Читать книгу Unbeatable Mind - Maya Yoshida - Страница 9

Survival instinct

In January 2007 I signed a professional contract with Nagoya Grampus Eight, and began my new challenge in the first team. It didn’t mean I started to play immediately, though. I was only an 18-year-old former youth player there and I had to wait for about two months before making my first-team début. I wasn’t even on the bench for the first two games of the season (the J.League season usually starts late in February or early March and ends in December in the same year). On the day of our opening game at home, I was instead helping the club off the pitch, dealing with ticket distribution before the match.

Back then, I just did whatever jobs I was given without questioning – even if it meant I would play a ‘position’ off the pitch. But now, I wonder if it was one of those typical old Japanese customs: regarding a young player automatically as an apprentice even if he had a professional contract. I don’t think that would be the case here at Southampton. I believe the club treats such players as professionals once they have a professional contract regardless of their age, even if they are still in their teens.

In general, people over here in Europe focus on doing what they are supposed to be doing, whether they are footballers, office workers or shop staff. They tend to stick with doing what they are paid for under their contracts (although I have to admit that this tendency sometimes makes them look a bit too inflexible to me, as someone who is used to a meticulous level of Japanese customer service).

Having said that, I have no complaints whatsoever about the fact that the first-team opportunities for me were hard to come by at the beginning, because, to put it simply, I was around the bottom of the pecking order. I was a nobody from the youth ranks. Many of the players in the team didn’t even know I’d been originally promoted as a defensive midfielder.

A team on the pitch consists of 11 players, of course. Even in a practice game on the training ground, there can only be a total of 22 players from the squad playing at the same time. And I couldn’t even get into those 22 when I initially joined the first team. When I did eventually have a chance to participate in a practice game at the training ground, the position I played in depended on where numbers were short on that particular day. If it happened to be a centre-back position, I was put in the middle of the back line. If an extra defensive midfielder was needed, I played in the middle of the pitch to fill the vacancy.

There was another wall to break through, a bureaucratic one, in terms of becoming a recognised first-team player. Under the J.League regulations, there are three categories for a professional player under contract: Professional A, B and C. I could only be given a Professional C contract, the lowest category as a player with 450 minutes or less of total playing time in the J1 league (the top division in the J.League). And at our training centre, the dressing room for players with a C contract was separated from the one for players with contracts in higher categories.

I found the atmosphere in the dressing room for the C-contract players rather negative. I’d hear comments like ‘I’m not in the team again!’ or ‘I should be playing rather than him because I’m better’ coming from players who had found out that they were not in the starting 11 or who had failed to make the squad travelling to an away game. Watching those around me during the first month I spent there, and feeling that negative atmosphere in the dressing room, I remember starting to feel, ‘I can’t be stuck in here. I’ve got to say goodbye to this dressing room as soon as possible if I want to make it at the top level.’ It was my survival instinct kicking in, urging me to do whatever I could to leave behind me a depressing environment that could have stagnated my professional career just when it had begun.

I tried my best to get closer to the A-contract players, approaching them off the pitch. Being the youngest of three brothers, I’m naturally used to being among my seniors, and was neither reluctant nor uncomfortable to share the company of those older than me. So yes, my resilience, ‘strength of the youngest’, helped me to make progress there. When we had lunch at the club’s canteen after team training, I tried to mingle at a table where the first-team regulars were. I also had the temerity to occupy the back seat on the team coach when travelling.

In Japan, there is an unwritten rule at a football club, and in the national team set-up too, that the back seat of a team coach is reserved for ‘VIPs’ (Very Important Players). At Grampus in my time there, Toshiya-san (Toshiya Fujita) and Nara-san (Seigo Narazaki), who were both in their thirties, and Kei-kun (Kei Yamaguchi), who was in his sixth year in the first team, were the regular occupants of the back seats. (‘San’ is a Japanese honorific suffix added to either the surname or given name of a person to show respect to someone senior or among equals, while ‘kun’ is an honorific common among male friends.) For someone who had just come up from the youth team to sit in the back seat would definitely be going against the rule. But I realised there was always one more space available in the back seat on our team coach, so I summoned up my courage and sat there one day.

Once I was sitting with the ‘VIPs’, although they frequently made fun of this out-of-the-box new face from the youth team, they never forced me to get out of the back seat. In the end, one of the spaces there became a reserved seat for the ‘VYP’ (Very Young Player); that was me.

My longing to secure a Professional A contract was not the only reason why I was drawn closer to these players. While we (the C-contract players) had to clean our football boots by ourselves, A-contract players had Matsuura-san (Noriyoshi Matsuura), the first professional kit man in Japan, to take care of their boots. For them, a pair of muddy boots they left in their dressing room would always be waiting as a nice and shiny pair of boots on the following day. More important than avoiding having to clean your own boots, a professionally serviced pair of boots makes you feel more comfortable and less tired when wearing them.

To get to a place where I could have the ‘magic hands’ of Matsuura-san take care of my boots became one of my goals as a first-team player at Grampus. And the more I dwelt on that thick wall – both metaphorical and physical – separating us from the dressing room assigned to the A-contract players, the more strongly I felt, ‘I don’t want to be a C-contract player for long.’

A sea of red

The football god seemed to have been listening to my prayers and started answering them little by little, though it was in unfortunate circumstances for the team and some of the regular players that I got my big break. Following Marek Špilár, who picked up an injury on the opening day of the season, other centre-backs who were ahead of me in the pecking order began to join the former Slovakia international on the team’s injury list. So came my first-team début. It was during the ninth league game of the season against Oita Trinita when I was told, ‘Maya, you are on for the second half,’ by the then manager, Sef Vergoossen.

I think I generally have a good memory, but when it comes to matches that I’ve been involved in, sometimes my memories remain exceptionally vivid. Maybe they are stored in a special drawer in my memory bank. I’m going to focus on key matches in my career in each chapter of this book, each one illustrating my ‘samurai resilience’.

My choice for this chapter has to be a J.League game against Urawa Red Diamonds on 19 May 2007. It was the game in which I received my first proper harsh lesson as a professional player at Grampus, a narrow defeat (1–2) due to a late winner scored by the former Brazil international striker, Washington (full name: Washington Stecanela Cerqueira).

It was also my full début in front of our home crowd, though I had already been in the starting 11 in the previous two away games. As soon as I ran out for the pre-match warm-up, I was just amazed and went, ‘Oh my God.’ The packed stadium was a sea of red, as this was the main team colour for both Grampus and Urawa Reds.

Besides, I had never seen with my own eyes from the pitch the Toyota Stadium with almost 35,000 spectators packed inside it. The football stadium, the home ground of Grampus, was opened in July 2001. I had watched many games there since an intra-squad game opened the stadium, but the electric atmosphere on that day of the Urawa Reds game was something out of this world to me at the time.

And I was going to play in the starting line-up in that game. I felt an adrenaline rush just from being on the pitch in that atmosphere. I was still gazing at the packed stadium and trembling with excitement at the prospect of playing against one of the big guns in the J.League, when Toshiya-san ran up to me and said, ‘Isn’t this great, Maya?’ I answered ‘Yes!’, but he’d already moved on. ‘How cool is he?’ I thought admiringly, as he made his way confidently about the pitch.

However, all I felt inside me right after the game was disappointment in defeat and frustration about my inability to prevent the winning goal, scored by the opposing team’s lone striker. Washington, who spearheaded the Urawa Reds’ attack, was a strong centre-forward and had been the J.League’s top scorer in the previous season. At that time there weren’t many players in the league who could stop this clinical 6’ 2” finisher. So when the manager told me, ‘Be prepared. You’ll be starting,’ the day before the game, I’d honestly thought, ‘What? Really? Can I deal with Washington?’

On balance, though, my overall performance against Washington in that game wasn’t too bad. To this day, I don’t mind facing strikers like him, whose main attribute is physical strength.

A small margin but a big difference

There were only five or six minutes remaining in the second half. The moment I saw Washington receive the ball to his feet from the right, he turned the other way to shake off his marker and shot with his right foot. I was about a yard away from him, and tried to block his shot with my outstretched leg, but I could only make the slightest connection with the ball. To make matters worse, that tiny deflection changed the flight and took the ball away from the arm of our goalkeeper flying to make a save behind me.

‘If I could have touched just a little bit more of the ball …’ The fact that it shaved my leg made my frustration stronger; it was such a small margin between blocking a shot and conceding a goal. I told myself afterwards, ‘I have to close that small gap which makes such a big difference. Otherwise, I can’t make it to the top in the professional football world. This is the world where only those who make a difference by using that slight margin to their advantage can survive.’ This thought was etched deeply in my mind on that day and has lived with me ever since.

Even now, I sometimes say, ‘It’s a matter of whether I can get one step or half a step closer,’ after the game. I have been trying my hardest to close that gap, but as you make progress towards a higher standard there’s always still a gap to close: a gap that makes a difference between winning and losing. And that difference can mean life or death in the world of professional football.

As a youth player I was almost invincible in aerial battles. I almost always came out as a winner. But against Washington I just about managed to make his life less comfortable when competing in the air. Not only the resulting defeat, but also the whole 90 minutes, was a really tough lesson for me on that day. The god of football certainly seems to be good at using a carrot-and-stick method to keep me motivated …

Two former ‘teachers’

Sef, the first manager I had as a professional footballer, was a very forgiving boss. It may be a common characteristic among managers and coaches from the Netherlands, his native country, but he was especially tolerant of positive mistakes by young players. Having said that, he must have needed great patience to keep playing me in my first year in the first team. Back then, I made two or three mislaid passes per game. There was one occasion when my mind was so preoccupied with making a forward pass to a team-mate’s feet that I actually passed the ball instead to the opponent’s striker standing right in front of me. But Sef still kept using me.

However, even he would surely have had second thoughts about playing me if the team had kept on conceding due to my mistakes. So I really have to thank Nara-san, our goalkeeper at that time. He kept making saves while this inexperienced centre-back kept making mistakes. Because of his skill in goal, my blunders didn’t prove fatal to the team. Not only did he save us from conceding goals; he also saved me from being dropped to the bench on countless occasions – a true guardian of young Maya Yoshida.

In his managerial style, Sef seemed to me more of a teacher type than a typical football coach. He saw a player’s behaviour both on and off the pitch as an important part of his quality as a professional. If a player did or said something deemed inappropriate by the manager, he wouldn’t be playing afterwards, even if he was good enough to be a national team player. Sef had that sort of disciplinarian side to him, too.

In contrast, Dragan Stojković, aka Piksi, who succeeded Sef at Grampus in 2008, was a very demanding manager even to young players.

He was my idol in his playing days. When I was little, he was merely a player whom I liked, but after I joined the academy at Grampus, the club where he became a legend thanks to his brilliant technique and creative vision, I started to see Piksi as my hero. When he hung up his boots in 2001, I even went to watch his farewell ceremony at the stadium. So I was simply overjoyed to have an opportunity to play in a team managed by him.

He still had outstanding ball skills even several years after his retirement. On the training ground he could deliver an inch-perfect pass to a receiver’s feet; sometimes he was angry with himself when he thought the quality of the pass was not up to his ultra-high standard.

He set the standards for his players quite high, too, and rightly so, never overlooking a single mistake in a game. The former fantasista known for his deft touches had a strict side as a manager. He may have been known for his good looks but his face was nothing but scary when he pointed out the mistakes we had made in a game and demanded an immediate response from us to improve. In one team meeting, while he was shouting at us, ‘Why did you guys concede such a cheap goal?!’ he banged a whiteboard he was using so hard that a magnet stuck to the board’s surface came flying towards me.

As it turned out, having a forgiving and understanding manager, almost like a school teacher, in my first year as a professional, and then a much more demanding and strict manager in my second year, seemed to help me greatly in terms of my first-team survival. My ideal style of football – the skeleton of which took shape while I was coached by Mr Pak as a youth player – was fleshed out under Sef and Piksi, my first two managers as a professional footballer. I have added more substance to that skeleton ever since, and being someone who is good at learning from people around me I still keep on fleshing it out as a Premier League player, too.

From the motherland to the Netherlands

At the end of the year 2009, it was time for me to switch stages to perform as a footballer outside Japan. A new challenge began when I signed a three-and-a-half-year contract with VVV-Venlo in the Eredivisie, the first division in the Dutch football league.

If someone were to ask me whether it was an easy decision to leave Grampus, where I had spent nine years since joining its academy, my answer would be, ‘No, it wasn’t.’ The people at Grampus, including managers, coaches and senior players, had taught me to grow both as a professional footballer and as a young man. It was there in Nagoya where the foundation of today’s Maya Yoshida was formed.

But I believed that I was making the right decision in my professional career, and that it wouldn’t be wrong to leave the club at that point. I even thought that a young Grampus player going abroad to advance his career would be beneficial to the club in the long term, so the Grampus supporters shouldn’t be feeling too sad about me leaving the club.

How did my parents and brothers take my decision? Well, I don’t really remember, to tell you the truth. I rarely ask my family members for advice and I certainly don’t remember asking them, ‘I want to move abroad to play, but what do you think?’ before deciding to move to VVV. That now makes me wonder how they would have reacted had I made wrong decisions when I was younger. Would any member of the laissez-faire Yoshida family have told off their youngest boy? I’m not sure, but then again, I don’t think I’d have made the sort of rash decisions some young people do.

Having said that, it was not like I had many options to consider before making a decision at that time. VVV were the only club I could go to if I wanted to move to Europe. I had just three years of experience in the J.League as a professional with no particular achievements even at the domestic level. There was no way for such a player to attract much interest from clubs abroad. On top of that, only a handful of Japanese were playing in Europe at the time and it was still difficult for a younger generation, my generation of Japanese players, to go abroad, even if we were keen to try.

For me, the move only became realistic six months or so after Honda-san’s (Keisuke Honda) move to VVV. Other Japanese playing in Europe around that time were all from an older generation, such as Shunsuke Nakamura (then at Celtic) and Daisuke Matsui (then at Saint-Étienne). Under those circumstances, a young player like myself, the nobody of nobodies, had no right to complain about having no choice of foreign clubs to move to. I was just fortunate to share the same agent as Honda-san and was able to count on his strong connections with VVV.

It was the summer of 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. At the Shenyang Olympic Sports Center Stadium in China my agent was watching a men’s Group B game between Japan and the Netherlands in the stadium with Mr Hai Berden, the chairman of VVV.

I’d only just made the Japan national Under-23 squad for Beijing and was not involved in the first two group games. But my chance finally came in our third game against the Netherlands, with Japan’s elimination from the tournament already confirmed after two defeats.

We had nothing other than our pride to play for, but for the Netherlands a place in the knockout stage was still at stake. Therefore we faced a strong Dutch side and I was fortunate to have the chance to play against attacking talents such as Roy Makaay (then at Feyenoord) and Ryan Babel (then at Liverpool) while the chairman of VVV watched on from the stand. And it was right there that a conversation between Mr Berden and my agent took place – one that can be very simply summarised as follows:

Mr Berden: ‘That defender looks quite good.’

My agent: ‘He’s our player.’

Mr Berden: ‘Oh, well, we shall make an approach then.’

Since I already had a vision of furthering my career step by step overseas, I didn’t have any problem at all with making my first step abroad in the Netherlands. In fact, I welcomed the challenge, as it was the country I could imagine myself moving to and playing football in based on past experience at least. Just before I became a high-school student in Japan I’d briefly had a chance to visit the Netherlands with a Grampus youth team, and had watched league games there and played against some local youth sides.

Some people were strongly against my decision to leave Grampus for VVV, saying, ‘Why do you have to move to such a small club in the Netherlands?’ But to me it was never that I felt I ‘had to’ move there, and it wasn’t like I chose VVV instead of some bigger clubs in other countries.

Piksi, my manager at Grampus, was also against the move at that point in my career. ‘It’s too early for you,’ he told me, on more than one occasion. Every time we spoke about my possible transfer, he said, ‘It’s not too late if you move after at least one more year here,’ or, ‘You’d better have enough under your belt before you move abroad,’ as he tried to persuade me to stay.