Looks like Mana Iwabuchi is starting to make a difference at Aston Villa: First start today, and she both scored once and assisted once for an eventual 2-2 draw. Hope we get to see highlights somewhere, dunno where even to start looking for such.
FA WSL Aston Villa 2 - 2 Reading Iwabuchi first time in starting XI. She scored 1st one in 55' and worked an equalizer in 90+1' noting an assist. Seriously though the gap between her and the rest of the team is huge.
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Thanks for the info! I also see now that @sbahnhof covers WSL in the Women's International forum on here. I wish she'd come back to Bayern. Back when she was here the team was also pretty weak (especially tactically) but this season I feel Mana would fit right in.
By the way: I hadn't had the time to watch and properly comment this interview from some days ago: Mana speaks a quite good English for a player who has never played in an English or US league before. Also, she's typically very humble, in Japanese style: doesn't even want to mention that she's a former World Champion and repeatedly presents this experience as "her new challenge", although it will probably mostly be a challenge for her team-mates to raise up their game at her level. Also she repeatedly bows à la "arigato gozaimashita" when she says "thank you". The falling snow on the pitch was nice and funny. Apart from what @Lechus7 pointed out, I guess the Aston Villa Youtube channel where the interview was released could be a good source for highlights of the women's team, although I am not sure when they could be uploaded there.
I don't actually have a clear favourite one. I always liked Kobayashi who in my opinion is quite underrated, she can fill any gap in the attack. Obviously, everyone likes Hasegawa, high football IQ very marketable. Miura was brilliant before, a key position but she regressed recently, even though she still young. In defence Doko was instrumental, I thought she should be a starter for the NT, same with Shimizu but CB is more important than RB. Lastly, Yamashita is the best Japanese keeper ever (in my opinion). So now it's should be between healthy Kobayashi, Hasegawa and Shimizu.
This reminded me that I made some remark that, after Doko's injury, Beleza's defense was, "Shimizu and a bunch of kids." I don't remember the exact quote, but I remember during the World Cup, the commentators here in the States saying that Shimizu was well on her way to being one of the top right backs in the world. I just nodded my head in knowing approval.
Meanwhile, I guess it's too long we don't post a good, random celebrative video like in the old days of this thread: let's enjoy this selection of Iwabuchi's goals and assists from the last two years.
Mana Iwabuchi is listed with the highest market value in her team:50000€. https://www.soccerdonna.de/de/mana-iwabuchi/profil/spieler_2904.html Pretty weak seems a bit excessive to me. Bayern won the German championship twice with Mana. I was surprised that a injury prone player like Mana chose a league which she herself assesses as more physical than the Bundesliga.
I think Shimizu is a good right-back, but Japan actually has depth at right back. I would like to see Shimizu moved to centre-back and have Takase from INAC play at right-back for Nadeshiko. I doubt that will happen.
Yeah, comparing to other league players, 50k is a joke. Prejudice and stereotypical thinking is showing. Ask yourself how they will price Nagasato then (BL and NWSL assist leader) - 40k? I bet Kumagai will be priced less than Henry, which will prove it's popularity contest yet again but this time with $ instead of ranks. Fun fact . Oberdorf is fantasy priced 250k (seriously dunno where that comes from)... while in reality Pajor has written in her contract 1 million euro transfer fee for anyone who wants her taken from Wolfsburg.
I'm not talking about weakness in performance against other clubs, I was referring to the prevalence (rather the lack thereof) of technical and tactical abilities over plain brute force football that became more and more common in the years after 2011 before new coaches (like Bayern's coach Jens Scheuer) and young players arrived.
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Highlights of the match, featuring Iwabuchi's goal & assist: the equalizer under the snow was quite poetic (although they should have changed the ball with a red one, by then: it can barely be seen in footage ). The rest of Mana's team looks indeed quite weak, but their GK made some good saves, thus keeping them in the game for long enough.
Women’s Super League: talking points from the weekend’s action | Women's Super League | The Guardian Rachel Brown Finnes on Mana Iwabuchi
Nice article: they are discovering how much of an impact player Iwabuchi can be. Seriously, she's one of the international stars of the women's game, so it shouldn't surprise that she can turn whole games around, but of course Nadeshiko players are not enough well-known outside of Japan, so it's understable that she looks quite the sensation. It stings a little that she has to settle with a so poor team as her current one, but who knows what Aston Villa could achieve with her help: for sure her mere presence make them something different from the cannon-fodder they were basically considered before. It almost reminds me (and not only because of the Mana-dona nickname that's been given to Iwabuchi in Japan) of the time in my youth when Napoli, a team that had never won an Italian league before, signed Diego Armando Maradona, and procedeed to grab two titles in the subsequent five years: of course the team was already a little better than current Aston Villa's level is, but the difference between the team and the star-player that's just been signed is similar. Anyway, as I have written before, their GK doesn't look bad at all, at least judging from this game. I learn from the article that she's Lisa Weiss, a German GK who sat on the bench as a reserve for OL in the last pair of seasons: if OL signed her, she had to have something, and anyway she sure had chances to further progress in that environment, even without substantial playing time. A question for @Manchester Nadeshiko: despite my decent English proficiency, I didn't understand what does this sentence exactly mean: "She is 5ft 1in and about seven stone". Is stone a measurement unit? I had never heard of it.
Wow, I knew Iwabuchi was light, but 44Kg is lighter than I figured! Also, last time I checked, you were using pounds in UK: where did these "stones" come from?
Oh, ok, thank you! I'll never understand why you Brits find more comfortable to count in base 12 or base 14 or any other oddity-base compared to decimal!
Imperial units are all a lot of fun if you're used to boring metric units that are always multiples of 10 of each other. @blissett
I appreciated your link and I educated myself with it. There I found this very clear scheme of English units of length, that I think says it all: