Japan Beats Germany, and Boldness Explains Why Upsets Happen
Japan won its opening match of the 2022 Qatar World Cup against Germany.
Things like this don’t happen very often, so let me write down my honest thoughts.
I hope I can look back on this fondly later.
Iran and Saudi Arabia
Before getting into it, we shouldn’t forget the two contrasting matches that came before.
Iran suffered a heavy 2-6 defeat to England.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, came from behind to beat Argentina 2-1.
What was the decisive difference between the two?
Anyone who watched the matches knows exactly what it was. Their “attacking mentality.”
Iran respected England and showed a deeply defensive posture from the start.
There was almost no chasing from the front line. The wide players also dropped deep, packing the center.
The intent to “aim for a draw” was obvious from kickoff.
But that’s exactly the kind of thing England can strip apart with technique and speed.
Bellingham, who scored the opener, is a defensive midfielder (third line), and in the end Iran got broken down through the flank, which became the starting point.
Even after that, Iran kept sitting deep to minimize further damage. The result was a heavy defeat.
You could say the result matched their true ability, and that would be that.
But Iran fans surely must have thought:
“Why did we choose a game plan that could only ever produce a result matching our true ability?”
Saudi Arabia was different.
Against an Argentina side vastly superior in technique, they took them on with a high line.
A high line. Not a high press.
This is a tactic you could reasonably call somewhat outdated.
A high line carries enormous risk.
It demands that the goalkeeper step forward too, and the difficulty of organizing the defensive line is extremely high.
On top of that, if you fail even once to properly restrict passing lanes in midfield, you concede immediately.
A high line often doesn’t function well against opponents who attack mainly through the flanks.
But try to cover the flanks instead, and you inevitably end up with something like a back five, which tends to leave the deeper areas of midfield exposed.
In fact, Saudi Arabia’s midfield defending was far from perfect, and they were cut open by through balls many times.
But they held on.
Their full backs rarely lost their individual duels, and the intensity of their center backs was extremely high.
They couldn’t commit numbers in the scoring scenes, and there was plenty of luck involved too, but in the end Saudi Arabia chose the following approach:
“If we do what we want to do and lose 0-4 or 0-5, so be it. In exchange, even if the odds are low, we’re going for the win.”
That was the tactic they chose.
This courage, and the decisiveness and organizational unity they showed as a team, deserve credit.
Now, how was Japan?
Everyone surely felt that Japan “changed completely between the first half and the second half.”
The first half was like Iran. The second half, in a certain sense, looked like Saudi Arabia.
The chaotic first half
Germany’s key player was, unsurprisingly, Raum on the left flank, who won the penalty.
Anticipating that Japan would sit defensively, he took up a fairly high position.
He isn’t a player who cuts inside, so in theory he should have been easy to deal with, but Japan struggled with him.
Why? Because the balance of Japan’s defensive midfielders was being disrupted.
And what was creating the trigger for that disruption? Germany’s three central midfielders.
Müller, Musiala, and Kimmich.
They would drift wide to create a numerical advantage, and from there build horizontal or vertical passing lanes.
To shut that down, Japan’s defensive midfielders would shift over,
which opened up the inside channel,
which made the full backs tuck in,
which opened up Raum on the far side.
This was exactly, precisely, what Germany intended.
Many people watching the first half were probably thinking, “Why is Germany’s passing going through so easily?”
Of course, Germany’s midfield passing is world class. It’s not something you can simply shut down.
But Japan’s midfield defensive ability is by no means low either.
Endo would go on to prove that repeatedly in the second half.
The cause wasn’t looseness in pressure on the flanks, it was looseness in the restriction happening earlier, at the front line.
Maeda, Ito, and Kubo up top weren’t able to properly force the ball
“to the location Japan intended” “at the timing Japan intended.”
Without that, the defense inevitably ends up reacting late, because the pitch is quite large.
Teams with a fast press aren’t necessarily fast runners.
It’s that they properly restrict from the front line and make the opponent kick or dribble to the spot they intended.
Naturally, that was Japan’s ideal too.
But they couldn’t do it. That’s just how it was.
On this point, unfortunately, it came down to a gap in ability.
The transformed second half
So how did Japan change in the second half?
Put simply, they stopped trying to trap the opponent according to their own intentions.
Honestly, I think this was a major decision.
They faced the gap in ability head on, and decided to change their own approach to match the opponent’s.
Specifically, they switched to a back three that leaned toward a back five, making the marking assignments against Germany’s front-line personnel clearer.
Since Raum and Nyabri aren’t players who move around all that fluidly,
“just contain the man in front of you”
was enough to lighten the decision-making burden for the wing backs.
The center remained fluid in its movement, but with the flanks no longer a worry, that decision-making load could be lightened there too.
Lightening the decision-making connects directly to speeding up the press, because there’s no hesitation.
Japan judged that this would let them compete on even terms.
In other words, they judged that while they were inferior in individual technique and overall team quality, they weren’t losing so badly in intensity in individual duels.
I think this is actually a groundbreaking thing.
Japan has never been blessed racially with physical size,
and high agility paired with low intensity was exactly the stereotype of the Japanese player.
That perception was overturned. And the central figure in that, of course, was Endo.
In the second half, Germany was no longer able to thread passes into the center as easily as in the first half.
That’s because Japan’s defensive midfielders were defending tightly.
In fact, losing the ball there would have created a real danger even against Germany.
(Maeda’s offside no-goal scene in the first half is a typical example of this.)
Japan’s front line was selected with speed as the priority, so it carries plenty of destructive power on the counter.
In particular, Asano, who scored the winning goal, will fire away without much thought whenever there’s even a sliver of a chance, even without a clear angle.
Actually, this type of player is the most unpleasant thing for a defense to deal with.
A slightly reckless guy who shoots anyway even when you’ve cut off the angle.
There was a scene where Rüdiger provoked Asano,
and I don’t think that was mockery. I think he wanted to psychologically assert dominance.
As if to say, “I won’t lose to you.”
In other words, he found Asano annoying. (There was a lot of adrenaline flowing.)
You don’t provoke someone beneath your notice.
Japan’s approach in the second half had a good clarity to it.
Defense was, for the most part, a tight plan with clearly assigned markers.
And attack was limited to the front three plus just one of the wing backs.
Trap the ball with the defensive midfielders, then counter from there.
From a first half where they were kept in constant disarray, they managed an extremely clear switch.
This was undoubtedly one of the reasons for the win, and you realize that Japan being able to do this is actually quite unusual.
The change in game plan
Changing the game plan mid-match is a common enough story. So are unexpected substitutions.
But in most cases, all that comes out of it is something along the lines of:
“Well, the substitute scored a goal, how about that.”
Are there really many teams that made this drastic a change between halves and had it work this well?
And against Germany, no less. And in their opening World Cup match, no less.
When the starting lineup was announced, the first thing I thought about was who he was planning to substitute.
The substitutions of Maeda and Asano were easy to predict, and it was immediately clear he wasn’t planning to use Nagatomo for the full 90 minutes.
Tanaka Ao didn’t seem to be in perfect condition either, so I figured he wouldn’t play the full match,
and I expected substitutions for Kubo and Mitoma as well.
If Japan had been behind, they could have brought on Doan or Minamino in place of Tanaka and dropped Kamada back into midfield.
That accounts for 4 substitution slots. And one more, I figured, for dealing with any trouble that came up.
What I noticed at this point was the high degree of positional flexibility.
There are players other than Asano who can play as a lone striker.
Minamino and Kamada aren’t inexperienced there either.
Kubo and Ito Junya can both handle a two-striker system, and bringing on Ueda wouldn’t have been a bad option either.
Swapping Nagatomo for Ito Hiroki would be the straightforward substitution, but Tomiyasu can also play on the flank, and conversely Ito can play center back.
I saw an article somewhere saying German media described manager Moriyasu’s tactics as “crazy.”
Indeed, Japan had almost no fixed positions, and because of that they held an extremely large number of options.
And from among those options, at halftime he first pulled out an option that (at least I) hadn’t imagined at the start of the first half.
Taking off Kubo, bringing on Tomiyasu, and switching to a back three.
The fact that he switched to a back three at halftime suggests this was likely one of the plans he’d had in place from the start.
A large-scale change requires detailed instructions, and halftime is when there’s time to give those instructions.
But usually it doesn’t work. Normally.
After all, when the formation changes, individual roles change too, and so does everyone’s perspective.
The teammates you need to combine with change, and so do your methods of attacking and defending.
Normally, it doesn’t work.
Tunisia, for example, took on Denmark, a stronger side, in a mirrored 3-4-3 in their opening match and drew.
This suggests they had prepared meticulously. Tunisia normally play an orthodox back four.
They built this in specifically for this tournament, for this crucial opening match.
That’s why they started the match in a back three. This too is plenty impressive.
But doing it mid-match is a vastly higher level of difficulty.
What do you need to do to pull this off? There isn’t just one answer, and honestly, I doubt anyone knows a clear-cut scheme for it.
But if I had to point to something, I can see how several things the Japan national team has been doing bore fruit here.
- Not fixing the starting lineup
- Using substitutions frequently
- Choosing players centered around those who can handle multiple positions
That said, I don’t think this alone explains it. Plenty of reasonably good managers do all of this.
And still it doesn’t work.
Take Goretzka, for example, who came on for Gündoğan and ended up disrupting Germany’s balance.
He came on while Germany was still leading 1-0, so there shouldn’t have been any particular need to change much from what Gündoğan had been doing up to that point.
But maybe out of impatience, he pushed forward, and often overlapped in position with Kimmich and Hofmann in the center.
If he had instead drifted wide and provided width, Japan would likely have struggled a lot more.
Japan was probably helped quite a bit by Goretzka’s poor positioning there. It made things easier for them.
That’s how it goes. Substitutions mostly don’t work out well like this.
By contrast, Japan’s equalizer— no, opening goal, was actually a goal in which only substitutes were involved.
What we can see in the opening goal
From Tomiyasu’s build-up, Mitoma received it on the flank, cut inside, and played it to Minamino, who had made a run suggesting a cross. Minamino’s shot-like cross was met by Asano diving in, forcing Neuer to only be able to parry it, and there was Doan.
Every single one of them a substitute.
In the first half, Japan couldn’t get the ball comfortably in the space where Tomiyasu operated,
and even if that ball had reached Nagatomo’s feet, there’s no way he’d have had the option to carry it that far and cut inside.
That was something only Mitoma could do.
Kamada, too, hadn’t been able to produce that kind of diagonal run that Minamino made.
Partly due to the first-half formation, Ito had only cut inside about once.
I think it was Doan’s hunger for a goal that put him in that position.
I suppose this is what it looks like when everything clicks into place.
Minamino’s diagonal run in particular gave me chills.
In that kind of scene, Mitoma usually goes vertical.
But whether it was pre-arranged or practiced, he cut inside instead.
When Minamino made that diagonal run at that moment, the defense had to think about multiple things at once.
Mitoma can cut in and shoot. They couldn’t afford to leave that lane open.
But his own marker had drifted away.
As a result, every mark ended up out of position by a fraction of a step (Asano was free too, Doan was free too).
That kind of flowing combination play is something you’d expect from teammates who’ve played together on the national team for years.
But Mitoma only became a fixture in the national team this year, and Minamino’s good form was last year’s story — he hasn’t been getting much playing time lately. Asano, prone to injury, has been in and out of the squad.
Doan has been outstanding in the Bundesliga this year too, but he still hasn’t fully established himself in the national team.
Tomiyasu stabilized the defensive line’s ball circulation, but not just Tomiyasu — Itakura too had been out with a long-term injury, so this must have been close to a first real test under match conditions.
How do you create this kind of tactical understanding permeating the team, along with this dedication and fidelity?
At this point, only people on the inside could know.
The team-building of a great manager
I’ve been an Arsenal fan for a long time, and Tomiyasu once mentioned that one of the distinctive features of Arteta’s training sessions is
“there’s a lot of training that makes players conscious of the whole picture, not just individual situations.”
The idea is that every single pass and every single run has to fit the concept of the team’s tactics.
And that gets built into every single training drill.
Because of that, apparently Arteta hardly gives out detailed instructions here and there.
There’s little tactical explanation before matches either.
And yet the tactics and the required tasks have permeated the entire team.
It doesn’t change no matter who takes the field.
In other words, Arsenal’s good form cannot possibly be explained by superficial talk of formation tweaks or substitutions.
I think Arteta is starting to edge toward being called a “great manager.”
Even though he was heavily criticized until just last year.
Manager Moriyasu, too, was heavily criticized.
His player selection and how he used them were often criticized as well.
But if all of that was actually laying the groundwork that led to this moment…
then this might be the very moment a tremendous great manager was born.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/11/1514/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.