On the second day of their activities, Japan National U-17 Team had two training sessions, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. In the morning, they went through 3-on-2, 4-on-4-plus-2, 5-on-5 and 10-on-10-plus-goalkeepers before finishing the session with shooting drills. Head coach Uchiyama said to players “Don’t receive the balls standing. Receive the ball as you move around and keep the ball moving around as well. Spend more time for moving toward the goal and when you attack, do it fast with your quickness.”

The afternoon session was centred on how to defend as a team as the players took on 3-on-2, 6-on-6-plus-goalkeepers, 6-on-5-plus goalkeepers and 11-on-11. After that, they moved on to making sure set-piece variations and to compete in an intra-squad penalty shootout. The drills kept the players always simulate match situation, while their defensive assignments required hard work to adjust positioning tenaciously and repeatedly according to the opposing offence in order to put pressure. 

In the evening, a welcome party was held for all the participating teams to get together. For the team introduction time, Japan had Tanaka Kosuke and Fujimoto Kanya showed their short performance. It was a rather pressured situation for the two players because Japan’s duo got on stage for the first of all the teams taking turns. But their perfectly choreographed performance brought laughter to everyone watching. While all the 16 teams put on their own shows, at the end of the section all the teams together worked on a game, which totally broke the ice and brought all players of different nationalities together to make a wonderful party. Finally the Sanix Cup starts their matches tomorrow. Japan’s U-17 squad go all out in the first match against Korea Republic.

Comments

TOMIYASU Takehiro（Avispa Fukuoka U-18）
We practiced especially on offence in the morning and defence in the afternoon. I felt it is important to predict next plays and get ready for them both in offence and defence. Now that the welcome party is over and we have the tournament start tomorrow. The first match is against Korea Republic who we lost to in last year’s AFC U-16 Championship, so we will play as one team to succeed in a payback.

TANAKA Kosuke（Kyoto Sanga F.C. U-18）
In today’s training, we paid attention to making sure we have good spacing and good vision and to defend not to be outnumbered. I thought we have to always keep using our brain and we need to care even about small movements we make. We will utilise those findings in the matches from tomorrow as well. We seldom have opportunities to communicate with people from other countries, so the welcome party was a good experience.

FUJIMOTO Kanya（Tokyo Verdy Junior Youth）
In the training today, both morning and afternoon, we communicate well with each other and went over things for the matches starting tomorrow, for example how to create outnumbering situations in offence and how to defend not to be outnumbered in defence. In the welcome party in the evening, every team showed a performance on stage and it was a very fun atmosphere. In the tournament from tomorrow, we will take advantage of the momentum this team have and keep advancing until we win it all.

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