Built at a cost of some 400m yen — much of which was paid by the local council — the rebuilt Omiya Park has a capacity of 15,000, similar to Shimizu S-Pulse’s Nihondaira ground, with four separate stands built tight to the pitch. In contrast to the direction in which football stadium design is moving in certain other countries, it is not an all-seater venue in that the stands behind each goal feature terracing at the front and seats at the back. The only roof is down one side over the main stand, another particularly striking feature being the colossal hairdryer-style floodlights.

NACK 5 Stadium Omiya in all its glory

For the Squirrel Nation, it was their new home. The official opening game of the NACK 5 Stadium Omiya — retitled following a sponsorship deal with a local radio station — took place in early November, when with just four rounds to go in the 2007 J1 season, Ardija hosted Oita Trinita. It could scarcely have been a more delicately balanced fixture: a crucial relegation six-pointer, in which both sides knew that a win would see them take a giant stride towards safety.

The place was packed, each stand a sea of orange and blue. The scene was set for arguably the biggest day in the club’s history and just three minutes in, midfielder Yoshiyuki Kobayashi grabbed the headlines as he took advantage of sloppy Oita defending to fire in the opening goal from twenty yards.

After such a stunning start, though, Omiya dithered and allowed the visitors back into the match. It was no surprise when Yuki Fukaya tapped in a close-range equaliser midway through the first half and Omiya’s coach Satoru Sakuma appeared content to concede the initiative altogether with his tactical changes, even as the match stood at one goal apiece. Ardija had a few half-chances after the interval, but the home side were usually second best. Sure enough, four minutes from time, Trinita forward Shunsuke Maeda scored the winner from close range.

The Squirrels had blown it. Oita took back with them to Kyushu three priceless points in the fight against the drop; Omiya were still deep in trouble and had lost the first match at their beautiful new ground in front of 15,000 fans. “The stadium’s a palace,” wrote one despondent member of the Squirrel Nation afterwards, “It’s too good for this Omiya team.”

Seconds before kick-off against Oita Trinita

The Final Countdown: 3

All across Japan, there are twenty three minutes to go in the penultimate round of fixtures in the 2007 J1 season. At a heaving Saitama Stadium, Urawa Reds have moments before gone a goal down in the top of the table crunch match with improving Kashima Antlers. Elsewhere, two teams are fighting to avoid the drop — hopelessly out of form and now in the relegation play-off spot, Sanfrecce Hiroshima trail 3-0 at Kawasaki Frontale, while just above them on goal difference, our Omiya Ardija are tied at 1-1 against FC Tokyo.

The preceding weeks had seen Omiya claw their way out of the relegation places. A handful of draws, that sensational 1-0 win over Urawa in the return derby match and a couple of narrow defeats of other struggling sides have seen Satoru Sakuma’s side give themselves a chance of staying up. The last few games have felt to the Squirrel Nation as if the team were playing on a knife edge, but unbelievably, with closest rivals Hiroshima three behind to Kawasaki, a victory over Tokyo would see Ardija practically guaranteed survival and J1 football at Omiya Park next year.

It’s just that coach Sakuma doesn’t seem to have realised this. Going for three points is the last thing on his mind: both strikers have been substituted, the Squirrels are playing 4-6-0 and are inviting the opposition to put them under pressure. It looks almost willful, Sakuma’s refusal to acknowledge that an attacking approach against a mid-table side with nothing to play for might yield dramatic results. And Tokyo midfielder and goalscorer Naohiro Ishikawa gathers the ball wide on the right, preparing to launch another attack.

What’s on the NACK 5 menu

The Final Countdown: 2

There’s a minute on the clock now. Reds are still losing, as Kashima — playing with only nine men after two red cards – threaten to blow the title race wide open with what would be a sensational victory. Tokyo continue to press forward against Omiya, even though Sakuma has finally succumbed to reason and thrown on a striker: the injury-prone Naoto Sakurai, who hasn’t scored a single goal all year. Kawasaki continue their stroll to victory over a shattered and demoralised Sanfrecce side.

For this is turning into merely the latest in a string of defeats for Hiroshima, in what has been a disastrous second half of the season. Boasting what is on paper one of the most dangerous front pairings in the country in veteran Brazilian goal machine Ueslei and his razor sharp foil Japanese international Hisato Sato, fans can’t grasp why results are so poor. But the fact is that due to a total collapse of form, coach Mihailo Petrovic’s Sanfrecce side have picked up just two points from the last 24 and have plummeted down the standings to their current position.

With Ardija’s game at Tokyo petering out to a 1-1 draw, Sanfrecce Hiroshima will go into the final match of the year knowing they need to beat third-placed Gamba Osaka, while relying at the same time on Kawasaki to get at least a point at Omiya. Difficult, yes, but — with Ueslei and Sato on board — maybe not quite impossible. They’re still in with a chance. It’s not over yet.

The Final Countdown: 1

Thirty seconds to go. The Red Army urge their team onwards, but the game looks to be up for them today; to retain the title, Urawa will just have to win at relegated Yokohama FC next week instead. Still three down in their match, Sanfrecce’s thoughts have by now also turned to their next match against Gamba, while another FC Tokyo attack has just broken down against Ardija: Omiya’s Leandro picks up the ball just outside his own area and brings it away from danger.

He advances forward into space, the Tokyo forwards slow to track back alongside him. Brushing off a challenge, the big defender exchanges a swift one-two with Daigo Kobayashi that takes out another couple of opponents and sees him across the halfway line. Leandro doesn’t have that much speed, but what he does have is power and momentum. This is enough to take him away from Tokyo’s Ryoichi Kurisawa and by the time Masahiko Inoha tries to get close enough to the ball to make a challenge, all of a sudden Leandro is barely thirty yards from goal. The whole of the home side’s defence has opened up before him.

Inoha has other ideas. Racing alongside his giant opponent and by this time desperate not to concede a free-kick or worse, with one lunge he makes a vital play for the ball. But Inoha’s touch is weak; aiming to flick it out for a corner, the Tokyo man simply nudges it further on and Leandro takes it in his stride, now clean through on the goalkeeper. Exposed, Hitoshi Shiota seems caught in no man’s land, backing off and then edging tentatively forwards to meet the onrushing Brazilian, but Leandro, now twelve yards out and unstoppable, makes up Shiota’s mind for him as he crashes the ball over the keeper’s shoulder and into the back of the net.

It’s 2-1. He’s actually scored. Leandro ran the entire length of the pitch and he scored. Omiya are winning. In the space of twelve seconds, one player has saved their season. The area of the stadium reserved for away fans is transformed into a mass of shrieking, orange-afro-wearing pandemonium, as the Squirrel Nation leap up and down, high-fiving and screaming at each other uncontrollably. The players mob their team-mate and Satoru Sakuma is caught on camera looking to the heavens, covering his face with his hands in a kind of ecstatic disbelief.

Leandro, Ardija hero

The Final Countdown: 0 (Postscript)

In the last fixtures of the 2007 season, Omiya Ardija drew 1-1 with Kawasaki Frontale and Sanfrecce Hiroshima drew with Gamba Osaka. The Squirrels’ place in J1 for 2008 was therefore confirmed as being safe and a few days later, Satoru Sakuma stood down as Ardija coach. His replacement was announced as being Yasuhiro Higuchi, who had in 2006 and 2007 led Montedio Yamagata to bottom-half-of-the-table finishes in J2. Hiroshima subsequently participated in the relegation play-off, which they lost 2-1 on aggregate to Kyoto Sanga. Urawa Reds lost 1-0 to Yokohama FC, a sensational defeat that allowed Kashima Antlers to pip them for the league title via a 3-0 defeat of Shimizu S-Pulse.

And so ended a rollercoaster J1 season, one the Squirrel Nation will not soon forget.

A Year In The Life

Throughout 2006 and 2007, then, the majority of Omiya home fixtures were played at Komaba Stadium, a charmless concrete bowl complete with an athletics track. The Squirrel Nation hated the place. It was 25 minutes’ fun-filled walk from the nearest train station, for one thing. And it was located in Urawa. Oh, and it just so happened to be something akin to the Reds’ spiritual home. In contrast to Omiya Park, the small crowds attending Ardija games at Komaba found it almost impossible to generate a proper atmosphere and the hardcore support, instead of being able to reach out and touch the goalnets as they had been used to, were fifty yards from the action.

But an additional factor was serving to isolate fans from the club. While few would have expected it to be easy to compete alongside teams of the stature of Urawa, Yokohama F Marinos or Kashima Antlers, among Omiya supporters there nevertheless existed the feeling that their team had been underperforming and, for many, the root cause of this sense of potential unfulfilled lay in the club’s transfer policy.

Time and again, foreign strikers in particular came to Omiya, failed to make any impact and were quietly let go. On other occasions, the Squirrels got rid of players who immediately went on to achieve terrific success at rival J-League clubs. Holder nominally of the position of Chief Scout, the man responsible for all this was Satoru Sakuma, effectively the General Manager of the club in that he oversaw the relationship with – and indeed continued to be employed by – main sponsor NTT. It was a mess and a constant source of dissatisfaction amongst supporters mistrustful of Sakuma’s power and suspicious of the fact that he was not even employed by the football club.

2007 started, then, with Omiya Ardija in an uncomfortable position both off and on the pitch. Toshiya Miura had departed after three years as coach, having taken the team to promotion but then not been able to move things up to the next level via his particularly cautious brand of football. Rumours abounded of the transfer budget having been blown the previous year, meaning that the incoming coach, inexperienced Dutchman Robert Verbeek, had little or no money to spend – or rather, to have Sakuma spend for him. The squad appeared notably weaker than 2006 and a relegation battle looked to be on the cards.

Defeats in all of the first four matches in March brought home what a tough year lay ahead. The team appeared ill-focused, with even less of a cutting edge than had been the case under Miura – and although the defence did begin to tighten up as new import Leandro settled in alongside Daisuke Tomita in the middle of the back four, the Squirrels were scoring on average only once every two games. Worse was to come at the end of April, when the team put in a particularly feeble performance in a home defeat by Ventforet Kofu, one of the few J1 clubs who are actually a smaller concern than Omiya.

After the final whistle, for the first time fans staged a noisy protest calling for the dismissal not of coach Verbeek, but of Satoru Sakuma. It was plain to see, they argued, whose fault all this was: not so much the lifeless football and the dreadful results but the sheer energy-sapping lack of ambition that seemed to be pervading Omiya Ardija, the apparent belief that simply being in the top division was going to be sufficient for the supporters and really ought to provide satisfaction in itself.

Nothing, of course, changed. In fact, although the simmering resentment against Sakuma remained, this heralded a modest improvement in the team’s fortunes. A hard-fought 1-1 draw in the rain at Saitama Stadium against high-flying Urawa turned out to be the first match of an eight-game unbeaten run.

But it was difficult to move up the standings when no fewer than four of those games were 0-0 draws and, as the season reached its mid-point in late June, there was an air of deep despondency enveloping the club: an unloved temporary home ground, third bottom in the league, lacklustre performances from players seemingly unconvinced by the new coach, very few goals… and overseeing it all, Sakuma. How could things be much worse?

Sakuma Yamero!

A break in the match schedule saw the Squirrels squad on a training camp in order to prepare for the second half of the season. Just prior to the recommencement of the J1 calendar, Omiya staged a friendly against Urawa and while the Reds’ line-up was filled with youngsters and fringe squad members, Robert Verbeek fielded more or less a full-strength side. The intention was that the Ardija players should use that match to put into practice the style of play and tactics that had been worked on during the camp, as a springboard for moving up the table.

The Squirrels had one shot throughout the whole of the ninety minutes and lost 6-0. They were shapeless, clearly uncommitted and ended up being torn apart by the young Urawa side. Verbeek was sacked later that evening.

The fans were split as to the wisdom of dismissing the Dutchman, some feeling that he’d done his best under difficult circumstances, while others took the view that his ultra-defensive approach was only ever going to achieve results by boring the opposition into submission. But there was no such disagreement when the identity of the new coach became clear. To the horror of the Squirrel Nation and with just days to go before the re-start of J1 against a strong Shimizu S-Pulse team, it was quickly announced that Verbeek’s replacement would be none other than Satoru Sakuma.

This was comedy gold for the sports press – who immediately nicknamed the new incumbent the “salaryman coach” – but total humiliation for the fans. As far as they were concerned, Sakuma had proved himself on countless occasions to be an appalling judge of players, he didn’t even have any real coaching experience at all and was, even worse, still to be an employee of NTT rather than coming onto the payroll of Omiya Ardija.

The club talked about how imperative it was to remain in J1 – that they were under additional pressure from sponsors and from the local council, as the financial backers for the new stadium. But how, fans wondered, would it be possible for the team to make desperately-need improvements under a coach who was in reality an office worker, a jobbing member of company staff? The Sakuma appointment seemed instead to represent a one-way ticket back to J2. The redeveloped Omiya Park would surely play host not to top flight football, but to the minnows of the Japanese pro game.

The End…

Luckily for Satoru Sakuma, in his first game in charge, Shimizu S-Pulse were way off form. Omiya scraped a 2-2 draw – only the second time all year that they had scored more than once in a match. The following week, though, Ardija were outclassed at home by Vissel Kobe before then being put to the sword by Kashima Antlers with what was a truly atrocious display. The Squirrel Nation were aghast at how low their team had sunk. The players were uncoordinated and uncommitted – something it would never have been possible to say about Omiya sides of old – and the new coach was nothing but an incompetent with a giant ego.

Protests by the supporters would clearly have no effect, given that Sakuma was now running the show entirely and there was no desire amongst Omiya followers to undermine the confidence of the players yet further by wholesale booing of their increasingly woeful efforts. But the fans’ websites crackled with impotent fury, while those Ardija players who maintained inevitably anodyne blogs as part of their media profile found that, via the comments sections of their sites, they were on the receiving end of a level of anger that surprised even the fans themselves.

On the pitch, matters reached a head one Saturday at the end of August, when Omiya travelled to take on a Nagoya Grampus 8 side on a terrible run of results and further weakened by injury and suspension. If ever there was an opportunity for Sakuma’s team to break out of their slump, this was it.

Omiya were crushed, 5-0. “The Squirrels followers who made the trip to Nagoya received for their effort and commitment nothing but mockery from the players,” read one fansite after the match. The mother of two young supporters commented on the blog of captain Chikara Fujimoto that she didn’t want her sons watching such awful football again, because it had made them cry. “Despair; thanks!” was the ironic posting of another fan on star midfielder Daigo Kobayashi’s web diary.

But amongst all the animated online discussions, a point that came up again and again was perhaps best summed up by one blog writer when he remarked, “I never realised before now how much I love the club. This situation has brought it home just how much it means to me.” The players seemed to be performing if anything even more poorly since the appointment of Sakuma, but for the Squirrel Nation a sea change had occurred in their attitude to and relationship with the club. The mood was paradoxically buoyant. The players might not look as if they care, the thinking seemed to go, but it’s our JOB to care: we’re Omiya Ardija supporters and we can’t change now.

All that was needed was for the team to provide a win. Any win. With ten or a dozen games to go there was still the possibility of avoiding relegation, but something needed to happen to kickstart a Squirrels revival. Incredibly, it came in the Saitama derby at the start of September when, with the score at 0-0 after an hour, league leaders Urawa had their defence sliced open. Forward Hiroshi Morita latched on to a perfectly weighted through ball after a surging run from the back by defender Leandro and clipped it past Reds keeper Ryota Tsuzuki for a hysterically-celebrated goal.

The reigning champions pushed Omiya back to try and grab an equaliser, but found themselves matched up against an opponent who had discovered a resilience not seen all year long. Leandro and Tomita were disciplined in the heart of the defence and goalkeeper Koji Ezumi played with an assurance that seemed to unnerve the Urawa attack. Ardija held on, reasonably comfortably in the end, for a 1-0 win. Was there hope still for the rest of the season?

Check back in a few days for the final part of a Year in the Life of the Squirrel Nation. And read more from furtho at Go! Go! Omiya Ardija and Japanese Non-League football.

The Derby

There’s half an hour to go before kick-off. Away behind one goal, a huddled group of fans dressed in orange strike up a chant, trying to ignore the torrential, sheeting rain and the fact that a good half of the seats around them are empty. Some of the soaked supporters wave home-made banners upon which they’ve painstakingly transcribed the names of their favourite players and, despite the unpromising conditions, they do a decent job of making some noise, creating an atmosphere and a sense of anticipation ahead of this, the first derby game of the 2007 season.

Their goal-shy team might not have much of a chance in the match ahead – recent results are hopelessly poor and the side are already in the relegation zone – but even so, the fans will do their best to encourage the players. This, after all, is why many of them wear orange replica shirts sporting the number twelve: collectively, they play the role of twelfth man and their job is to support the team all the way up to the final whistle. Who knows, maybe today there might be an incredible upset?

The response of the supporters in red behind the other goal – and indeed across most of the rest of the stadium, although they are nominally the away side – seems explicitly designed to crush any such optimism stone dead. It is a shattering, physical volume, coordinated by nominated leaders with military precision, drums and voices united in the absolute certainty that their team of choice are the strongest in the land.

For Urawa Reds were champions of Japan in 2006 and are top of the league again today. They have a fanbase that stretches far beyond their home in Saitama prefecture, from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south. They have the biggest budget and the best players and it is unthinkable that their diminutive near neighbours Omiya Ardija – the Squirrels, for God’s sake – might today be in with even a sniff of a chance of avoiding an absolute hammering.

The Reds fans have home-made flags, too. One of them shows a large cartoon fist coming down from the sky, like a Monty Python foot, to crush an Ardija logo. Another features a squirrel being tossed into a garbage can, while a third simply bears the legend OMIYA FUCK.

When Omiya’s mascot, a cheery seven-foot tall squirrel named Ardy, goes on a pre-match walkabout, the air is filled with catcalls, whistles and boos. As kick-off time approaches, the regimented noise from the Urawa followers becomes if anything yet more intense. The supporters wearing orange, meanwhile, continue to wave their banners and shake their umbrellas. You can see that they’re still singing as well. You just can’t hear them.

The Squirrel Nation

Let’s get the whole issue of the name out of the way first. Omiya itself is a small city in Saitama prefecture in central Japan and Ardija is a corruption of the Spanish word ‘ardilla’, which means ‘squirrel’, which is in turn a symbol of Omiya city. Expecting to understand Japanese football club names — Consadole Sapporo, say, or non-league outfit Renofa Yamaguchi — to any greater extent than that is like expecting to understand the deepest mysteries of the universe, so it’s best if you can just let it go there.

At least among the small pocket of foreign followers of teams in Japan’s professional league, the J-League, Omiya Ardija supporters have as a consequence of all this picked up the nickname of the Squirrel Nation. The passion which the Squirrel Nation feel for their diminutive club is something that has, as we shall see, grown greater than ever during the course of a tempestuous 2007, but in terms of the relationship with their near neighbours – the cities of Urawa and Omiya are a matter of only five miles apart – being regarded as playing second string is a pretty normal state of affairs for Ardija fans.

The fact of the matter is that Urawa are far and away the most popular club in Japan, never mind on their own patch, and as such provide a straightforward default option for any new supporter getting into the game and hunting round for a team to follow. Manchester United are now and always have been a clear model for the Reds, from the cultural omnipresence to the design of the uniforms; even their proper full name is Mitsubishi Urawa Football Club.

While Urawa can stage matches at the Saitama Stadium enormodome and turn it into a pulsating cauldron of noise populated by at least 40,000 followers chanting in tight unison, when Omiya play there they’re satisfied to pull in a quarter of that number. And while Urawa aspire to being part of world football’s upper echelons — they were thrilled at winning the Asian Champions League 2007, not particularly because it meant that they were better than other clubs in Asia, but more because it gave them an opportunity to match themselves up with top European and South American sides in the Club World Cup — Ardija operate under their noses at a local level, scrapping for every supporter they can get.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this means that the Squirrel Nation are a tightly-knit bunch, vociferous in their expression of the fact that there are most emphatically two teams in Saitama: a point consistently misunderstood by almost everyone who is not connected to the club. The mayor of Saitama City, for instance, making a speech at Omiya’s brand new stadium and clad in an ill-fitting orange shirt, misjudged his audience as only a local politician can when to a distinctly frosty response he referred in glowing terms to the Reds and their recent achievements.

Omiya Park

Like almost all J-League teams, Omiya Ardija have their roots in the corporate football which blossomed across Japan in the 60s and 70s. While Urawa grew out of a Mitsubishi works side, Omiya’s origins lie in a local representative team of the NTT telecommunications giant. NTT Kanto played Regional League football before gaining promotion to the lower ranks of the Japan Soccer League, a nationwide competition populated by company teams like Toshiba and Yamaha.

During the 90s, however, Japanese club football was changed beyond all recognition by the establishment of the J-League and in 1999 NTT rode the wave of sides joining the ranks of the professionals by being among the founder members of the second tier, J2. The team name was changed in accordance with J-League policy that clubs abandon their corporate monikers completely and instead choose something that grounded them in their local community.

In their first few seasons in J2, Omiya Ardija were mainly stuck in mid-table alongside other small teams, such as Montedio Yamagata and Sagan Tosu. The Squirrels nevertheless had one significant asset at their disposal, in that they were able to use as their home stadium Omiya Park, which prior to the World Cup of 2002 was one of the few football-specific stadia in Japan. Built to stage the football tournament of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the ground had a capacity of 12,000 and the lack of a running track gave it the kind of intimacy that meant a 5000 crowd for a night game was enough to create a piping hot atmosphere. Despite the fact that Ardija were really no more than J2 also-rans, their stadium quickly developed a reputation among J-League fans as one of the best places to watch football in the whole country.

Late in 2004, however, a major problem arose from an unexpected source: suddenly, Omiya got good. Squirrels coach Toshiya Miura in the final quarter of the lengthy J2 season somehow managed to coax a series of increasingly impressive performances from his squad and it was Ardija who emerged from the pack to move into second spot behind runaway leaders Kawasaki Frontale. In the end, Omiya notched up a remarkable thirteen-match winning streak to close out the year and thereby claim an incredible promotion.

Appropriately, the move up to J1 was finally confirmed at Omiya Park with a 3-1 defeat of Mito Hollyhock, after which players and fans celebrated together the club’s shock success. Tears streamed down the face of Japanese / American midfielder Jun Marques Davidson as he shook hands with Squirrels supporters: university students and high school girls, middle-aged salarymen, parents and little kids, all in their orange replica shirts. None of them could have dreamed that a tiny club like Ardija – boasting an average gate of barely 6000 – would fight their way to a place among the elite of the Japanese game, alongside even their Saitama rivals the Reds.

But the problem for Ardija lay in the shape of their cosy, familiar old home stadium. Constructed in the leafy surrounds of the city’s main park and with cherry trees shedding their blossom on the flag-waving fans behind the goal in the spring time, however charming it was, the fact remained that the venue was now showing its age. More to the point, it wasn’t actually large enough for the 15,000 minimum capacity restriction placed by the J-League on stadia regularly staging J1 matches.

The Squirrels were subsequently allowed by league authorities to play a limited number of games there in the 2005 J1 season, but after a 1-0 win over Gamba Osaka in November of that year, the demolition men moved in and the stadium was completely knocked down. It was estimated that construction of its replacement on the same site would take two years. Just at the very point that they were trying to establish themselves in the top division, Ardija were homeless.

Check back next week for part two of a Year in the Life of the Squirrel Nation. And read more from furtho at Go! Go! Omiya Ardija and Japanese Non-League football.