Miura's decision not to retire at the age of 53 is enough to feel incredible, and just recently, the 41-year-old former Japanese international and midfielder Shinji Ono has returned to the J1 League. When the two teams meet in the 2021 season, if 53-year-old Chira Miura and 41-year-old Shinji Ono can compete together, it will undoubtedly be a rather memorable scene.
Just a week before 2021, J2 club Ryukyu FC announced that it would not renew his contract with famous midfielder Shinji Ono, and it was widely predicted that the 41-year-old Japanese star was likely to end his career. But unexpectedly, on the first day of 2021, J1 League team Gonzado Sapporo announced that he had signed Shinji Ono. The 41-year-old veteran is also returning to the J1 League after a year and a half.
In the past 2020 season, Shinji Ono has played 14 J2 League games for Ryukyu FC, playing 116 minutes. In fact, because of injuries, Shinji Ono, who became famous early, reached the age when he should retire very early, and throughout the 2019 season, he only played 9 games because of a leg strain. Last season, he took a two-month hiatus from an injury to the medial collateral ligament in his right knee. In this case, Shinji Ono still insisted on not retiring, and also received an olive branch from the J1 League team, which had to be surprising.
In Shinji Ono and Chiryo Miura, people seem to see the spirit of craftsmanship that has been highly respected in recent years. Football "evergreen trees" like Chiryo Miura and Shinji Ono are respected, and in stark contrast to them is Hidetoshi Nakata, who was at the peak of his career at the time but ended his career at the age of 29.
At the age of 19, he represented the National Olympic Games of Japan, and Hidetoshi Nakata, who shined at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, won the title of "Asian Little Shell", and since then he has performed well in Perugia, Rome, Parma, Bologna and Florence in Serie A. Even in his final year before retiring, he played 21 games in the league while representing Bolton Wanderers in the Premier League. In this case, Nakata Hidetoshi directly chose to hang up his boots, which made everyone feel incomprehensible.
Later, in Nakata's self-description and the trajectory of his life after that, people finally understood why he chose to retire. Talking about the reasons for his retirement years later, Nakata admitted that he could no longer find happiness in football and that he felt that he had failed to live his life. So he chose to use travel to find himself again.
Since then, he has traveled to more than 100 countries in the world, and spent 6 and a half years traveling to 47 prefectures in Japan. Although it may seem that this is not a very meaningful thing compared to playing football in the top league, Nakata Hidetoshi rediscovered the original purpose of life, and during this period completed a literary work "Rediscover japan", learning to brew sake, carpentry and other crafts.
Although Hidetoshi Nakata, who retired at the age of 29, has a very different attitude towards his career than Miura Chira and Shinji Ono, they treat life with the life they really want to pursue. It takes courage to stay, and it takes courage to leave, but as long as you really dare to take that step, you can achieve admirable achievements.