12 Jun 2009(Fri)

The old analogy about two buses coming along at once doesn’t work quite as effectively in Japan, what with public transport tending to actually run on time and everything, but since most of the world’s club football is on hiatus at the moment, it’s only right that I should follow last week’s article on the international game with another. Specifically, I would like to follow up on a couple of interesting points raised in an anonymous comment posted on the Japanese version of this column the other day, in response to my suggestion that Japan’s national team was now ‘good, but not great’:

 

‘Surely this level is just right for us now? We can be happy just seeing how far we’ve come. Countries like England can only be happy if they win the whole thing…’

 

It is, of course, impossible to overemphasise just how staggering an amount of progress has been made in Japanese football over the last 15-20 years to lift it up to the level it enjoys today. This usually goes unrecognised in Europe; largely (and probably understandably) because we are obsessed with our own, more ‘celebrated’ domestic and continental competitions, but perhaps also to extent because Japan’s economic strength and technological influence have made it seem only normal for the country to take its place on any world stage. Now that the national team qualify for the World Cup every time, it is easy to forget that they had not appeared at a single Finals before France ’98. English eyes did briefly focus on the J. League amidst the razzmatazz of its inauguration and Gary Lineker’s arrival at Nagoya Grampus in 1992, but having been a fascinated observer myself ever since then, it is great to see that its growth is showing no signs of stopping almost two decades later. This is a debate for another time, but one could now easily make the case that the J. League is the strongest domestic competition anywhere outside Europe and Latin America.

 

The point I was trying to make last time, though, was illustrated perfectly last weekend. Japan – along with South Korea and Australia – were, as predicted, able to clinch one of Asia’s 4.5 World Cup spots with two of their eight final qualifying round matches still to play, and indeed more than a year remaining before the tournament kicks off in Johannesburg. Perhaps I would have been too paranoid to count chickens as well had it been ‘my’ team, but in reality, it was always going to take a failure of reasonably epic proportions to prevent Takeshi Okada’s side from booking their place in South Africa. It is brilliant that Japan are now good enough to make such an easy job of qualification, but as far as I am concerned, it is only now that this country’s national team can embark on its first genuinely exciting challenge since the Asian Cup semi-final exit to Saudi Arabia in July 2007.

 

In England, meanwhile, we may all be prone to pronounce our footballers as world-beaters one minute and hopeless losers the next, but having not appeared in a single international final since 1966, we probably have little right to expect them to bring back trophies. Steve McClaren’s brief era of spectacular underachievement has probably made us a little more realistic anyway, but as (generally speaking) one of the best six to ten national teams in the world, being knocked out in the quarter-finals is par for the course. The rare occasion that England go just one step further, as in Italia ’90 and Euro ’96, will always evoke a euphoric excitement that unites the entire nation. With non-qualification for the 8-team Euro ’84 preceding last eight appearances at Mexico ’86 and Euro ’88, Sir Bobby Robson’s average needed that semi-final with West Germany in Turin, but the joy of this one birdie will live far longer in the memory than the three par scores in a row managed by Sven-Göran Eriksson between 2002 and 2006.