Takeshi Okada has finished his second stint as Japan’s head coach, but and despite a tumultuous reign he has finished on a high. But Okada came into his second World Cup as a figure of ridicule in Japan, for his team’s pitiful form, and globally, for his semi-final prediction. After the East Asian Championships in February, where Japan finished behind China and South Korea, the calls for O..

The South African adventure has come to an end for the 23 players involved. Some have of course been involved more than others, with 6 players playing every minute (the back 5, plus Honda), while 5 saw no action at all. So how did they get on individually? Well my brief opinions are below, but no doubt we’ll all have slightly differing views on several of them, so let me know what you think ..

After a difficult second round of matches for the Asian teams, things came rather good in the final round, culminating in two teams going through and two going home. North Korea were already eliminated of course, and finished up with a 3-0 defeat to the Ivory Coast. Things have petered out somewhat for the Chollima since their magnificent opening performance against Brazil and they finish up w..

Apparently there have been three goals in the World Cup which have been responsible for breaking the all-time record number of Twitter posts written per second, although that later got beaten by the NBA Basketball finals. But the biggest of those World Cup tweets was when Keisuke Honda scored for Japan against Cameroon. Normally there are around 750 messages per second apparently. But when K..

Japan went into this match with an unchanged side, which meant Keisuke Honda as the lone man up front again, and a very defensive formation. Japan were set up to play for a point and frustrated the Dutch throughout the first half. The first half possession was overwhelmingly in favour of the Dutch, but in the first 45 minutes Eiji Kawashima was not threatened once so you could say the stifling ..

After the narrow win over Cameroon, we go into the next match joint on three points with the Dutch at the top of the table, trailing on goal difference. Japan have got off to a great start but the level of opposition goes up several notches now. Naturally this is going to be a tougher match than the Cameroon one, but there are two ways of looking at it. Firstly, this could turn into a humiliat..

Asia’s four representatives have all played their opening matches and with one notable exception it’s gone rather well from an Asian perspective. Getting the exception out of the way first, Asia’s highest ranked team coming into this tournament was of course Australia (20th in the world). They faced Germany on Sunday night which was obviously a fairly tough prospect. The Australia of 4 y..