Just 24 hours before the opening ceremony the world got a taste of how Chinese crowds are likely to behave during the Olympic Games as the nation’s much-derided men’s soccer team ran out on to the pitch.

Their opponents were New Zealand, a rugby-obsessed nation where soccer is largely ignored and only a few dozen Kiwi supporters joined the crowd of more than 40,000 spectators on Thursday in the Manchurian rust-belt city of Shenyang.