22 May 2003(Thu)

A visit to Kashiwa Reysol's Hitachi Stadium is always interesting.

Not just to watch the actions of the so-called Yellow Monkeys behind the goal, but also because the atmosphere in general is excellent.

The stadium is small, compact and the fans are close to the pitch.

It reminds me of visiting a lower division club in England, or a club from outside the professional league.

You don't need a big crowd to create a good atmosphere, but last Saturday we got one (over 12,000) for the visit of Yokohama F Marinos.

With the Yellow Monkeys at one end, and a mass of Marinos blue at the other, it was a clear sign that the J.League is serving its purposes by providing hometown teams for the people to follow.

It was an excellent match, too, with Reysol winning 3-1.

Reysol almost went down to J2 last season, but there are strong signs now of a revival. They have 16 points from nine games, just four off the pace being set by Jubilo Iwata.

The bright and energetic performance of Keiji Tamada earned him the Man of the Match award against Yokohama. He scored Reysol's third goal, a crucial strike after Marinos had fought back to 2-1 down, and played a big part in the first two, for Jussie and rookie Tatsuya Yazawa.

Slowly but surely, Reysol manager Marco Aurelio is overhauling a tired and slumping team, which fell into steep decline after coming close to winning the second-stage title in 2000.

On top of this, the Japanese players feel they are benefiting by the absence of Edilson, who returned to the club for a second spell after helping Brazil win the World Cup last summer.

Watching Reysol in that period, it seemed as though Ricardinho and Edilson were playing amongst themselves, ignoring all the Japanese players in attack.

With Edilson gone, Ricardinho is now the focal point of the team, and he is forced to pass the ball to all his teammates rather than looking for Edilson at every occasion.

The Reysol revival is far from finished yet, though.

On Saturday they played like the away team for much of the game, defending, counter-attacking and time-wasting throughout the second half.

This shows Marco Aurelio is not fully confident in his players, yet, but they are heading in the right direction.

Reysol have wasted sacks full of Hitachi money in expensive overseas signings in recent years.

But with eight Japanese players in the team compared to three foreigners, the emphasis must always be on developing homegrown players.

ends