Vs Vissel Kobe (away) 23/9/17, J-League match 27

Vissel Kobe 0 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

Damn this was horrible. Perhaps better than last year when we lost 3-0 having pretty much failed to turn up, but it was a stinker all the same. This time we put in a decent effort but were thwarted by a horrible pitch and a terrible referee. So it’s back on to familiar territory for me, moaning about referees. A year or so ago we thought Nishimura was bad, but now we are plumbing new depths, and no one can sink as low as Tojo. He has quite a reputation it seems, and I'm not saying he’s biased, doesn’t favour the big team or the home team or anything like that. He’s just absolutely hopeless, giving one bizarre decision after another. As for the pitch, the amount of repairs they were doing to the surface before the game speaks volumes. Kobe have pots of money but don’t seem to want to spend any of it on their notoriously bad playing surface. I initially thought the lines on the pitch were where they’d mowed in opposite directions to make stripes. After a few minutes of the game it was clear that they were apparently just marks from the plough they’d been dragging all over the pitch for the last few weeks. But I don’t want to be a bad loser about this, (or maybe in this case a bad draw-er). We should still have had enough to get past a Kobe side who set out to disrupt and destroy, playing football only rarely coming into the game plan. That was their game plan and they stuck to it well. There seemed to be a surprising amount of celebrations from their fans and players at the final whistle. I guess they wanted to make up for the 5-0 loss in the reverse fixture, but a horrible 0-0 can’t really make the heart sing, no matter what the previous result was.

We started the game with our usual starting eleven again and the bench had resorted to pretty much usual form too. After dealing with Shimizu quite comfortably in the last two games, having shaken the team up a little, this was perhaps a statement of intent that things were getting serious again. Unfortunately the return of our strongest team resulted in one of our most disappointing results. In their post match comments most of the players mentioned the surface but also made it clear that they weren’t using it as an excuse. The game started in ridiculous fashion as straight from our kick off Podolski scythed into Neto, planting his boot firmly on his ankle. At the time I was furious that it wasn’t a booking. Looking at the replay, I think it could well have, and probably should have been a red. It was a hugely reckless challenge which could have resulted in a serious injury and was presumably all in the name of making his presence felt. From the resulting free kick, the same thing happened. One pass and in comes Podolski again, with another horrendous foul. This time he was booked. But to be honest, he probably should have been off the pitch. It was almost like he had a dinner appointment he had to make. He seemed determined to get back into the changing room as early as possible. Both tackles warranted at least a yellow. The two of them one after another is just idiotic. But Tojo is clearly not the kind of ref who is going to send off the home team’s big money signing a minute into the game. This wasn’t the end of Podolski’s idiocy. He spent pretty much the whole game, kicking, tripping, pulling, diving and bitching to the referee and his team mates. He looks a deeply dissatisfied person. Guess he’s not turning out to be quite the star he expected. Maybe he should have taken the big money and gone to China after all. Anyway enough of the moaning from me, (well, for the time being anyway...) and on with the game.

I’m probably not going to write too much about the actual game as not a lot happened. We started fairly brightly but passes were going astray and players from both teams were stumbling and falling on the horrible surface. I guess it’s no surprise that Leandro, Kobe’s former star striker has been injured so long and so frequently. I’m sure if I checked I’d find he got injured away from home, but that would undermine my point, so I won’t. Elsinho and Neto seemed to be having particular problems passing. On the whole we were doing ok, but were having to resort to playing it a little longer than usual, as short passes were more liable to be affected by bobbles. Kobe were playing a very physical game, allowing us no time on the ball and this wasn’t helping our usual game much. It’s a tactic people have employed with some success against us and it definitely disrupts our flow. Of course, I don’t like it, but I totally understand why people do it. Unfortunately Kobe were overdoing the whole pressing thing, committing foul after foul. It seemed extremely unlikely that the match would end with everyone on the pitch. We were making chances but they were having a few of their own. Sung-Ryong made an amazing save from one of these chances. The majority of their attacks were dealt with fairly easily. But after we won the ball, we’d then give it away playing out of defence. Not exactly the most reassuring kind of play. Guess our old friend the pitch was playing an important role. We were doing ok, but I couldn’t help but feel that we were slightly intimidated or on edge. Not a hugely satisfying first half, but we could definitely have some confidence that we’d turn it up a gear in the second half.

After another round of repairs from the huge team of groundsmen at half time we were back out, ready to pick up where we left off. Unfortunately it didn’t really work like that. We were definitely much more on the back foot in the second half. We made a sloppy start and were once again kicking everything long. I know we were being pressured on the ball at the back, but I still think we would have been better off sticking to the normal plan and playing it out of defence. As I’ve said many times, we lack height up front so long goal kicks meant we were losing possession, either to a Kobe defender or sometimes with the ball running all the way through to their keeper. Not at all effective for us. Kobe had the lions share of the chances in the second half, hitting the post and bringing out some great saves from Sung-Ryong. I remember last year we were down to our fourth choice keeper for this game and Takagi had a bit of a mare for a couple of the goals. Thankfully we had Sung-Ryong in this game. We were making opportunities but never quite getting to the actual shooting part. It was pretty disappointing. This disappointment was compounded by an injury to Oshima on 57 minutes. After beating a Kobe defender he went charging past only to pull up with what looked like a serious muscle injury. No blame on the defender. I’m guessing it was thanks to the damn pitch. Moriya came on to replace him. Out for two months, so the majority of the remainder of the season. The ref was losing control a little. Plenty of yellow cards were being dished out to Kobe but they also seemed to be getting the benefit of the doubt every time one of our attackers came up against one of their defenders. We made a couple more changes, as we’ve come to expect, Hasegawa on for Abe and towards the end of the game, Morimoto on for Kengo but nothing gave. We hugged and puffed but couldn’t get our shots away, let alone hit the target or work the keeper. We finished the game with two decent chances from free kicks just outside their box, but the first resulted in a free kick to them and the second sailed across the box without us getting anything on it. To make matters worse, Kashima scored in injury time to win against Gamba, pretty much putting an end to our title hopes. Oh well, maybe next year... Let’s hope we can hold onto second place as apparently the prize money has dramatically increased this year. And of course we need another Silver medal to add to our collection.

Positives and negatives. Positives first. Better result than last year, but not nearly good enough for what we needed. Only one serious injury from a horrible surface and some terrible tackles. A clean sheet. Players didn’t blame the surface which is good of them, as I think it really should be blamed. That’s about it. Negatives. We couldn’t cope with the bad surface. We definitely didn’t challenge their keeper enough, attacking a lot, but not really shooting much. A big problem if you want to score goals. Too many players couldn’t pass. A bad injury for Oshima. Any momentum picked up in the Shimizu games is gone. Our title challenge is over. Tojo is still a referee. That’ll do for the negatives as I’d quite like to move on from this game if you don’t mind.

Next up we have Cerezo Osaka at home on Saturday. No midweek game for us this week, which is nice, but maybe it would have been good to get back in action and not dwell on Kobe away. Cerezo beat us easily earlier in the season in another game where we really didn’t turn up. I hope we can get back to winning ways and keep our race for second going. After that, we’re away to Sendai in the Levain cup next Wednesday. A game that’s getting increasingly crucial for us as we drop out of competitions. Fingers crossed. Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG

DF 18. ELSINHO

DF 3. NARA Tatsuki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

MF 21. EDUARDO NETO

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 45+1')

MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo (Yellow card 64')

MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs 
GK 30. ARAI Shota
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
FW 9. MORIMOTO Takayuki (on for NAKAMURA 82')

MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for ABE 65')

MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro (on for OSHIMA 57')

DF 23. EDUARDO
DF 28. ITAKURA Ko


My Frontale Man Of The Match

Not many players covered themselves in glory in this game. Taniguchi made some important blocks, Nara did a decent job against Podolski and in the second half Hasegawa and Kurumaya were getting some stuff going down the left. But given that these attacks didn’t come to anything, I’ll have to give it to...

Sung-Ryong JUNG - prevented a disappointing draw for becoming a soul-crushing defeat with some important saves.

Goals 
None...

Highlights

The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that last year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want.

Vs Shimizu S Pulse (home) 20/9/17, Emperor's Cup 4th Round

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 1 Shimizu S Pulse

Wednesday night saw us back in action in the Emperor’s Cup (not the Levain cup as I tweeted during a brain freeze. There’s been a lot of games recently and I’m sticking with that as my excuse). Once again Shimizu were our opponents, although this time we were at home and the line ups were a little different. I still can’t really say for sure which competition we are prioritising, but this line up certainly had more than the usual compliment of players who might normally be expected to start on the bench. Perhaps Oniki suspected that this line up would have enough to get past Shimizu (who also seemed to be resting players as far as I could tell). If that was the case, he was right. Whilst the performance wasn’t exactly clinical, the result was pretty satisfying and saw some good performances from players who could now be said to be making a decent claim for a starting spot. Whether they’ll get it is another matter, but it’s nice to know that we have some options in the event that we pick up some injuries. Hopefully we won’t. 

Into the starting line up came Arai, Tasaka, Edu, Itakura, Moriya, Hasegawa, Kano and Morimoto. The bench had plenty of the usual starters on it, but also some less familiar faces. Ando had a chance to put on his gloves for a change and Chinen was back. The rest of the bench was made up of Kurumaya, Taniguchi, Oshima, Ienaga and Kobayashi. We were playing with a back three of Nara, Edu and Itakura with Moriya and Neto in front of them, Tasaka and Hasegawa on the wings and Abe and Kano behind Morimoto up front. In theory anyway. As seems to be the case when we play with three at the back, at least one of them spends most of the game bombing forward, so we were attacking quite a lot. We didn’t start particularly well, perhaps due to the unfamiliar line up and formation and for a while we were a little under the cosh, having to defend as Shimizu attacked us looking to make an early breakthrough. But we survived and it was us that scored first on 8 minutes. It was Morimoto, continuing where he left off last Saturday. The goal game from an Itakura through pass, (one of our centre backs who was magnificently running at the Shimizu defence with the ball). Morimoto took a touch to control it and then calmly slotted it past the keeper. The goal settled us down a bit, but the game was still pretty open. Both teams were attacking a lot and it appeared that we were going to be in for a goal fest. Presumably as a result of this thought coming into my head, there were no more goals for a while after this. Shimizu were hitting us on the counter attack and one of these hits finally landed on 23 minutes. There was more than a hint of handball from a Shimizu attacker lying on the floor in the box beforehand, but can't complain about the finish, which was pretty unstoppable. Moriya got totally flattened trying to block the shot and it looked a bit dodgy for him for a little while. No complaints about the ref’s decision though, as it was by no means intentional. He left the pitch on a stretcher but was thankfully able to resume not long afterwards. Shame we gave them the chance with a bit of dodgy ball control from Edu though, but never mind. It looked like we were going to head in to the break level, but Morimoto popped up again. On 41 minutes we were ahead once more and once again it was Itakura (one of our centre backs, it's worth stating again...), who, from just outside the box, swung in a lovely cross for Morimoto to head home. A lively and exciting first half, made all the more exciting by the fact that we were leading and given the scorer and provider of our goals.

The second half started with no changes for us. We seemed a little more assured than we were at the start of the first half, but we gave them a few good chances by giving away the ball cheaply trying to pass our way out of defence. Whilst we were leading and also defending pretty well, it wasn’t exactly comfortable and I felt that we probably needed another goal. Thankfully we got it, and unbelievably it was Morimoto again. The Japanese Ronaldo is back! Apparently he is statistically the most dangerous striker in the league at the moment if you're judging by the amount of minutes taken for each goal. But statistics can be a little misleading I guess! Not that anything should be taken away from Morimoto who was having a great game. His hat-trick was completed with a through ball from Abe and finished with his left boot. A perfect hat-trick, one from each foot and one from the head. Great stuff! He seemed to relax a little after this goal and was dropping a bit deeper and puffing a bit harder. I guess he’d put in a shift so he deserved a bit of a rest. I made a fool of myself for the second time around this time when a marauding Shimizu forward made it to the goal line and just fell over. I can’t pretend it wasn’t a hilarious moment, but it seemed I was enjoying it a bit more than most of the other people around me. I did feel sorry for the Shimizu player, but it was an almost slapstick moment. Chances were being created at both ends of the pitch and it almost had a feel of last season about it, when we went about most games attacking like crazy, almost encouraging the other team to score so we would need to do some more attacking. Thankfully we seem to have got a bit more steel about our defence since last year though. Even when attack after attack is coming, we’re pretty calm, (although maybe a touch too calm sometimes), and satisfyingly solid. Shimizu now really needed a goal so they were pushing forward relentlessly. Our clearances started getting longer, but there wasn’t the desperation we saw against Urawa, and the ball was sticking a bit more. On 59 minutes, Oshima came on for Neto who hadn’t had his best game for us. Not saying he was playing badly, but he wasn’t quite his usual forceful presence in midfield. About 15 minutes later, Kurumaya entered the fray too, replacing Abe. It was definitely a good opportunity to rest some more players as we were doing pretty well and looked at least equally as likely as Shimizu to score.  There wasn’t quite the urgency of the first half though. I guess we’d understandably slowed things down a little. Because of Morimoto dropping back, I thought the game was begging for Chinen to replace him, giving Morimoto the perfect opportunity to get a nice reception as he left the field. But when Chinen finally did come on it was for Hasegawa, and was after we’d scored again. Our fourth came from the head of Edu via a Moriya free kick and he seemed very pleased to score. There wasn’t much more action after this to be honest. I guess everyone had kind of accepted the result. Chinen had a go and once again I thought showed that he will probably have plenty to offer us in the future. It was also good to see Kano play 90 minutes. He’s very much a favourite with the fans and got plenty of encouragement and played pretty well. Think he’s a way off dislodging anyone in the regular starting eleven though, but with a run of games, who knows? Whether he’ll get that chance is another matter. So, a fairly comfortable 4-1 win and we’re through to the next round where we’ll meet Kashiwa Reysol, just a few days before we play them in the league. Weird how this seems to keep happening this season. It was the case with Shimizu and will also be with Sendai next month.

Positives and negatives. Positives first. Decent win, decent performance, pitch time for fringe players, plenty of whom gave a good account of themselves and rest time for some players who’ve played a lot of minutes recently. Arai looked pretty solid in goal making a few good stops and one particularly good save when Shimizu broke through. We looked fairly at ease with the different formation which is good as it seems to hint at us actually having a plan B. Hasegawa once again looked dangerous on the wing with his trickery. Moriya seems to be growing into the defensive midfield position which represents his best chance to get more pitch time. Itakura did a great job with the assists for the first two goals, especially considering he was apparently playing at centre back. He seems to be growing in confidence and quality every time he plays. Negatives, not many really. Not the best day for Neto, but by no means a bad performance. Defending was at times a little desperate, and we did give them a few chances that normally would have resulted in us conceding. But we only did once, so let’s leave the negativity at that.

Next up we’re away to Vissel Kobe on Saturday. This fixture was a stinker last year when we lost 3-0. They also now have some guy called Podolski. I’m looking forward to the game as their stadium was pretty nice. I hope we can banish any of the remaining traumatic memories of last year. Don’t think it will be an easy game, but hope we can keep our title chase alive. We’re running out of games, and not many people are beating Kashima this year in the league, but let’s keep going for those wins and keep our fingers crossed that someone will do us a favour. And then that two other teams will also do us favours. Clutching at straws a little I guess, but let’s keep the dream alive! Go Frontale!

Team

GK 30. ARAI Shota

DF 28. ITAKURA Ko

DF 23. EDUARDO

DF 3. NARA Tatsuki

MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke

MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro

MF 21. EDUARDO NETO

MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki

MF 25. KANO Kenta

FW 9. MORIMOTO Takayuki

Subs 

GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for ABE 75')

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for NETO 59')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for HASEGAWA 86')

MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro

My Frontale Man Of The Match

I think I said before that I try to usually look beyond goalscorers to pick out a man of the match. After the first two goals were scored, I thought that Itakura was in with a shout for his great assists and ‘dynamic’ defending. But what with the hat-trick, it’s pretty churlish to give it to anyone other than...

MORIMOTO Takayuki - perfect hat-trick. Is he finally going to be able to fulfil the promise of his early career? It certainly would be very welcome and quite well timed if he is.

Goals 

MORIMOTO (Frontale) 8' 1-0
DUKE (Shimizu) 23' 1-1
MORIMOTO (Frontale) 41' 2-1
MORIMOTO (Frontale) 49' 3-1
EDUARDO (Frontale) 85' 4-1

Highlights

Vs Shimizu S Pulse (away) 16/9/17, J-League match 26

Shimizu S Pulse 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale

What a difference a few days makes. After the despair and disappointment of Wednesday night when we slid out of the ACL without really putting up much of a fight (at least from an attacking point of view anyway…), we got back to winning ways away at Shimizu. This ground was voted the ground with best scenic views in the J League and I would probably have to agree. The reason for my slight lack of confidence is that with a typhoon on the way, the visibility of the apparently beautiful views was severely compromised, but there was enough of a hint of it probably being a very nice place to watch a game of football. Apart from the views looking out of the ground, the views inside are pretty good too. No running track and some enjoyably steep and high stands meant that we got to watch the match from a decent viewpoint for once. Apart from when the big flag in front of us was waving, much to the chagrin of a few people around me. From our particular position, it was pretty much covering the whole goal which was a little irritating when the action is in that exact place. Once again, it was another stadium where we were allowed to walk around the ground and fans were mixing freely. Apparently there’s only one team’s fans who this doesn’t apply to and I think you can probably guess who that is.

There were a few changes to the starting line up. Read into them what you like, but the basic facts were that Neto was replaced by Moriya, and Abe by Hasegawa. I imagine it was more to give them a rest than for any reasons of form, but who knows really? I guess both of them had to put in a bit of a shift in the last game. It was nice to see that Kurumaya, who has played the most minutes of everyone this season wasn’t rested, as I’m sure he wanted to get back on the pitch and get playing again after his red card on Wednesday. He more than redeemed himself in this game, although to be honest, I don’t think anyone was holding it against him anyway. The two changes mentioned above were straight replacements, so no formation changes or anything like that. The difference from Wednesday was huge though. I reckon a few lessons have been learned since then. We came out positive rather than nervy and consequently our play was a lot better. Of course, Shimizu and Urawa are different teams so any direct comparisons are not really worth making, but we were back to our old attacking selves. The constant rain prevented me from writing too much down, but we were certainly playing a lot better. Passing the ball out from the back was in evidence again and we were keeping possession nicely. We were also cutting through the Shimizu defense with ease at times with some nice moves. Shimizu weren’t causing us too many problems but they had a few shots. I hope they can get some good results (after Wednesday), and stay in J1 next year. I'd like to see their nice views and this was a ground that I really enjoyed visiting. Our first goal came from a free kick just outside the edge of the box, I guess kind of like a close-up corner. Taniguchi beat the markers and headed the ball home. If there’s one thing that seems to have changed a lot recently, it’s the fact that in the last couple of years we seem to have started being able to score from set pieces which makes a nice change. Corners used to give us little more than an opportunity to lose possession but now they pose a real threat. Things were looking bright for us. Hasegawa and Moriya were both doing a good job of making the most of their starting eleven chances. Hasegawa’s pace and trickery is a real boost and I wish he’d been used against Urawa to try to do something with one of those many hoofed clearances. Moriya looked solid defensively and was spraying some nice passes around. I’m sure it’s not his preferred position (I’m also sure I’ve said this a few times before), but it does seem to be the place where he will get his chance this year unless something changes drastically. On 25 minutes we doubled our lead and the goal was set up with a lovely through pass from Taniguchi to Kurumaya, who rolled the ball across perfectly for Kobayashi to smack it home. I think the keeper got a hand on it, but it was hit with enough power for it to go in pretty easily. The reaction to the goal was strangely subdued. We were all at the other end of the pitch and weren't quite sure what had happened. Wearing no glasses (it was raining too much for them to be of much use), I decided it must be a hand ball, so that shows just how much I know (and how much I can see). But a goal it was, and we seemed to be back to where we left off last weekend. Shortly after the goal Taniguchi made an amazing block in the box as a Shimizu striker pulled the trigger. He was having a good game! A few other points of note from the first half are the fact that once again Shimizu have some very fun songs, particularly the samba style ones and of course that the referee was absolutely atrocious again. Nakamura, another name for the crap ref list. The linesman was a bit of a joke too. He didn’t have a clue with the majority of throw in decisions, waiting to be told by the ref before raising his flag. But, we seemed to be in control and were playing some nice stuff, so all was right in the world.

The second half continued much in the same vein as the first, although perhaps Shimizu came back into the game a little and we took our foot of the gas a bit. Memories of the home game earlier in the season came back, when they scored a 95th minute equaliser. We were pushing for a third though but it wasn’t quite coming. Quite a few players had chances but they were either blocked, saved or off target. However, we were knocking on the door. Abe was brought on for Hasegawa on 72 minutes. I think he’d done a decent job but was maybe running out of gas a little. By this stage Shimizu had already used all three of their subs and the 95th minute goalscorer from the last game Thiago Alves was on and was looking a little dangerous. Sung-Ryong had to make a couple of saves, but, we were defending pretty comfortably most of the time. Six minutes later it was Morimoto’s time to have a go, this time getting a few more minutes than in the last match. He scored almost immediately. A long cross field ball out of defence from Taniguchi was just about collected by him (he stumbled over it a bit), and he decided to shoot from outside the box. It clipped the boot of the defender who was coming across to tackle him and arced perfectly over the keeper into the back of the net. Morimoto looked both delighted and surprised. It’s a bit tough on the keeper but these things happen I guess, and who knows, it might have been going in anyway. Three up and with ten minutes to go, things petered out a little. Neto was brought on for Ienaga on 88 minutes and could have made it four but instead of smacking it he tried a fancy rabona type pass. I don’t mind him doing this 3-0 up with five minutes to go I guess. The arrival of Neto seemed to provoke Thiago Alves to try some similar ball tricks, as if he had been suddenly made aware of some kind of ‘samba football man of the match’ award. In the event, this imaginary award wasn't actually presented. There were no more goals, so we ran out fairly comfortable 3-0 winners. The players looked pleased. I think we sometimes can forget that they are also pretty upset when they lose, and it must have been good for them to get back to winning ways. I guess we should also be pretty pleased how many fans we took. It’s not so far and it’s a nice ground, but after Wednesday and with a typhoon on the way, I guess some people could have had second thoughts. But it didn’t seem like they did. We were numerous, loud and fairly optimistic I’d say. It was a pleasantly redemptive experience.

Positives and negatives. Let’s start negative. The weather was bad. Let’s not pick at anything else this time. It wasn’t the slickest of performances, but we did a good job in the situation we were in. Positives, good performances from Moriya and Hasegawa demonstrated that we might have some options beyond the first eleven. A couple of well taken goals and a nice, but slightly lucky one from Morimoto. Kurumaya looked determined and was pretty effective. Likewise, Elsinho seems to be coming into some form recently. Kobayashi is catching Koroki and Sugimoto in the goal scorers chart. Not sure he’ll overtake them, but who knows. Oh, I forgot one big negative. Kashima were losing 2-0 away at Niigata at half time but pulled it back to a 4-2 victory. Damn them! We’re running out of games for them to drop points, but we can keep our fingers crossed I guess. As long as we keep winning our games we can remain hopeful I guess.

Next up is Shimizu at home in the Emperor’s Cup. Not sure how much bearing the league match will have on Wednesday’s game. I suspect we might see some changes in the line-up, but I’m still not sure which competition we are prioritising at the moment. I guess there’s one less on the table now, so maybe we won’t be as stretched as we might have been. After that, we’ve got what was a killer away game last year, at Kobe on Sunday. Last year we got a very humbling pasting from them when we really didn’t turn up. Hopefully we can get some revenge for that fixture. Although I fancy they might want some revenge for the 5-0 at our place in July. A couple of wins by this time next week would do very nicely thanks. Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG

DF 18. ELSINHO

DF 3. NARA Tatsuki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro  

MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo

MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs 
GK 30. ARAI Shota
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki (on for HASEGAWA 72')
FW 9. MORIMOTO Takayuki (on for KOBAYASHI 78')
MF 21. EDUARDO NETO (on for IENAGA 88')
MF 22. RHAYNER
DF 28. ITAKURA Ko


My Frontale Man Of The Match

Some decent performances. Redemption for Kurumaya, goals from Kobayashi and Morimoto, few good saves from Sung-Ryong and nice efforts from Moriya and Hasegawa, but it has to go to the person who had a hand in all of the goals and made an amazing defensive block.

TANIGUCHI Shogo - Perhaps mainly for the passes for the first and third goals and the defensive block, but he also finished his chance well, so got his name on the scoresheet. Maybe one of the best performances I've seen from him. Bravo!


Goals 

TANIGUCHI (Frontale) 14' 0-1
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 25' 0-2
MORIMOTO (Frontale) 79' 0-3


Highlights

The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that last year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want.
 

Vs Urawa Reds (away) 13/9/17, ACL, quarter final 2nd leg

   

Urawa Reds 4 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale (5-4 on agg.) 

Damn. It's fair to say that this wasn't how many people expected this game to go. Our ACL campaign is over and in humiliating and heartbreaking circumstances. I think I want to write this about as much as you probably want to read it, so I'm going to try to keep things brief (although I usually fail to do so, when I say this). I don’t think I need to discuss the line-up (the same as usual which has done us pretty well recently) or the goals we conceded (watch the video if you want, but I’d rather not think about them anymore if that’s ok with you). Similarly to the FC Tokyo game, I didn’t make many notes during this match but the reasons were starkly different. Instead of being caught up in the excitement and action, it was more a case of not being able to look away from the extreme slow motion car crash that was materialising in front of us. It’s a cheap metaphor, but there was a feeling of our Kawasaki Frontale puppet having its strings slowly being cut with the only drama being whether the final whistle would come before the scissors delivered the killer blow. In a way, maybe it’s a blessing that they got a winner as I can’t imagine how many more they would have scored if we’d gone to extra time. 

The mood after the game was unsurprisingly, in stark contrast to the pre-game atmosphere, where we were treated to a selection of some of the campest chart music from the early 2000’s. It was quite incongruous with Urawa’s tough guy image and was pretty amusing at the time. I have to say, I was pretty disappointed with the ticket allocation we were handed. There was only one area of the ground that had sold out and that was our part. They penned us in to a narrow area behind the goal whilst huge swathes of the rest of the ground were near empty. This is in huge contrast to the first leg, where we sold their fans way too many tickets. A game against Urawa would normally give me a good opportunity to moan about their boring fans, but to be fair to them, on this occasion they actually managed to make some noise other than booing through the whole game. I guess they had a few things to celebrate though. Unlike us. But we sang our hearts out and didn’t stop supporting even when the game was slipping away, and finally was lost. I feel slightly guilty that I left so quickly after the final whistle, but to be honest, I was quite keen to not be on a train with a load of triumphant Urawa fans. Although it seemed that quite a few of them seemed to also have made a swift exit. Guess they’re used to these kind of comebacks.

Going in to the game Kobayashi had said that we weren’t going to go there and try to defend the lead. We would go and attack and look for the two goals we’d need to make it extremely difficult for them. This made sense to me. I wouldn’t have much confidence in us being able to hang on to a lead for 90 minutes. So far so promising. However, we started the game very much on the back foot, very nervous and completely out of sorts. Our passing was severely misfiring and we kept giving them the ball and inviting attacks. This was very much the theme of the evening actually. There were a lot of long balls being played by both teams. I have no idea why, but we were launching the majority of goal kicks long, unsurprisingly losing the ball as we are not exactly blessed with height up front. I really don’t get why, as this is something we very rarely do. Why were we changing out usual formula? Our goal came a little against the run of play on nineteen minutes and came from a nice long pass from Kengo and was a nice finish by Elsinho. At this stage it seemed we were pretty much through. But the nerves didn’t seem to settle and we continued as if we were a non-league team playing in a big stadium and in front of the TV cameras for the first time. Totally baffling. Of course, after a while they scored and then there was the red card. At the time, it looked like the right decision. From the TV pictures, it looked like the right decision, but I’ve heard Kurumaya say that he didn’t make contact with Koroki, which if true, has annoyed me a little as you'd never know that from his reaction. You can make a case for both sides looking at the replay, but fundamentally, the ref was left with a pretty straight-forward decision and we were looking like we were going to have a pretty worrying next sixty minutes. Kengo was sacrificed and Tasaka brought on to take Kurumaya’s place at left back. Not that you’d really know as the remainder of the game was spent with pretty much all of our players defending desperately behind the ball.

The second half was painful, Urawa’s required goals being slowly and methodically scored as our despair deepened. On 65 minutes Oshima was off, replaced by Edu presumably to shore things up at the back but leaving us with not a lot in the middle. We did manage a few attacks on the break, but we were so outnumbered, what with our entire team being behind the ball, that when someone did break there was no-one to support them and the attack fizzled out. According to the stats we had no shots in the second half, a situation which I guess made it quite difficult for us to score. Urawa were winning corner after corner and it clearly was only a matter of time. Still we pumped the ball forward from every goal kick or free kick, instead of our usual passing it out from the back thing, and it came straight back at us. By 86 minutes they had their fourth and even more agonizingly it had come from what was clearly a mis-hit cross. Our final sub was Morimoto on for Kobayashi. It would have been lovely for Morimoto to score a goal hugely against the run of play and put them out on away goals, but of course it didn’t happen. Cue tears on the pitch, the bench and in the stand, but personally, it had felt like it was coming since the start of the game with our goal only being a mere distraction from the inevitable. Of course, I was gutted, but there was a weird side to this feeling, as I was really confused as to how we had gone so badly wrong. The game was so frantic that the only player’s play I can really remember is Sung-Ryong. He maybe could have done better for some of the goals, but to be honest if he hadn’t have been playing it could easily have been double figures. I can’t point my finger at any of the outfield players in particular for having a bad game. No-one really had anything near a good one though. They all merged into one big desperately defending splodge of blue.

I think most people are blaming Oniki for this defeat, and I guess whilst I have to agree, I think some of the decisions he’s been criticised for are of less significance for me. Firstly the substitution of Kengo after the red card seems to be what everyone thinks was the end of the game for us. It’s true he’s been playing very well recently, but you can’t exactly say he’d been having a good game (like everyone else in blue). I am guessing that Oniki’s thinking was that he’d probably have to replace Kengo around 70 minutes anyway (as has been the case recently) and that bringing someone else off at that stage would have meant that he would need to sub Kengo off later, playing another one of our cards. I think maybe I would have brought on Edu instead of Tasaka and gone to three at the back. Tasaka has played some good games in defence since he has been asked to fill in there last season, but I’m not sure left back is the place for him in a game like this. Our second sub, Oshima off and Edu on, has been criticised too. True, it removed pretty much all of our midfield, but we weren’t really using this area of the pitch much anyway. The ball was being lumped long, usually down the wing or being picked up on the edge of our box, with the player then running forward with it. The final sub, Morimoto on for Kobayashi, was also criticised. I agree with Morimoto coming on to see if we could get something to stick a little up front. Not sure why it came so late though. And not sure who I would have taken off. Kobayashi would definitely have been an option, but probably Abe and Ienaga could also have been possibilities. My criticism is related to the tactics. Sure it was a big game and we were nervous, but I have no idea why we weren’t trying to play our usual game. Even before the sending off we weren’t passing. I’m not sure that Urawa were particularly pressing us to the extent that we were forced to rush and not do our usual passing thing. I know we’ve started games not particularly well recently, but we’ve not started one this badly. It was shocking, with us losing the ball repeatedly and rushing when we would normally stop, think and make another sideways pass. It just doesn’t make sense to change our game plan so drastically when we have used pretty much the same one all season so far. I know I’ve often said that we don’t have a plan B. Perhaps Oniki thought this too and therefore decided to start this game with a plan B that we hadn’t actually tried practicing yet. It’s just baffling. As I said above, there was not even any hint of us trying to go there and score twice. We left the tunnel with our backs against the wall and remained there for 90 minutes.

Positives and negatives are kind of ridiculous after a result like this. Perhaps one positive could be that we are no longer spreading ourselves thin over four competitions. I don’t think we would have been able to win the ACL and the long distance travel required would have stretched our already thin first choice team to breaking point. It does feel heartbreaking to go out like this though, especially against a team like Urawa. I have gone into my negatives at length above so I’ll merely briefly recap them here. Complete tactical implosion right from the start, not just after the red card. A real nervy shakiness that I’ve never seem from us before. Sure, we’ve looked bad in the past, but this was really to another level, or maybe I should say a new low. This must have been as devastating for the players as it was for us. Let’s hope we can pull ourselves together, firstly for Saturday, and then to concentrate on the remaining three competitions we’re in. We can’t afford any slip ups from now on. We’re still in with a shot on three fronts. Let’s hope we can go one better than silver in at least one of these. Oniki is still in his first season and we have to expect that sometimes things won’t go our way and that sometimes this will be due to mistakes on our part. I’m sure he’s learned a lot from this game and I hope that going forward we won’t make the same mistakes again.

Next up in the league is Shimizu away on Saturday. And then Shimizu at home on Wednesday in the Emperor’s Cup. Not exactly the team we might want to be playing in these circumstances as we never seem to do well against teams towards the bottom. In a way though, if we put in a good performance, I’m pleased we are able to get on with things fairly quickly after this game. The ACL has gone now and we have to put it behind us and focus on what we still have. A surprisingly optimistic way to finish this blog post. Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG

DF 18. ELSINHO

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 3. NARA Tatsuki (Yellow card 31')

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (Red card 38')

MF 21. EDUARDO NETO

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro

MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs 
GK 30. ARAI Shota

DF 6. TASAKA Yusuke (on for NAKAMURA 42')

FW 9. MORIMOTO Takayuki (on for KOBAYASHI 89')

MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro
DF 23. EDUARDO (Yellow card 71') (on for OSHIMA 65')

MF 28. ITAKURA Ko

My Frontale Man Of The Match

JUNG Sung-Ryong - Kept the scoreline embarrassing, preventing it from becoming totally humiliating. That's about as optimistic as I'll get with this.

Goals  

ELSINHO (Frontale) 19' 0-1 
KOROKI (Urawa) 35' 1-1
ZLATAN (Urawa) 70' 2-1
RAFAEL SILVA (Urawa) 84' 3-1
TAKAGI (Urawa) 85' 4-1


Highlights

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (home) 9/9/17, J-League match 25

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 0 Yokohama F Marinos

The worrying thing about us picking up another great result like this is the fact that this year we seem to be playing great for three or four games, then throwing in a stinker of a performance. In previous years maybe this wasn't such an issue, but with us very much in the hunt on quite a few fronts this time round, one of these stinkers could see us out of one of these competitions. Even in the league, we can't really afford to not win any games as we've got six points to make up on Kashima, who scraped another 1-0 bore win this weekend. We really need someone to beat them soon. Preferably a few teams, as I'm not counting out another slip up from us. But let's not dwell on what might happen in the future and concentrate on a great performance against a Yokohama team who we shouldn't forget were above us in the table before the game. We definitely owed them one from the game at their place which was jointly ruined by an appalling ref and an appalling blip performance from us, creating a very unenjoyable afternoon for us Frontale fans.

We started with our usual line-up and no real surprises on the bench either. See below for the line-up. I seem to be typing pretty much the same opening sentences for these second paragraphs every week so I'm trying to save myself a bit of work going forward. Possibly the one slight surprise was Kano on the bench, keeping his place from the last game. He got a great reception from the crowd again. At least from our fans anyway. He's a former Marinos player, but they didn't seem to remember, either in a positive or negative way. Much like last weekends FC Tokyo smashing, the game started fairly evenly with a bit of possession for both sides. Yokohama's tactic seemed to be to play long balls down the flanks for Saito and Martinus to chase. Aaaah, Martinus. A new contender for my most disliked J League player. He did a great job against us in the last game which I don't hold against him in any way. What I do hold against him is his constant whinging, fouling and diving. I don't think he made a single fair tackle in the whole game, committing foul after foul and never picking up a yellow card. And here we come on to the next rotten performance. I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you to hear me moaning about a referee, but it seems that Sato is another one of the bad ones. I'd say its pretty unusual for a local derby to end without any yellow cards being shown, and I think there definitely should have been a few dished out. It was by no means a dirty game, but when you have players committing foul after foul, slicing through opponents, it's not really usual for there to be no bookings. I wonder if our pregame scouting showed their keeper to be a bit weak with long range shots, as we were definitely more willing to have a go from distance than we usually are. And in a way this is where our first goal came from. A nice move resulted in a cross/shot from Abe being chested on by Kobayashi but not quite making it to Kengo. The ball was cleared by a defender to Oshima who smacked it in from the edge of the box. Ole! We were really coming into the game pouring forward and cutting through them time after time. They were clattering through us in the tackle. They did occasionally break but we were again doing a decent enough job at the back. Whilst the defending was at times a little seat of the pants, we were holding up sufficiently solidly. Oshima was having a pretty damn good game. He often goes a little unnoticed by me, so I guess if even I was spotting his great work, he must have been having a blinder. There's a video that has appeared on twitter of an Oshima highlights reel from this game which I guess says something. All in all, a decent first half with the greatest threat to us being a refereeing blunder or an injury from persistent hacking. Thankfully neither arose.

The second half started with Yokohama having a go at us. I guess this was an important game for both teams and they really needed to try to get something from it. Thankfully though, we were resolute at the back and were still making plenty of chances. Shockingly for us, it seems that the vast majority of our shots in this game were on target. It's definitely easier to score this way, so I'm all in favour of that. On 57 minutes we were two ahead and this time it was Kobayashi. We seemed to have lost possession in the middle of the pitch, but a blunder from Yokohama gave us the ball back and Neto was able to prod it on to Kobayashi who belted it home. At the time it looked like the keeper had made a bit of a mess of it as it seemed to be hit straight at him. However watching the replay, I think it was hit with quite some venom and with a lot of dip and bend on it. A nice finish! Martinus continued with his cheating and around this time it really looked like he was losing both his rag and his mind. I half expected him to have a swing at someone. Guess things weren't really going his way. Our third came on 70 minutes and it was Ienaga this time. Yokohama dithered in defence again and Kengo was able to nick the ball. He then got absolutely walloped (not a yellow according to the ref...) playing the ball through to Ienaga, and he gave the keeper the eyes before slotting it home at the near post. It looked like we had the game in the bag, but two thoughts came into my mind. The injury time comeback by them in this fixture last year (I know we mounted our own comeback to cancel out their comeback but it was pretty tense), and the final league game of the season last year, when Yokohama were doing us a favour against Urawa and then we stuffed it up against Gamba at home. I am praying that we don't have any similar capitulations this year. With a three goal lead Oniki was free to make some subs. First off was Oshima, replaced by Moriya. He'd had a great game and thoroughly deserved a nice sit down with a bit of ice on his ankle (hopefully just a precaution). Then Edu replaced Kengo and we seemed to switch to five at the back. I initially presume it was three at the back but we were under a bit of pressure and having trouble clearing our lines at this stage, so more often than not, it was five with the two wing backs sitting deep. The final change was Hasegawa on for Kobayashi, presumably to add a bit of pace up front for when we hoofed the ball clear. It almost paid off actually, late on, but we weren't to score any more goals. But we didn't concede either. And it was a pretty good result all things considered. If only Omiya could have got something against Kashima...

Positives and negatives. Start negative, although there's not much. Guess the fact that we're still six points behind Kashima with games running out. But I guess as long as we keep winning, we still have a chance (if they slip up). Only other negative I can come up with is the fact that we were pretty ragged at points in the second half. However, nicely segueing into the positives... we didn't concede. It's good that we have a bit more of a gutsy side to our defending this year. Plenty of the front players are doing their bit when required and whilst our defending at times isn't the prettiest, it seems to be effective most of the time. Three more goals is nice, and they were nice goals too. We really seem to be scoring for fun at the moment. (Hope that continues at Urawa on Wednesday). And it's good that some of our goals are coming from different kind of moves than usual. It seems that we've been hitting people on the counter attack a bit recently which is a nice new string to our bow. Also, a high percentage of our shots were actually on target. Quality over quantity this time I guess. Finally, an abundance of team spirit is in evidence and everyone seems to be working for one another. Fun times!

Next up are a couple of away games. Firstly, we go to Urawa on Wednesday for the second leg of our ACL quarter final, leading 3-1 from the first leg. Hopefully, as we did against Tokyo, we can score an early away goal and really put them up against it. After that we travel to Shimizu on Saturday in the league. We only got a draw against them at home earlier in the season but we'll need something more this time. It will be my first time going there and will leave me with just one more J1 ground to tick off. Exciting times! Let's hope that we can keep this run going and banish the blips. Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG

DF 18. ELSINHO

DF 3. NARA Tatsuki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

MF 21. EDUARDO NETO

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro

MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo

MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs 
GK 30. ARAI Shota
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
FW 9. MORIMOTO Takayuki
FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for KOBAYASHI 89')
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro (on for OSHIMA 78')
DF 23. EDUARDO (on for NAKAMURA 84')
MF 25. KANO Kenta


My Frontale Man Of The Match

This was an all round good team performance with everyone playing their part up front and at the back. Given that he has his own highlights reel from the game though (which you can see here), I guess it has to be...

OSHIMA Ryota - class act all over the pitch. Great goal, great tackling and great passing. Great stuff! Don't have the little player key ring thing for him, so you're spared any weak visual puns this time.


Goals 

OSHIMA (Frontale) 14' 1-0
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 57' 2-0
IENAGA (Frontale) 75' 3-0

Highlights

The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that last year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want. And we have that extra footage video again at the bottom.