Salt Lake: Two 20-year-old Japanese girls led the cheerleading for Japan at the Salt Lake stadium on Tuesday as their country took on England.

The boys were able to hold off England till full time when the score read 0-0 but had to go down by a solitary goal in the penalty shoot-out and get knocked out of the tournament.

" Khubi dukhyo pelam... we were so close to beating England," one of the girls, Yoshika Otsuka, said after the loss.

Yoshika and Mai Iwasaki are pursuing a diploma in Bengali from Jadavpur University and speak Bengali slowly but without any mistake.

" Amra aaj ekhane aste parbo bhabini," Yoshika said in between cheering for one of the numerous runs towards the opposition's goalpost by Japan's most famous player, Takefusa Kubo.

She said they had managed to buy tickets online for the Japan-New Caledonia group league match on Saturday but tickets for this match had been sold out long ago.

They could catch the game, thanks to a friend who gave them two tickets.

Yoshika and Mai said everything they knew about No. 7 Kubo, who is a known as Japan's Lionel Messi. "He (Kubo) even played for the Barcelona junior team," Mai said.

The two girls are in Calcutta since July for their one-year course. Both said they could speak Bengali well because they had studied the language fore more than two years in Japan.

They stay at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Golpark.

The two kept chatting in Japanese and Bengali, their anxiety apparent, whenever Angel Gomes or Callum Hudson-Odoi launched an attack on the Japan.

"We watch football only during the World Cup and that too only Japan's matches... this, too, happens to be a World Cup," Mai said.

The match ended in heartbreak for them as Japan went down in the tiebreaker.

Both said they felt "nice" standing with the rest of the crowd when Japan's national anthem was played.

Yoshika said she had decided to study Bengali at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies because she was influenced by the Bengali culture. "I am a big fan of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray. I watched some of Ray's films in Japan and many more in Calcutta."

The two have even acted in a play at Tokyo University, which had a bit of both Tagore and Ray. "We had enacted Samapti, which is part of Ray's Teen Kanya. I played the central character of Mrinmoyi while Mai played Apurba's mother," Yoshika said.