Sunday 10 March 2024

Vs Kyoto Sanga (home) 9/3/24 J League match 3


Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 1 Kyoto Sanga 

Congratulations Oniki! You’ve achieved a new record for earliest loss of hope for a season. I realise that this is exactly the kind of petty comment that people come flocking to this blog to read but don’t get me wrong, I’m actually kind of thankful he has managed to so successfully crush my hopes so early this year. For the remainder of 2024 there will be no grinding of teeth with frustration about how badly we are doing. Instead, just a little smile and wink to myself as I see Oniki repeat, time after time, the same dodgy selections and push on with the same tactic that was last effective some time around four years ago. Bravo Oniki! No more weekends ruined by us performing at a level that is unbelievably further below what even a random team and tactic selection might result in. (It’s a real talent to get us playing the worst possible stuff. Like drawing the one ticket that was put into the tombola by accident and doesn’t even get you a tin of mandarin orange slices). How could a weekend ever possibly be ruined by a game turning out exactly as expected? As sure as summer in Japan will be horribly hot, as sure as any musical release involving any former member of Oasis will sound like the Beatles and be extremely shit, as sure as any 7-11 item that looks vegetarian contains gelatine. That’s how sure we can be that Oniki will keep persevering with his beloved tactic and that we will continue to get horrible and utterly justified results. We’ve played three times at home and have lost them all. We’ve played three teams widely predicted to finish near the bottom of the league and have lost to two of them. I’m seriously worried what will happen when we play a team who are expected to finish above 12th in the league. And the most depressing thing is that we have months of this same old rubbish ahead of us, until we even get the hope of a little break with a cup game, the same players being trotted out every week with micro changes to the starting line up, and the one consistent thing being that at least one player will be played out of position. I suppose at least it makes these posts a little easier to write. In fact I’ll make a new section below that i can cut and paste for future games. Lovely!


How did we play? -


There was a small adjustment to the usual starting eleven. We decided to build extremely slowly with plenty of passing along the back. Once the requisite number of pointless passes was reached, we either booted the ball forward for Marcinho to run on to, hang on to too long, and then lose, or just hoofed it straight to the opposition cutting out the middle man. And also, we occasionally gifted possession to the opposition, somehow with all of our players out of position and looking in the opposite direction to where the ball was, allowing them a relatively easy finish to take the lead. After which point we continued with the same tactics and players, before shaking things up around 60 minutes with some like for like changes, ensuring that even if one of the players subbed off was playing out of position, there was at least one player coming on who was also playing out of position. At the end of the game, we added a new option, booting the ball forward after only half the usual number of prepaatory pointless passes, but still failed to score, as we lost the ball before we could even have a shot. Oniki said the usual things in his post match interview. But apparently decided that his plan was 98% correct and we’d been unlucky, so has decided to give it another go in the following game.

Anything of note in this match? -

No. Our performance was less blood and thunder and more ketchup and light drizzle. One shot on target for every 200 completed passes. It was truly turgid stuff!

Bitching about the opposition -

Their shorts and socks were weird. They looked like they’d been subject to a laundry error. Their player Kawasaki was once again a thorn in our side and is as far as I can tell, still a bit of an arsehole. Their manager, shock horror, knows what he’s doing and actually thinks about the upcoming game before it starts. How nice it would be to have someone who didn’t think the solution to every situation is to do the same thing. They had two massive centre backs. Oniki played Yamada there by himself. And then put Tono and Kobayashi up against them. Who needs to win headers anyway, eh? Their keeper looked quite dodgy, almost giving us a goal but completely mis-controlling / missing the ball from an early back pass. Their keeper was so dodgy that… he kept a clean sheet. They didn’t bring that many fans, which I was surprised about, as I was pretty sure they’d win the game. Perhaps they too thought that result would be so predictable that it wasn’t worth bothering with.


Ref -


We had a guest ref from overseas! I spent a long time trying to work out who he was and where he was from as his name was listed on the J League site as ‘スミス ルイス ディーン’. So was this Smith Lewis-Dean? Dean Smith-Lewis? Smith Ruiz-Dean? Smith Luis Dean? It was Lewis Smith, apparent rising star of English refereeing who was perhaps surprised to find that everyone in Japan was including his middle name every time they referred to him. Slightly worryingly he seemed to have only had one game in the Premier League before he came to Japan, so only one experience of VAR before he got thrown in at the deep end in the country where there is no guarantee that the people watching the replays from numerous angles will even understand the rules of the game enough to male the correct decision. And right away after six minutes, off we went again for a lengthy VAR review. Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but I’m guessing Smith doesn’t speak Japanese, so that added an extra level of… what’s the opposite of streamlining?… obfuscation maybe, to the whole thing. Our last two games have for me compounded how much of a game killing waste of time VAR is. I don’t even care if it means that the right decisions are being made (if that is indeed the case. I think it’s not a given in the J League). I think the only people who like VAR must be the people who never go to the stadium to watch a match. VAR saved us in the 6th minute and took a goal away from us in the 88th. On both occasions the wait was interminable, players and fans alike just twiddling their thumbs whilst some out of sight people do their best to kill any kind of atmosphere in the stadium. These awful delays are the reason that almost half of the photos on this post are of people standing around doing nothing. As for the ref, I thought he was alright. Definitely one of those refs who wants to ‘let the game flow’ and consequently doesn’t whistle for much. This approach probably favoured Kyoto who seemed to have come with quite a physical game plan. (Oniki was presumably surprised and shocked by this. Almost everyone else on earth expected it). But I don’t mean to say the ref favoured Kyoto. I thought he was very even handed, and I’m sure everyone on the pitch knew after the first ten minutes or so how the officiating was going to pan out and exactly what they could get away with. So basically no complaints about the ref, which is a rarity. I will say though that I got quite a strong young-school-teacher-‘call me-by-my-first-name’ vibe from him. Plenty of I’m-not-like-those-other-stuffy-refs,-let’s-just-have-some-fun-here-and-shake-things-up-a-bit energy.

Looking forward -

Who will get the opportunity to play out of position in the next match is the big question I think. At least we now have an idea of the pecking order for the right back spot. Well, we at least know that one of our more exciting signings pre-season is lower down in that pecking order than a left back playing out of position, a midfielder playing out of position and a striker playing our of position. I know Oniki is almost permanently incapable of leaving out one of his favorites so perhaps that was why he moved Tachibanada there. This move also saw the reemergence of last season’s tactic where we use the right back coming inside to the defensive midfield spot to start building attacks. I suppose Tachibanada is more suited to this role than a right back might be. The big question though is probably why we’re bothering to try this as it seems to have absolutely zero effect when it comes to varying out attacks. It’s basically just a new way to start doing the move which leads to the same pointless end. Up front, Erison is injured, which is a huge shame as his goal per game guarantee would have got us a point in this match. It seems clear that Gomis is at best Oniki’s fourth choice in a position where we usually only play one player. I’m gutted that his goal got ruled out as we’re all desperate for him to score. When the replay was shown on the big screen, his facial expression did suggest that he thought it might not stand. I think the goal keeper situation is no clearer after this game. I think Kamifukumoto has done ok when he’s played this year. I’d say no better and no worse than Sung-Ryong, who has had the misfortune to have to play behind some defensive horror shows. Ominami and Maruyama looked reasonably solid. but it’s worth remembering that that partnership let in four goals against Shandong, so perhaps we shouldn’t be that positive too quickly. Who knows what’s happened to Jesiel? I’m pretty sure he’s not injured. Just too far down the tactical master’s preference list. The midfield looked pretty bad again I thought. But to be fair, Wakizaka’s corners were better than in recent games. Sp how do we get out of this mess? My first solution would be to smash Oniki’s magnet board to pieces. I think he’s hopeless now and somehow seems to have way too much courage in his own convictions to have noticed quite how much his selections and tactics suck. I’m sure we won’t get rid of him this year, but I think that if we did it would immediately cause a change in fortunes as our players are good but seem to be losing both their footballing skills and any kind of enthusiasm under his charge. As Oniki will remain in charge, slowly further trashing his reputation, I think my other ideas for what should change are about 0.0001% likely to happen. But, I don’t think Wakizaka, Ienaga and Maricnho should be playing every game. Our attacks are woefully predictable and horribly blunt and as long as those players are in the team following the Oniki plan, I can’t see anything changing. The ‘route to goal’ will remain the long bal for Marcinho to chase, with nothing going down the other side because there’s no-one there. But basically with Oniki in charge, and no new ideas, I think the most we’ll get is a little shuffle in other positions, the ‘thinking’ being that the reason we’re so crap is because we haven’t yet discovered the right player to play out of position at right back.


Next up, Kashima away, who’ve just lost to Machida, which would be funnier if it weren’t for the fact that Machida’s ‘fairytale’ promotion to J1 came backed up by just the massive oil tanker full of cash. And also would be funnier if we hadn’t lost to Kyoto and Jubilo already this year. We normally do well there, but I can see us getting hammered to be honest. Especially if we approach the game in the same way, and let’s be honest, it will be an absolute miracle if we don’t. Normally one consolation when taking the horrific bus journey back after the game is the fact that we have got three points in the bag, and those three points have on more than a few occasions been absolutely robbed from Kashima. If we have to get on the bus after a humiliation it will take a significant amount of booze to erase the memory after arriving at Tokyo station. Luckily though, I’m now in my happy place, with expectation levels at absolutely rock bottom! At home games I can enjoy the fun at the usual after game pub. Last night, I seemed to be the most positive person there, in no way disappointed as what I knew would happen had happened. Away games still carry the excitement of visiting different places. Well, normally that’s the case, but very much isn’t for Kashima away, where the local highlights basically extend no further than the stadium car park. At least we’re getting the game out of the way early on in the season, meaning that the worst away trip will be done and we can look forward to more exciting destinations. Like… Chofu?
 
 
Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota (Yellow card 36')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 80') (on for WAKIZAKA 79')
MF 6. ZE RICARDO
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 70')
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS (on for IENAGA 84')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 70')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for SEKO 79')


Goals

KAWASAKI (Kyoto) 65' 0-1

 
My Frontale Man Of The Match

Hideji's Doppelbock was a real surprise inclusion and ended up being the star performer of the day.
 
 

Highlights

Saturday 2 March 2024

Vs Jubilo Iwata (home) 1/3/24 J League match 2


Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 5 Jubilo Iwata

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I think there’s no other appropriate reaction to another horrible performance but this time at least we had a crazy game to take the edge off a bit. 'Friday Night J League' is not something I get particularly excited about, but maybe that’s just me. If you win, well maybe it’s a good start to a nice weekend. If you lose, it has weekend ruining potential. In this case, the game was just… stupid… and in its stupid weirdness, it actually worked quite well when it came to just putting it behind me and just getting on with the weekend. Well, apart from the fact that I have to write this blog post I suppose. In a game where we conceded five times to a newly promoted team who only had nine shots in 107 minutes it was something of a surprise to see that people didn’t seem to be absolutely furious at the final whistle and instead sank into another one of those late defeat post game silences. To be honest as they scored goal after goal there also didn’t seem to be much anger or frustration in the stands and more, well, ironic laughter at the absurdity of the situation.

In the pub before the game I heard someone say that we were looking pretty good this season. At the time I found this more than a bit of a stretch, but now, well it looks almost like trolling. I dunno though, I’d probably say that we have a better squad this year than last year. We’ve got a player who looks like he will score in every game he plays. But sadly for 2024 Oniki Frontale, scoring a goal a game is nowhere near what we need to end up taking any points. We’ve now played five games this year, two at home and three away from home. The fact that we’ve won every game away from home might make it look like we’re having a great year. The win away at Shandong was looking like a decent result until we just started slinging out goals for free. The win away at Shonan showed us just about coming out on top over a team many people have down to be relegated in a generally fairly low quality game. The only one where the performance looked in any way assured was the Super Cup final against Kobe where what Oniki considers to be our B team kept things tight at the back against last year’s J League champions and won. At home, when Oniki puts out his A team we’ve lost 4-2 and 5-4, conceding for fun against teams we probably could have beaten quite comfortably. Nothing to worry about here, we only concede an average of 4.5 goals each time we play at home! It’s wonderful value for money when it comes to entertainment for the neutral. Sadly there probably usually aren’t that many neutrals in the stadium, and even last night when the atmosphere in the stands was much better than it deserved to be considering what was gong on on the pitch, there’s probably only so much that even the happiest clappiest of supporters can put up with. Well that would be the case at most clubs, but somehow people seem to be on Twitter trotting out the usual, oh well, on we go to the next match, it was probably just a blip stuff. I have a horrible feeling the maybe we might have peaked already this year by being in sixth after the first game.


 
Unsurprisingly, we went with the same line up as against Shonan, perhaps not noticing that we weren’t very good in that game. There were changes on the bench and people were delighted to see Kobayashi and Tono fit and back in the matchday squad again. Well, some people were. Probably Ze Ricardo and Gomis weren’t so happy, especially considering that neither of them had even a minute on the pitch in the last game but were dropped. There is a huge irony in that this was the first game when we didn’t have a defensive midfielder on the bench and Oniki chose it as the game in which he’d sub off the defensive midfielder at half time. To be fair to him, you probably can’t really complain about Tachibanada being taken off as he hadn’t done much. In fact the whole midfield hadn’t done much at all again. All we seem to get from this midfield recently is the occasional attack and nothing when it comes to stopping the opposition from just having a run at our defence. I felt a bit bad about having slagged off Wakizaka so much recently but that corner in the ACL still really irritates me. Of course I understand that everyone makes mistakes, but I dunno, he’s starting to become a bit Yamane-esque to me, interested mainly in scoring and not much else. Apart from getting irritated at his teammates. In this game, our best midfielder was again the one that has only been with us a few months. But I bet Wakizaka and Tachibanada will both start the next game.

When Seko came on and took a set piece, we immediately scored from it. Presumably this irked Wakizaka and he took the set pieces afterwards and we didn’t. I think the only reason Seko had the chance to take it was because it came straight after a corner on the opposite side and Wakizaka wasn’t making it across the pitch quickly enough. Miura took the free kicks against Shonan last week and they seemed to be ok I thought. Well he took the free kicks where we weren’t shooting. In this match, whenever a shooting opportunity came about you could be sure that Wakizaka would be there to put it over the bar. Perhaps it’s something similar to the situation with Tachibanada last year, in that when he became captain, he simultaneously became not very good at playing football, but because of the captaincy, was not dropped until much later than he should have been. I don’t know if the pressure of being captain is weighing on Wakizaka, but he shouldn’t be starting the next game, as far as I’m concerned. So yeah, the midfield was a bit of a mess. At the back, Takai seems to be repeating his 2023 season, where he came in, had some great games and just as he looked to be settling, had an absolute mare of a match where he was at fault for numerous goals. I feel really sorry for him. He’s definitely a good player, but I’m sure he’ll be affected by having another horrible game. Definitely not helped by our lack of midfield though.



Perhaps more infuriating though were the tactics, which let's be honest, I shouldn’t be that angry about, as they are more predictable than the sun rising every morning. Perhaps some kind of nuclear winter / meteor strike extinction event would be what is required for Oniki to change our tactics. You could perhaps draw some comparisons between yesterday’s game and Kazama Frontale games. I don’t remember them being quite so depressing though. And even though we scored four times, the fact the majority of the first half was spent with us passing the ball sideways along the defence line, over and over again, until launching a long ball forwards for Marcinho to run fast with and then lose without threatening the goal meant that our attacks were neither exciting nor effective. I guess our approach this year is a bit like the one that those guys who do the trick shots online have. Hours and hours of failed attempts of which only a handful are shown before the basketball launched off a shovel from about 50 meters away finally goes through the hoop. Sooner or later it will happen. Just keep repeating it, over and over and over again. 
 
Perhaps the tactic might work a bit more often if a couple of things changed. Firstly it might work a bit more often if Marcinho could pass the ball a bit better or earlier. We know he can, but this year he seems to be nowhere near as good. Even when we scored from this tactic in the first half it came after Marcinho lost the ball, we had a shot from the loose ball which was saved, and then luckily bounced to Erison who scored. The other thing that might make this tactic a bit more effective is if it weren’t our only method of attack. It’s probably quite easy to prepare for playing us, just get the strikers to stand a little bit off our defence whilst we pass the ball amongst ourselves, then when you are sure that the rest of the team are in the correct position, pressure us a bit, at which point we’ll hoof the ball to Marcinho who’ll run and then lose it. It’s not fair of me to say that Oniki has no other tactics. In this game he switched Erison to the right and put Ienaga in the middle. When this happened we had two approaches instead of the usual one, and some attacks went up the right! Sadly though, there wasn’t anyone in the middle as Ienaga was probably doing his own thing somewhere around the left back spot at the time. Oniki switched them back after about four minutes. He also did change things up a bit later when we were desperately trying to get back into the game, doing a quadruple substitution and changing the formation to…. I dunno really, but Sasaki was kind of playing centre back but going forward a lot, Segawa was at right back and as for what was going on ahead of them, who knows really? Probably don’t need to point out that the handball that gave them the penalty for their winning goal came from Segawa, who once again has proved that he’s not the best defender. Which obviously isn’t a surprise as he’s a striker. But you know... Oniki, eh?

As I’m slinging around the moans everywhere here, I probably should say again that maybe Ienaga shouldn’t be playing as much as he is. Wherever he is played, the most notable thing is his absence from that area. That’s why we’re always playing it to Marcinho. There’s nobody on the right, so no other option. Ienaga is nowhere near as effective as he used to be. Of course this is the case as he’s getting older. His one arm stretched out holding off of the opposition doesn’t even seem to work as well anymore. Yet still he’s starting every game. Which once again means we’ve got to turn the blame back to Oniki. I don't like criticising the players. I know they are good players. Believe it or not, I don’t particularly like criticising Oniki either, but I would be really interested to see how someone with anything more than the one approach Oniki has would do with the same group of players. Surely some of the Oniki lovers must be having at least some doubts now? Surely he must have realised that what we’re endlessly repeating doesn’t work? Surely! SURELY!



Much like us, Jubilo employed just the one tactic in this game. However, there was a significant difference in that their tactic worked. You would have thought that after a first half of Oniki watching them sit back and then hit us with a fast counter attack, (and more often than not score), he might have tried something to stop them in the second half? Naaaah. It’s not like other teams haven’t played with those tactics against us over the last five or six years and quite often succeeded with them. So we’re really talking about five or six years of Oniki pondering on how to deal with teams who play like that against us. As of yet, still no ideas. Jubilo striker Germain, who has scored 19 goals in the last seven years put four past us in one game whilst Oniki watched and probably fiddled with his magnets. I mean two of them were penalties though, so let’s be fair. If you take the penalties out, Germain only scored one quarter of the goals he scored in the whole of last season in J2 against us in one J1 game. This is not sour grapes though. They stuck to their plan, which they had thought about before the game, and did a job on us. I don’t have any complaints about them, aside from Ricardo Graca, who seemed to be claiming he’d been elbowed in the face by Erison in the build up to our first goal. Well, he said he was elbowed by Erison, but in the replay you can clearly see Graca hack Erison down, get back up, run to inadequately defend his goal, and then after the ball went in, drop to the ground clutching his face, the apparent pain of the assault on him by a waft of air only then sinking in. Was quite funny to see him give away a penalty later on. And yes, it’s these small things that you have to clutch close to your heart on these occasions. Clearly he got the last laugh though. But at least after another horrible defeat for us, we could gain some pleasure in discovering that YFM had lost to Avispa. But clearly they had the last laugh too, as they’d only conceded once to a team who finished 7th in the league whilst we conceded five to a team who weren’t even in J1. Hmmmm. We don't even get the last laugh. This game was so shit that even the Schadenfreude isn’t hitting the spot….

A few words about the ref. I don’t really like Iida, and even though he’s considered to be one of the best in the league at the moment, I think he’s pretty bad. However, I thought he had a decent first half, aside from the fact that I thought Miura was fouled in the run up to their first goal but he wasn’t interested or didn’t notice it. In the second half the game went VAR crazy, to the extent that the final whistle only went in the 107th minute. I’m not sure what was going on when he was checking what seemed to be Jubilo’s winning goal for an attacking handball, only to find a defending handball and then award them a penalty instead. I guess it was because both teams had handled. If it had worked in our favour and the penalty hadn’t been scored, I think there would have been some very angry Jubilo fans in the stadium. And probably rightly so. Without a doubt, this was a crazy game, but I don’t think Iida helped matters. Considering his seniority, it did seem that quite a lot of his onfield decisions were proved wrong by VAR. Which I know is the point of VAR, but doesn’t say much about the quality of the ref. And just the whole messy feeling of the game was undoubtedly enhanced by a chaotic refereeing performance. It’s a real quality of mine, that in a blog post that has been mainly about moaning about my own team, I found time to praise the opposition a little, very faintly and with an undercurrent of having a dig, and still take time to go in two-footed on a ref who had a decent first half. I should say though, that we lost because of the way we played and didn’t lose because of the ref, and he probably got most of the decisions in the game right. But still, and with not much evidence on this occasion, yeah refs are shit. Yaah!

In past seasons we’ve been slow starters. I don’t know what kind of starter we are this year. Mixed starters? Mmmmm, that sounds quite delicious actually. One thing’s for sure, we’re slow starters in absolutely every match we play this year. Next up we have Kyoto at home, when we’ll have to do our best to not concede in the opening eight minutes like we have in the last three games. As I write this, Kyoto are losing to Shonan, so surely we should beat them, right? And they did draw with Kashiwa who have just beaten Vissel Kobe. Who we beat with our B team. So if my calculations are right, if we play the B team we should be able to beat the team who drew with the team that beat the team we beat and who are losing to the team we beat. Right? Well, 'if we play the B team' is a massive if. If this was 2023, I’d be pretty sure that Oniki wouldn’t change the team for the next match. I’m not sure 2024 Oniki is that different from 2023 Oniki, but I think after conceding nine goals in two home games, he is probably going to have to change something. Bet it will be one or two players though and not any kind of approach or tactics. Expect plenty of sideways passing. At least it won’t be on a Friday evening. That will be our third league game of the season and the third which you could say are against teams expected to finish in the bottom half. If we don’t win it, I think it's quite likely that we will be finishing in the bottom half. 
 
If any Sorare players are reading this hoping for a line up prediction for the next match, well, forget it. Some people who’ve contacted me on Twitter asking have been quite nice and polite, but some are really rude once they have received my opinion, and to be honest, I can’t really be bothered to deal with people like that. I don’t know anything that I haven’t said in this post, so if you didn’t find an answer here, you won’t get it elsewhere from me as I don’t know. Sorry to any Sorare players who have read this far expecting something and who have been subjected to and now targeted by my moans. For me, and I’m sure for many, football is an emotional thing. Plenty of things I say on here are huge exaggerations of what I might really think if I sat down with my lab coat on and got my clipboard out and that’s because I care about how my team does. The reason I end up arguing on Twitter with analyst experts is because I watch the games with some emotional investment rather than just to count passes and describe passing moves, all to bolster my self-appointed status online. I don’t really understand people who support the league rather than a team and are interested in every Japanese player that plays anywhere in the world. Anyway, seems like I’m in danger of offending an even larger amount of people than usual with this post so I should probably leave it here.

 
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong (Yellow card 79')
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 36')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 82')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for TACHIBANADA 46')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 82')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for TAKAI 82')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 90+6') (on for YAMAMOTO 82')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi

Goals


UEMURA (Iwata) 6' 0-1
GERMAIN (Iwata) 18' 0-2
GERMAIN  (Iwata) 29' 0-3
ERISON (Frontale) 36' 1-3
ERISON (Frontale) 55' 2-3
MARCINHO (Frontale) 59' 3-3
GERMAIN  (Iwata) 7' PEN 3-4
YAMADA (Frontale) PEN 24' 4-4
GERMAIN  (Iwata) 7' PEN 4-5

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Not a huge appetite to do this, so let's just quickly give it to...

ERISON - second time in a row, but he just scores goals which is exactly what he should be doing. Big fan favourite already. And well done to him for letting Yamada take the penalty. Must be wondering what he has done to deserve signing for us. I'm sorry Erison! Sack your agent!

Highlights


Tuesday 27 February 2024

Vs Shonan Bellmare (away) 24/2/24 J League match 1


Shonan Bellmare 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

Now the season has kicked off properly we can just pretend that what happened in the ACL was just all a bad dream and concentrate on the league. It’s fair to say that we’re not really fancied to do anything at all in the league this year and I think I’d go along with that. In spite of our squad looking pretty good, I don’t get the feeling yet that we’re particularly organised and have a plan that can get the job done. Hopefully we can do a bit better than last year, but let’s be honest, that’s not a very high bar to clear, is it? In a way, having a very early season meltdown after a truly terrible, (yet wholly predictable), performance in the ACL has allowed me to gain a bit of perspective on where we are this year. In the same way that it’s ultimately pointless and probably not great for anyone’s health to get too angry about a bad defeat, we probably shouldn’t get too excited about a win. Perhaps this is all just a roundabout way of saying I’m really trying to scale back these blog posts a bit as I really don’t have much time to write them at the moment. It seems like a better idea to cut back rather than stop altogether. Anyway, this is probably of not much interest to you, so let’s get on with it.


Us -


When we conceded after seven minutes in this game to a team that we have struggled a lot against in recent years, it’s fair to say that I was a bit irritated. Particularly as it was a goal that came from a horrible error we made again. Wakizaka, after booting the ball straight off the pitch with his first touch of the game gave the ball away cheaply for a second game in a row and this time it ended up with a free kick for them which they put away after the ball broke free. It looked like a bit of a soft goal to concede and suggests that we’re still in a bit of a mess at the back. This was our fourth game of 2024 and featured our fourth centre back pairing. Somewhat bizarrely I’d say that the one clean sheet we have got in this time came when we played the strongest team out of all those we have faced so far. I guess Shandong might disagree with that though. Also somewhat surprisingly, the only clean sheet came when we had Kamifukumoto in goal. I don’t know what to think about this really. In contrast to the fact that the centre back positions are still very much in flux, it seems that Oniki has decided that his best left and right backs are Miura and Sasaki. It’s quite a turnaround for Sasaki who last year couldn’t get a look in at left back, which is presumably his strongest position and is now first choice on the right. Aside from the defence, it was business as usual with the same midfield and same forward line named again. Any thoughts that Ienaga might be played a bit less this year seem to have been disproved already.


After I got quite irritated about Wakizaka’s poor start to the game/season, which had been slightly inflamed by him saying in a recent interview that he wanted to take the lead in getting Frontale back to where they should be not long after a horrendous cock up by him had helped us get limply knocked out of the ACL, I was delighted to see myself proved wrong and look like an idiot (again) when he blasted in a goal from a long way out at the other end of the pitch. There was an element of justice for me too as in the celebrations I got elbowed in the face. The celebrations weren’t that wild either, so I can only presume it was karma that did it. Our other goal, which came quite a bit later was an extremely amusing goal, with the Shonan keeper doing his absolute best to haul Erison to the ground, but being unable to do so. He can be thankful that Erison was trying to score a goal, rather than running for a train, as so strong was his grip and so unaffected was Erison, that if it were the latter, he would have been dragged up the escalator and onto the train and now be clinging to Erison’s shirt on the next Tokkaido line train out of Hiratsuka. Probably the only other thing of note in this game was the fact that, perhaps with Wakizaka’s ACL opposition assist in mind, it seems that Miura is now taking our set pieces. Perhaps that will not be the case when it comes to us having a free kick in a shooting position, but in this match it was Miura who was taking the ones where we put the ball into the box. I can’t speak for the corners as we only had one in the whole game and I can’t remember it. It would be a very welcome thing though if we had some variation from our corners. Positive variation that is. I guess you can say giving the ball away directly is a kind of variation. Perhaps the fact that we only had one corner, coupled with the fact that Ienaga was encouraging his teammates to take the ball to the corner flag to waste time with five minutes to go suggests that this wasn’t a vibrant performance from us. It’s definitely preferable to conceding in the last minute but I think it does hold quite a bit of danger and sooner or later if we try to do it for the last 5% of every game it’s going to come back and bite us. But on this occasion it didn’t. As I said above, we weren’t great and as I’ll say in the next couple of sections we got a bit lucky at times, but not losing is a good step forward from our ACL trauma.


Them -


Shonan always cause us trouble and this game was no exception. However they are doing in any particular season, one thing you can guarantee is that form goes out of the window and they give us a real challenge. As this was their first game, we can’t really talk about form on this occasion I guess. But we can remark that they had one shot on target and scored with it. They also hit the bar and had a goal ruled out for offside, which I somehow ‘spotted’ from the other end of the pitch but didn’t realise how close it was until I saw the replay. I guess I spotted the deflection more than anything, but looking back it was a lucky, but just about justified escape. Praise the lord for VAR! Or maybe not, as I’ll come on to shortly. In spite of the stats being slightly one sided in our favour when it came to possession and shots on target, you can’t say that they didn’t cause us quite a few scares. I don’t have much else to say in this section apart from a plea to them to turn down the PA system a bit that was directly behind our area. Pre-game they played a whistle sound effect for some reason which caused a significant amount of people to jump and hold their ears. Similarly, the sound they play for every sub was blasted at such a level that the correct preparation when you saw a sub about to be made was to cover your ears before the attack. There was probably a clue for them in the fact that even normal speech sounded like it was being played through a Big Muff (or other similar distortion pedal). I suppose that part of the point is to cover up the opposition’s singing. I know a few clubs who definitely do this. But they should probably be careful with that whistle sound as they could have a lawsuit in their hands and someone’s audiologist bills to pay.

Ref -

The ref on this occasion was Koya, or as he used to be known on Flashscore, 'K. Hut', the app deciding for some reason to translate his surname. I don’t expect much from J League refs anymore and it’s pretty rare to think a ref has had a decent game. It’s also quite rare to think that a ref hasn’t had an awful game. On this occasion I think he was alright. I didn’t write down anything about being extremely angry about anything he did, so that must be a positive. He did give the two big decisions in the game different ways, which I’m not sure about really as I thought we should have had a penalty but I suppose he was trying to even things up as the previous marginal decision to disallow their goal went our way. I don’t think refs should do this kind of thing, but I understand that they are human beings and this probably seems like the right thing to do if your whole job is showing impartiality. He probably shouldn’t, after his lengthy look at the VAR screen, have whistled loudly and pointed in the direction of the penalty spot though, even if the incident had happened in a similar area, as I think everyone in the stadium thought he’d given it. But let’s be honest, if the biggest complaints we have about a ref are that his hand signals were ambiguous and that he gave each team one of the two big and kind of marginal decisions, he’s probably done ok. Blimey….


So a thoroughly meltdown free blog post for our first league game. Let’s see how long that lasts. I guess it helped that we won. There were some very enjoyable results over the weekend and our 2-1 win sees us sitting in sixth. Hopefully this won’t be the highest we get this year. It’s nice to get one of our biggest banana skins out of the way early on in the season, and even nicer to come away with a win. Next up we have Jubilo at home on Friday. At least this game won’t be kicking off at 5pm. If we can get another win it would be very nice. I suspect we’ll be going with exactly the same players again. And I haven’t seen any evidence of this new approach that I heard we’d be adopting. But I’m not particularly surprised about that either. However, as long as we keep winning, I guess I should refrain from whinging.

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 71. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 51')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for YAMAMOTO 72')
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 84')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MARCINHO 84')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for WAKIZAKA 90+6')
MF 6. ZE RICARDO


Goals

IKEDA (Shonan) 7' 1-0
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 24' 1-1
ERISON (Frontale) 56' 1-2 


My Frontale Man Of The Match

It wasn’t the most polished performance but we got the job done. With no one really standing out I’m giving this a bit randomly but with some slight justification and it’s going to…

ERISON - looks like a brute up front and is doing the business nicely at the moment. Gets this mainly for the pure entertainment of him dragging the Shonan keeper along behind him whilst he slotted the ball home. Oh, and the goal celebration too, of course! Three games, three goals so far!


Highlights

Friday 23 February 2024

Vs Shandong Taishan (home) 20/2/24 ACL round of sixteen


Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 4 Shandong Taishan
(5-6 on agg.)

What an awful performance. And an awful performance merits an awful blog post, so here we go. 6 Football is crap, isn’t it? Or rather, we’re crap, aren’t we? How far we’ve fallen. 2 Ugh. Where to start with another horrible performance. 3 This was awful again. The game plan didn’t work, and we had no response to going behind. 2 Of course, you know I’m going to blame Oniki for this. 2 What a shit manager. 7 Still grimly sticking to the same formation and tactics. 7 I don’t enjoy moaning constantly about Oniki and I’m often told he’s a nice person, so it doesn’t feel good to just moan and moan, but he’s useless and totally without ideas. I really wanted him to put up his hands at the end of last year, admit he’d fucked it up and move to pastures new. Instead he’s opted for staying and trashing his reputation further. 1 It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t know where to go from here. Our system has been found out and there’s no sign of any other ideas. 2 We scored twice, but we missed an unbelievable amount of good chances. We could almost have had double figures in this game if the majority of our shots didn’t sail miles wide. 1 If I had access to a replay of the whole game, I would ideally get a screen grab of the shot of Oniki in the 88th minute with his magnets and whiteboard trying to work out something... anything, and then not bothering. As usual, too little too late. 2 I believe that as long as Oniki is in charge, we’ll continue to toil and bore our way to mediocrity. 3 If one player is playing badly in one game, well, that’s unfortunate, but it happens. If all of the players are playing badly for the whole of the season, then you’ve probably got to look elsewhere. 4 I realise you were expecting me to say this, the real stinkers once again came from Oniki. 3 The one constant is Oniki’s useless safety first approach. Could we just once take a free kick in midfield and play it into the box, rather than constantly playing it short, especially if there’s an opposition player standing very close waiting to take the ball. 5 We’ve got plenty more players to choose from but a manager who hasn’t got a clue who to pick. 7 Every week a little bit more of my sanity gets chipped away by having to watch the same old shit. It feels a bit like finding the person that irritates you the most on Twitter and blocking everyone else in the world aside from them, basically giving them a funnel to pour a torrent of horror directly into your brain without relief. It can’t be good for our health to watch these games. I’d have no problem if we just weren’t that good, but it’s just that the clown in charge keeps making the same stupid decisions apparently unaware of any detrimental effect they might be having. 6


Perhaps that first paragraph seemed a bit weird. Or perhaps it didn’t. It’s made up entirely of direct quotes from various blog posts over the last six seasons (see the footnotes at the bottom). I guess the point I’m making is that nothing changes, and we’re still dealing with the same problems we have been for years, which were only swept under the carpet by us fortunately having some very good players who mismanagement couldn’t stop from playing well. I’ve long said we have succeeded in spite of Oniki and not because of him, but unbelievably there still seems to be confidence in and good feeling towards him from the majority of our fans. It’s taken me four days to write this blog post. Not because I am so traumatised by our defeat but more because I’m just totally fed up with writing about Oniki Frontale and with arguing with people about it on Twitter. On paper this is probably a tie that we should have won. We stormed through the group but once again totally shat the bed when it came to the knockout stage. Funny that, eh? Oniki is a manager who in the past could deal with the league format reasonably well as more often than not his one tactic worked, as the players were good. In a one off game though, he can’t rely on being able to back up the bad performances with some good ones afterwards and instead has to think on the go and actually make some changes that might affect the game. I don’t know if it’s all his fault. There is clearly a malaise at the club at the moment, particularly since the new and apparently clueless chairman joined. After the game our main supporter group the Kazoku demanded to see him. Apparently, (and really don’t quote me on this as it’s only information I’m getting second hand), they were upset at the club’s failure to get more fans in the stadium for the game. I’ve got a couple of issues with this, as while the attendance of about 12000 was pretty low, the game was at 5pm so 12000 seemed kind of decent. I have my theories about why the kickoff might have been so early but have yet to have them confirmed, and instead have been told by people who don’t actually know anything about the J League or Frontale that my theory is almost certainly wrong. And in any case, like I said, our support was actually pretty good. Much better than the performance of most of the players. I don’t think an extra 5000 supporters in the stadium would have changed anything when it came to the three major cock ups that our players made that led to three of their four goals. Like I said in the introduction though, one player playing badly or making a horrendous error can be blamed on the player. The same thing happening with three different players in one game, well, you’ve probably got to look at the manager. So basically, I don’t know if the Kazoku’s complaint to the chairman was right, but I am totally with them when it comes to wanting to complain to him. The exodus of important back room staff speaks volumes about something not being right behind the scenes. Anyway, if I went into detail about every moan I had about this match, this post would extend to novella length and much in the way that I don’t think anyone wants to read that, I don’t want write it. So instead I’ll just whinge away in bullet point form.


- Shocking from Ominami for their first goal, dodgy from Maruyama giving the ball away for the late attack that lead to their fourth, but the one that made me the most angry was the ridiculous corner from Wakizaka that lead to their second. His corners have long been terrible, but this was really sinking to a new low. Please can someone else take them.
- Oniki’s lack of a clue is perhaps evident in the fact that the two games in which he’s played what he thinks is our strongest line up, we’ve played worse than in the game when he played what he considers to be the second team. Kind of weird that the only changes he made from the first Shandong game to this one were to drop Jesiel for Maruyama, (who was ok in the Super Cup but not immediate-elevation-to-starter level ok) and to change the left back. Quite concerned how little confidence Oniki seems to have in Jesiel now. At the same time, a bit confused that Takai had a great game in the Super Cup and wasn’t chosen to start this game if a change had to be made. Similarly, perhaps the one player who didn’t play that well at the Super Cup also jumped into the first team. In the case of Miura replacing Segawa, it was quite welcome to see a left back playing at left back instead of a striker. And to his credit, the things that looked a bit dodgy about Miura, (kept getting knocked off the ball very easily), in the Super Cup seemed to have been completely eradicated in this game. He had a decent game I thought and his goal was nice. So I guess I’m saying credit to Oniki here…
- By the way, the rumoured line up for the Shonan game only has two changes. Sai replacing Sasaki and Takai replacing Ominami. If this is the line up, I guess it shows that Oniki was on the whole quite pleased with how this game went…
- The above point is backed up by the fact that it took him till the 84th minute to make any changes in a game that we were losing and had looked generally clueless in. And even then the changes were pretty bad. The whole front three were replaced, but instead of removing a tiring Ienaga, he was instead moved into the midfield where his do-what—I-want style proved to be a lot more dangerous for us. So basically no change of approach, just ploughing on with the same formation and tactics. The change of approach came on 90+9 minutes, three minutes after the game should have ended, when he brought on Takai and Jesiel and sent them up front for one hoofed ball. 84th minute subs seemed to be the wrong changes, way too late, but par for the course for a manager whose only new idea is to grow a beard so that he looks less young for the benefit of the refs. So,  actually I should apologise as I’ve long been saying he has no new ideas. He had one - grow a beard!
- I think the big aim for 2024 was to make the most of getting through to the knockout stages of the ACL and have a real good go at it. Our aim for 2024 has bitten the dust before our J League campaign has kicked off. Because we were in the ACL, we won’t be joining the more exciting looking than in previous seasons 2024 Levain cup till the later stages, so now we can ‘concentrate on the league’ with our squad that contains players who will almost certainly have almost no involvement. Poor Matsui, Yui, Kanda and probably more, whose season is now probably done before it began. But this is all a bit of a moot point anyway, as Oniki was never a great fan of rotating that much, was he? There is some irony in the fact that this year we probably have a decent amount of centre backs and now Oniki doesn’t appear to know who to play. We’ve had three games with three different combinations so far. The Paradox of Choice seems quite relevant in this situation. Still, never mind, we’ll probably start getting the injuries and red cards flowing soon and he’ll be back on more comfortable ground.
- The ref started the game pretty well I thought, playing a decent advantage and seemed to be in control. This didn’t last long though and he really should have sent off at least one Shandong player in the first half for a second yellow, (for his third of fourth bookable offense). In the second half he was all over the place and the game got quite physical, but by this stage he was only interested in booking numerous staff on the Shandong bench. He did also award Shandong the corner that they scored their winner from after the six minutes were already up. But obviously his performance wasn’t why we lost the game. That was down to us being useless and Shandong really wanting it. They were a different team in the second leg. Or perhaps I should say they were a different team after we gifted them their first goal in the first leg. After that, the gifts continued to flow, our manager watching as the tie slipped away from us, perhaps hoping that sooner or later the boost of him having grown a semi-beard would kick in. It didn’t. They were by far the better team on the day. The only aspect that we bettered them in was with the ‘giving the ball away in potentially fatal areas’. We were SO much better at that.


Anyway, let’s tie all this up with a suitably meandering last paragraph. As I’ve been stewing in my frustration for the last few days, dreading another whole season of this crap, the one image that keeps coming into my head is a strange one. It is of Oniki, whose job is to move some water from one bucket to another, and is trying to do it using only his hands. He keeps stopping halfway between the two buckets water pouring from his inadequately cupped hands whilst he looks at his magnet board and considers perhaps a slight change of the colour of the buckets, all the time not realising that he could have just carried the first bucket to the second one and poured it in to complete the job in an efficient way. There were many people in the stadium on Tuesday who’d taken time off work to watch what they hoped would be a solid performance, seeing out the tie in what was supposed to be the easier second leg. Little did they realise that Oniki and most of the players had also booked time off work and hadn’t showed up. If we agreed to or even didn’t protest the ridiculous early kick off, diluting the home advantage and inconveniencing ourselves, there really is something wrong with the club. I love that fact that we are a family club and welcoming and friendly to all. I don’t believe this should extend to changing kick off times for the benefit off the opposition, (if this is what happened). This was also displayed when Shandong scored their winner and one of their fans jumped the barrier, did a quick turn, leaving one of our security staff on their backside, ran to celebrate with the players and still eluded the security for a while before being ‘apprehended’ and gently ushered back to their seat. Even when we’re supposed to be throwing people out of the stadium we just let them go back and have a sit down. They probably got him some refreshments after his exertions. After these kind of disasters I usually try to be optimistic and say that hopefully this will give us a kick up the backside going forward. Whether that happens remains to be seen. Tomorrow we’ll be going to play Shonan away and kick off our league campaign. We have a pretty mixed record there. If, as it seems, we go with almost the same line up and get another shocking result, don’t expect the next blog post to be very long. Now we’re out of the ACL, (at the first time of asking), Oniki presumably has time to get going with his new tactics and approach that wouldn’t have been ready for the ACL game. Whether I did actually read this online and it’s true, or if it was just a dream I had where my subconscious was trolling me, I don’t know. I don’t believe he has any new tactics or a new approach and now we’ve seen that the grow a beard thing doesn’t work, I suspect we’ll just be stuck with the same old stuff for the whole of 2024. And what better way to finish this rotten post on that note of bleakness!

1 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/08/vs-gamba-osaka-home-6823-j-league-match.html
2 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2019/12/vs-yokohama-f-marinos-home-301119-j.html
3 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2018/09/vs-gamba-osaka-away-2918-j-league-match.html
4 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2022/05/vs-shonan-bellmare-home-25522-j-league.html
5 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/04/vs-gamba-osaka-away-9423-j-league-match.html
6 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/07/vs-nagoya-grampus-away-1723-j-league.html
7 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/05/vs-urawa-reds-away-24523-levain-cup.html

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 71. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 89. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 69')

Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 4. JESIEL (on for WAKIZAKA 90+9')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS (on for YAMAMOTO 84')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 84')
MF 25. MATSUI Renji
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
DF 29. TAKAI Kota (on for IENAGA 90+9')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MARCINHO 84')
DF 52. Sai VAN WERMESKERKEN
MF 55. ZE RICARDO
 

Goals

CRYZAN (Shandong) 8' 0-1
GAO ZHUNYI (Shandong) 25' 0-2
MIURA (Frontale) 30' 1-2
ERISON (Frontale) 59' 2-2
CRYZAN (Shandong) 73' 2-3
JADSON (Shandong) 90+7' 2-4


Highlights

Monday 19 February 2024

Vs Vissel Kobe 18/2 Super Cup


Vissel Kobe 0 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

It’s February 18th and already we’ve played our second game of the year. By the time 16 out of the 20 J1 teams kick off their first competitive game of 2024, we’ll be starting our fourth. And there’s no time to sit around enjoying not writing blog posts because game number three is fast approaching. After our first eleven just about did enough against what looked like a not particularly strong Shandong team last Tuesday we turned up at the National Stadium with a completely different first eleven. I think I expressed my doubts that Oniki would rotate much for this match, but he totally did so I have to eat some humble pie. Maybe he really has changed his approach. I guess that will become clearer as the games continue to come thick and fast. I know I always make a joke about the Levain Cup being the most prestigious of all Japanese football titles, but the Fujifilm Super Cup, as I believe it is now called, is most definitely the title all teams take least seriously and care the least about. Well, unless you are the troll Marinos fan who always finds something to criticise us about and expressed his disgust at us not taking this prestigious cup final seriously by rotating too much. Perhaps he’s still a bit sore after his side threw away a two goal lead against Bangkok United. I think a competition that only two teams have a chance of winning and which is usually crammed in between the last pre-season friendly and the season opener is absolutely the least admired trophy to add to the cabinet. But I am delighted that we snatched it away from Vissel Kobe’s clutches. Actually, that makes it sound like they were cruelly denied the cup by some misfortune, but I think we looked much better than them. To add a bit more detail and heat to that burn let’s say I think our second team looked much better than their first team. And even if they want to use the excuse that we’d already started our season, I’d like to add that any start to the season that our starting eleven had had, was basically sitting on a plane, and then sitting on a bench. I’m sure Mikitani could have funded a similar trip for their players if they’d wanted it. Anyway, this introduction has already gone longer than I wanted the whole post to go on, so I’d better get on with rolling out some more insults, as I’m sure that’s why you’re here. Let’s use the usual headings.


Us -


Massive changes as I said above. First pitch time for Ze Ricardo, Patrick Verhon and Yamauchi.  First starts for Van Wermeskerken and Maruyama. And I thought everyone did alright! There was no-one on the pitch for us who didn’t show some real positive promise. Certainly there were a few dodgy moments, but that’s to be expected with a team and partnerships that have never played together. And presumably there was a bit of a language barrier between Ze Ricardo and Patrick as they’ve only been in the country about a month. Sai almost made the perfect start to his Frontale career, coming very close to scoring with a backwards header very early on in the game. He later went on to actually make the perfect start to his Frontale career by scoring in the second half. It doesn’t bother me that he basically blocked a clearance which was then deflected into the net. I’ve seen goals that have more egregiously been not designated as own goals. I thought the rule was that if the ball was going on target before the final deflection it’s not an own goal. But anyway, I’m sure he’s happy to be credited with it and us fans are just happy it went in. To be honest, I couldn’t see a great deal of difference in the way we approached the game to how we did last year, but it just felt a lot better than it has recently. I guess this is due to the novelty factor of there being different players. I don’t think it’s particularly apparent that the ‘first choice’ team is better than the ones who started this match, which is something that if Oniki agrees with, will give him some difficult decisions to make. Certainly in the past I have been frustrated by us not changing anything much when the one plan we had wasn’t working. Seems like I’m easily placated by seeing some new faces though. Oh, and perhaps by winning! As I said above there were plenty of decent performances. I’m a bit biased as I like him a lot, but I thought Seko had a really good game and was unlucky to see his free kick hit the bar. His corners looked better than Wakizaka’s 2023 corners too. (I do remember thinking his corners were a bit better in the ACL game though). Takai was the other stand out I thought. He was clam and assured at the back and dealt with Osako pretty easily for the most part. He also looked good coming out of defence too. He showed this kind of promise in his first few games, so it’s good to see that kind of thing coming back after he had a bit of a wobble. I felt a bit sorry for Gomis in this game as he’s coming closer and closer to scoring but just doesn’t seem to have any luck. When he did put the ball in the net, (see below), the ref wasn't having it and he was denied an almost certain goal when after Marcinho came on and did one of his trademark dribbles, he tried to shoot rather than pass to an unmarked Gomis. Hopefully he’ll score soon, as I think that when he does he’ll start banging them in for fun. So, a much improved performance from our last game in this stadium and maybe some reason for optimism. Hopefully that doesn’t come crashing down in the immediate future.


Them -


After years of laughing at Vissel Kobe’s splashing of the cash to no effect I think everyone had to admit that last year they were deserved champions. Certainly their ability to sign plenty of high profile and effective players, somewhat in contrast to some of their recent more high profile foreign imports, helped them do well, but they more than earned their success. This is especially easy for me to say as they stopped YFM winning the league and did so with an extremely dodgy decision, hopefully rubbing salt in the YFM wounds. Not sure what’s happened to them since last year though. Now they seem like an ineffective long ball team. I particularly enjoyed the English language interview of Sai (van Wermeskerken, from now on just know as Sai as it’s a long name to have to keep typing), where he singled out the fact that it had been a challenge because we had to deal with a lot of long balls from Kobe. I don’t know if this was a wonderfully taken dig, but I kind of hope that it is. I guess their shooting was pretty bad in this game and that helped us out. Sakai was particularly awful when it came to getting shots or passes on target. I wonder if they’ve turned into 2023 Frontale. I saw they had plenty of possession and a decent amount of shots but failed to score. Got to love it when one of the three teams who people seem to be tipping for the title start out their year like that.  Their keeper looked awful too. I’ve been trying to think of a more amusing second half to the following comparison but haven’t quite been able to find one so you have to make do with this. Maekawa had more flaps than a migrating Arctic Tern in these 90 minutes. And one of these set up our goal. It’s a bit of a shame that we couldn’t have taken advantage of more of them though. One final point on Kobe. Seeing Arai and Miyashiro in their colours was a bit of a wrench. Arai was much loved at Frontale and we were kind of surprised when he left. The fact that he went down to J2 for a few seasons with JEF and then ended up at the J1 champions is a surprise, but I guess he’ll be playing a back up role there. Perhaps judging on how bad Maekawa played though, he could be getting more action than anyone expected. Miyashiro is a tough one. I had his shirt last year, (curse of the shirt, basically it’s my fault he left), but can’t begrudge him leaving us as he was underused, never really played in his best position and even though he scored more goals from open play than any other player in far less minutes, it was clear that Oniki wasn’t going to either make him his first choice striker or change our system to suit him. I was a bit shocked to see how many of our fans booed him before, during and after the game, and kind of disgusted that it happened when he and Arai came to greet us after the match. I don’t know if it’s because they resent him for leaving for a bigger pay packet, for the reigning champions or just because he was a youth team product who didn’t stay with us for the rest of his career. It seems that no-one has a problem when our players leave for foreign teams, regardless of the level, but if they leave to a J1 rival they should be hated. Of course it wasn’t everyone booing, but it was a significant amount of people. Perhaps these people think it would be better for him to stay with us forever, playing fewer and fewer games as the years pass, but still being there to take pictures with bananas for themed match day events and to make everyone in the crowd feel comfortable and warm inside. I don’t know what 2024 will hold for him, but maybe Kobayashi is an interesting comparison. He turned down some offers to go to teams where he’d definitely have played more and is apparently going to have a career with us after he stops playing. I can’t imagine it’s much fun for him though, particularly in a season like 2023 where the rotation was really minimal. Fingers crossed for him in 2024.


Ref and VAR -


This game had the potential to be a perfect storm of absolute shitness when it came to officials. The ref was Ikeuchi who is notoriously bad, but who I faintly praised in the last game we had with him saying that I ’didn’t find much if anything to get irritated about’. Perhaps he read this and was infuriated and determined to prove that there is always something to get irritated about when he’s in charge. The first note I made during the game said ‘four mins till first absolute shit decision’. I can’t remember what it was now, but I guess it was one of many, in my opinion, absolutely one-eyed decisions he made in the game. I knew we were in trouble when he decided to apparently warn Tanabe after a tackle that he didn’t even give a free kick for. Then unsurprisingly, the very next tackle Tanabe made he was booked. Gomis pointed this out to Ikeuchi but perhaps that only encouraged him, and it wasn’t long before he was able to book Gomis too. It seemed like everything was given Vissel’s way. I wouldn’t be surprised if you checked his fridge you’d find a massive bit of Kobe beef in there and a big pile of Rakuten gift cards on top of it. Of course I am naturally biased in favor of Frontale and my Vissel supporting friend seemed to think he’d done ok in the game. I find though that in the J League, if you feel like the ref has had a decent game, he’s probably been biased in your favour. I think a ref having a decent game is rarer than a cross that Maekawa doesn’t flap at. Or a bit of Kamifukumoto distribution that doesn’t end up flying off the side of the pitch,(this is hugely unfair, as I thought he had a decent game yesterday). The most egregious Ikeuchi cock up though was him blowing for a free kick when Yamada absolutely fairly won the ball by the goal line, passed it back to Gomis who put the ball in the back of the net. He clearly blew up for a free kick as it looked like some of the Kobe players had stopped. So I guess he must have been confident he was right, or does that 'let the play go on and get VAR check it' thing only work with offsides? I can’t remember if it was Ikeuchi who previously decided to blow the whistle for a goal that we scored that was incorrectly flagged offside, but crucially blow the whistle before the ball went in, so ruling out any possibility of VAR coming into play? I don’t know if it was him, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. I know it’s not a good look for our fans to boo the ref as he went up to receive his medal for a job truly terribly done, but to be honest, I thought he was awful, so probably got what he deserved. One thing that I thought was interesting was that the stadium screen which was broadcasting the action throughout the game stopped showing the action or replays as soon as there was any kind of hint of a decision which could have been contentious. I guess they are fed up of the referee’s incompetence being clearly shown to all in the stadium, and I suppose if you have incompetent refs it’s easier to try to hide their incompetence than try to actually make them not incompetent.

Next up, Shandong at home in the second leg of our ACL knockout game. We did our best to try to make the second leg interesting by gifting them a few goals late on in the first game, but it would be nice if we could put in a good and confident performance in what will be a library of a stadium given that the kick off has been set for 5pm on a Tuesday. I can only imagine this is due to us being obliging with the opposition's request which was probably intended to minimise any home advantage we might have. Certainly, there isn’t a rational reason to start at 5 when it comes to other time zones. Fingers crossed for a good result. I’m hoping that these posts might become a bit less rambly, a bit funnier and a lot less moany in 2024. I’m not sure I’ve started that particularly well though. And I guess a lot depends on what’s happening on the pitch. Definitely it’s a lot easier to not moan when the team isn’t playing badly, but I’m honestly trying to be less critical and a bit fairer to people who are doing their best. I’m sure Ikeuchi would be happy to hear this. Of course the useless bastard would.
😉
 


 
 
Team

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 31. Sai VAN WERMESKERKEN
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 15. TANABE Shuto (Yellow card 15')
MF 6. ZE RICARDO
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS (Yellow card 25')
FW 28. PATRICK VERHON

Subs

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 90+3') (on for YAMAUCHI 80')
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for TANABE 46')
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for PATRICK VERHON 65')
MF 25. MATSUI Renji
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 80')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for SEKO 85')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

This game and the team showed something of a work in progress, but some of that work was more complete so I have to give it to...

TAKAI Kota - looked great at the back and also bringing the ball out from the back. Really pleased to see him back on track after a little wobble.

 

Goals
VAN WERMESKERKEN (Frontale) 48' 0-1
 
Highlights