Weekend News Round-up

The last few days has been about the busiest part of the winter so far for the Squirrels, so let's get straight into an update. First thing to report is that there are two new additions to Ardija's squad for 2011 - well, strictly speaking one new addition and the return of an old, uh, friend, for Omiya have announced the signing from relegated, sixty-goals-conceded-in-the-season Kyoto Sanga of defender / midfielder pairing Daigo Watanabe and... Yosuke Kataoka. Watanabe, scorer of a scorching long-range shot against Omiya at the start of the 2008 season, moves after eight years with Sanga - and in surely the most incomprehensible deal of the close season, Kataoka heads back to Saitama after a single year, during which even Kyoto's management quickly realised that they'd made a big mistake and banished the player to the substitutes' bench in early May.

Alongside Watanabe and - it hurts to write it, really - Kataoka in the Squirrels squad will be Naoki Ishihara, Shin Kanazawa, Koji Ezumi and Chikara Fujimoto, all of whom have renewed their contracts. Regular readers will probably be able to work out for themselves why those four players have been listed in that particular order. Masahiko Ichikawa, on the other hand, heads out on a year's loan to Tokyo Verdy, which is probably a good move for all concerned - it seemed as if Ichikawa found it tough to recover from a serious injury suffered in April 2009 against Gamba Osaka and although he had a decent amount of playing time in 2010, it just didn't really happen for him. Hopefully a season in J2 will enable Ichi to get his confidence back and he can score a few goals for the Green Machine.

The main transfer rumour at the moment relates to extensively-reported Omiya interest in Jubilo Iwata midfielder Kota Ueda, who despite being only 24 has been in and around the first team at Jubilo for five years now. A playmaker with decent passing ability, Ueda looks at first glance as if he may be exactly the sort of player that Ardija don't have and indeed have lacked since the departure of former star man Daigo Kobayashi. The only Omiya player ever to wear the blue shirt of Japan, Kobayashi has seen fit to wander the byways of lower-tier European leagues since leaving Omiya a couple of years ago, but after several weeks of speculation at has finally been confirmed that he is on his way back from Iraklis in Greece to the J-League and Shimizu S-Pulse.

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