Yesterday’s hero Kenyu Sugimoto joined an event held to celebrate the opening of “MaruCere” this afternoon.
While the team are in a good form, maintaining the top spot in the league table after the 4-2 win over Urawa Reds yesterday, the club have also actively taken steps to appeal to more people. Recently, they opened a shop at the Marui department store located in Namba, the very heart of Osaka City, although temporarily.
The shop is named “MaruCere,” taken from the names of both the department store and the club. It opened on July 18th and until August 27th.
Today, an event was held to celebrate the opening of the shop and Kenyu Sugimoto, as well as Golazo Cerezo presenter Aeri Ikeda, participated in it.
The event included a talk and autograph session by Kenyu Sugimoto. Not just about things like the shop and merchandise, he also talked about the team and yesterday’s game. An interesting question from Aeri Ikeda was about his relationship with Kazuya Yamamura.
It’s good to play with Kazuya-kun. I think we’ve built a good relationship as we can play while communicating well with each other. But both have scored a similar number of goals, so we both think we don’t want to lose to each other. I hope it (a sense of competition) will work well.
Sugimoto also revealed other interesting episode: Yamamura is seen to be a calm man who rarely becomes very excited and just does what he needs to do, but when Sugimoto scores a goal, he always asks him how many goals he has scored in total. That’s another manifestation of competitiveness and an episode which sugggests Yamamura also clearly feels it.
Although Sugimoto massively contributed to yesterday’s win with two early goals, he wasn’t just happy after the game, in part because he couldn’t score the third one, which would lead to a hat-trick, and in other part because “it’s too early to be pleased” when they have a derby match a week later. About this game, he said
Not just to myself, but also to everyone who have supported Cerezo, there is no team we don’t want to lose to, no, we want to win, than (Gamba). Also, we felt a huge disappointment when they equalized in the last minutes and turned the game into a draw at home. So, more than anything else, we want to win. That’s what I strongly feel.
今日は、なんばマルイ期間限定ショップ「CEREZO STORE」のオープン記念イベント🌸
— 池田愛恵里 (@ikeda_aeri) July 23, 2017
杉本健勇選手の、トークショー＆サイン会でした！
みなさんからの個性豊かな質問コーナーがあったり、すごく暖かい雰囲気で、楽しいトークショーでした！
ありがとうございました(*^^*) pic.twitter.com/Ty2nA7PRyL