Shunsuke Nakamura and Yasuhito Endo will be expected to provide the artistry in Japan's World Cup qualifier at home to Bahrain on Saturday, but no player can build a cathedral without someone to carry the bricks.
Makoto Hasebe will again be tasked with shouldering the burden, and it is a measure of the progress the Wolfsburg midfielder has made over the past year that his place in the team has now been set in stone.
The 25-year-old seemed destined to become a future international mainstay when he burst into Urawa Reds' first team in 2003, but while his time in Saitama brought medals and praise by the bucketload, there remains a lingering feeling that things did not go quite according to plan.