Ao Tanaka played 79 minutes as Japan booked their place in the Kirin Cup final with a penalty shootout victory over Ecuador.<\/p>\n
The Leeds United midfielder started at the Nissan Stadium in Yokohama, with Japan making a number of changes from their previous international fixture.<\/p>\n
Tanaka was involved in a competitive contest, with both sides creating opportunities but unable to find a breakthrough during the 90 minutes.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old was replaced by Daizen Maeda in the 79th minute as Japan made a late push for a winning goal. <\/p>\n
With the scores still level, the semi-final went straight to penalties.<\/p>\n
The result sees Japan progress to the Kirin Cup final, where they will face New Zealand at Tokyo’s National Stadium on Monday, 5 October.<\/p>\n
New Zealand also required a shootout to reach the final, defeating Panama 5-3 after a 1-1 draw.<\/p>\n
For Tanaka, the appearance was his third of the current international window, having also featured as a substitute in Japan’s victories over Uruguay and Venezuela.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ao Tanaka played 79 minutes as Japan booked their place in the Kirin Cup final with a penalty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-618616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}