Official 2018 Nadeshiko Japan Thread [R] - なでしこジャパン（英語スレッド）

First of all, welcome on board, Pierre, and congratulations for the choice of your avatar (Magritte being probably my favourite painter).

About your points: it's obvious that, two years after being put in charge, Takakura is still tinkering a lot with the team. In part, I guess she can't do otherwise (any way you look at it, this generation doesn't have the same level of talent as the one from 2011 WWC), in part it sometimes almost seems like she's looking for troubles with some very particular choices of players or positioning. I have to give her some credit, because it's exactly this kind of apparently odd choices that led her to the win 2014 U-17 WWC, one of the most impressive display of complete dominance by a team that I've ever seen in an international tournament. On the other hand, she can't think that any "odd choice" can always pay and that she can simply repeat what she did at youth level, that's in fact a competly different animal from senior level.

As I said before, I guess the moment of truth will be AFC Cup; in the end, Algarve Cup remain a glorified set of friendly matches, made difficult by weather conditions and lack of fitness by our players who are at the beginning of the season. If these matches will reveal the correct preparation for AFC and we will get some good results there, then Takakura will be allowed to claim she's on the right track. If Japan will look as mediocre at AFC as they looked at Algarve instead, then it will be correct to start discussing Takakura. Until then, I guess it's fair to suspend the judgement (although, as you rightfully noticed, two years is already a lot of time to make things right, and we should have already seen some light at the end of the tunnel).

About your more specific points. In the past I could have agreed with you about Nakajma, who had often seemed a ball-waster to me in the years around 2015-16. Right now, I don't agree anymore, since she seemed a key-player to me in 2017 instead. Ok, her best matches were often against quite mediocre teams (for instance, Switzerland, that was just demolished by Italy in Cyprus Cup), but I quite like the way she was moving on the pitch and she was giving depth to the team last season. This Algarve was really sub-optimal from her, but I will blame it mostly on her poor fitness: I am persuaded that a fit Nakajima can be an effective starter for the team (if a little fragile by a physical point of view: but this can be said for our best technical talents also: Iwabuchi, Hasegawa...; of course, as M.N. noticed, they have to be protected more by referees).

About Hasegawa, I agree with you that she's one of our best hopes, although she has to find continuity at high level and her play has to become a little more pragmatic. She already does a lot as a winger: you see her more as a central play-maker? In fact, at last U-20 WWC some of her triangles with Momiki were outstanding: would you care to elaborate how you would see an optimal starting midfield for Nadeshiko Japan?

 

So were the venues for U-20 WWC matches also decided?

 

Yes, and what's probably the best discovery from this Algarve gets injured and will most likely have to skip AFC! How much cursed are we?

She indeed knew how bad it was to miss Shimizu (and how thuggish some Canadian players have been: she cares for her diminutive team-mate from both NT and Beleza, and wants to protect her!).
But, let's face it: isn't Mizuho often a little grumpy? She just has been a little more than usual: her smiles are as precious as they are scarce on the pitch, where she uses to prefer a more "serious" look.

 

Thank you very much, @GunnerTNB! I wasn't hoping anymore to retrieve this kind of info!!!

I am happy that we have so many "silent" followers and that what we post generates interest for them: by the way, welcome back @GunnerTNB: long time no see, but I suppose you're anyway following the thread, at least from time to time if not regularly!

So we just witnessed our worst defeat in the last 15-16 years! It's sure impressive!

And we hadn't anyway much results that were worse in our recent history: I am not really good at Japanese, but I can at least count the worse results, even if I can't really tell each opponent. I am going to do that right now... (*statistics geek in action*).

 

By painfully using a Google translator at each step, I managed to piece together from the file provided by GunnerTNB (courtesy of JFA ) all of the results in Nadeshiko Japan's history that were as bad as our recent 2-6 defeat, or worse. Luckily for me there are "only" about 37 years of Nadeshiko Japan history, and in the first years Japan didn't anyway play much (five games in 1981, including some tournament called "Utopia '81", then three full years of stop, until 1984 ; three games in that year, in some mysterious "Xi'an Invitational", then another stop until January 1986! It can't surprise that most of our worse defeats came in those years: you couldn't really say that we could be very fit and well-trained with something like 8 games in 5 full years ). Also luckily for me, there really weren't many losses that could be compared with the one we recently witnessed: only 18 matches (19 counting the latest one) out of 350 in our history were equal or worse to 2-6 (the total matches are the 232 from JFA file + 118 from the recent Wikpedia entry I had found: apparently there is an historical gap between summer 2008 and 2010, when only 3 games are recorded, while probably some more were played).

Of course, there were other bad losses with result like 1-4 or 2-5 (most notably the final of WWC 2015), but I didn't count them because, even if Japan had taken 4 or 5 goals, the goal difference was anyway less than 4.

It appears the teams that used to school us this way in the past were mostly China (4 such losses, 2 by a 4 goal margin, 2 by more), USA (4 such losses, 2 by a 4 goals margin, 2 by more, including being tied for our worse defeat ever, a 0-9) and, quite surprisingly, Italy (4 such losses, 2 by a 4 goal margin, 2 by more, including being tied for our worse defeat ever, another 0-9). Obviously, Japan met Italy in those years pre-World-Cup-existence, when Italy was still one of the powers of women's football. Other losses were to Canada, Norway, Australia, England, Sweden, Russia (now Netherlands join them).

Among the losses with a 4 goals margin, there was only another 2-6, to Australia in 1984 (others were three 1-5 and six 0-4): so, apart from being one of the worse results in our history, our loss to Netherlands was also a quite uncommon one, an actual oddity.

In the lists below, I gave the results (from more recent one to oldest one), the dates, the teams that defeated us and the circumstances when they happened: in some cases these are well-know international events, in others they're tournament I didn't know about (probably the names for some glorified set of friendly matches that were popular at the time, as Tournament of Nations is these days): when I wasn't sure about my translation or anyway I had never heard of such a tournament, I added a question mark (?). In a pair cases, even the file didn't have any name for the tournament (probably some kind of random double-header vs USA).

Here are the lists: enjoy!

Nadeshiko Japan results with the same margin as our recent 2-6 defeat to Netherlands (total: 10):
- 0-4 on 2002/08/27, to China (EAFF Cup? Although still not-official, I guess, since first official EAFF Cup was in 2005)
- 1-5 on 2000/06/10,to Canada (Pan Pacific Cup)
- 0-4 on 1996/07/25 to Norway (Olympics 1996 in Atlanta; interesting tidbit: first women's football olympic tournament ever, Homare Sawa and Asako Takakura were on the pitch )
- 0-4 on 1996/05/16 to USA (US Women's Cup?)
- 0-4 on 1995/06/13 to USA (quarter finals of WWC 1995 in Sweden)
- 0-4 on 1989/01/16 to China (Xiamen international Convention?)
- 1-5 on 1986/07/19 to Italy (Mundialito 1986, in Italy)
- 1-5 on 1984/10/24 to Italy (Xi'an Invitational in China?)
- 2-6 on 1984/10/22 to Australia (Xi'an Invitational in China?)
- 0-4 on 1981/09/06 to England (Utopia '81 Tournament?)


Nadeshiko Japan results worse than our recent 2-6 defeat to Netherlands (total: 8):

- 0-5 on 1999/06/23, to Russia (group stage of WWC 1999 in USA)
- 0-7 on 1999/05/02, to USA (??? Some kind of friendly)
- 0-9 on 1999/04/29, to USA (??? Some kind of friendly)
- 0-8 on 1991/11/19 to Sweden (group stage of WWC 1991 in China)
- 0-5 on 1991/06/08 to China (final match of AFC Asian Cup 1991 in Japan)
- 0-5 on 1990/09/27 to China (Asian Games 1990; first women's football tournament ever at Asian Games: no final, only a round robin was played and Japan was second to China; Asako Takakura and Midori Honda on the pitch)
- 0-6 on 1984/10/17 to Italy (Xi'an Invitational in China?)
- 0-9 on 1981/09/09 to Italy (Utopia '81 Tournament?)



Edit: actually, I now realized that I just manually found these result in the file and I didn't double-checked the results, so I most likely could have made some mistake. If anyone wants to make a check for me, I would be very grateful!

 

It's worth considering that, out of 37 years of Nadeshiko Japan NT activity, 10 of the worse losses happened in the first decade, between 1981 and 1991. we had only 9 of them in the remaining 27 years (in means an average of one in three years).

They were actually just 8 of them, alas, until last month!