As the World Cup winds down to its final few matches, I thought I’d put down some of my final thoughts on the Japan National team. I’ve been able to digest the team’s performance at the World Cup for the past week or so. The tremendous highs from the victories over Cameroon and Denmark have subsided, but the bitter disappointment from the penalty shoot-out loss to Paraguay has gone too. With a level-headed mind, I can truly say that the World Cup was a success for Japan and that the future looks very bright for this team. However, that’s not to say that success will now come easily for the team. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done over the next few weeks and in the next four years if the team is to match or surpass this performance.

It’s been a few days since our painful loss to Paraguay, but now I’ve realized there are a lot more heart-breaking ways to leave the World Cup. We thought Komano’s PK miss ripped our hearts out, but what the Ghanaians must feel after Gyan’s miss, or how Paraguay must feel after Cardozo’s, is hard to imagine. Although, I don’t have too much sympathy for the Paraguayans ;-). The fact of the matter is every team gets their hearts broken, except one. But if you digest the initial heartache that came from our loss to Paraguay and see what Japan accomplished over the past few weeks, you can see how beautiful of a World Cup it has been for Japan. There’s no real theme in today’s post but I just wanted to quickly go over a couple hot topics that have come out in the past few days - Shunsuke Nakamura's retirement and transfer news.