So, the Japanese-to-English Wikipedia didn't answer everything... What about the past match videos of Japan WNTs and clubs? Let's post some. Starting with a game in 2010. Was this one of their most important results? 2010.05.30 - Japan vs. China - 2010 AFC Women's Asian Cup 3rd Place Playoff ⬤ Nadeshiko thread in that week: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/official-2010-nadeshiko-japan-thread-r.1436540/page-4 ⬤ One player rated this in her top 30 games https://www.bigsoccer.com/posts/35585471 One or two other game videos are online. I guess, post a match, discuss it for a bit, then someone says "Can I post [match X]?", and the whole thing starts again. In Japanese: Youtube "なでしこジャパン" >20min In English: women's Japan football >20min In English but more random: women's Japan >20min. Including rugby. The Polsy geoblock page may also help.
Maybe it is too early, because who knows when football will start again, but would anybody be interested in posting a Nadeshiko best of all time eleven?
I could, but I am afraid i don't know much about the pre-2011 players (since i actually became a fan with 2011 WWC).
(IQremix, cc-by-sa) All excellent ideas, thank you! That would be great. I'd also ask a simpler question for anyone - who are your 3 favourite players ever, and why? And who are some famous players from the earlier times?
...yes! ___________ Alternate History? This match goes the other way, China qualify to the World Cup instead of Japan. In a bizarre parallel incident, the CONCACAF vs UEFA playoff is the worst-organized match ever, and Italy win due to confusion. The 2011 World Cup final is China v Italy, a thrilling game in which China score 2 equalizers and win on penalties. Frustrated with the situation, @unepommekun and @Manchester Nadeshiko become the new Japan coaching team in 2012. They win successive EAFF titles and are no longer welcome in North Korea. Italy's ISWNT becomes the world's most unbearable team, causing @blissett to move abroad to San Marino. ...but Japan won so it doesn't matter. (uh, some better-informed posts would be welcome anytime plz ) Next - this was their last match before the World Cup: 2011-06-18 Ehime Ningineer Stadium Japan 1 - 1 South Korea www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUy-qiqPnfg&t=3m21s See also - Match report at the time (in English / Archive)
In the Nadeshiko thread 2011 part I a game against Sweden is mentioned which ended 1:1 on 23rd June. Does anybody know why there is a Nadeshiko thread part I and part III but not part II which should include the WWC 2011?
My contribution to this thread, two friendly games USA vs Japan before the WWC 2011, May 14th and 18th
⬤ A match and some clips from Japan's '90s World Cups are in these threads: 1991 World Championship for Women's Football for the M&Ms Cup https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/1...for-womens-football-for-the-m-ms-cup.2109774/ has a link to Japan v USA, the last group game And Dream Team: The Stars of the 1995 Women's World Cup https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/dream-team-the-stars-of-the-1995-womens-world-cup.2109694/ including Akemi Noda at @38.14 in the program.
@pierre bezukhov said: I have had a bit of free time, so I watched all of Nadeshiko's games from the 2011 World Cup and there were a few things I noticed regarding the way the team played compared to now. They defended way better back in 2011. Watch the Germany game and Germany did not create too many dangerous chances; the same with Sweden. The US was very different, but the Americans played incredibly well that day. It was probably their best game of the tournament, which they lost. I think Sasaki just focused more on defence, but there were fewer major defensive errors. Again it is a small sample size. However, the 2011 team did not move the ball that quickly in attack. It was generally slow build play. I have issues with Takakura, but I do think that when Nadeshiko play well under her they move the ball more quickly and look more dangerous.
@blissett replied: It's a lot of time I don't rewatch the games from 2011, but back then I had watched them repeatedly to the point of almost knowing them by heart. There's absolutely no doubt that defense won that WWC to us. I said it back then and I say it again. There were multiple aspects to it. One was that we had a solid block of players that were reliable and didn't change around during the 6 matches of the tournament: no fiddling with different solutions. From right to left it was Kinga-Iwashimizu-Kumagai-Sameshima all the time: most of these players almost played every single minute of the World Cup (I remember Sameshima for sure literally did; Iwashimizu probably would have if she hadn't been sent-off in the last two minutes of the final match). We were able to try different line-ups in the midfield and in the forward line, where we could sometimes recur to super-subs as Maruyama or "baby" Iwabuchi, but we never had different starters in defense and not even subs for most of the time, not even in the last stages of the single games. I mean, our main alternate in defense back then, Kyoko Yano, was, if I remember well, the only player in the 21 players' roster who didn't play a single minute in that tournament along with the reserve GKs (incidentally: we had excellent alternate GKs in Fukumoto and Yamago, but Sasaki decided to trust Kaihori for all of the length of the tournament, that's unusual for a Nadeshiko NT, and was rewarded with the best overall performance posted by Ayumi in her whole career). We had Kinga and Sameshima in their primes, not only able to neatly defend but also to powerfully overlap on their respective sides in an era when the 4-4-2 was the go-to strategy. Iwashimizu was as solid and experienced as she's ever been (4 years later she would have been destroyed in the 2015 final, but in 2011 she was as reliable as you get) and a young Kumagai, at 20, flourished at the exact perfect moment to form a match-made-in-heaven-level CB duo with Azusa (it's not a case that Saki was consistently playing in defense, at the time, in Urawa and in Frankfurt, and not in the midfield as she currently does in OL). Given how much we were relying on a so special defense, quite magically peaking at its form, as single players and as a unit, in that precise moment in time, we sure were very lucky that no-one of our Defenders picked serious injuries during that WWC. To give you a rough idea of how important each of them was, Saki Kumagai was coming from a head-injury, but she played every minute of the first match vs New Zealand with a big headband (and she wasn't anyway shy of contact with other players: don't remember if she kept any kind of medication in the subsequent match vs Mexico, but probably just some big plaster at max)! I can tell you: had we lost any of these key-defensive players anywhere along the way, I am quite sure we wouldn't have lifted the cup. And there were some kind of heroics to that group of players: I remember Iwashimizu describing almost every match (especially the ones vs Germany and USA) as some kind of "storm" (don't remember if it was the exact word, but something similar), where the players had to toughen up and rely on each other as a unit for countless minutes without respite, encouraging each other along the way, and pining for any moment of breath ahead. It was a very stoic narrative and I guess it said a lot about that team. Bonus for anyone who read me so far: Saki Kumagai wearing her headband vs New Zealand :
I deeply deplore that but I am afraid it got lost during one of the website's migrations: not sure exactly when (probably circa 2012) one of those migrations happened and I remember that the threads weren't back all at once, but they painfully appeared one after the other in a quite slow time span, taking several days, if I remember well. When the migration was supposed to be finished, some of the threads, actually, hadn't come back at all! "Nadeshiko thread 2011 part II" was one of them, and, as you can figure, it was a very important one for us Nadeshiko Japan's fans: for my part, I had posted some messages that were very important to me in particular, as WWC 2011 was the time when I fell in love with Nadeshiko Japan and started following the team (to be honest, in the infancy of my Nadeshiko Japan's passion, I had also written some very silly post, that I can somehow rejoice it's not available anymore ). Of course, at the time, we individually and collectively contacted the moderators to try and get back that particular part of the thread but to no avail. I am not sure if that thread exists again on some obscure server of if it got lost forever in the plies of the internet, but it's a fact that it never came back to the place where it belonged to.
It is good you live in Italy. If you lived in the US you would find that is illegal in 21 States including the entire south,
If you have a Japan IP address, this week you can see the JFA's 2012 Algarve Cup stream - www.youtube.com/watch?v=80AC5YiJogM The Japan squad in 2012 (list here) had beaten Norway, then Denmark, and Japan won this 3rd group game to reach the final v Germany. For everyone, the match highlights are online - Youtube also has a full video, but only from blurry web streams (USA 0-1 Japan 1st Half, and USA-Japan 2nd Half) US WNT vs. Japan: Highlights - March 5, 2012 www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOqfRqKNK44 Match report: Japan Times (Archive), JFA (Archive) What was the final like? It sounds amazing - it's a pity the highlights may not be online anymore https://www.fifa.com/womens-football/photos/galleries/algarve-cup-germany-japan-march-2012-1595884
Mmmm... not only I don't have a Japan IP address: I don't even know exactly what it is! (Although I suspect it) It's quite funny that, in the JFA report, you can actually repeatedly read Alex Mogan, without "r", as indeed is usually spelled by a Japanese. The final was indeed amazing. I had already come back from Portugal (I had to, for work reasons), but it was in the afternoon so I managed to watch it in streaming from Italy after my morning's hours of work at school. It was a high emotional affair: Japan managed to come back twice with the score, the last time at 90', after a German goal at 88', but the subsequent German goal in the injury time killed the hope for a penalty shootout like the one at WWC 2011 vs USA and shocked and stunned the players sitting on the bench. I remember in particular the face of my favourite Shark, Aya Sameshima, after the goal (she had been subbed out during 2nd Half):
Here are the goals in the final! I'd forgotten to consult the Japanese google Algarve Cup 2012 日本 3 - 4 ドイツ Kawasumi 35', Tanaka 55', Nagasato 90' - Marozsán 20', Okoyino da Mbabi 22', 88'p, 92' Highlights: nicovideo.jp/watch/sm17185881 ...It's kinda like, you have to persuade your computer to think that it's Japanese. But vocabulary videos don't help it, I've tried. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXK5bvsYUsU
Japan... invented the World Cup?!! Well, no, but Japan created the MUNDIALITO / Little World Cup • 1981–1988 https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/mundialito-little-world-cup-•-1981–1988.2110201/ - (WorldsFairPhotos.com)...at Portopia! Just don't ask the score of the first game v Italy.
Ah, I should add - that was game 2 in the 1981 tournament. The England game was 3 days earlier, the first recorded European opponent for Japan, who had played in Asian championships since 1977. A few years later Japan played in the 1986 Mundialito in Italy, their first matches held outside Asia, including a win v Mexico 3-0 with two goals by Kaori Nagamine. In a short time the team were at the world tournaments in 1988 (invited) and 1991 (qualified), so the early efforts did pay off. Kaori Nagamine (now Kaori Imai) has been writing her football memoirs this past year on her blog, which looks incredible - she was in the Nadeshiko team from 1984 to 1996 and is still the 3rd(?)-highest goalscorer. Nagamine Kaori / 長峯 かおり https://ameblo.jp/jupangi1991/entrylist.html She was at the 1981 tournament - but as a fan! https://ameblo.jp/jupangi1991/entry-12440364053.html / Anglo-Translo / Archive
With Japan and Great Britain set for their first Olympic match, here's one from the video archive recently uploaded, the first 21st-century meeting of Japan and England: Women's World Cup 2007 Japan 2 - 2 England www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW3gDRU9HFA - Match info on Fifa.com. Japan: 1 FUKUMOTO (GK), 2 ISOZAKI (C) (-86'), 3 KINGA (-46' HT), 7 MIYAMOTO (-71'), 8 SAKAI, 9 ARAKAWA, 10 SAWA, 15 IWASHIMIZU, 16 MIYAMA, 18 OHNO, 20 UTSUGI. Subs: 6 HARA (+71'), 13 ANDO (+46' HT), 17 NAGASATO (+86') England: 1 BROWN (GK), 2 A. SCOTT (-89'), 3 STONEY, 4 CHAPMAN, 5 WHITE (C), 6 PHILLIP, 7 CARNEY, 8 WILLIAMS, 9 ALUKO (-74'), 10 K. SMITH, 11 YANKEY. Subs: 16 J. SCOTT (+74'), 20 JOHNSON (+89') ...and since then, they've been opponents in every World Cup.