Unbeatable Mind

My background as a defensive midfielder still influences how I play today. As a centre-back, when I have to deal with the ball either with my foot or my head, I usually try to check my team-mates’ positions around me and make a pass rather than a mere clearance, if possible. That awareness of space and the position of a team-mate comes from being a defensive midfielder.

I also know from experience that it will be really tough for a defensive midfielder if a clearance by a centre-back gives the ball straight back to the opponents. My teammates’ workload depends on whether or not we can build up from the back line after stopping the opponent’s attack. If I can feed the ball to a team-mate, it gives the whole team time to move forwards rather than retreating to defend again.

That’s just a small part of what we defenders do but it’s the sort of detail that can make a huge difference in terms of how a game goes and how tired team-mates become. When I started watching games on DVD, I realised that good Premier League players always care about such details. Those viewing sessions were very beneficial for someone like me, adept at learning simply through observation.

Players I admired – and hugely optimistically started looking forward to playing with on the same pitch, whether as a team-mate or an opponent – were also mainly midfielders, such as Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard or Claude Makélélé. Gerrard and Lampard were especially influential for me. I thought they were a class apart even among the other accomplished Premier League players of that era.

Playing in central midfield gives you a different view of the pitch from the one you get in the middle of the defensive line. As a centre-back, your view is basically locked in on what is going on ahead of you, while as a central midfielder you need a much wider range of vision. You get pressure from your opponents from the side or behind as well as in front. At first, when playing in that role, there were times when the ball was nicked off me by someone whom I wasn’t paying enough attention to. But once you get used to playing in the middle of the pitch, you start enjoying it more, too. I felt it was fun to initiate an attack from a deep-lying position. Also, it felt good every time I sniffed danger and stopped the opponent’s attack before it actually developed.

In midfield, I also found that I could polish what I had been trying to equip myself to do since I started kicking a ball with my brothers and their friends, such as developing complete control of the ball and learning to think quickly in order to beat older, more developed opponents. That, I think, is why Mr Pak put me back in midfield – to improve my technique and awareness.

Beginning of the long-distance hurdle race

The role I was given by Mr Pak in the Grampus youth team was that of anchor-man – a one-man shield for the back line. While I was learning and performing in that pivotal role between the team’s attack and defence, I was also named team captain. My character – naturally positive but objective and realistic at the same time – no doubt contributed to me getting the armband.

By the end of the season I led the Grampus Under-18 team to just one win away from being crowned as the national champions in the 2006 Prince Takamado Trophy All Japan Youth Football League, in which professional clubs’ youth sides competed with high-school football teams. That professional club involvement distinguished the tournament from the two other major domestic youth tournaments in Japan, namely the All Japan High School Soccer Tournament and the Inter High School Sports Festival (Football). In the tournament proper, 24 teams who came through regional qualifiers were divided into six groups of four in the first round, and then the top two teams in each group competed in the knockout stage to reach the summit of the Japanese domestic youth football world.

We lost to a team from Takigawa Dai-ni High School in the final, but my performance in the tournament as an anchor-man wearing the captain’s armband didn’t go unnoticed by my coaches. By then I had already occasionally been invited to first-team practice sessions at Grampus. I don’t think my overall physical strength really stood out among my professional seniors, but I believe the coaches thought I was worth taking a closer look at in the first-team environment because of my height and ability to build up from the back. When I joined the academy at the age of 12, I was in awe of players around me such as the ‘Big Four’, the four team-mates who were regularly called up to join the team in the higher age group, but now I felt I had a chance of being promoted from the youth to the first team at Grampus.

It would be a lie if I said that, as a high-school student, I didn’t feel uncomfortable or like an outsider when all the others in my class were thinking about going on to have a higher education while I was trying to set out on the path to becoming a professional footballer. But quitting school was never an option because I didn’t want to be labelled as someone who could do nothing but football. At the same time, I didn’t want to be viewed by people at the academy as a youth player who couldn’t make it because he was going to a state school. I have always set myself targets that seemed difficult to reach.

At a J.League club, only a few players are given a professional contract at the end of the youth development process (at the age of 18). I have heard that only around 1 per cent of youth graduates at a Premier League club make it, but even in the J.League I reckon that only around 2 per cent of youth players go on to become a professional with their club. I, together with three other youth graduates, was given a professional contract by Grampus, and it was unprecedented in the club’s history that four players from the youth academy were promoted to the first team as professionals at the same time.

In order to pass through such a narrow gate, it is important to have a clear vision of how you’re going to reach a higher standard from an early stage in your development. How far you go depends to a large extent on how high you set your goal as well as the actions you take to reach it. I believe this applies not only to players at youth academies in Japan or at J.League clubs, but also to those playing in any league in any country. It could even be the same for players or competitors in other sports, or for those trying to work their way up in a corporation or organisation.

Of course, on your way to reaching your goal there may be times when you feel as though you’ve hit a wall; you feel inadequate or far behind the others. But you can’t give up or lower your aspirations. You shouldn’t swap the high hurdle in front of you for a lower one, imagining that this will make it easier to continue running. If you have the right mental attitude, a sense of inferiority or impending defeat can be turned into a positive energy, a boost to help you clear the hurdle or smash through the wall. That’s how you get used to clearing hurdles one by one, barely noticing that each gets a little higher along the way. Certainly, that was how this youngest brother of three, who left his home town at the tender age of 12, managed to reach the point where, in my long-distance hurdle race towards a football career, I could see the starting line in terms of becoming a professional player.

CHAPTER 2

FIRST PROFESSIONAL VOYAGE

Survival instinct

In January 2007 I signed a professional contract with Nagoya Grampus Eight, and began my new challenge in the first team. It didn’t mean I started to play immediately, though. I was only an 18-year-old former youth player there and I had to wait for about two months before making my first-team début. I wasn’t even on the bench for the first two games of the season (the J.League season usually starts late in February or early March and ends in December in the same year). On the day of our opening game at home, I was instead helping the club off the pitch, dealing with ticket distribution before the match.

Back then, I just did whatever jobs I was given without questioning – even if it meant I would play a ‘position’ off the pitch. But now, I wonder if it was one of those typical old Japanese customs: regarding a young player automatically as an apprentice even if he had a professional contract. I don’t think that would be the case here at Southampton. I believe the club treats such players as professionals once they have a professional contract regardless of their age, even if they are still in their teens.

In general, people over here in Europe focus on doing what they are supposed to be doing, whether they are footballers, office workers or shop staff. They tend to stick with doing what they are paid for under their contracts (although I have to admit that this tendency sometimes makes them look a bit too inflexible to me, as someone who is used to a meticulous level of Japanese customer service).

Having said that, I have no complaints whatsoever about the fact that the first-team opportunities for me were hard to come by at the beginning, because, to put it simply, I was around the bottom of the pecking order. I was a nobody from the youth ranks. Many of the players in the team didn’t even know I’d been originally promoted as a defensive midfielder.

A team on the pitch consists of 11 players, of course. Even in a practice game on the training ground, there can only be a total of 22 players from the squad playing at the same time. And I couldn’t even get into those 22 when I initially joined the first team. When I did eventually have a chance to participate in a practice game at the training ground, the position I played in depended on where numbers were short on that particular day. If it happened to be a centre-back position, I was put in the middle of the back line. If an extra defensive midfielder was needed, I played in the middle of the pitch to fill the vacancy.

There was another wall to break through, a bureaucratic one, in terms of becoming a recognised first-team player. Under the J.League regulations, there are three categories for a professional player under contract: Professional A, B and C. I could only be given a Professional C contract, the lowest category as a player with 450 minutes or less of total playing time in the J1 league (the top division in the J.League). And at our training centre, the dressing room for players with a C contract was separated from the one for players with contracts in higher categories.

I found the atmosphere in the dressing room for the C-contract players rather negative. I’d hear comments like ‘I’m not in the team again!’ or ‘I should be playing rather than him because I’m better’ coming from players who had found out that they were not in the starting 11 or who had failed to make the squad travelling to an away game. Watching those around me during the first month I spent there, and feeling that negative atmosphere in the dressing room, I remember starting to feel, ‘I can’t be stuck in here. I’ve got to say goodbye to this dressing room as soon as possible if I want to make it at the top level.’ It was my survival instinct kicking in, urging me to do whatever I could to leave behind me a depressing environment that could have stagnated my professional career just when it had begun.

I tried my best to get closer to the A-contract players, approaching them off the pitch. Being the youngest of three brothers, I’m naturally used to being among my seniors, and was neither reluctant nor uncomfortable to share the company of those older than me. So yes, my resilience, ‘strength of the youngest’, helped me to make progress there. When we had lunch at the club’s canteen after team training, I tried to mingle at a table where the first-team regulars were. I also had the temerity to occupy the back seat on the team coach when travelling.

In Japan, there is an unwritten rule at a football club, and in the national team set-up too, that the back seat of a team coach is reserved for ‘VIPs’ (Very Important Players). At Grampus in my time there, Toshiya-san (Toshiya Fujita) and Nara-san (Seigo Narazaki), who were both in their thirties, and Kei-kun (Kei Yamaguchi), who was in his sixth year in the first team, were the regular occupants of the back seats. (‘San’ is a Japanese honorific suffix added to either the surname or given name of a person to show respect to someone senior or among equals, while ‘kun’ is an honorific common among male friends.) For someone who had just come up from the youth team to sit in the back seat would definitely be going against the rule. But I realised there was always one more space available in the back seat on our team coach, so I summoned up my courage and sat there one day.

Once I was sitting with the ‘VIPs’, although they frequently made fun of this out-of-the-box new face from the youth team, they never forced me to get out of the back seat. In the end, one of the spaces there became a reserved seat for the ‘VYP’ (Very Young Player); that was me.

My longing to secure a Professional A contract was not the only reason why I was drawn closer to these players. While we (the C-contract players) had to clean our football boots by ourselves, A-contract players had Matsuura-san (Noriyoshi Matsuura), the first professional kit man in Japan, to take care of their boots. For them, a pair of muddy boots they left in their dressing room would always be waiting as a nice and shiny pair of boots on the following day. More important than avoiding having to clean your own boots, a professionally serviced pair of boots makes you feel more comfortable and less tired when wearing them.

To get to a place where I could have the ‘magic hands’ of Matsuura-san take care of my boots became one of my goals as a first-team player at Grampus. And the more I dwelt on that thick wall – both metaphorical and physical – separating us from the dressing room assigned to the A-contract players, the more strongly I felt, ‘I don’t want to be a C-contract player for long.’

A sea of red

The football god seemed to have been listening to my prayers and started answering them little by little, though it was in unfortunate circumstances for the team and some of the regular players that I got my big break. Following Marek Špilár, who picked up an injury on the opening day of the season, other centre-backs who were ahead of me in the pecking order began to join the former Slovakia international on the team’s injury list. So came my first-team début. It was during the ninth league game of the season against Oita Trinita when I was told, ‘Maya, you are on for the second half,’ by the then manager, Sef Vergoossen.

I think I generally have a good memory, but when it comes to matches that I’ve been involved in, sometimes my memories remain exceptionally vivid. Maybe they are stored in a special drawer in my memory bank. I’m going to focus on key matches in my career in each chapter of this book, each one illustrating my ‘samurai resilience’.

My choice for this chapter has to be a J.League game against Urawa Red Diamonds on 19 May 2007. It was the game in which I received my first proper harsh lesson as a professional player at Grampus, a narrow defeat (1–2) due to a late winner scored by the former Brazil international striker, Washington (full name: Washington Stecanela Cerqueira).

It was also my full début in front of our home crowd, though I had already been in the starting 11 in the previous two away games. As soon as I ran out for the pre-match warm-up, I was just amazed and went, ‘Oh my God.’ The packed stadium was a sea of red, as this was the main team colour for both Grampus and Urawa Reds.

Besides, I had never seen with my own eyes from the pitch the Toyota Stadium with almost 35,000 spectators packed inside it. The football stadium, the home ground of Grampus, was opened in July 2001. I had watched many games there since an intra-squad game opened the stadium, but the electric atmosphere on that day of the Urawa Reds game was something out of this world to me at the time.

And I was going to play in the starting line-up in that game. I felt an adrenaline rush just from being on the pitch in that atmosphere. I was still gazing at the packed stadium and trembling with excitement at the prospect of playing against one of the big guns in the J.League, when Toshiya-san ran up to me and said, ‘Isn’t this great, Maya?’ I answered ‘Yes!’, but he’d already moved on. ‘How cool is he?’ I thought admiringly, as he made his way confidently about the pitch.

However, all I felt inside me right after the game was disappointment in defeat and frustration about my inability to prevent the winning goal, scored by the opposing team’s lone striker. Washington, who spearheaded the Urawa Reds’ attack, was a strong centre-forward and had been the J.League’s top scorer in the previous season. At that time there weren’t many players in the league who could stop this clinical 6’ 2” finisher. So when the manager told me, ‘Be prepared. You’ll be starting,’ the day before the game, I’d honestly thought, ‘What? Really? Can I deal with Washington?’

On balance, though, my overall performance against Washington in that game wasn’t too bad. To this day, I don’t mind facing strikers like him, whose main attribute is physical strength.

A small margin but a big difference

There were only five or six minutes remaining in the second half. The moment I saw Washington receive the ball to his feet from the right, he turned the other way to shake off his marker and shot with his right foot. I was about a yard away from him, and tried to block his shot with my outstretched leg, but I could only make the slightest connection with the ball. To make matters worse, that tiny deflection changed the flight and took the ball away from the arm of our goalkeeper flying to make a save behind me.

‘If I could have touched just a little bit more of the ball …’ The fact that it shaved my leg made my frustration stronger; it was such a small margin between blocking a shot and conceding a goal. I told myself afterwards, ‘I have to close that small gap which makes such a big difference. Otherwise, I can’t make it to the top in the professional football world. This is the world where only those who make a difference by using that slight margin to their advantage can survive.’ This thought was etched deeply in my mind on that day and has lived with me ever since.

Even now, I sometimes say, ‘It’s a matter of whether I can get one step or half a step closer,’ after the game. I have been trying my hardest to close that gap, but as you make progress towards a higher standard there’s always still a gap to close: a gap that makes a difference between winning and losing. And that difference can mean life or death in the world of professional football.

As a youth player I was almost invincible in aerial battles. I almost always came out as a winner. But against Washington I just about managed to make his life less comfortable when competing in the air. Not only the resulting defeat, but also the whole 90 minutes, was a really tough lesson for me on that day. The god of football certainly seems to be good at using a carrot-and-stick method to keep me motivated …

Two former ‘teachers’

Sef, the first manager I had as a professional footballer, was a very forgiving boss. It may be a common characteristic among managers and coaches from the Netherlands, his native country, but he was especially tolerant of positive mistakes by young players. Having said that, he must have needed great patience to keep playing me in my first year in the first team. Back then, I made two or three mislaid passes per game. There was one occasion when my mind was so preoccupied with making a forward pass to a team-mate’s feet that I actually passed the ball instead to the opponent’s striker standing right in front of me. But Sef still kept using me.

However, even he would surely have had second thoughts about playing me if the team had kept on conceding due to my mistakes. So I really have to thank Nara-san, our goalkeeper at that time. He kept making saves while this inexperienced centre-back kept making mistakes. Because of his skill in goal, my blunders didn’t prove fatal to the team. Not only did he save us from conceding goals; he also saved me from being dropped to the bench on countless occasions – a true guardian of young Maya Yoshida.

In his managerial style, Sef seemed to me more of a teacher type than a typical football coach. He saw a player’s behaviour both on and off the pitch as an important part of his quality as a professional. If a player did or said something deemed inappropriate by the manager, he wouldn’t be playing afterwards, even if he was good enough to be a national team player. Sef had that sort of disciplinarian side to him, too.

In contrast, Dragan Stojković, aka Piksi, who succeeded Sef at Grampus in 2008, was a very demanding manager even to young players.

He was my idol in his playing days. When I was little, he was merely a player whom I liked, but after I joined the academy at Grampus, the club where he became a legend thanks to his brilliant technique and creative vision, I started to see Piksi as my hero. When he hung up his boots in 2001, I even went to watch his farewell ceremony at the stadium. So I was simply overjoyed to have an opportunity to play in a team managed by him.

He still had outstanding ball skills even several years after his retirement. On the training ground he could deliver an inch-perfect pass to a receiver’s feet; sometimes he was angry with himself when he thought the quality of the pass was not up to his ultra-high standard.

He set the standards for his players quite high, too, and rightly so, never overlooking a single mistake in a game. The former fantasista known for his deft touches had a strict side as a manager. He may have been known for his good looks but his face was nothing but scary when he pointed out the mistakes we had made in a game and demanded an immediate response from us to improve. In one team meeting, while he was shouting at us, ‘Why did you guys concede such a cheap goal?!’ he banged a whiteboard he was using so hard that a magnet stuck to the board’s surface came flying towards me.

As it turned out, having a forgiving and understanding manager, almost like a school teacher, in my first year as a professional, and then a much more demanding and strict manager in my second year, seemed to help me greatly in terms of my first-team survival. My ideal style of football – the skeleton of which took shape while I was coached by Mr Pak as a youth player – was fleshed out under Sef and Piksi, my first two managers as a professional footballer. I have added more substance to that skeleton ever since, and being someone who is good at learning from people around me I still keep on fleshing it out as a Premier League player, too.

From the motherland to the Netherlands

At the end of the year 2009, it was time for me to switch stages to perform as a footballer outside Japan. A new challenge began when I signed a three-and-a-half-year contract with VVV-Venlo in the Eredivisie, the first division in the Dutch football league.

If someone were to ask me whether it was an easy decision to leave Grampus, where I had spent nine years since joining its academy, my answer would be, ‘No, it wasn’t.’ The people at Grampus, including managers, coaches and senior players, had taught me to grow both as a professional footballer and as a young man. It was there in Nagoya where the foundation of today’s Maya Yoshida was formed.

But I believed that I was making the right decision in my professional career, and that it wouldn’t be wrong to leave the club at that point. I even thought that a young Grampus player going abroad to advance his career would be beneficial to the club in the long term, so the Grampus supporters shouldn’t be feeling too sad about me leaving the club.

How did my parents and brothers take my decision? Well, I don’t really remember, to tell you the truth. I rarely ask my family members for advice and I certainly don’t remember asking them, ‘I want to move abroad to play, but what do you think?’ before deciding to move to VVV. That now makes me wonder how they would have reacted had I made wrong decisions when I was younger. Would any member of the laissez-faire Yoshida family have told off their youngest boy? I’m not sure, but then again, I don’t think I’d have made the sort of rash decisions some young people do.