Originally Posted by
mrbluejay
Playing and living in Japan has been good for Jay Bothroyd.
With a sixth season in the country and his fifth on the books at Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo now complete, the former Cardiff City striker is quick to tell The Athletic how Japanese culture has aided his personal growth as we speak via FaceTime while he is back in the UK.
“Going to Japan, in particular, calmed me down,” he says with a smile brought on by the luxury of hindsight. “Especially in my younger years I was well known for having a temper, being angry and having an attitude problem but coming here has taught me to bite my tongue and accept people have different opinions, accept that things are not always going to go my way. It’s been a fantastic experience.”
Bothroyd is a familiar face to fans of English football having spent time at Wolverhampton Wanderers, Queens Park Rangers, Cardiff City and Sheffield Wednesday but in the last few years the 38-year-old has been on the other side of the world setting records as the top-scoring English player in J-League history. An impressive 73 goals in 150 games across Japan’s top two leagues have made him a popular figure on the island of Hokkaido in a league and a climate that is a long way from his roots in north London.
Living on the other side of the world has brought cultural and footballing differences as well as distance which, until this year, was not too much of a problem as Bothroyd’s wife, Stella, and children Mace and Zar, would spend up to half the year with him in Sapporo. The last 12 months have been a different story, though, and the Christmas and new year period which has seen Bothroyd return home between J-League campaigns is the first time he has seen his family in person since the start of 2020.
“Normally my wife would come out but because of the COVID situation, she didn’t get to come out at all,” Bothroyd explains, admitting that it would be safer for him and his family in Sapporo with COVID-19 rates much lower than in the UK as we enter yet another national lockdown. “I didn’t see her or my son for a whole year. That was difficult because when I left last January, he wasn’t speaking much at all but now I’m having little conversations with him. It’s weird to have that transition, I didn’t lose the bond with him but that closeness you have with kids you have to build up again.
“Over there COVID-19 is not anything like it is here. I’m living normally in Japan but the big difference is that even before this, people wore masks in supermarkets or at airports or on public transport. We had a lockdown for two weeks in March but apart from that it has been normal — at the last game I played (in December) we had 25,000 in the stadium. Things are very different over there because people listen and respect the rules, they’re very obedient people in Japan.”
Bothroyd points out that his six yellow cards in his first season with J2 club Jubilo Iwata, who he joined from Muangthong United in Thailand’s top tier in 2015, are proof enough of his initial struggle to adjust to the natural tendency to show obedience on and off the field but he has slowly learned to adapt. Arguing back with the referee gets him nowhere in the J-League, which the one-cap England international feels is sometimes overlooked in the broad scheme of Asian football because of the Chinese Super League’s perception as a division that is able to attract international talent on big wages.
“The beautiful thing about Japan is you get to see four seasons,” says Bothroyd. “We’ve had powder snow, you see the red leaves and cherry blossoms. It’s really nice in that respect and quite different to London and the UK where it’s grey and rainy a lot of the time. It’s an easy place to live but the only thing that is difficult is they are very strict on the rules and regulations. In England, for example, if you went into a sweet shop and you didn’t have a penny they would let you off but in Japan they won’t let you off that penny.
“The rules are clear and you have to follow them and, in the beginning, that was frustrating for me but as time has gone on you get used to it. I have improved and the people have embraced me and they like that I help young players a lot. I try to explain to them the mindset that they need to have because a lot of them want to come and play in Europe. When I speak to people about Asian football, straight away they think there’s loads of money if you’re a name but in Japanese football it’s different because there are a lot of talented players there.”
By their own standards, Bothroyd says that Sapporo “underachieved” last season, having finished 12th in the table with the final round of league games being played in mid-December. A brief interruption to the season because of COVID-19 made life difficult for the club as the only J-League outfit on the island of Hokkaido, which meant they were limited to playing behind-closed-doors preparation games against university teams rather than fellow professional clubs before the season resumed.
Bothroyd, who plays with “Jay” on the back of his shirt because it is easier for the locals to pronounce than his surname, netted seven and assisted two in the course of the campaign under manager Mihailo Petrovic. While Bothroyd has picked up a few Japanese phrases, there is little expectation for foreign players and managers to master the language so each player is usually assigned a translator. Messages from coach Petrovic in German will often be translated twice, once into Japanese and then once again into English by Bothroyd’s translator.
And even though performances in 2020 were not been as good as Bothroyd might have hoped, he explains that Japanese football fans are largely more forgiving than those in Europe on the back of a bad result.
“Fans in Japan don’t get angry at all when you lose. There was a game that we lost 7-0, I came on at half-time and we conceded three in the second half. The game finished and we went over to the fans and they were singing, they weren’t insulting us and it wasn’t anything like what a European fan would do in asking for their money back or going crazy. It was the mentality that, ‘We’ve lost this week but we’ll put it right next week.’
“It’s a good thing but also a bad thing for some players because if you don’t have that pressure, you don’t have that motivation to drive yourself to do more. If there’s no pressure on you winning, then how can you be successful? Coming from England, where criticism from fans or pundits happened every week, and then going there, it used to frustrate me because I would be thinking I’m not interested in the next game — I’m interested in this game. Now I understand the culture, I’ve relaxed a bit more and I’ll speak when needed but I won’t go off on people in the dressing room every single day and every time we lose. Now I look at it as the glass is half full rather than half empty.”
The fans’ appreciation for their players extends off the pitch too, with Bothroyd often respectfully approached for photographs and autographs while he does his weekly shop at the supermarket. Memories of his efforts to get autographs of Arsenal players as a youngster are never far away, even though Bothroyd would eventually sign for the club and progress through the ranks until leaving for Coventry City aged 18.
“Whether it’s raining or snowing I’ll stand there from the beginning to the end to give them an autograph when they want it. I remember being a young player standing behind a fence with my hand out with a scrap of paper hoping they’ll sign it and I remember the players that stopped and I remember those that didn’t. Ian Wright was always so good to us young players at Arsenal.
“As someone who grew up a fan, it’s a really frustrating time to see Arsenal going through this period. It’s given the youngsters an opportunity to come in and perform because there are players there that are probably not doing the job that the manager wants. (Emile) Smith Rowe has come in and done well while (Mesut) Ozil’s been out, (Bukaya) Saka and (Kieran) Tierney have been fantastic. My era at the club was probably classed as a golden era and compared to now in terms of the first team it’s chalk and cheese. We were bringing (Sylvain) Wiltord off the bench and he was a World Cup winner. Arsenal are at a transitional stage and they have to look at this like a rebuilding project for the next five years.”
Bothroyd reflects on his Arsenal exit as a positive now, after he was sold to Coventry for £1 million in the wake of throwing his shirt at youth-team coach Don Howe, having been substituted in the Premier League Youth Cup final. The move away from London taught a teenage Bothroyd some vital life lessons and put him in a first-team environment for the first time.
“A lot of the moves in my life have been big transitions,” he says. “I went to Coventry and I didn’t know how to pay rent, council tax, water bills so I had to learn that the hard way. Doing that then, a lot of players when they got released from Arsenal didn’t have anywhere to go. It was a real shock and mentally it broke them but for me it didn’t, as much as I love Arsenal and wanted to play for them more than anything. It made me want to show them that I can become a professional and show them that I didn’t need them, so that was my motivation. Gordon Strachan was very good and I don’t think that people realise how good he was for the club at the time.”
There’s little doubt which manager has played the most significant role in Bothroyd’s career, though.
“Dave Jones was one of the key people that helped me revitalise and come back to life really because I was at Wolves with Mick McCarthy (Bothroyd joined Wolves in 2006 after spells with Perugia and Charlton) and we fell out. To this day I don’t really know the reason but he had something against me and I’m not perfect so my attitude wasn’t always great — I was still young then, really. Dave Jones called and said he wanted me at Cardiff and when I got there he said to me, ‘You’re a really talented player but you are underachieving and you don’t want to finish your career having not achieved half of what you could have’.
“I went to sleep with that really playing on my mind and I knew that at that moment I had to plan out a strategy in my head to make myself indispensable to the club. He moulded where I went for the following three or four years because as much as I was talented, he was the catalyst and brought me away from a crap situation to put me in a good one.”
Those three years in south Wales ultimately brought an England call-up that made Bothroyd the first Cardiff player to have played for England in a rare Three Lions cap for a Championship player. Subsequent spells at QPR and a tough loan stint at Sheffield Wednesday under Jones followed but Bothroyd’s record of 45 goals and 32 assists cemented his status as a Cardiff hero.
“My feeling when I first went to Cardiff was that it was exactly where I was meant to be but at Wednesday, my thoughts were always about getting back to QPR and showing them what I could do. I was injured for about four weeks and I remember feeling like it wasn’t Cardiff, where it was a possession-based team. It was one of those things where my expectations for them and their expectations for me didn’t match up. People say that I hated the place but it was a difficult move that just didn’t work out and that happens sometimes.
“At QPR, it was hard to be successful as a forward when we were at the bottom. We had three managers coming in, chopping and changing the formations and the players. At the end of my contract I did have offers but they weren’t really what I was interested in and the chance came to play in Asia, in Thailand initially. We had done a pre-season with QPR in Malaysia and I had no idea until we got there that the fans are crazy for football. I remember me and Djibril Cisse saying we would love to come out and play in Asia and luckily it happened a few years later.”
Another year of J-League action awaits Bothroyd once he receives clearance to travel back to Japan later this month and he says that, even though his recovery time after matches is longer than it used to be, he has no immediate plans to retire. Winning silverware while with Sapporo is still an ambition and would be a fitting way to mark a successful spell in Japan that has been a learning curve and an opportunity to grow as a person.
“I got to achieve everything that I wanted when I started out as a nine-year-old,” Bothroyd says. “I got to play for my country, I got to play in Europe, in the Premier League and abroad and I got to earn money doing it. I achieved all of the things that I wanted to but I could have achieved them at different heights and that was down to my own actions.
“My attitude as a youngster wasn’t right because I wasn’t prepared to listen to anyone, I thought I was always right and pointed the finger rather than looking at myself but luckily I still got to achieve great moments in my career. I did it my way and even though people might say I underachieved, I don’t have any regrets about that.”
big deal.
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