Japan Beats Spain 2-1 to Reach World Cup Knockout Stage

In the final group-stage match of the Qatar World Cup, Japan came back to beat Spain 2-1.

Excitement, surprise, relief. It’s a complicated mix of feelings, but first I simply want to celebrate advancing to the knockout stage. And I’d like to think about how this World Cup will be talked about in the future history of Japanese football (for now, just in my head).

<A match where it’s hard to say who the key man was>

My first honest thought after the match was that it was really hard to say “well, today’s key man was so-and-so.”

If I had to name one, I’d say Moriyasu-kantoku. (Well, the manager is inevitably a key man in every match anyway.)

Simply put, there were a lot of key men. Everyone, really.

We probably need to learn a new way of watching matches by now. Moriyasu-kantoku comes in with a plan to fight a 45-minute match rather than a 90-minute one. This was true against Germany, and it was true against Costa Rica too.

The 45-minute framing happens to line up with halftime, but either way, he doesn’t seem to be thinking in terms of “overwhelm the opponent for 90 minutes” or “defend for 90 minutes.” He designs the match as one game for the first 45 minutes and another game for the second 45.

Given that, Nagatomo — who spent the first half simply watching Nico Williams and couldn’t hold the ball at all, ending with a somewhat bitter impression — could in a sense be said to have faithfully carried out his mission. The team had probably given up on attacking down the left in the first half.

Kubo also looked noticeably less stiff than against Germany and showed good play, though he wasn’t involved in any decisive chances. But understood as part of the game plan, he too faithfully fulfilled his role.

The start of the match. The back three from the kickoff was a formation designed with Spain’s height on both flanks in mind, but the concept from defense to attack stayed consistent throughout.

However, the low position of the pressing was a concern.

For one thing, Maeda at the very front pressed with an unusually strong focus on Busquets, which meant the passing lanes weren’t sufficiently limited, and Spain’s back line must have found that quite comfortable. It might have been worth trying to open up the lane to Busquets and target him there instead, but they probably judged that there was no need to even try — it would surely get punished.

Either way, once it became clear the ball couldn’t be fed to Busquets from the back line, what did Spain do? Pedri dropped deep. By taking up depth, he completely neutralized the pressing.

He was probably making this judgment at an individual level, but it was extremely precise positioning — the kind you’d only fully appreciate watching from outside, on TV.

When Pedri drops next to Busquets, or even near the defensive line, it creates a blank space there. In principle, Tanaka or Morita from the double pivot should cover that space, but in the first half there was a great deal of confusion here.

The reason was the back three.

Japan played a back three, while Spain’s front line was a front three. But Williams and Olmo are both good at drifting wide. That meant the wing-backs, Nagatomo and Ito, ended up in something like a back-five shape marking those two, leaving two of the three center-backs without a direct marker. Then one of them marks Gavi, and the other is left free. That part is straightforward. That should free up one of the double pivot players to push forward.

Saying it in words is easy, but this coordination was extremely difficult. Morata isn’t the type to drift wide, so he’s easy to track, but Gavi moves everywhere. Williams tends to stay wide, but Olmo comes into something like a second-striker position. The handovers of these markers didn’t go well, and as a result a large blank space opened up in front of the double pivot, which Spain exploited effectively.

Also, if the double pivot doesn’t push forward and create a point to win the ball, the counterattack after a turnover loses its effectiveness. Not enough numbers, no space, and the starting position too deep.

So in most cases Japan would quickly get surrounded and lose the ball. That’s basically the picture it painted.

By around the 30th minute of the first half, this issue had finally started to be corrected, but conceding a goal amid this confusion was extremely costly.

Still, at 0-1, the flow wasn’t particularly bad — though honestly Spain didn’t feel at all like they were going to be beaten — and it was in that kind of atmosphere that the match headed into the second half.

As it turned out, that too worked in Japan’s favor.

The start of the second half. Spain came out in the same relaxed rhythm as the first half, but Japan pressed as if they were a different team.

Pressing in the opponent’s half, Ito contested a mistrapped ball, and off the loose ball Doan struck a left-footed shot from the middle range. A shot from the exact angle he’s scored from many times in the Bundesliga naturally worked against Unai Simón too. A superb goal to equalize.

Spain were clearly lacking concentration. Maybe news of the Germany vs Costa Rica match had come in at halftime, or maybe they grew complacent, thinking they should be able to coast through today given Japan’s lack of attacking threat.

Either way, Tanaka’s positioning, shrewdly targeting that looseness, became considerably more advanced. Tanaka lays the ball off to the right, Doan crosses, Mitoma cuts it back, and there’s Tanaka — for a double-pivot player to reach that position in front of goal, in a match where Japan had been pinned back so much in the first half, requires real conviction.

There was almost certainly a clear instruction behind it.

Japan then withstood Spain’s ensuing onslaught and held on for the win.

Let’s organize a few key points below.

Some time into the second half, I noticed a clear sense that the overall balance had shifted. Pedri’s positioning had become more advanced. This continued until around the 20th minute of the second half, even for a while after Japan had come back.

Because of that, the blank space that had troubled Japan in the first half instead turned into a “hunting ground” for Japan’s press. Japan’s goals were both triggered by pressing from the front line, and Pedri had a major influence on this.

I’ve almost never seen Pedri position himself incorrectly, so I suspect that was an instruction from the manager. Spain’s front line is thin, effectively just Morata, so it’s understandable to want to add some thickness there. But that doesn’t seem like the strategy a Spain team happy to settle for a draw while leading would take.

Luis Enrique’s misjudgment was a major opportunity for Japan.

<The assumption that Busquets wouldn’t shoot from range>

Late in the second half, Japan set up a solid block in front of their own goal. They could commit to this so decisively because of Busquets. In fact, Japan barely pressed Busquets at all. Their positioning even seemed to say, go ahead and shoot from distance if you want. Instead, they focused their preparation on pressing whoever received the ball after Busquets. The thing you least want to concede when you’ve set up a solid block is a shot from midrange. If it’s on target, there’s a decent chance a deflection or a keeper’s mistake lets it in. So normally you’re forced to defend actively out of consideration for “what if he shoots.”

But Japan, whether as a result of scouting or some other deliberate calculation, put no pressure on Busquets whatsoever.

Given how they had positioned Maeda in the first half specifically to stop the ball reaching Busquets, this looks odd, but it can be read either way: they may have corrected the first-half problem, or they may have deliberately chosen to tighten the block centrally, win the ball on the flanks, and let Busquets have the ball instead.

<Tomiyasu’s quiet brilliance>

Tomiyasu, brought on in the 69th minute, was clearly a message to the team to shift into “hold the line” mode. At the same moment, Spain swapped Gavi for Ansu Fati, Barça’s supremely powerful attacker. This substitution — putting Tomiyasu directly against Fati — was spot on.

Did they read it coming? Or was it just chance?

Tomiyasu shut Fati down completely — it’s fair to say he neutralized him and let him do nothing at all. It’s beyond praise. As he’s already been showing all season at Arsenal, when it comes to fighting one-on-one on the flank, in a confined area, there is almost no attacker who can get past Tomiyasu, even at the very highest level in the world. Arteta always puts Tomiyasu up against the wide attacker he wants to erase from the game, and it genuinely works. Arteta invented this, and Moriyasu-kantoku seems to have learned it well too.

<Spain’s defensive line in the closing stages>

Deep in the closing stages of the match, a certain judgment was clearly at work on the Spanish bench. Even if updates on the Germany vs Costa Rica match weren’t being fed in continuously, they had probably reached the players by this point. Asensio was up front, visibly fired up, shouting encouragement with something like frustration, yet Spain’s back line didn’t move forward at all until the very end. They were never a team built for power play to begin with, but even so, the full-backs could have pushed higher. Carvajal in particular, who came on partway through, probably never once overlapped past midfield. That’s hard to imagine from a full-back on a team that’s losing.

In other words, it looks like there was, to some degree, a judgment at work that said this is fine as it is.

Of course there’s also the pride of a World Cup-winning nation — it’s hard to imagine the public would be satisfied with a team that doesn’t attack. Still, I think the judgment softly kicked in anyway.

Various media had predicted this, but personally I had taken the view that it was possible depending on how the closing stages played out, not something they would deliberately aim for.

So what’s most remarkable, above all, is that it was Japan who created that situation.

There must have been tremendous pressure.

The thing that felt most disappointing about the Costa Rica match was, without question, the defense.

“Beaten by a deep-lying opponent, ending in a scoreless draw” — that kind of match happens often enough in the world. It’s no different at the World Cup.

So the one thing that absolutely must never happen is this:

Losing to a deep-lying opponent from a careless mistake that concedes a single goal.

That’s the kind of thing that happens maybe once every few dozen matches, and yet it happened exactly that way.

“Why didn’t we do this,” “if only we’d done that there” — these thoughts must have circled through their heads over and over. But shifting their focus to “there’s still a next match, we can win that one” and rising to face it anyway takes real mental strength.

With the victory, that tension broke, and the tears came out. What a wonderful thing it is to cry tears of victory.

There’s no need to cry again even if Japan beats Croatia in the next match.

When a miracle happens twice, people call it inevitable.

There’s no more surprise left.

There is only joy.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/12/1536/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.