National Team Match:

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Japan 1 - 0 Yemen

Date: September 6, 2006 Location: Sanaa, Yemen Japan 1 0 1H 0 2 2H 0 0 Yemen Kazuki Ganaha (89') Scoring Cautions Wasim Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi, Marcus Tulio Tanaka, Keisuke Tsuboi, Yuki Abe, Keita Suzuki, Akira Kaji, Naotake Hanyu (Kazuki Ganaha 73), Alessandro Santos, Yasuhito Endo, Seiichiro Maki (Tsukasa Umesaki 89), Tatsuya Tanaka (Hisato Sato 45) TBA

The first Japan national team match that this writer watched was in 1987. A 1-0 victory by Japan over Thailand at Tokyo National Stadium, with Takashi Mizunuma scoring the lone goal of the match. Today, almost 20 years later, Mizunuma is head coach of the Yokohama Marinos, and Japan has climbed more than 100 places in the FIFA rankings. Yet on Wednesday afternoon, in Sanaa, Yemen, a group of clueless pretty-boys turned in the worst football performance -- bar none -- that we have seen in the entire 20 years that we have been following the Japan national team.

The performance was so awful that it is almost impossible to analyze. About the only players who didnt manage to look more inept than my niece's U-15 team were Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi (who only touched the ball with his hands three times over the entire 90 minutes) and Tsukusa Umesaki, who entered the contest in the 93rd minute and managed to make two successful passes in the 60 seconds he was on the pitch -- probably a greater number than Alex Santos and Yasuhito Endo made over the full 90 minutes. Everyone else turned in a performance so gut-wrenchingly awful that the US military police immediately confiscated a copy of the video and shipped it to Iraq, where they plan to begin showing it repeatedly to the high-security prisoners at Abu Gharaib (this despite the pertinent articles of the Geneva Convention that forbids military forces from subjecting their prisoners to cruel and unusual punishment).

The "quality" (if that word can be used under such circumstances) of play by nearly every player on the pitch was so universally bad that it is a bit difficult to single out individuals for criticism. However, we thought that the midfielders were particularly insipid, and veterans Alex Santos and Yasuhito Endo seemed to set the example for all to follow, by seeking new superlatives in incompetence. FOUR TIMES over the course of the match, Santos managed to lose the ball over the touch line despite the fact that no opposing players were within five yards, and he had all the time in the world to settle the pass. Endo, meanwhile, had five opportunities to collect the ball inside the penalty area, with no defender in front of him and three or four teammates in front of net. Three times he sent wild "passes" soaring off into the distance, leaving his teammates with slack jaws and open mouths, wondering what mirage Endo had ben aiming at. The fourth time, with no defenders anywhere near and the net at his mercy, Endo swung at the ball on the edge of the three yard box and sent it balooning into the stratosphere .

After Sunday's debacle in Saudi Arabia, Ivica Osim made a lot of empty comments about how disappointed he was in the team, and how he planned to make some changes. Yet in this match he started exactly the same losers, and left them in for the full 90 minutes. More importantly, he failed to provide any useful guidance for his players, in a situation where even a half-drunk high school coach could have seen the problem. The pitch in Sanaa Stadium was in awful condition, and passes were even more likely to bound wildly into never-neverland than to go where they were aimed. Anyone with half a brain could see that the situation demanded shorter passes and more effort to hold the ball, or to dribble through the opposing formation. Even the most technically gifted players in the world were not going to make connections with fourty-meter passes that needed to be letter perfect in order to be effective. Yet as fara as we could tell, Osim never once advised his players to shorten up their passes and work the ball forward on the dribble. Indeed, his first substitution merely made matters worse, as he removed Tatsuya Tanaka (possibly the most effective player on the pitch over the first 45 mintues, though that isnt really saying much) rather than one of the incompetent midfielders.

With a minute of injury time already in the books, substitute striker Kazuki Ganaha bailed Osim out of what could have been a very bad situation, when he pounced on a loose ball in front of the net, headed into a dangerous area by Seiichiro Maki, and pulled it back against the grain to beat the keeper into the left corner. Even so, this was no cause for celebration. It may be true that coach Osim has only had two months to prepare. It may be true that he is still trying to see what each player can do. It may be true that the players themselves failed to do the job. But the source of the problems is glaringly obvious, yet Osim has shown even greater inflexibility in his player selection than Zico. Wishful thinking will not make Alex Santos an effective left wing, nor will it address Endo's inability to connect with his teammates on pressure passes. It wont make Akira Kaji's skyrocketing crosses any more accurate, and it wont make Naotake Hanyu any less of a wimp.

Coach Osim came in with a glowing reputation for strategic brilliance and coaching prowess. He may yet managed to live up to these high expectations, but so far he has not done much to demonstrate his ability to identify talent, to develop an effective game plan, and to convey that plan to his players. In both the Saudi Arabia match and this one, Japan played like a bunch of unschooled teenagers messing about with a soccer ball in the local park. If this sort of tomfoolery continues, you can be sure that by the end of the year national team fans will be begging Santa Kawabuchi to give them Osim's head on a platter, as this year's Christmas present.