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Teruaki Moniwa emerged as a very impressive young defender in the Bellmare Hiratsuka youth system, and established himself as a national team candidate at an early age. By the time he made his rookie debut for Bellmare in 1999 -- their final year in the J1 -- he was already a player who many opther teams were watching closely. When Bellmare tumbled into the second division, and was forced to restructure as "Shonan Bellmare", Moniwa displayed his loyalty to the team by sticking around for two frustrating season,s but when it became clear that the team was not going to return to the J1 any time soon, he eventually asked to be traded away to a J1 team, where he could establish his credentials for the National team. Moniwa was a core member of the 2004 Athens Olympic team, and he got his first call to the full national team not long afterward, though it would be another year before he received his first international cap. As the 2006 World Cup approached, Moniwa made a strong bid for inclusion in the squad, but after going through a nail-biting process of elimination, Zico opted to drop him from thegroup of 23 who left for Germany in late May, 2006. Zico decided to go with the more experienced (though in our view, less talented) Makoto Tanaka. Moniwa left Japan with his family for a vacation in Hawaii, hoping to soak away the disappointment with a few days in the sun. But ten days before the World Cup was due to kick off, Moniwa received a phone call at his hotel, at 4AM, and answered it in bleary-eyed confusion. Who on earth would be calling at this hour? Very few people even knew where he was. On the other end of he line was JFA chairman Saburo Kawabuchi, asking if Moniwa could hop on a plane in just a few hours, to join the team in Germany. Tanaka had injured a hamstring during the team's training camp, and apparently it stiffened up and got worse on the long flight to Europe. By the time Japan kicked off their pre-cup friendly against Germany, on May 30, it was apparent to Zico that Tanaka would not be at 100%. Since many people had been pressuring him for months to drop the aging, error-prone defender, Zico finally decided that it was time to choose an alternate, and Moniwa quickly accepted the call. By June 1, he was in Germany, training with his teammates, and trying to get over the jet lag of a flight from one side of the globe to the other. Moniwa was always been our preferred choice as a backup to the three "central" defenders -- Nakazawa, Miyamoto and Tsuboi. In terms of playing style he probably resembles Tsuboi most closely, with good speed and excellent ball skills, but not quite as tall or as powerful in the air as Nakazawa. Nevertheless, he is a clever player in terms of defensive positioning, is vocal enough to "direct traffic" (albeit perhaps not as forceful as Miyamoto), and can at least hold his own in the aerial battles. These skills were put to the test when captain Miyamoto was ruled out of the team's final pool match against Brazil, and Moniwa stepped into the breach. Following Japan's quick exit from the World Cup, both Nakazawa and Miyamoto lost favour with incoming coach Ivica Osim, whose views on the role of a defender are quite different from those of Zico. Moniwa is a member of the generation that will probably form the core of Japan's squad in 2010, so it was be nice to see him get his feet wet in Germany, even if only for a cameo appearance. He is not much of a contributor on offence, with only one goal to his credit in an eight-year career, but he is good at distributing the ball and supporting the attack with pinpoint passes from the back. His main focus is on defence, though, where he combines decent height and power in the air with firm tackling and a good ability to contain fast opposition strikers on the dribble. So far Moniwa has been only a marginal presence in Osim Japan, but that was largely becuase he was sidelined by an injury for much of the latter half of 2006. In 2007 we expect to see him bounce back both at the club level, and for the national team. We definitely view him as one of the players who has a leading chance to earn a starting spot under Osim.
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