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. Sung-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. ARAI 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