you get in the middle of the defensive line. As a centre-back, your view is basically locked in on what is going on ahead of you, while as a central midfielder you need a much wider range of vision. You get pressure from your opponents from the side or behind as well as in front. At first, when playing in that role, there were times when the ball was nicked off me by someone whom I wasn’t paying enough attention to. But once you get used to playing in the middle of the pitch, you start enjoying it more, too. I felt it was fun to initiate an attack from a deep-lying position. Also, it felt good every time I sniffed danger and stopped the opponent’s attack before it actually developed.
In midfield, I also found that I could polish what I had been trying to equip myself to do since I started kicking a ball with my brothers and their friends, such as developing complete control of the ball and learning to think quickly in order to beat older, more developed opponents. That, I think, is why Mr Pak put me back in midfield – to improve my technique and awareness.
Beginning of the long-distance hurdle race
The role I was given by Mr Pak in the Grampus youth team was that of anchor-man – a one-man shield for the back line. While I was learning and performing in that pivotal role between the team’s attack and defence, I was also named team captain. My character – naturally positive but objective and realistic at the same time – no doubt contributed to me getting the armband.
By the end of the season I led the Grampus Under-18 team to just one win away from being crowned as the national champions in the 2006 Prince Takamado Trophy All Japan Youth Football League, in which professional clubs’ youth sides competed with high-school football teams. That professional club involvement distinguished the tournament from the two other major domestic youth tournaments in Japan, namely the All Japan High School Soccer Tournament and the Inter High School Sports Festival (Football). In the tournament proper, 24 teams who came through regional qualifiers were divided into six groups of four in the first round, and then the top two teams in each group competed in the knockout stage to reach the summit of the Japanese domestic youth football world.
We lost to a team from Takigawa Dai-ni High School in the final, but my performance in the tournament as an anchor-man wearing the captain’s armband didn’t go unnoticed by my coaches. By then I had already occasionally been invited to first-team practice sessions at Grampus. I don’t think my overall physical strength really stood out among my professional seniors, but I believe the coaches thought I was worth taking a closer look at in the first-team environment because of my height and ability to build up from the back. When I joined the academy at the age of 12, I was in awe of players around me such as the ‘Big Four’, the four team-mates who were regularly called up to join the team in the higher age group, but now I felt I had a chance of being promoted from the youth to the first team at Grampus.
It would be a lie if I said that, as a high-school student, I didn’t feel uncomfortable or like an outsider when all the others in my class were thinking about going on to have a higher education while I was trying to set out on the path to becoming a professional footballer. But quitting school was never an option because I didn’t want to be labelled as someone who could do nothing but football. At the same time, I didn’t want to be viewed by people at the academy as a youth player who couldn’t make it because he was going to a state school. I have always set myself targets that seemed difficult to reach.
At a J.League club, only a few players are given a professional contract at the end of the youth development process (at the age of 18). I have heard that only around 1 per cent of youth graduates at a Premier League club make it, but even in the J.League I reckon that only around 2 per cent of youth players go on to become a professional with their club. I, together with three other youth graduates, was given a professional contract by Grampus, and it was unprecedented in the club’s history that four players from the youth academy were promoted to the first team as professionals at the same time.
In order to pass through such a narrow gate, it is important to have a clear vision of how you’re going to reach a higher standard from an early stage in your development. How far you go depends to a large extent on how high you set your goal as well as the actions you take to reach it. I believe this applies not only to players at youth academies in Japan or at J.League clubs, but also to those playing in any league in any country. It could even be the same for players or competitors in other sports, or for those trying to work their way up in a corporation or organisation.
Of course, on your way to reaching your goal there may be times when you feel as though you’ve hit a wall; you feel inadequate or far behind the others. But you can’t give up or lower your aspirations. You shouldn’t swap the high hurdle in front of you for a lower one, imagining that this will make it easier to continue running. If you have the right mental attitude, a sense of inferiority or impending defeat can be turned into a positive energy, a boost to help you clear the hurdle or smash through the wall. That’s how you get used to clearing hurdles one by one, barely noticing that each gets a little higher along the way. Certainly, that was how this youngest brother of three, who left his home town at the tender age of 12, managed to reach the point where, in my long-distance hurdle race towards a football career, I could see the starting line in terms of becoming a professional player.
CHAPTER 2
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).