1 Jun 2009(Mon)

It’s taken me nearly a year of writing this column to get around to doing a single article on the Japanese national team. It’s not as if I don’t enjoy their games – if you can appreciate watching Taunton Town’s travails in the lower reaches of eighth tier football in England, you can probably appreciate anything – and the fact that I unconsciously jump out of my chair whenever I see them score suggests to me that being foreign has little to do with it either. The main problem, I think, is that the level that Japan has now reached within the world game – good, but not great – has had unfortunate side-effects in terms of the continental calendar’s ability to capture the imagination.

 

Put simply, Japan – and South Korea, and probably Australia too now they’ve moved to the AFC and raised their game – are too good not to qualify for the World Cup. Saudi Arabia always make it as well, despite seemingly growing progressively weaker since Saeed Al-Owairan’s wonder strike and a last 16 appearance at USA ’94. The 46 nations in the Asian confederation may only have four or five places in the finals to compete over, but unless the likes of Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Bahrain, and Uzbekistan can make things a little more of a challenge, qualification itself is no longer the success to rejoice in that it once was. Switching the Asian Cup to be played every four years from 2007 (rather than 2008) was undoubtedly a good idea in terms of avoiding the clash with the Olympic Games and European Championships and carrying over the rhythm from the World Cup, but everything inevitably becomes distinctly quiet immediately afterwards. One can hardly blame the players – let alone the fans – of the Japanese national team for failing to feel the tension as they wait seven whole months for their next ‘competitive’ fixture against India, Oman, or whichever other minnows have made it through to a World Cup qualifying first group stage in which you only have to finish in the top two anyway.

 

But the good thing, of course, is that we are now entering the exciting part of the cycle. Last week’s Kirin Cup was billed as an opportunity for Takeshi Okada to ready his side for the three forthcoming World Cup qualification matches, but with the 1-0 win over Bahrain in March leaving Japan just two points from a guaranteed place in South Africa, the mini-tournament could instead be seen as the beginning of the road towards the finals themselves. The squads of both of this year’s guests, Chile and Belgium, may have been weakened by club commitments (and, in the case of the latter, a post-season title playoff between Standard Liege and Anderlecht), but perhaps all the more because of this, Japan’s players were clearly under pressure to perform. Two 4-0 victories was an emphatic way to answer any questions posed of them.

 

Shinji Okazaki of Shimizu S-Pulse has rightly received much acclaim for the three goals he contributed, which took his tally to six in seven internationals this year and surely makes him first choice forward for the forthcoming qualifiers, but there were also two major positives that stood out for me in terms of the team as a whole. Whereas, in the past, profligate strikers have forced Japan to look for goals from midfield, almost every player from front to back in the current side now looks capable of either creating something or scoring themselves. Okada, meanwhile, was able to try out a number of different options, with Keisuke Honda continuing to show excellent progress, and steady debuts for defender Satoshi Yamaguchi and midfielder Naoki Yamada (who, at 31 and 18 years old respectively, had entirely different reasons to be surprised at their call-ups). The manager’s hopes of making the semi-finals next year may be a touch optimistic, but the pool of talent available to him is now deep and broad enough to make selecting the 23 – let alone the eleven – a real potential headache. There is still a long way to go until the summer of 2010, but Japan look to have made a pretty good start.