Japan

Vahid Halilhodzic denies rift with players, cites “lack of respect” from JFA

Former Japan head coach Vahid Halilhodzic held court on Friday at a highly-anticipated press conference in downtown Tokyo, responding lengthily to Japan Football Association chairman Kozo Tashima’s claims that the 65-year-old had lost the locker room ahead of his shock dismissal earlier this month.

While many expected the man who qualified Japan for their sixth straight FIFA World Cup to come out firing at his former employers, Halilhodzic was equal parts defiant and reflective.

“I’ve worked at a high level in football for 45 years,” Halilhodzic said. “I felt a lack of respect from the JFA as a head coach. I worked hard for three years and I wanted to show [the results] at the World Cup.”

Halilhodzic spent the bulk of the press conference denying Tashima’s claim of irreconcilable communication issues between players and his coaching staff, which came to light two weeks after Japan’s 1-1 draw with Mali and 3-1 loss to Ukraine in March.

“I was in constant contact with players, both domestic and overseas. I can’t count how many times I talked to them over the phone,” Halilhodzic insisted. “I never criticized my players in public. I always said that I should take the blame [for bad results].”

An admission that “perhaps two [veteran] players weren’t happy” over their lack of playing time in the team’s famous 2-0 win over Australia last August was as close as Halilhodzic came to naming Shinji Kagawa and Keisuke Honda, the two stars who have been front and center in the national team’s marketing campaigns yet all but absent from the squad for much of the last six months.

Halilhodzic, who coached Algeria to the 2014 Round of 16 and was dismissed months before Ivory Coast’s 2010 campaign, repeatedly suggested that Tashima and others at the JFA were negligent in raising their concerns.

“[Tashima] talked to some of the [Japanese] coaches, but why didn’t he talk to [the foreign] coaches?” he asked the hall of over 330 assembled media. “I wish he would have told me there were communication issues.

“The most shocking part to me [about the dismissal] was that there was no discussion beforehand.”

While top JFA officials had pledged their full support to Halilhodzic in the weeks and months leading to the coaching change, the picture he painted of newly-appointed head coach Akira Nishino was not nearly as vivid.

“He came to all of our training and meetings. But when I asked for his opinion about call-ups, he never spoke much,” Halilhodzic said of the JFA’s former technical director. “One time he asked me what technical directors do in France.

“All of the team’s arrangements were in place, but [Nishino] will have a big challenge ahead of him.”