Unbeatable Mind

скачать книгу бесплатно


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.

Having said that, it was not like I had many options to consider before making a decision at that time. VVV were the only club I could go to if I wanted to move to Europe. I had just three years of experience in the J.League as a professional with no particular achievements even at the domestic level. There was no way for such a player to attract much interest from clubs abroad. On top of that, only a handful of Japanese were playing in Europe at the time and it was still difficult for a younger generation, my generation of Japanese players, to go abroad, even if we were keen to try.

For me, the move only became realistic six months or so after Honda-san’s (Keisuke Honda) move to VVV. Other Japanese playing in Europe around that time were all from an older generation, such as Shunsuke Nakamura (then at Celtic) and Daisuke Matsui (then at Saint-Étienne). Under those circumstances, a young player like myself, the nobody of nobodies, had no right to complain about having no choice of foreign clubs to move to. I was just fortunate to share the same agent as Honda-san and was able to count on his strong connections with VVV.

It was the summer of 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. At the Shenyang Olympic Sports Center Stadium in China my agent was watching a men’s Group B game between Japan and the Netherlands in the stadium with Mr Hai Berden, the chairman of VVV.

I’d only just made the Japan national Under-23 squad for Beijing and was not involved in the first two group games. But my chance finally came in our third game against the Netherlands, with Japan’s elimination from the tournament already confirmed after two defeats.

We had nothing other than our pride to play for, but for the Netherlands a place in the knockout stage was still at stake. Therefore we faced a strong Dutch side and I was fortunate to have the chance to play against attacking talents such as Roy Makaay (then at Feyenoord) and Ryan Babel (then at Liverpool) while the chairman of VVV watched on from the stand. And it was right there that a conversation between Mr Berden and my agent took place – one that can be very simply summarised as follows:

Mr Berden: ‘That defender looks quite good.’

My agent: ‘He’s our player.’

Mr Berden: ‘Oh, well, we shall make an approach then.’

Since I already had a vision of furthering my career step by step overseas, I didn’t have any problem at all with making my first step abroad in the Netherlands. In fact, I welcomed the challenge, as it was the country I could imagine myself moving to and playing football in based on past experience at least. Just before I became a high-school student in Japan I’d briefly had a chance to visit the Netherlands with a Grampus youth team, and had watched league games there and played against some local youth sides.

Some people were strongly against my decision to leave Grampus for VVV, saying, ‘Why do you have to move to such a small club in the Netherlands?’ But to me it was never that I felt I ‘had to’ move there, and it wasn’t like I chose VVV instead of some bigger clubs in other countries.

Piksi, my manager at Grampus, was also against the move at that point in my career. ‘It’s too early for you,’ he told me, on more than one occasion. Every time we spoke about my possible transfer, he said, ‘It’s not too late if you move after at least one more year here,’ or, ‘You’d better have enough under your belt before you move abroad,’ as he tried to persuade me to stay.