xie Wenneng and Shenzhen Peng City’s 21-year-old striker Behram Abduweli, who played a key role in China PR’s equaliser in the 1-1 draw with Thailand in June.

The recent results – one win, two draws and a narrow loss against Korea Republic – since Ivankovic’s arrival have done much to boost the mood around the Chinese game and with more lead-in time ahead of the next round, the coach is confident of further improvements.

“The atmosphere around football is going up and is on a high,” he says. “A lot of games in the league have 40, 50, 60,000 people coming to the stadium and enjoying the football.

“With these results of the national team everything around football is getting better. OK, it takes time but the most important is to create a good atmosphere in the football especially around the national team.

“Culture is one of the most important things in football to create a good result. This is something and there are some young players coming and they’ve shown they don’t have respect for anybody, which means they are not scared."

“They respect everybody, but they want to fight with everybody, the same like in the last game against Korea. They didn’t allow them to play easily against China. This is the most important for me.

“We will try to establish this style of thinking and character and establish a winning mentality. This is something that is maybe the hardest, but we will try to do something like that with our style of playing with full self-confidence.

“Everybody should want to use a lot of power to have to beat China.”

The first test of that new resolve will come at Saitama Stadium against the Japanese early next month, with Ivankovic confident his team will not be overawed as the four-time AFC Asian Cup winners continue their quest for an eighth straight FIFA World Cup qualification.

“Japan, of course, is our traditional opponent,” he said. “I know Japan very well because I was the coach in Oman and we played qualifying games with them and we beat them in Japan.

“They have more than 20 players not just in Europe but in the top five leagues. I watched the game against Croatia in the quarter-finals of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar and they lost only on penalty kicks.

“Japan are an excellent team. Same as Australia and Saudi, but football is football. The ball is round. You never know what’s going on in the field.”