Moriyasu was at the helm four years ago when Japan lost to Oman in their first game of the third round of the preliminaries for Qatar 2022, but there were to be no such issues as the hosts launched their AFC Asian Qualifiers\u2122 – Road to 26 campaign in emphatic fashion.
\nNot even the presence of Ivanko Brankovic, who oversaw Oman\u2019s shock win, could insulate the Chinese from a rampant Japan as Wataru Endo, Kaoru Mitoma, Takumi Minamino \u2013 who scored twice \u2013 Junya Ito, Daizen Maeda and Takefusa Kubo all found the net.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the previous Asian final round of qualifying we lost the first match, so there were a lot of learnings from that,\u201d said Moriyasu, who is now in his sixth year at the helm. \u201cWe didn’t want to do the same this year.
\n\u201cThrough the meetings we had we tried, as a team, to discuss how we were going to fight in this qualifier and to have a clear image of what we wanted to do. In previous World Cup qualifiers I was just simply sharing the image of what I wanted to do with the players, we were not able to train together because the timing of when we able to get together was different.
\n\u201cBut with the Japan Football Association\u2019s support we were able to have all the players here on Monday and I think that made a great difference in how we were able to prepare for today\u2019s match.\u201d<\/p>\n
Japan\u2019s extra groundwork paid dividends in front of a crowd of more than 52,000 as Endo put the hosts in front with a 12th minute header and Mitoma doubled that advantage on the stroke of halftime.
\nBut it was in the second half that Moriyasu\u2019s side cut loose, Minamino netting a pair of top class finishes before substitute Junya Ito hit the target with a deflected effort and then set up Maeda to head in the sixth. Kubo smashed the seventh home with seconds remaining.
\nThe result means Japan sit on top of the early Group C standings alongside Bahrain, who handed Australia a late loss on the Gold Coast on Thursday to reinforce Moriyasu\u2019s sense that there will be numerous challenges for the Samurai Blue along the Road to 26.<\/p>\n
The Japanese travel to Manama to take on Dragan Talajic\u2019s Bahrain side in their second qualifier of the current international window on Tuesday.
\n\u201cThe win in today’s match doesn’t guarantee that we will qualify or mean anything before the Bahrain game,\u201d said Moriyasu. \u201cWe should not forget to prepare at our best going into the remaining matches.
\n\u201c(The Australia-Bahrain) result confirms how difficult the first match in these Asian qualifiers can be and we should never feel relaxed. That’s how I feel.
\n\u201cRanking wise Australia should have won, but that doesn’t guarantee that you can always win. We always need to focus on the next game and do our best. And then repeat that exercise. I think the loss of Australia has given us that lesson again.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the next match, Bahrain will have momentum with that win today and it’s going to be a home game for them, so we just need to aware of that going into the match.
\n\u201cSometimes we need to play aggressively but sometimes we have to be very tolerant and play until the end, doing our best until the final whistle. It depends on the flow of the match.
\n\u201cWe have to be very flexible and maximise the ability of the individual players on the pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Moriyasu was at the helm four years ago when Japan lost to Oman in their first game of the third round of the preliminaries for Qatar 2022, but there were to be no such issues as the hosts launched their AFC Asian Qualifiers\u2122 – Road to 26 campaign in emphatic fashion. Not even the presence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":1017818,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20967],"tags":[3733,28042],"class_list":["post-1017812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afc-news","tag-afc","tag-afc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1017812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1017818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1017812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1017812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/91varzeshi.ir\/portal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1017812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}