Tiger Poker 07/06 Yesterday, J-League team Yokohama Mariners officially announced the signing of former Japanese international Ryo Miyaichi, a once-talented teenager who finally returned to Japan after bidding farewell to Bundesliga side St. Pauli. He was poached by Arsenal after graduating from high school, and after 10 years of staying in the ocean and suffering multiple serious injuries, this is his first time playing in a professional league in Japan. "Sports Weekly" wrote an article reviewing Miyaichi's young fame and half-life career, and also associated with China's former genius - Dong Fangzhuo, the coincidence of the fate of the two people is lamentable.
Young fame step up to the sky
Dong Fangzhuo practiced football at Dalian's most famous Cheng Xianfei Football School when he was very young, and in 2000 his Yiteng echelon was acquired by Success and became a player in the Success Fourth Team. In the national championship held in the autumn of that year, the Four Teams of Shide won the championship, and in the Saudi Abdullah Prince Cup in the past year, the 16-year-old Dong Fangzhuo performed extremely well, helping the team reach the quarterfinals.
Around the same time, Ryo Miyaichi, who was born in 1992, began his football career. Ryo Miyaichi, who is 8 years younger than Dong Fangzhuo, was born in Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture, where his father worked as a pitcher in Toyota's baseball department and led the team to the top 8 in high school. Influenced by his father, Miyaichi originally chose baseball from an early age, but he became interested in football from the age of 8 and soon chose football as his career path.
In March 2003, Dong Fangzhuo finally made an official appearance on behalf of Shide. In the AFC Champions League match against Seongnam Yihe, he seized the opportunity and scored a wonderful volley in just 5 minutes of the game, thus becoming the youngest goal scorer in the history of Chinese football in the AFC Champions League. At the end of the season, an Englishman approached Dalian Shide, who hoped that the young players of the Shide team would sign the team to open up the Chinese market.
According to Dong Fangzhuo himself, this is because Manchester United clearly requires that players from China cannot change their age. In January 2004, at the age of 19, Dong Fangzhuo officially joined Manchester United for a record value of 3.5 million pounds of Chinese players, becoming the first Chinese player to land in a European giant. In the following two seasons, Dong Fangzhuo was loaned to the Belgian Second Division, where he scored 35 goals in 70 games in Antwerp, scoring one goal per two games. No one expected this to be the only highlight of his career, when he was only 19 years old.
Exactly 5 years after Dong Fangzhuo joined Manchester United, Miyaichi Liang encountered almost similar opportunities. In junior high school, Miyaichi Ryo jumped several times to be selected for the Japanese youth national team, and at that time he also played as a right-back. However, in high school, Miyaichi began to learn left winger play, and at the 2009 World Junior Championships, his dribbling and speed attracted the interest of European scouts who were concerned about Japanese football. In January 2010, the Cologne team first extended an invitation to high school student Ryo Miyaichi. Since then, Wenger, who used to coach miyaichi Ryo's Nagoya youth training, has invited him on behalf of Arsenal. At the end of 2010, Miyaichi Ryo finally ascended to the sky and entered the arsenal.
Ryo Miyaichi, who joined Arsenal, played a similar performance at a similar age as Dong Fangzhuo. In 2011, he was loaned to Feyenoord in the Dutch league, first breaking the record for the youngest Japanese to play in major European leagues at the time, and then breaking the record for the youngest Japanese to score in major European leagues at the time. The Dutch media gave him a nickname, Ryodinho, for his comparison with Brazil's famous star Ronaldinho.
Injuries plague the years
As time went by, Dong Fangzhuo and Miyaichi Liang, after reaching the first peak of their careers, encountered almost similar problems with team selection and injury problems. After Dong Fangzhuo returned to the Red Devils from Antwerp, he could only play a few games occasionally after winning the title early. The entire Manchester United team is full of talent, and what Dong Fangzhuo has to do is to prove his worth in the fastest time, but when he first faced Manchester United against Chelsea, the embarrassed Dong Fangzhuo did nothing all and lost the trust of coach Ferguson in just one game.
Dong Fangzhuo's fate is even more bumpy. In 2008, Dong Fangzhuo represented the national Olympic team in the Beijing Olympic Games, scoring the only Olympic team goal in the Chinese Olympic team so far. But after that, he chose to return to Dalian Shide, and in more than a year of playing, he actually did not score a goal, and the bubble of the talented teenager burst in an instant. In 2010, Dong Fangzhuo joined Polish giants Legia Warsaw and made only 4 appearances; since then, he has changed to the Portuguese Premier League Portimão and cannot play. Going around, Dong Fangzhuo fell to the top four mika in the Armenian league, where he scored a total of 6 goals and improved his form slightly.
In the 2012 season, Miyagi was loaned to Bolton, where he made 12 appearances without scoring; in the second half of the year, he was loaned to Wigan Athletic, where he suffered a major injury and a four-month hiatus just one month after playing. In the second half of 2013, Arsenal seemed determined to have the talented teenager play in the first team, so he made his appearances in the Champions League against Marseille and the Premier League against Stoke. But Ryo Miyaichi, who came out, was already a surprise: he was addicted to dribbling on the side, and he was unfamiliar with his teammates, as if he had never played a game.
After that, Miyaichi's career began to go downhill. In September 2014, Arsenal officially announced that Ryo Miyaichi had joined Twente on loan, but what awaited him at Twente was the team's reserve team. Ryo Miyaichi made only 10 appearances in the first team of Twente, without scoring assists, and his playing style became more and more lonely. In June 2015, the contract with Arsenal finally expired, but Miyaichi Ryo has lost the style of "Ryo Nadino". St. Pauli of the Bundes in the Bundesliga took him in, and the once-gifted high school student could only survive.
In addition, what plagues Miyaichi Liang and Dong Fangzhuo together is the frequent injuries. Because of his low weight, Miyaichi's injuries were concentrated on his ankles and shoulders, forming an old injury; while Dong Fangzhuo's problem was too heavy, and a reserve team was shoveled to seriously injure his meniscus, and he was eventually forced to accompany the rehabilitation training machine for a long time. The passage of time has made the two of them completely devoid of the spirituality they once had.
What if you don't go to the giants...?
Looking back at the stumbling road of the two once-geniuses, Sports Weekly asked what was wrong. Whether it is Miyaichi Liang or Dong Fangzhuo, the physical condition and technical conditions have been recognized by world-class coaches, and other coaches who have coached them do not deny it. There are many injuries and illnesses of the two, but not all of them are brought about by bad luck, Dong Fangzhuo played games all night, ordered pizza takeaway, and Miyaichi Liang did not pay attention to strength training, resulting in three ruptures of the cruciate ligament, which was obviously his own irresponsibility and laissez-faire, which led to the end of the crowd.
Maybe it's better for two players not to go to the giants? Dong Fangzhuo was saddled with the expectations of "King Dong" and "Oriental Zhuo" at that time, and created an effect in Manchester United that the commercial value was greater than the competitive value; Miyaichi Liang was overtaken by Wenger, which also made the British media pay attention repeatedly, creating huge pressure. Regardless of whether Miyaichi Ryo can find some state after returning to China, the experience of the two tells us that young players directly joining the European giants are probably not the right way for East Asian football to stay abroad. Perhaps, more pragmatic and basic foreign countries can make a country's football move towards a real rise. And this is also the biggest gap between Chinese and Japanese football, a Miyaichi Ryo or Dong Fangzhuo can not make up.
(Editor: Yao Fan)