Note: Having spent the whole tournament in a very fancy press box, overlooking a stadium astroturf, the England team will play it's biggest game in four years at 9am, in a park, where I will overlook from a bench. The organizers had assured me that a wireless network would be set up from 'the beer tent', of all places, to allow the press (me) to continue realtime coverage of England's progress. As of last night the beer tent had been taken down... I will be at the field first thing to try and rescue the text commentary, but if there is abolutely no internet access I will be forced to file a report after the game has finished. (Old-school I know). Apologies in advance if you hear nothing from me until about 17.00 GMT.
England v Japan Preview
Everybody knows that England knows Japan. England cameraman and Video Analysis Coach Dave Hallows has six shiny new tapes of Japan just from the last week. Japan has its own video team, which has seemingly pulled shifts below the stadium press box. Although we would like to think that there are a few tricks up the sleeves of both coaching staffs, the reality is that there are probably no fancy formations or ultra secret six-man zones in the playbooks for the fifth/sixth playoff.
The last two times these two teams have faced off, the cumulative score has been 21 - 21. Japan pipped Dave Elwood’s squad to the fifth spot in 2002, 13 – 12, and England squeezed past Tetsuo Fukasawa’s team earlier this championships 9 – 8. Both teams were very disappointing against Australia, competitive with the Iroquois and got good first halves in against Canada. Both were hammered by the USA. Don’t bother trying to look hard at the group stage results to find a way to categorically separate these squads, there is nothing to find – the bottom line is that if you add up their scores against the rest of the division England have lost 79 – 36 over their group games while Japan managed to go down 79 - 29. What difference there is can be explained by England’s marginally better showing to Canada, (but Japan actually had a better halftime score in their game against the hosts), and Japan’s slightly heavier drubbing by the Aussies.
Having said all that, there is plenty of reason to optimistic for today’s match-up – England’s defence definitely had the better of the physically smaller Japanese offensive players on day four of the group phase, and Japan’s old trump card, speed and fitness, has been nullified by England’s pre-tournament training regime. The England attack has had two productive games back-to-back against Canada and Germany, and the whole team has made progress on the penalty front. (England cannot afford to have eight times as many penalties as the Japanese, as they did in the group game, if they want to win convincingly.)
It’s almost ironic, but after all the planning, all the high-tech training techniques, all the expense, a game like this boils down to hard work, ground balls, face-offs, staying on the park and having the least turnovers – just like the U-12s every Saturday.
I figure our U-12s would beat theirs by about four goals (just a hunch) so I’ll stick my neck out and say 13 – 9 England.
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