Women’s World Cup game-changing moments No 5: Japan in 2011 | Nick Ames

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Within months of the earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands, the Nadeshiko let a grieving nation take leave of its senses for just a moment

“We ran and ran,” the Japan captain Homare Sawa said. “We were exhausted, but we kept running.” Japan’s footballers had not been completely sure whether to play at the 2011 World Cup. Three months previously their country had suffered something appalling: the earthquake and tsunami that struck the coast of Tohoku that March had cost thousands of lives and, at moments like that, talk of football’s restorative power could hardly seem more inadequate. The conversations among the squad were serious, earnest, intense; the eventual decision was that they should travel and, on a dizzying night in Frankfurt, it was vindicated in ways nobody could have foreseen.

Saki Kumagai knows how to handle pressure. In 2016 she scored the winning penalty for Lyon, her brilliant club side, in the Champions League final against Wolfsburg. But five years before that she was just 20, a utility player who had joined Urawa Reds from high school, when she was handed the chance to let a grieving nation take leave of its senses for just a moment.

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from Football | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/25/womens-world-cup-japan

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