Vissel
Kobe
Overview
What
can one say about Vissel Kobe. The team has
been trying to "redefine" itself
for so long that nobody is really sure the
team is all about. First of all, let's take
the name. Vissel Kobe's roots lie in the Ito
Ham soccer club, which was never a particularly
great club team, but performed well enough
to earn promotion to the J.League at the end
of 1996. With much fanfare, the team announced
its new name: Vissel!
Naturally,
the response of nearly everyone in the footballing
community was: "What the heck is a vissel?"
Perhaps the team was choosing a yiddish word
to describe what fans do after the opposing
team scores a goal?
No,
the team explained, "Vissel" is
a combination of the words "victory"
and "vessel". This was a ship that
was going to carry Kobe to victory. When the
fans got over their initial surprise, the
team announced its mascot. Since the main
sponsor company was a packer of ham products,
naturally, the team chose as its mascot -
a cow.
The
reader should be getting the picture by now.
Vissel Kobe has never been quite sure what
it was all about, and the team's play has
been similarly disorganised. This is not to
say that Kobe is a bad team. On the contrary,
they have always been a difficult opponent
to face, and frequently upset top contenders.
However, the club always seems to end the
season near the middle of the table. In 1998,
Kobe decided that it should make an effort
to appeal to the many ethnic Koreans in the
Kobe-Osaka area, as one potential fan base.
To do so, it began to lure top Korean players.
While several good players did indeed serve
time in Kobe, the team did a poor job of pitching
itself to Koreans, in the way S-Pulse, for
example, has cultivated support from ethnic
Brazilians in the Shimizu area. After just
a year or so of this charade, the Koreans
were all shipped off and the team forgot about
its desire to be the Korean-flavoured delicacy
of the J.League.
Beginning
in 2001, the team's "strategy" seemed
to take another turn, this time focusing on
former national team players that were down
on their luck. Kobe went out of its way to
sign Kazu Miura, who was one of Japan's finest
football players in his heyday, but had reached
a low point in his career due to a combination
of age and arrogance. Another addition early
in the year was Shigeyoshi Mochizuki, whose
resume includes the winning goal in Japan's
2000 Asian Cup championship match, but also
features a record of firing and censure by
Nagoya Grampus, after Mochizuki and two other
players defied the authority of then-coach
Joao Carlos. During the course of the season,
Vissel picked up former Reds speedster Masayuki
Okano, who could never match his sprinter's
pace with much scoring ability.
But
despite laying out a lot of money to pack
their roster with has-beens, this turned out
to be yet another dead end. Vissel acquired
midfielder Takashi Hirano and striker Shoji
Jo, both of whom were once viewed as "golden
boys", but who have since fallen so far
out of favour that many regard them as washed
up. To make matters worse, coach Ryoichi Kawakatsu
was unable to provide a coherent strategy
for his collection of "fallen idols",
or mold them into a cohesive unit. The team
was extremely fortunate to avoid relegation
in 2002.
Kobe
will have to start from scratch in 2003, since
their effort to revive the careers of washed-up
stars has been proven to be a failure. Under
new coach Hiroshi Matsuda, the team has ditched
such castoffs as Shoji Jo and Kazu Miura,
though the team may hang on to players like
Ryuji Bando and Masayuki Okano, who delivered
at least some positive results last season.
Kobe will also hang onto its three Brazilians,
Sidiclei, Oseas and Harison, giving the team
at least some base on which to build. Nevertheless,
Kobe have a lot of work to do if they hope
to rebuild the team into a cohesive and competitive
unit. Most likely they will be pleased just
to finish in the middle of the table in 2003.
