Gary Neville on Japan national football team's dramatic late equalizer against Netherlands national football team:
🗣️ “This is exactly why you never celebrate too early in football. The Netherlands thought the job was done, and then Japan punched them right in the face with one moment of pure belief.
I have to be honest, the Dutch completely lost control of the match in those final minutes. They stopped playing to win and started playing not to lose. That's always dangerous at World Cup level.
When Ogawa scored, you could feel the panic immediately. One team looked alive, the other looked terrified. That's not what you expect from a nation with the Netherlands' experience.
People will talk about the finish, and rightly so, but this equalizer was about mentality. Japan never accepted defeat. They kept running, kept pressing, and kept believing that one opportunity would come.
For the Netherlands, this result should feel like a defeat. When you're leading that late in the game, there are no excuses. You have to see it out.
Japan deserve enormous credit because most teams would have accepted their fate. They didn't. They kept fighting until the very last second.
And that's the brutal thing about the World Cup. Ninety minutes of hard work can be destroyed by ten seconds of carelessness. Tonight, Japan earned a point but the Netherlands threw two away.”