11 steps to heaven?

January 5th, 2010 | by: Aidan | View Comments

Japan intends to play eleven matches between now and their first World Cup match with Cameroon on June 14th. Eleven?!

The World Cup is a mere five months away now, so this does seem to be a hell of a lot. On the other hand, several of those are competitive fixtures. Yemen are the opposition on Wednesday in an Asian Cup qualifier, as are Bahrain in March.

In between those are three matches in the East Asian Championships in Tokyo which will see Japan take on South Korea, China and Hong Kong. Of these five matches, only the one with South Korea looks to be truly testing.

This is all against Asian opposition of course, and Japan want to test themselves against more exotic opponents before the World Cup comes around, which means yet more fixtures. The opposition is yet to be arranged but it is looking as though six friendly fixtures will take place before the big kick off with Cameroon.

This is a lot by anyone’s standards. That said, the first choice squad won’t necessarily play in all of these games, as indeed they aren’t in the upcoming tie with Yemen where the squad is made up mostly with youthful inexperience.

Any other nation planning on playing as much as this in the build up to the World Cup?