I was disappointed by Japan's game but absolutely not surprised, it was totally on par with what I was expecting after watching them on a constant basis for the last few years.
It boils down to a few, fairly clair-cut problems if you ask me:
- They can't defend for their life. Central defense has been abyssmal all year and the positionning on counters left me wondering more than once what the fuck they were doing;
- Honda and especially Kagawa are very hit-and-miss. The latter was transparent today, not to say complete shit. Honda was good, but it's far from always being the case;
- They never do shit with the ball. They struggle to build decent plays and miss simple passes all the time;
- The team has a whole really seems to have a morale problem. They will ALWAYS drop the ball in a major way at some point;
- Kawashima just isn't good enough anymore. The problem is that I'm not sure there's any JP goalie fundamently better than him and he's a big presence for the team.
I wanted to believe and tried hard to convince people this group was totally doable for Japan despite my growing concerns. Today's game put a serious dent in that belief...
I'll keep supporting them until the end though.