TOKYO, Japan -- In May of the 1999 J1 League season, seventh-placed Sanfrecce Hiroshima travelled to face 16th-placed Kyoto Sanga, returning home with a convincing 4-0 win. Australian centre-back Tony Popovic opened the scoring in the 29th minute that day before making it 3-0 in the 55th. The result was sealed by Hajime Moriyasu 11 minutes later, his first goal of the season and one that proved to be his final for a club where he was so adored, fans had organised a petition to prevent his sale to Kyoto the season prior and force a loan instead. Popovic would stay with the club until 2001 before signing for Crystal Palace, the same year that Moriyasu moved on to Vegalta Sendai to see out his career.
Flash forward a quarter of a century, and Popovic and Moriyasu will once again share the field on Tuesday. Or at least, the sideline of one, in opposite dugouts at the Saitama Stadium, leading Australia and Japan respectively into what has become one of Asian football's biggest rivalries, and a top-of-Group C clash in the third phase of Asian qualification.
It's not, however, not the first time the coaches have crossed paths since they played together in Hiroshima. On the pitch, for instance, Popovic's Western Sydney Wanderers knocked out a Moriyasu-coached Sanfrecce on the way to winning the 2014 Asian Champions League. A few years later, after he had left Hiroshima and without employment, Moriyasu visited his old friend in Parramatta, observing how his former teammate ran the program at Wanderland, as well as visiting a son who was studying up in Newcastle and playing for Edgeworth FC in the NNSW NPL.
'We are very good friends. We still have maintained very good terms," Moriyasu said. "When we are playing for Sanfrecce Hiroshima, we are teammates. I understand that calls me Captain, but at the same time, he called me Poichi too. That's my nickname.
"After leaving Hiroshima, when I didn't have any jobs, Mr Popovic was the head coach for Western Sydney and I contacted them and asked them to have me at training for about two weeks. It was a very good opportunity to refresh my mind. I was stimulated so that I was able to motivate myself to be a head coach once again."
It's the kind of friendly exchange of ideas that occurs regularly in the modern game. But this one, in particular, and the enduring friendship that created it, would appear to have created a ripple effect that is still being felt in both Australia and Japan today.
"Moriyasu-san is a fantastic coach," Popovic said. "You can see how well he's doing with the national team.
"As a person, I have great respect for him. He came to visit between jobs for him, and that probably explains a lot about what type of person he is. He wants to keep evolving and keep learning. He wants to get new ideas.
"It was a really enjoyable time for me as well, picking his brain about football, so we had a good time together, and I'm looking forward to seeing him tomorrow."
After their catchup, though, the friendship between the two must be put aside as they meet, for the first time, at the helm of their respective nations, with the Samurai Blue able to all but secure automatic qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup with a win, and the Socceroos able to take a giant step on that road should they pull off an improbable upset.
And while this international caper is still very new to Popovic given that he's just one month into his new life as Socceroos coach, when Moriyasu glances across the field at the Australian bench he won't even be looking at a former Hiroshima teammate for the first time. In his first two meetings with Australia, the 56-year-old locked horns with Graham Arnold, who spent a year in Japan towards the tail end of his career, playing 28 games and scoring seven goals as one of several Australians that landed in Hiroshima after former Socceroos boss Eddie Thompson took charge of the club.
A longtime collaborator with Popovic and presently serving as his assistant with the national team, Hayden Foxe was a part of those squads, the 11-time Socceroo playing 37 games for Hiroshima between 1998 and 2000. So, too, was current Melbourne City and former national teams coach Aurelio Vidmar, ex-title-winning Sydney FC coach and current Auckland FC gaffer Steve Corica, and former Wanderers youth doyen and the current elite programs manager at Football Australia, Ian Crook. In other words, across the Thompson years, the future coach of six A-League Men premierships, four championships, two Australia Cups, an Asian Champions League, a place in the round of 16 at a World Cup, and nearly 100 years of coaching experience all wore the shirt of Hiroshima.
"I couldn't tell you exactly what was in the water there," Foxe said. "But I look, I think we all had the same mentality, and we wanted to try and keep improving and keep developing every day as players and then that continues into your future plans on whatever you want to go into.
"[Moriyasu] was a leader, he was our captain and he helped us a lot on and off the field.
"It's no surprise that he's gone on to have the coaching career that he's had."
Those Australians who were present in Hiroshima, though, aren't the only ones with a Japanese connection who have gone on to make their impact within Australian coaching. As while the rise of the Samurai Blue and the continued growth of the J1 League increasingly threatens to put the Socceroos and A-League Men in the shade, the fabled long-term outlook the Japanese Football Association (JFA) has taken to growing the game has created a rising tide upon which an increasing number of Australian managers have set sail.
Months after resigning from his post as Socceroos boss, Ange Postecoglou returned to coaching at the helm of Yokohama F Marinos, winning a Japanese title before moving on to Celtic and, eventually, Tottenham Hotspur. He was succeeded at Yokohama by Kevin Muscat, who also won a league title before shifting across to Shanghai Port, where his star has continued to rise. John Hutchinson is currently steering Marinos after the midseason axing of Harry Kewell, while former Postecoglou assistant Peter Cklamovski has FC Tokyo sitting sixth in the J1 League as the season begins to wind down. Before moving into coaching, current Sydney FC boss Ufuk Talay spent the 2008 season with Avispa Fukuoka, current Adelaide United assistant and rising coaching prospect Mark Milligan spent two years with JEF United, and Football Australia's general manager of state federations Joshua Kennedy was at Nagoya Grampus. Australian football has been made much richer, and much smarter, thanks to the connection.
But for all the benefits that Australia is gleaning from Japan's rise, they have not seen their two national sides maintain parity across the nearly two decades since the former joined the AFC. As while the rivalry between Samurai Blue and Socceroos may be considered one of the continent's best, it's also one that the Japanese have largely dominated throughout its history. Of the seven wins that Australia has taken from their 27 meetings, only two have come following the turn of the millennium and that most recent occasion came 15 years ago -- a Tim Cahill brace firing the Socceroos to a 2-1 win at the MCG during 2010 World Cup qualifying.
Only one member of the Australian squad that has assembled in the hills of Bunkyo for Tuesday's game has even scored against their foes -- Ajdin Hrustić curling a free kick off the underside of the crossbar to make it 1-1 in a World Cup qualifier in Saitama three years ago, only for Japan to subsequently fight back and claim an 86th-minute win after an unfortunate Aziz Behich own-goal. That result, the last time the two played in Japan, represented something of an inflection point for the two, breaking what had been a record-setting 11-game winning run by the Australians and kickstarting a series of events that would see the hosts automatically progress through to the World Cup and the visitors forced to traverse a heart-stopping intercontinental playoff.
It's this recent history, as well as the near-imperious form Japan enjoyed across the past year, winning 20 of their last 22 games and scoring 14 goals across their last three World Cup qualifiers, that has Japan considered heavy favourites on Tuesday. Most observers Down Under would be content to see their side eke out a narrow defeat, let alone figure out a way to take a point. But after getting on the board with a 3-1 win over China last week and showing clear signs of progress in their possessional play in a new, 3-4-2-1 formation, Popovic and his side are insistent that they can take something from the game.
"Japanese football has improved immensely," Popovic said. "And I know my colleague and friend Moriyasu-san, has played a big part in that, and credit to him. They keep growing from strength to strength, and that's something that [Australia has] to do as a nation. We need to challenge Japan for first position in every campaign. We want to have that expectation, that belief, that confidence that we can challenge them. Tomorrow night, I want to start that challenge and show that we are here to win and we are here to play."