Ossie Ardiles: Yokohama a 'wonderful club' but Hernan Crespo can guide Al Ain to ACL title

It was the first major club prize of the new millennium, celebrated in elite football’s easternmost corner. Yokohama F Marinos had just won the J-League title, a league championship that at that time divided into two parts, one for each half of the season. Their head coach acknowledged the applause and immediately declared: “This is just the beginning.”

That was mid-2000, the speaker Osvaldo Ardiles, one of modern football’s most intrepid, admired figures, a World Cup winner when he played for Argentina, and a pioneer, first as an ingenious midfielder and then as attack-minded manager through English football’s march from 1970s isolationism to its international growth in the Premier League era.

Few know the global game as thoroughly as Ardiles, who looks forward to Saturday’s deciding leg of Asian club football’s great showpiece, the Champions League final, with twin affections. His old club, Yokohama, are a goalless draw from lifting the prize for the first time in their history. But were Al Ain to reverse the 2-1 scoreline in Abu Dhabi, Ardiles’ compatriot, Hernan Crespo, would finally put an Argentinian name on the competition’s managerial honours board.

Ardiles’ varied coaching career straddled club football in England, Argentina, Mexico, Croatia and two distinct poles of the Middle East – Saudi Arabia and Israel – but he retains a special affection for Japan, where besides Marinos, he managed Shimuzu S-Pulse and Tokyo Verde to domestic knockout titles.

“I was there for eight years in all, coaching some of the biggest clubs,” he tells The National, “and it was really a very happy time overall. Yokohama F Marinos are a wonderful club, in a wonderful city.”

When he forecast that his J-League triumph of mid-2000 was