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