Monday 29 August 2016

Vs Kashiwa Reysol (home) 27/8/16 - 2nd stage match 10

  Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 5 Kashiwa Reysol 

I'd been looking forward to this game after missing three matches and after the excitement of beating Urawa in their own backyard. The excitement ran away quite quickly into the game though. To be precise, probably in the fifth minute when we decided that a one goal headstart wasn't generous enough. Normally at two down I would still have some confidence that we could get something from the match, but the woeful performance we were putting in made optimism a little difficult to come by. In short, this was nothing but a total disaster and one which was fully deserved.

Admittedly, we have a lot of injuries at the moment and for this game we were also without the services of Eduardo as he is on loan from Kashiwa and couldn't play as part of the loan agreement. But we still had enough players to put out a pretty strong team which has done us pretty well recently. But not on Saturday evening against Kashiwa. Right from the start we were giving the ball away constantly and it didn't take long for them to punish us. However, their first goal was a bit lucky. I can't believe it has gone down as a Diego goal. The deflection was huge and that makes it an own goal in my book but I don't particularly want Taniguchi to have it against his name. Can't really blame Sung-Ryong for it. He had no chance as he was totally wrong-footed by the deflection. But the fact that their star striker can get a free header standing on the penalty spot in loads of space with no Frontale player anywhere near him says something. Don't like to say it, but it was probably Neto's fault. I always knew we are pretty bad at scoring from corners but had never considered our defending corners skills. Pretty much non-existent judging by this goal. 

Their second goal was a sucker punch, scored pretty much from the restart (obviously our restart… but we lost the ball pretty quickly). A ball down the wing looked to have been dealt with by Elsinho but he messed it up and they were able to pass the ball to the invisible man (at least to Frontale defenders…) Diego who had no trouble making it two. This was pretty shocking but we’ve come back from these positions before so whilst they had started pretty well, we could still hold on to a thread of confidence. And this thread was reinforced by Elsinho redeeming himself for his mistake on the second goal by playing a nice ball to Moriya who hit a first time curling finish into the net from just inside the box. At this stage it felt like we’d might be settling and be able to recover from the terrible start. But as soon as the thread was reinforced it got severed. A Cristiano free kick resulted in a header off the bar and once again there was a complete absence of marking and the Kashiwa right back could just pass the ball into the net. This one looked like Igawa should have done something. The look on the celebrating Kashiwa players’ faces says a lot. Disbelief that it was all so easy I think. The fourth came from another set piece, this time a corner. Once again no marking whatsoever. Much, much too easy.

Either side of half time, two injuries meant that maybe we were spared total humiliation (as opposed to the medium humiliation we got). Igawa left the pitch on a stretcher just before the whistle (replaced by Takeoka and we looked a bit more solid afterwards). And then shortly after the restart Diego was stretchered off (probably the first time many of the Frontale team had spotted him). On 55 minutes Nakano replaced Moriya and we started to come into the game a little bit. Nakano was seeing a lot of the ball and his running at the Kashiwa back line gave us some hope. They seemed to be having a lot of trouble containing him, but unfortunately his final ball was always a little off. Guess this is due to having hardly played this season. I also think that Okubo’s presence always causes issues for the younger players around him. There was a time that Nakano was through on goal and last season would probably have shot but he seemed to feel the need to pass to Okubo and that was the end of another good opportunity. When Miyoshi came on on 67 minutes for Neto we stepped up another gear. The combination of Nakano and Miyoshi looked like it could do some damage. But we were three goals behind and Kashiwa could afford to put everyone behind the ball and wait to hit us on the break. Which is exactly what they did. Can’t complain too much about this. We had to push forward and it was always going to be a risk if we gave the ball away. We did finally get a goal back, but way too late. On 82 minutes Miyoshi fired in a rebound from a Kobayashi header from a Nakano cross. But, yeah, too little, too late.

Some overall impressions of the game have to start with the fact that in the first half we defended terribly and when we weren’t defending our attacks almost always broke down with us giving the ball away cheaply. We were totally hopeless and it was as big a defensive horror show as I have ever seen at Frontale I think. I know we are much more focussed on attacking, but when you have conceded this many goals cheaply it’s difficult to score one more than the opposition. When we did make it into the opposition half we were invariably caught offside. I guess this was a Kashiwa game plan that we couldn’t deal with. Okubo was terrible. I don’t know if we are still not playing to the system that he wants us to, but he looked uninterested and shockingly out of form. It’s controversial, but I feel that when we play with him at the moment we are basically playing with 10 men. Or maybe even less as I feel he sometimes negatively influences some of the other players around him. The second half we looked better, but still not good enough and we were way too far behind at that stage to be able to get anything from the game. You can’t fault Kashiwa for sitting back and time wasting for 45 minutes. After all, they were hammering the team who are top of the league. I don’t know what happened between the Urawa and
Kashiwa games. Or maybe that comparison isn’t fair, but these are pretty much the same players who were playing with loads of confidence and skill a month or so ago. I hope we were just unlucky or all having a bad day at the same time. I’m worried that we may have been found out and might struggle for the rest of the season. Hope this isn’t the case. Anyway, something needs to be sorted out this week as our season’s bogey team are up next and if we lose to Fukuoka I think it’s all over for us. Finally one thing which baffles me a little is the reaction of the fans to this. I don’t believe in booing your own team, particularly during the game, but why we greeted a totally hopeless performance and huge defeat with ten minutes of singing to the team I don’t know. I know a defeat like this hurts the players as much as it hurts the fans, but I have to admire how much the fans could deal with such a rotten performance in this way, as I certainly couldn’t do it. I couldn't even bring myself to take many photos as this was a thoroughly disheartening day out. So you'll have to make do with the one above and this one, which incidentally was probably one of the highlights of the game from a Frontale point of view.



Positives and negatives. Well certainly more negatives. Pretty much every word written above. Positives, and very slight positives they are, a slightly improved second half performance, Nakano and Miyoshi looking like they might be able to do something that more senior players couldn’t. And the biggest positive, Urawa lost again so unbelievably we are still top. But unless we do some serious sorting out this week we won’t be for long.

Up next in the league are Avispa Fukuoka, who beat us in the Nabisco cup and ruined our first stage chances. Last week I mentioned that Kashiwa might want to avenge us giving them a pasting earlier in the season. Surely this means that we owe Avispa one. I think that a comfortable victory is pretty much essential if we are going to survive at the top of the league for much longer. Low confidence has to be rebuilt and we need to bounce back (again!). Before that we have the magnificently named Blaublitz Akita in the Emperor's Cup but we probably can't really read too much into that, unless we lose... Anyway, I’m not sure any of you are enjoying reading this any more than I enjoyed writing it, or watching the game, so I’ll shut up now and keep everything crossed that we can sort something out this week.

 
Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO (Yellow card 28')
DF 4. IGAWA Yusuke
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 20. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 21. EDUARDO NETO
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota 
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 22. MORIYA Kentaro
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 13. OKUBO Yoshito (Yellow card 61')

Subs
GK 30. A
RAI Shota
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
MF 22. NAKANO Yoshihiro (on for MORIYA 55')
DF 17. TAKEOKA Yuto (on for IGAWA 45+3')
MF 26. MIYOSHI Koji (on for NETO 67')
MF 32. DUKE Carlos

Goals

DIEGO (Kashiwa) 4'  0-1
DIEGO (Kashiwa) 5'  0-2
MORIYA (Frontale) 17'  1-2
BARADA (Kashiwa) 29'  1-3 
DIEGO (Kashiwa) 32'  1-4
NAKAGAWA (Kashiwa) 75'  1-5
MIYOSHI (Frontale) 82'  2-5    

Highlights

Tuesday 23 August 2016

Vs Urawa Reds (away) 20/8/16 - 2nd stage match 9

 Urawa Reds 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

What a game, or at least I guess it must have been a great game. I can’t be sure as I was on a plane whilst it was happening. Thanks again to Kaoru for the photos. This is the last game I will miss this season hopefully. I think I said last week that we definitely needed to bounce back in this game after the defeat against Sagan Tosu. I hoped but couldn’t have imagined that we would bounce back so well and be back on top of the league again. But we are and I hope we can stay there for the rest of the season.

Coming into the game we needed to change the starting line up again as Hashimoto and Otsuka were (and still are) injured. It seems that we also changed the formation, switching to something more approaching 3-2-4-1, instead of the usual very very loose 4-4-2 we have been playing recently. Although I guess our formations are always quite fluid so I might be reading too much into this. It seems it was three centre backs anyway, Igawa, Taniguchi and Takeoka. So, something closer to what we were playing last season and certainly it makes more sense than putting Taniguchi or Takeoka out of position at left back. The wide players were Elsinho and Nakano (pleased to see him getting a chance again and pleased it was on the wing where he plays best). Don’t know if we put an extra centre back in to counter Urawa or whether it was just because Kurumaya is still injured and we don’t have another left back. But I guess it worked, so it doesn’t really matter why it was done. There was also a newcomer on the bench, 16 year old Carlos Duke, a midfielder from our youth team.

Don’t know much about the goals other than what I have seen on the video, but the first one was another cracker from Kengo. I’m pleased that recently we seem to be shooting from a bit further out. We do sometimes seem to over-complicate things and try to pass the ball into the net. Nice to go ahead at Urawa, especially after only 15 minutes! Unfortunately they equalised around the half hour mark. We had plenty of people behind the ball but were a touch unlucky with a couple of bounces and deflections. From their cross we had a few people who could have cut it out but it ended up bouncing off a falling Takeoka and sitting up perfectly for Lee. Presumably the Urawa fans didn’t boo their striker for the goal, although they normally seem to like giving him some grief.


In the second half Urawa had some decent chances, but a combination of bad finishing and decent goalkeeping managed to keep them out. On 73 minutes we went ahead again. Oshima made a great run beating a few players and after a few passes pinged around their penalty box he got it back and fed it to Elsinho on the wing who crossed perfectly for Moriya to prod the ball into the net only a few minutes after he came on for Nakano. I remember he scored a cracker at Urawa last season and I’m delighted to see him back on the scoresheet. This goal prompted a couple of Urawa substitutions but happily they couldn’t get back into the match. Okubo had a goal disallowed for handball. It’s difficult to see from the video, but as he didn’t seem to complain, I guess it was the right call. The game finished with a 2-1 victory for us. Lovely! Cue the towel waving!


Once again, not being there, I don’t think I can really go into any detail regarding positives and negatives. The two big positives are obvious though. We beat my most hated team who are also our biggest rivals at the moment and we are back on top of the league. That’s good enough for me! I remember last season being distinctly unimpressed by Urawa’s ‘passionate’ support which basically consisted of a bit of singing before the game and then booing everything we did and remaining almost silent for the rest of the game. Of course I am biased, but it’s difficult not to intensely dislike them and their racist fans. I suppose this is probably only a minority, but it’s enough of a minority for them to get away with the ‘Japanese Only’ banner last season and the vile twitter attacks on opposition players who are foreigners. Anyway, rant over until we next play them. For now I am just going to enjoy the fact that we have beaten them and gone above them. Let’s hope they now have another mini collapse like they did at the end of the first stage!

Next up, it’s Kashiwa at home. We gave them a bit of a battering at their place earlier in the season so they will be up for taking some points off us, but hopefully we can prevail. Edu won’t be able to play this game as he is on loan from Kashiwa and it’s part of the loan agreement, but I guess recently he has only been coming on as sub anyway so hopefully it shouldn’t disrupt us too much. Three more points and plenty more goals please!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 17. TAKEOKA Yuto
DF 4. IGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 40')
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
MF 21. EDUARDO NETO (Yellow card 75')
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 18. ELSINHO 
MF 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 22. NAKANO Yoshihiro
FW 13. OKUBO Yoshito

Subs
GK 30. A
RAI Shota
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro (on for NAKANO 71')
DF 23. EDUARDO (on for IGAWA 78')
DF 28. ITAKURA Ko 
MF 32. DUKE Carlos

Goals

NAKAMURA (Frontale) 15'  0-1
LEE (Urawa) 28'  1-1
MORIYA (Frontale) 74'  1-2

Highlights

Thursday 18 August 2016

Vs Sagan Tosu (away) 13/8/16 - 2nd stage match 8

Sagan Tosu 1 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

Firstly, apologies for the lateness of this post. And also apologies for the fact that this post is not going to really tell you anything you couldn't find out from watching the video or looking at the stats. I'm still on holiday in Europe so am still not getting to games and maybe on this occasion it was a good thing. It seems that our second loss of the season didn't really leave us with anything positive to talk about. We lost, Urawa won, Kobayashi's scoring run is over and we now have a red card ban to go along with all the injuries. Thankfully Oshima is back from the Olympics. Unfortunately he has flu. I hope this is a one game blip, but it's a bit worrying that our next game is away to Urawa, one of our toughest fixtures of the season coming at a pretty bad time. 

So, like I said above, I know next to nothing about what happened at this game. Kurumaya was injured so Takeoka came in for him. Not sure how good he is at left back rather than right back but I guess we don't have much choice. It was however a bit of a surprise that Hasegawa started instead of Otsuka though. He was on the bench last game but didn't make it on the pitch. However, Otsuka was on at half time for Hashimoto, who had picked up a muscle strain and will be out for a few weeks. This coincided with Tosu scoring, pretty much from the kick off. They exchanged a few passes, we failed to get anywhere near them with a challenge and they slotted the ball home from just outside the box. You've got to think that Sung-Ryung should have done better. The shot was hardly a belter and he was beaten at his near post. But they should not have been allowed to get in a position to shoot from their kick off when we should have been perfectly organised behind the ball. Maybe a lack of concentration. Bit painful to watch it on the video to be honest. 

To be honest the only other things that happened for us were two more substitutions and a red card for Miyoshi. Hasegawa was replaced with Eduardo and later, Takeoka by Miyoshi. The Miyoshi red card seemed a bit tough. He seemed to be pulling out of the challenge but I can totally understand why it was given. With only six minutes left after the red, that was pretty much game over I guess and we were defeated and knocked off the top of the league. Sure we had the majority of the possession, but only six shots in the whole game says a lot. Most of them seemed to be straight at the keeper too. We need to bounce back fast from this otherwise things could start going wrong very quickly. Giving that we are playing our closest rivals next, another defeat would put a lot of distance between them and us and give us some big problems I think, particularly for our confidence. The injury situation is a little confusing from this distance so I've no idea who might play the next game. Guess we'll see in a couple of days. And as I will be on a plane during this game I guess the next post will be equally vague. Sorry about that. Hopefully, normal service will resume soon on both this blog and on the pitch for us.

Team

GK 1. S
ung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 4. IGAWA Yusuke
DF 17. TAKEOKA Yuto
MF 21. EDUARDO NETO
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
MF 7. HASHIMOTO Koji
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 13. OKUBO Yoshito

Subs
GK 30. A
RAI Shota
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro
MF 22. NAKANO Yoshihiro
DF 23. EDUARDO (on for HASEGAWA 54')
MF 26. MIYOSHI Koji (on for TAKEOKA 79') (Red card 84')
MF 27. OTSUKA Shohei (on for HASHIMOTO 46')
DF 28. ITAKURA Ko 

Goals

KIM (Tosu) 46'  1-0

Highlights

Monday 8 August 2016

Vs Venforet Kofu (home) 6/8/16 - 2nd stage match 7

 Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 0 Ventforet Kofu

This was the first of three games that I'm going to miss, so there obviously won't be as much that I can say about it, other than what I can find from the youtube video and the game statistics. The score is pretty satisfying though. Thanks to Kaoru for sending me photos and answering some questions I had. I feel a little for Kofu as we gave them a bit of a pasting at their place earlier in the season. We've put eight goals past them this year so you could say that we probably quite enjoy playing them and they don't much like playing us. A quick look at the statistics proves that they probably got what they deserved though. We had three times as many shots as them and they didn't manage to hit the target. Pretty quiet game for Sung-Ryong I guess! We also very much dominated possession (63% to 37%, although never sure how accurate these figures are).

So, once again it was the same starting line up. As much as I have been moaning about performances I guess we have been winning so something must be right. Also I guess we have limited options right now. Noborizato has had an operation so won't be featuring for a while. Oshima and Harakawa are still at the Olympics, although after one loss and a draw so far they might be home quite soon. Moriya and Tasaka have disappeared from the bench. Watching the highlights it seems that we had quite a few chances in the first half but they weren't quite going in. At least not until just before half time when Yoshito connected with a Hashimoto corner. They must have imagined, much as I would, that it was going to go to Taniguchi like our corners normally do. Happy to see Yoshito chalk up another goal. The more he scores the better I think he'll play.


At half time Hashimoto was replaced by Miyoshi. This was apparently due to him picking up an early yellow card. I guess given that he would probably be replaced half way through the second half it doesn't matter if you do it a bit earlier in order to avoid a red. Seems that Miyoshi had a pretty fast impact as on 48 minutes we went two up. He brilliantly managed to grab the ball of the Kofu defender who was trying to shepherd it out for a goal kick, skipped away from him and his powerful cross was deflected into his own net by a Kofu defender. It's a shame he won't get to claim the goal, but well done to him anyway! On 56 minutes it was three with Kobayashi finishing nicely from a Kengo throughball. 7 goals in 7 consecutive games for him now, a Frontale record. Hope that continues. The fourth came on 69 minutes with Miyoshi intercepting a Kofu pass out from the back, and Okubo passing to Elsinho who smacked it coolly into the corner. Nice to see him score again as he's been a little off the boil recently. The last two significant (or possibly not so significant) events were an injury to Neto who was stretchered off and replaced by Itakura (his first league appearance) and a red card for Kofu's Davi after he shoved Okubo a couple of times. The game was already well over by then really though. Apparently Neto was back sitting on the bench with an ice pack before the end of the game so hopefully it's not serious.


Little difficult to talk about positives and negatives without being at the game, but... Positives, still top, lots of goals being scored again, clean sheet, Okubo and Kobayashi keeping their scoring runs going, some good stuff from Miyoshi. Negatives, dunno really, maybe none. It's much easier to find things to moan about when you see more of the game than just the highlights. Maybe the constantly long injury list. Next up, we have a long away trip to Sagan Tosu, who are playing well at the moment. Will definitely be a different kind of game to this one, but hopefully we can keep things going and get another three points.

Team

GK 1. S
ung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 4. IGAWA Yusuke
DF 20. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 21. EDUARDO NETO
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 27. OTSUKA Shohei
MF 7. HASHIMOTO Koji (Yellow card 5')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (Yellow card 72')
FW 13. OKUBO Yoshito

Subs
GK 30. A
RAI Shota
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
DF 17. TAKEOKA Yuto (on for OTSUKA 57')
MF 22. NAKANO Yoshihiro
DF 23. EDUARDO 
MF 26. MIYOSHI Koji (on for HASHIMOTO 46')
DF 28. ITAKURA Ko (on for NETO 80') (Yellow card 90+1')

Goals

OKUBO (Frontale) 44'  1-0
TSUCHIYA (Kofu) OWN GOAL 48' 2-0
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 56'  3-0
ELSINHO (Frontale) 69' 4-0

Highlights