As the 2022 World Cup in Qatar draws nearer, Japan, the Asian powerhouse, was placed in Group E, along with Spain and Germany, along with Spain and Germany, in the previous draw ceremony. Facing such a formidable opponent, Japan naturally will not miss this opportunity to educate its younger generations with the highest level of world football, and recently they said that they will take the Japanese U21 to Qatar together!
It is reported that the Japanese national football team plans to take japan U21 to train together in the form of almost "eating and living together" during the World Cup, and Japan's U21 will also watch the seniors play in the group stage on the spot to feel the atmosphere of the World Cup. At present, the base camp of the Japanese team is set as the most well-equipped Al Sadh club among Qatari clubs, creating the best conditions for the team in terms of hardware.
In fact, as early as the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the Japanese national football team had already brought the then U19 players to participate in team training as a sparring partner, and watched three group matches, and the then only 17-year-old Kuji Ying was among them, so the intuitive feeling brought to the strength behind Japanese football was undoubtedly extremely valuable.
For today's Japanese U21 national football team we are no longer strangers, just before the end of the Dubai Cup Youth Invitational Tournament, Japan U21 won the championship with three wins and zero goals in the final 1-0 Nick Saudi U23, as the youngest team in this invitational tournament, the reserve strength of Japanese football can be seen. This is the first official game of coach Oiwa Tsuyoshi coaching the team, he injected his tenacious character into this team, and paid special attention to the team's play in set-pieces, according to Japanese media reports, Oiwa Tsuyoshi spent an hour on the day before each game to carry out set-piece attack and defense drills, and as a result, in the last two games, the Japanese team used set-piece and out-of-bounds ball tactics to complete the goal.
In terms of goalkeepers, the goalkeeper of the Paris Olympic age-appropriate team known as the "Paris Generation" is also quite noteworthy, with three different goalkeepers used in three matches, mixed-race Suzuki Caiyan (father Ghanaian, mother Japanese), with Ederson and Oblak, Benfica-born goalkeeper Reiyang Kokubo Reiyon (father Nigerian) and Masashi Sasaki, known as the next generation of door gods of the Sun God. In addition, new stars who play in the J League, such as Suzuki Toshihito, Araki Ryotaro araki and former "Japan's first high school student" Matsuki Jiusheng, and some foreign players are the main force of this U21 team.
In fact, such a policy is also inseparable from the continuous improvement and promotion of the game itself by the Football Association and the league, in September 2019, the Executive Committee of the Japanese J-League officially passed the proposal on the U21 policy and the U21 League, announcing that from 20 years, the J2 and J3 leagues will implement the U21 reward policy, specifically stipulating the total playing time of the club to send U21 players, the J2 league reaches 3780 minutes (90 * 42) the prize money is 3 million yen, and the J3 league indicator is 3240 minutes (90 * 36) The prize money is 2 million yen, and the U21 goalkeeper time is doubled. In 2021, the U21 League will be held, and all three league clubs can sign up.
The Japanese Football Association's policy can be said to be in line with the times, and in order to cultivate the next generation of excellent people, the goal is to achieve the World Cup Final Four as soon as possible and the 2030 vision of creating the world's most suitable football environment for players to grow. It can be seen that the previous U23 policy of the Chinese Super League has been criticized, and in recent years, with the rapid development of world football, the ability and improvement space of U23 players have been relatively fixed, and Japanese football has proved the feasibility of its U21 policy with the title of the Dubai Cup.
For the upcoming East Asian Cup, Japan also plans to send U21 to play, the Chinese men's football team plans to send U23 men's football to compete, sending national football teams of different ages to play also represents the target of both, China is considering training for the Hangzhou Asian Games, and Japan has long pointed to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Such an "inner volume" has also attracted the attention of the Korean Football Association, and it is also considering reassigning the U23 national football team to compete in the East Asian Cup under fear...
Perhaps we should really consider changing the existing policy, the living example is Shanghai Shenhua, due to the heavy task of the national team, focusing on the training of the U23 national football team in the context of Shenhua not only to be drawn Wen Jiabao, Zhu Chenjie and Jiang Shenglong, the team's main midfielder Wu Xi is sent to U23 to help the team to fight, no matter what the result of the national team, and whether it has achieved the purpose of training, Shenhua's Chinese Super League journey this season has not yet begun has been marked with a big question mark. On the other hand, the extraction of U21 will not have too much impact on the club, but also better achieve the purpose of training, so that the training path is difficult to have bad results.
After the Dubai Cup match, manager Ōiwa said he would build the team by the standards of an adult national team, hoping that the players would "not go to the national team through Paris to report, but to Paris as a full international". Now, this U21 team will go to Qatar with Japan's adult national football team, and in the future, we may not even see the taillights of our opponents...