Hidetoshi Nakata retires from Soccer
I heard some sad news this morning: Hidetoshi Nakata is retiring from soccer. As you may recall from my post about the 10 dreamiest soccer hunks in Japan, Nakata was my favorite player on the Japanese national team. His level of dedication and his serious approach to excelling at what he did meant that he would often practice hours longer than his teammates. Leading up to Japan’s appearance in the World Cup, Nakata was critical of the lack of spirit and dedication he felt from Team Japan; his comments were probably justified after Japan suffered a humiliating loss to Australia and later failed to beat Croatia and Brazil.
After Japan’s loss to Brazil, Nakata laid on the field for a long time, no doubt exhausted and disappointed by his team’s dismal showing in the World Cup. Some say that the loss was a major factor in his decision to retire. Others say that he realizes that he will soon be 30 and he probably wants to retire before he becomes too old to be useful. I’m no expert on Nakata, or even soccer, but I still think he is cool guy and I will miss seeing him play. Good luck in your future business enterprises, Mr. Nakata!
Watch a Hidetoshi Nakata Tribute Video featuring his greatest goals here!
Post Script: At some point after Nakata’s retirement announcement last night, Japanese netizens started posting links on Japanese blogs and forums to my ‘Nakata Hidetoshi gets his ass kicked‘ update. My site has since been flooded with thousands of hits from Japan, many of them who are probably enraged to see Koreans kicking around Nakata’s uniform. I hope they realize that I don’t have anything against Nakata, and that the few of them who can read English become regular readers of this blog. Peace out.
