I read an interesting piece from that redoubtable authority on South American football Tim Vickery the other day, suggesting that derbies are an over-rated aspect of the modern game. While it's difficult to disagree with his assessment that derbies are all blood-and-guts football with very little culture in between, there's no doubt that local rivalries continue to stir the passion of football fans the world over.

That's something that the J. League understands, and in what must rank as part of a policy of instituting just the one good idea per season, the league schedules a number of crackerjack local derbies during 'Golden Week' - when a string of public holidays gives the average worker a much-needed few days off.

Football fans use the opportunity to pack J. League grounds across the country and so, exactly a year to the day since they last met at the picturesque Nihondaira Stadium, the next installment of the fabled Shizuoka derby gets set to rock the port city of Shimizu on May 3.

Last season Jubilo midfielder Fabricio's badge-kissing antics in front of the S-Pulse fans produced a positively nuclear atmosphere, and while Fabricio is long gone, so too is Cho Jae-Jin; Shimizu's hero from their two derbies last season, with the Korean wracking up all three of his side's goals against their bitter prefectural rivals.

In his classic book on Japanese football "Ultra Nippon: How Japan Reinvented Football" (which somewhat bizarrely depicts a Jubilo fan on the cover, despite the fact that it's an account of S-Pulse's 1999 season), Johnathon Birchall paints a vivid account of Shimizu's excruciating loss to Jubilo in the 1999 championship playoff.

Having won the first stage of the 1999 season, Jubilo saw their Shizuoka rivals storm back to be crowned second stage champions. A two-legged playoff ensued, and after both teams played out 2-1 draws away from home, the 1999 J. League title came down to a penalty shoot-out. Jubilo won the shoot-out at Nihondaira, and that's something that the Shimizu faithful have never forgotten, adding extra spice to an already heated affair.

These days the J. League has reverted to a single stage season, and after several years of playing the derby exclusively at Ecopa Stadium - a 2002 FIFA World Cup venue, Shimizu now schedule their home leg for Nihondaira Stadium. That makes perfect sense to S-Pulse fans, since the town of Aino lies some seventy kilometres down the Tokaido line from Shimizu. Rather conveniently for Jubilo fans it's just a short hop from Iwata, and while Jubilo still play their home fixture at Ecopa, gone are the days when they can command fifty percent of the support in both derbies.

As such Jubilo will be up against it when they travel to a seething Nihondaira Stadium, and to complicate matters these two teams have also been drawn together in this season's League Cup group stage. They'll meet again in the Nihondaira foothills on May 25, and both teams will be looking to get the upper hand this weekend, as Shimizu braces itself for another edition of the Shizuoka Clásico.