National Team Match:

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Japan 2 - 0 Yemen

Date: August 18, 2005 Location: Niigata Stadium Japan 2 0 1H 0 2 2H 0 0 Yemen Yuki Abe (70') Hisato Sato (89') Scoring Cautions Al-Hubaisi Alwa Abdullah Yahaia Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi, Yuichi Komano (Naotake Hanyu 45), Marcus Tulio Tanaka, Keisuke Tsuboi, Akira Kaji, Keita Suzuki, Yuki Abe, Alessandro Santos, Yasuhito Endo (Yuto Sato 71), Seiichiro Maki, Tatsuya Tanaka (Hisato Sato 89) TBA

Ah! The nostalgia! .

For a moment there, we thought we were reliving the summer of 2003, when Japan's Olympic team stumbled their way to Athens without ever once raising a sweat, except on the palms of nervous fans' hands. That clammy feeling is back, and it isnt hard to tell why. Once again, we had a demonstration of how easy it is for a bunch of semi-talented grassrollers to make the mighty Japanese national team look bad. All you have to do is pack the penalty area with eleven men, and challenge them to come at you, mano-a-mano. You can be sure that they will back off and pass the ball around indecesively for an hour or so, trying to decide whether it is really worth the risk to "confront" the opposing team.

As you will recall from our story on the Trinidad & Tobago match, last week, we still have significant misgivings about many of the players that Ivica Osim has selected to form the core of his team. While they do have a great deal of technical skill, many of these players just dont have the sort of intensity and "killer instinct" tat it takes to dismantle an opponent such as Yemen.

Fortunately, Ivica Osim responded the way a coach ought to respond, when his team are looking noticeably gutless. His comments after the match suggest that the team will get an earful this evening, and that there will not be much celebration following this victory. Unlike Zico, who frequently would appear on camera after such a showing with a peevish look on his face, trying to argue that since the team won that was "good enough", Osim came straight out and called a spade a black, upside-down heart with a toothpick sticking out of it. This performance was barely adequate, and the players who were most responsible for the insipid showing should expect to feel the heat when Osim names his squad for the next Asian Cup qualifier, in September.

Interestingly enough, the worst performances of the evening came from the veteran NT players, weveral of whom Osim added to the squad following the Trinidad & Tobnago contest. You would think that these individuals would take the hint from Osim's snub of Shinji Ono, Mitsuo Ogasawara, Tsuneyasu Miyamoto and others, and recognise that if they fail to put in a full effort, they wont be in the roster for very long. Unfortunately, Akira Kaji and Yasuhito Endo did absolutely nothing to justify their inclusion in the team, showing even less energy and more spinelessness than the members of the Athens generation. Kaji was constantly pulling the ball back out, rather than taking on his defender and trying to penetrate, while Endo seemed to be stuck permanently in reverse: every time the ball came to him, he immediately began moving in the direction of his own goal. Now if the opponent had been Brazil, these "instinctive habits" might make sense. But against a team that never even bothered to challenge the ball until it moved within ten meters of the penalty box, they simply sapped the fluidity of the team's attack, and wasted unnecesary time in getting the ball to within shooting distance of the Yemeni goal.

Alex Santos, the "hero" of the Trinidad match, was similarly useless in this contest. TO be honest, we were not overly impressed with his performance last week, either, but at least he was taking his chances on goal, and trying to penetrate. In this match, he also showed a commendable level of effort, but his timing and accuracy were way off. Both he and Endo squandered more set play opportunities than we were able to count. If they had managed to hit the target with even 10% of their short-range free kick chances, Japan would have doubled their winning margin.

Granted, it can be difficult to play a team like Yemen, who have developed the tactic of wasting time and feigning injury to a level of artistic expression and technological perfection that is truly breathtaking. Even the Korean referee, who did not seem the least bit inclined to give Japan any benefit of the doubt, eventually reached the point where he refused to stop play when Yemeni players went down. In fact, on one play late in the contest, a Yemeni striker dove to the turf as Japan counterattacked, and the ref urged Japan to continue play despite frantic protests by the other Yemen players. Even when the defenders at last managed to clear the ball over the sideline, he motioned for Japan to take the throw-in, deliberately ignoring the player writhing on the ground at midfield. He looked determined to allow play to continue until the shamming striker got up on his own accord. It was only because the medical team rushed onto the field and interrupted play that he finally blew his whistle and allowed the "injured" player to be stretchered off.

Be that as it may, if Japan had made a concerted effort to drive the ball forward, and thrown a few extra bodies into the box, this contest would have been over much sooner. When Osim finally went to his bench, and brought in players with a bit more "hunger" and the ability to penetrate on the dribble (specifically, Naotake Hanyu and the Sato twins, Hisato and Yuto), the Yemeni defence did indeed crumble, and the final twenty minutes were as relaxed and joyous as this entire contest should have been.

After 70 minutes of frustrating scorelessness (despite over 20 shots on net), Japan finally took the lead on a corner kick from the right side that was headed home by Yuki Abe. It is worth noting the events that led up to this goal, since they represented the sort of play that we were begging for from the opening kickoff. At around the hour hour mark, Osim relayed instructions to the players, and for the next several sequences of play, Tatsuya Tanaka, Hanyu and Keita Suzuki began drifting in behind the play, to take up spots just above the penalty arc, and tried to collect a quick cross or a drop pass and make a sudden dash into the box. Suzuki broke into the clear on one such penetration move, but pushed the ball a bit too hard as he make the final cut, and was unable to catch up with it before the keeper. On the very next sequence it was Hanyu's turn, and he took the ball all the way to the right post before a defender desperately cleared it over the end line. The subsequent corner kick met Abe cutting to the near post, and Japan finally had the lead.

At this point, Osim removed the ineffective Endo for Yuto Sato, and over the next few minutes the Yemeni defence fell completely to pieces. Three times in the space of 2 minutes, and a half-dozen times before the final whistle, Japanese penetrators were hauled down on the edge of the box, and as we noted above, if they had done a better job with their free kicks, the score could have mounted quickly. The final key was the introduction of Hisato Sato at striker. Though not quite as deft on the dribble as Tatsuya, the younger Sato twin is a consummate finisher as he demonstrated less than a minute after stepping onto the pitch. The very next time that Japan won a free kick, Santos sent the ball in for Sato, who flicked the ball enough with his forehead to cause the keeper to fumple it, and then immediately poinced on the loose ball, driving it home and turning the match into a rout.

After two matches, Osim Japan is still very much a work in progress. However, based on his response after the match, Osim will not let his players bask in the limelight of this win. The team shows a lot of promise, but will need to step up their work rate a great deal, and improve their finishing if they are to satisfy their burly Bosnian boss. For the time being, a win will keep the criticism to a minimum. But if the players Osim has selected fail to put in a bit more convincing effort in their away matches against Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, next month, we are sure to hear calls for the European contingent to be brought back into the fold. In our view, that would be neither necesary nor desirable at this stage. But if the domestic youngsters dont start producing results, it may be hard for Osim to defend his current plan to focus strictly on domestic players.