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'Mitoma put Brighton on the map' - Tokyo reporter Dan Orlowitz on Albion's pre-season trip to Japan
SussexWorld
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24/05/2024
Tokyo sports reporter Dan Orlowitz discusses Brighton and Hove Albion and all things Kaoru Mitoma ahead of the pre-season fixtures against Kashima Antlers and Tokyo Verdy in July at the Tokyo National Stadium.
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00:00
Thank you very much for joining us today. We're joined by Dan Ulowitz, who's a Tokyo-based
00:08
sports journalist and will be commenting on Brighton's two friendlies that they've just
00:13
arranged in Tokyo ahead of the next Premier League season, where they'll be up against
00:19
J1 league sides Kashima Antlers on Wednesday 24th July before facing Tokyo Verde on Sunday
00:27
28th July. Both games will be at the 68,000 capacity National Stadium in Tokyo. So Dan,
00:36
thanks very much for joining us. What can Brighton fans expect from their first ever
00:42
trip to Japan and from Tokyo?
00:45
Darren, thanks for having me on. It's going to be, I should hope, a very enjoyable experience
00:54
for any Brighton fans who are making the trip. The club certainly has a lot of fans in Japan
01:00
and in Asia. Obviously, there's a lot of English and British expats who live here, live and
01:08
work here for whatever reason, and quite a number who are very attached to Brighton.
01:13
And I know quite a few who have gotten a lot of recognition. They say they're from Brighton,
01:20
and they go, "Oh, Mitama." So it really does show how much of an impact Mitama has made
01:27
at the club and in Japan in terms of raising the club's recognition. They're going to be
01:33
friendlies, so obviously the level of play, it's the middle of the summer. Japanese summers
01:42
get very hot, very humid, so anyone who's making the trip, I will say, be cautious and
01:48
be aware of that. But the fans are second to none. The National Stadium is magnificent
01:55
when it's packed, which hopefully the organisers will be putting a lot of work into over these
02:01
next two months or so. And it'll be eye-opening, I think, for anyone who comes over, and I
02:08
think they're going to get a chance to see how big Brighton's fandom in Japan has grown
02:13
over these last two years, really.
02:16
Yeah, yeah. It's going to be a great experience for the fans, by the sounds of it. Can you
02:22
give us a feel for Mitama's profile in Japan? How popular is he? Obviously he's a key player
02:28
for the national team. You get the feeling there's so many more Japanese fans around
02:36
the Amex Stadium now when you go to the match days. Does that correspond in Tokyo as well?
02:42
Is he quite big over there?
02:44
Absolutely. I believe Brighton - it's been about a year since Brighton opened their official
02:50
Japanese language Twitter account, if you will, and they have 86 or so thousand followers.
02:59
One of the top European clubs in Japan in terms of social media presences. He's put
03:09
the club on the map, and definitely a star for the national team. A star as far as the
03:17
J League is concerned, even though he only played in the J League for a season and a
03:21
half and that was during the pandemic. I always like to say, one of the great tragedies of
03:30
the pandemic in terms of football here was that so few fans got to see him play in the
03:36
stadium because obviously attendances were capped at 5,000 for most of the 2020 season.
03:42
I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten to watch him grow and evolve into the player
03:48
that you see today. Arguably he was very much robbed of the MVP award that season. Just
03:55
a massive player for both club and country these days. Certainly in a national team that
04:05
hasn't quite settled on who the star is, he is one of the candidates. His exploits
04:11
at the World Cup, it goes without saying, are massive. That one millimeter made all
04:16
the difference against Spain. As you've seen around the Amex Stadium, he's bringing fans
04:25
out and that's not a cheap trip these days considering how weak the yen is. You have
04:30
to be very dedicated to make that journey and certainly he inspires that in fans here.
04:36
Yeah, he's absolutely, when he's on his form, obviously he's sustained this lower
04:43
back injury in the last stages of the season. But prior to that, he's absolutely electric.
04:50
He's one of the few players that you can say when he gets the ball, the whole crowd,
04:55
they're anticipating. He's one of those players that get the crowd on their feet.
05:02
To do that at the highest level in the Premier League, was that potential evident when he
05:06
was at Kawasaki Fontale?
05:09
Absolutely. He came as a rookie into that 2020 squad and even just coming off the bench
05:17
as a super sub essentially, Kawasaki, that 2020 Kawasaki squad was arguably one of the
05:27
strongest top to bottom that the league has ever seen just in terms of the quality that
05:32
they had at the depth that they had. And even in a squad that good, he stood out. Whenever
05:39
he got the ball, you knew that he was capable of doing something incredible, not just scoring
05:43
goals but also key passes, making assists, setting up chances. And you knew that it was
05:50
never a question of if Europe, but it was a question of when Europe. And it was honestly
05:55
no surprise that he's ascended to this level.
05:58
Yeah. And how is it on the news now? Are his games covered on the news, on the mainstream
06:07
media in Japan?
06:09
Yes. Anytime a Japanese player does anything in the Premier League, you see it in the headlines,
06:16
in the little, the info displays on the trains where they'll show sort of the highlights,
06:22
not the highlights, but photos and sort of headlines from whatever happened over the
06:26
weekend. And of course, if Mitoma plays, you're going to see him at some point, very prominent
06:32
in advertising related to the national team. Of course, Brighton is becoming more of a
06:39
draw for sponsors here as well. And he's out there, certainly one of the most visible Japanese
06:45
players today.
06:46
Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully he's fit in time. He mentioned that he is working towards being
06:54
fit for the new season with the eye, definitely playing these two games against Kashima Antlers
07:01
and Tokyo Verde. What can they expect to face against these teams, Dan? What sort of tests
07:10
are Brighton going to get against them?
07:13
So the Kashima game is going to be probably the tougher of the two friendlies. They're
07:20
very much sort of, I hesitate to say rebound because they did fairly well last season,
07:26
but they're under Renko Popovich this year, the new manager, and he's got them in third
07:31
place. Very, very tough. Yeah, just a very tough squad. The most accomplished in Japanese
07:43
football. They've won the most titles, and I'm talking about both major titles, domestically
07:50
and if you include their ACL triumph in 2018. I expect you've got players in there like
08:00
especially Yuma Suzuki, who for a while was one of Japan's brightest talents at striker,
08:07
and he had some personality conflicts that kept him from the national team, which is
08:12
sort of a shame because he's been one of the best strikers that Japan has produced in the
08:16
last decade.
08:18
Verity are the interesting choice. They are newly promoted this season. An original 10
08:26
club like Kashima, one of the co-founders of the J League, but they've been in the second
08:30
division since the end of the 2018 season. So for them to land this friendly, I think
08:37
that the league is, I shouldn't say the league because they're not organizing this game,
08:41
but the sponsors are maybe banking on some nostalgia there.
08:47
Playing wise, Verity are actually doing a pretty good job this season of returning to
08:52
the J1 and they're holding their own. They have a flair for the dramatic so far this
08:59
season. I believe 10 or 11 of their games and they're 15 games in, 10 or 11 of their
09:07
results have been determined in the last five minutes of play.
09:10
Oh really? Yeah.
09:11
Basically from the 85th minute on, they've had a total of 14 goals scored.
09:16
Oh wow.
09:17
I mean, and both for and against. So never a dull moment. Never a dull moment. Only three
09:24
wins so far, which is the problem, but only three losses, just nine draws and they've
09:29
all been just the most thrilling games you can imagine. So I don't know. I don't know
09:34
if this game is going to be like that, but it'll be interesting. And like I said, when
09:39
the national stadium, it does have the track. It's not the best stadium that Japan has to
09:45
offer, but when it's packed, it is an incredible atmosphere.
09:50
We saw that last year with the Bayern and Manchester City friendlies. And you would
09:56
hope that, especially with the draw of Mitoma, there's going to be a lot of fans who are
10:00
going to come out to see that. And it will be an interesting mix.
10:03
Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think they didn't have a friendly against his former team, Kawasaki
10:08
frontail? That would have been a nice one, wouldn't it?
10:13
Yeah, it would have been. And to be honest, the number of European clubs we have coming
10:19
to Japan this year who aren't playing the match that we sort of predicted is pretty
10:25
high. You have Tottenham coming, but they are playing Vissel Kobe, who won the J-1 last
10:33
year, rather than Andrzej Postakoglou's former team, Yokohama F. Marinos. You have now Brighton
10:39
coming and not playing Kawasaki. Stuttgart are coming and of course Genki Harajukuchi
10:48
is leaving, but Hiroki Ito isn't going to be facing off against J-Bil Iwata. So a lot
10:55
of weird matchmaking happening here. I think that sort of comes down to who the sponsors
11:01
are, who is organizing these games. The J-League is doing some but not all. And also how clubs
11:09
are prioritizing their summer breaks. And you do have to look at Kawasaki's, you know,
11:18
from the sort of load-bearing perspective, they will have the Asian Champions League
11:22
to contest from September. So maybe they've made it, maybe their club ultimately made
11:29
the decision to take that time to help their players recover. But to my knowledge, they
11:36
were in the running for this game. So it was somewhat of a surprise to see that they didn't
11:41
land it. And I'm sure Kawasaki's fans will be very disappointed that they didn't land
11:46
it.
11:47
Yeah, yeah. Well, no, it would have been a great story to have Matoma going back there.
11:51
But there's this sort of perception that Brighton seemed to pluck him from out of nowhere. But
11:56
obviously he was doing great things for Kawasaki at the time. Are there any other players that
12:03
you think in the Japanese league that you think could be ready to make that next step
12:09
that perhaps even Brighton should be keeping their eye on?
12:12
I mean, there's always J-Leaguers who are on the verge of a big move. I think that the
12:19
time of Japanese players being sort of these diamonds in the rough that nobody saw coming,
12:26
that's sort of over. You look at how there's always every offseason, you have five to 10
12:33
Japanese players who are going to Europe, they're going to Belgium, they're going to
12:38
Portugal, they're going to all sorts of clubs and signing on and making an impact and then
12:44
moving on to bigger clubs. The biggest surprise of this summer friendly season is that FC
12:52
Tokyo don't have anyone lined up as the biggest club in the capital and a club that is capable
13:00
of drawing a very large crowd and a club that's featuring a lot of national team and Olympic
13:09
team players. Maybe that's one reason why it didn't work out because a number of their
13:13
players including Kuriyama, goalkeeper, or Kuriyama is a midfielder, but Brandon Taishino
13:20
is the goalkeeper, Kashiyeth Bangnagande a defender, they're all potentially going to
13:27
be playing in Paris at the Olympics. So maybe that's sort of why it didn't work out is that
13:31
Tokyo aren't expecting to have that star power available for these games. But you turn on
13:39
any J-League game and there's someone you should be paying attention to. I think that's
13:45
the strength that this league has is that it's producing so many young talented players
13:51
who are ready for Europe, maybe not the Premier League immediately, but you watch some of
13:58
these players and within a year or two you're going to see them in action. And as I've told
14:05
other outlets before, the World Cup is in two years and I think it's very possible that
14:12
Japan will field a squad of all Europe-based players. I think that's the depth that the
14:20
player pool has right now.
14:21
Mattoma is certainly leading the way and hopefully he can get recovery time to play a big part
14:31
in these games coming up. But away from the football, Dan, what should Brighton fans say
14:36
if they're heading to the football then after the game? Is there any sort of parts of the
14:41
city that they should perhaps look around?
14:44
Oh, I mean, it's all good. I think that, especially these days, we're experiencing a tourism boom,
14:56
the likes of which Japan has not experienced until now. Even in the pre-pandemic peak of
15:03
2019, the National Stadium is basically a five-minute train ride from Shinjuku, which
15:11
is one of the big nightlife and entertainment districts. Saying, "Well, where should you
15:20
go in Tokyo?" is like saying, "Where should you go in London or New York City?" It is
15:28
not just a city. It is in fact designated a metropolis by the government. You go to
15:34
Tokyo Tower or Skytree and you look out and just all the light touches is Tokyo. I think
15:42
that the fans who make the trip, I hope that they'll discover some gems of their own. I'm
15:48
sure that they're going to... I'll be seeing some blue and white stripes in July. I would
15:57
say the biggest suggestion I can say is just be respectful of the local customs, be adventurous,
16:06
be curious. Don't be afraid to go off the beaten path and go into a restaurant that
16:12
doesn't have English signage. You're going to find the best meals of your life. You're
16:18
going to find amazing culture and history and beauty. Go outside Tokyo. You've got three
16:28
or four days between those friendlies. Go out. Experience all Japan has to offer. Yeah,
16:34
get out there.
16:35
Yeah. No, it's going to be a great experience. I was pleased when it came through because
16:39
there was so much talk that it might happen. Then once the confirmation came through, it's
16:46
the fans that can afford to travel over there. I think they're going to have a great experience
16:52
in Tokyo and watching some good football as well. Thanks again for joining us, Dan. That
17:00
was some great insight. Yeah, we look forward to the games over there.
17:06
Yeah, absolutely. Can't wait. Hopefully you'll be making it out. I look forward to meeting
17:13
all the Brighton media at the National Stadium.
17:16
That would be great.
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