Thursday 26 July 2018

Vs V-Varen Nagasaki (home) 22/7/18 - J League match 17

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 0 V-Varen Nagasaki

Back to Todoroki and it was a pretty much full house on a sweltering hot day for the visit of V-Varen Nagasaki. Once again, an interesting team name. Perhaps it’s a sign that I have become too comfortable with the J League that recently I rarely find myself being intrigued by the origins of the multitude of intriguing names around. I’ve checked this one though and am pleased to report it’s a mixture of Portuguese and Dutch with the first V standing for two different words in two different languages. Lovely! Understandably given the distance and the fact that this was another Sunday night game, there weren’t a great deal of Nagasaki fans in attendance but fair play to the ones who made it. This was the first home game after the World Cup break and the stadium was actually pretty loud. I guess people have missed their dose of Frontale. Some of us have been to two games in the last week and a half though! In charge was the reliably poor (in my opinion), Nishimura. Fantastic... He wasn’t as bad as he’s been in the past but I still get the impression that he thinks he’s the star attraction and perhaps wilfully makes some strange decisions to draw attention to himself.

The team was unchanged from Wednesday’s game in Sapporo. The bench was almost the same, with the one change being Takeoka taking the place of Michael James, Oniki presumably thinking that it’s better to have two full backs who can be drafted in to have a go in central defence if required than someone who job it is to play that position. Once again, no sign of Moriya or Saito. The game started with Nagasaki really getting in our faces, pressuring us on the ball, particularly in defence. But we were dealing with the pressure pretty well. It was however stifling our attacks. We’d spend ages getting the ball out from the back and then run aground in midfield, being unable to penetrate a ten man Nagasaki defence. We still have trouble playing against teams that defend in numbers against us and with these kind of counter attacking tactics popular this year, we really should have worked something out by now. Nagasaki were playing with two big lumps up front and whilst we contained them, we had a few nervy moments. Juanma seemed to be really one-footed, which probably helped us a lot. It certainly reduced their options. At this point in my notes I have the phrase ‘Nishimura clown’. Can’t remember what in particular it was about, but I think the thought stands up by itself. The one thing missing from both teams play was a final ball. We’d finally reach the danger zone after a lot of sideways passing and try just one more pass instead of having a shot. Taking of which, Oshima never seems to shoot anymore. He used to score some crackers. Wish he’d start doing that again. Perhaps this is also something Moriya brings to our game. He really loves to have a long range shot. It would be good to have that option. The highlight of the first half for me was a couple of perfect almost prone passes Ienaga made after being wrestled to the floor. He seems to be providing me with some special enjoyment every week at the moment. Great stuff! We’d dominated possession as you might expect and had a few shots but hadn’t quite found either our groove or range.


For the second half, we seemed to come out with more purpose. Nagasaki were still content to try to keep the score even and try to snatch a goal on the break, but we shifted up a couple of gears. Unfortunately we still weren’t getting very lucky with our finishing. Elsinho had a nice chance with a header at the back post, but the ball seemed to really change direction after it bounced. We took the lead through Kobayashi who put the ball away at the second time of asking. The first shot was straight at the keeper who parried the ball back to Kobayashi. The second shot was perhaps unnecessarily uncompromising, into the roof of the net with quite some power. It was pretty exciting to see the ball smashed home. Thankfully it went in! You would imagine that us going ahead would mean that the game really opened up and we’d have some more decent chances due to Nagasaki having to commit some more bodies forward. Whilst the latter happened, the former didn’t. We had some chances but looked much more nervy than we had before the goal. For quite some time at the end of the game we were hanging on, with plenty of players back, even indulging in a bit of time wasting if I’m honest. It wasn’t the most edifying of sights. Whilst I don’t want us to be completely Kazama-style gung-ho, it would be nice if we weren’t trying to shut up shop at 1-0, what with us being defending champions playing a team that was promoted last year who are sitting in the bottom half of the table. 1-0 is a bit too dangerous a score and we could easily have conceded an equaliser and then would have probably struggled to go back ahead again. Somewhat interestingly, the substitutions in this game were identical to the last game, so perhaps now we not only have our first eleven set in stone, but also the changes. Nagasaki had the lion’s share of the possession in the second half but we hung on and took the three points. It was nothing like a confident and exciting performance, but with Neto and Nagoya holding Hiroshima to a 0-0 draw, it was a crucial win, reducing the gap to eight points. I guess I’d have to say that I’d take a repeat of these results for a few weeks if it meant that things got a bit closer up at the top of the table.



Positives and negatives. Positives first. Probably the big one is the combination of us winning and the Hiroshima result narrowing the gap. A step in the right direction. Kobayashi's goal was enjoyable and it’s good to see him keep knocking them in. There weren’t really any stand out performances though, either for positive or negative reasons. On to negatives. This was a pretty uninspiring performance. Not bad, just not really there. We looked worse after we scored which is a bit weird. We are still pretty inflexible with the same players starting every game and the same tactics being employed whatever the situation and now even the same subs being made. Sure, we're the reigning champions so maybe we should be forcing other teams to adapt to our way of playing. But the thing is, plenty of them have, and it’s causing us a few headaches. This year may be the year of defending in numbers and snatching long ball goals on the counter attack. We might not like that, but we do need to work out how to combat it and I still don’t think we know. We’re picking up wins and long may that continue, (four in a row in the league, so what am I moaning about?!), but other teams are blasting in goals left right and centre and we’re scraping victories by the odd goal and hanging on with some time wasting. We may soon have to give up our moral high ground. Sure we pass the ball around very nicely but we’re not exactly dazzling. In fact it’s more like someone turned down the dimmer switch to the minimum at the moment. Hopefully, even if we can’t dazzle we can at least glow a little soon.

Next up, Shonan Bellmare away on Saturday. Apparently a typhoon is coming so that makes pretty much every aspect of the match day a challenge. They’re another team in the bottom half, but one which has just hammered Vissel Iniesta (as I believe they are now called). It’s a local derby too, so perhaps that can stir us into life a little. Go Frontale!


Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 25. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
Subs 
GK 30. ARAI Shota
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for NAKAMURA 85')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
DF 17. TAKEOKA Yuto
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (Yellow card 90+3') (on for KOBAYASHI 90')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto (on for ABE 74')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Like I said, not a great deal of stand-out performances in this game. For the sake of giving it to someone, I'll give it to the person who I never really notice, but seems to always get on with doing his thing very well.

OSHIMA Ryota - why not, eh?

Goals

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 67' 1-0


Highlights

The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that a previous 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.

Saturday 21 July 2018

Vs Consadole Sapporo (away) 18/7/18 - J League match 16

Consadole Sapporo 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

We’re only one game back into the restarted season and I’m already running the risk of not getting a blog post done before the following match. The schedule this year is pretty hectic. Presumably that’s why we decided to crash out of the ACL early. Must be, right? It was good to get back into league action though. Particularly after last week's disappointing cup game against Mito. The team selection for our league games will always be more representative of what Oniki considers to be our best team, so now we have a bit more idea of how our midfield will look post-Neto. I guess it will come as no surprise that Morita will be taking his place. Thankfully, my hero Nara was back where he belongs, alongside Taniguchi, for his return to his old hometown team. Any line-up surprises were probably on the bench. I’m pleased that Oniki actually put a replacement centre back on there this time. It now seems that Michael James is his preferred third choice. The writing is probably on the wall for Edu, who I think has been unfairly blamed by Oniki in the past at times, but seems to suffer from making one big and sometimes costly mistake per match. He looks destined to spend the rest of the season playing for the reserves. I’m not sure an injury would even get him back into the squad. The other big surprise was the absence of Moriya. Shimoda was the bench replacement for that position. But at least this time the bench made a bit more sense than at Mito.


It’s always nice to go to Sapporo and this time we got to go to their second stadium, which I think I enjoyed more than the Sapporo dome. It’s interesting to watch a game inside in a baseball stadium, but given that this was summer, and the weather was much nicer than in boiling hot Kanto, it was great to be outside. Of course there was a running track though, and the pitch seemed to be even further away than usual. Given the slightly limited viewpoint, the lateness of this blogpost and the Sapporo Classic on tap at the stadium, the details in this post may be lacking somewhat. But I guess you can watch a video of the game if you’re into details and that kind of thing. You probably come to this blog just for the moaning, right? You may be disappointed with this post though, as I had a fun time and consequently haven’t got too many moans this time. The game was pretty exciting and was quite open from the start with chances for both teams. We were defending well though, with the two centre backs and the keeper doing a good job of keeping Sapporo at bay. Morita was also doing well (I still miss Neto though...) and it was nice to see Oshima back on the pitch.  Morita did pick up an early yellow card though. It looked a bit harsh from where I was but to be honest I couldn’t see much. The weird thing is, they were showing a lot of replays on the big screen in the stadium. These replays clearly, and amusingly, showed up bad decisions from the referee on several occasions. This time the ref was Iemoto, who has been decent for us this year. I’m not sure I’d say he had a good game, and apparently both sets of fans thought he’d favoured the other team, but we did win again with him in charge, so I’m not going to complain. We were moving the ball around quite nicely but occasionally over complicating things up front and over playing it in the middle and almost getting caught out at the back at times. The Consadole fans were annoyingly booing all our possession. I’m not sure what effect this kind of thing is supposed to have. It annoys me, but I’d imagine it probably makes the team in possession enjoy the possession all the more. We managed to put a stop to this booing and go into halftime a goal to the good though. I’ve seen the goal referred to as a PlayStation style goal and I think that sums it up quite nicely. Elsinho got the ball on the right and dribbled infield past player after player towards the box before his shot squeezed in under keeper. The keeper probably could have gone a better job of stopping it, but I’m glad he didn’t. So a decent first half, with chances for both teams, a high percentage of which were on target for us. Promising!


Sadly, half time brought the realisation that Sanfrecce were winning comfortably against Gamba who’d received an early red card. And also our local rivals Yokohama were destroying our friends Vegalta Sendai. Not the best first half scores from the other matches to be honest. Someone has to stop Hiroshima soon. Let’s hope it’s Neto at Nagoya this weekend. Statistically the second half was quite similar to the first. A decent amount of chances for both teams with us having the edge in terms of possession. We scored again early on into the second half and it was through Kobayashi, who looked pretty good throughout the game. It was a nice move and a great finish, cutting back, losing the defenders and curling the ball into the corner. This meant that Consadole really had to start doing something and they gave it a decent crack. Most of their attacks seemed to be coming down their left, with Jay being a constant menace in the box. The ref was making some slightly bizarre decisions and there was a possibility that they could have had a penalty in the first half. The ref didn’t give it though (excellent decision, I’m sure...). Iemoto seemed to perhaps think he’d got that decision wrong, (probably saw the replay on the screen), and for the whole of the second half gave them pretty much everything to try to even things up. They had to get a goal to get back into the game and this opened things up for us to pour forward at times. Ienaga had a couple of lovely chances that he was unlucky with. He was really putting in a shift though and again showing how important he is for us this year. Oniki made a couple of changes, Nobori on for Kengo (!?), Ienaga moving into the Kengo spot and Abe and Nobori changing wings a couple of times (I think... or perhaps it was just a bit of a confusing mess). Five minutes later he brought on Suzuki for Abe, who’d just missed a glorious chance to put us three up, sliding to meet a cross and putting it just wide. Now Nobori could stick to the left and Suzuki could go on the right. I don’t know why Oniki didn’t make the two changes at the same time. Perhaps he was expecting the first change to do the business, or perhaps he wanted to run down the clock a little. To be honest, we did almost score during this spell, so perhaps he’s a tactical genius! The removal of Kengo meant that Ienaga was now on the corners and I really really enjoyed the contrast between his fatigue defying lung busting bursts up the pitch to shoot just wide, with the utter exhaustion displayed when he had to go to take a corner, tiny steps, head hung low, legs wobbling like he’s just finished a marathon. Great stuff! And will probably be just as good an Ienaga image as his shoulder flick at Yuma Suzuki, which was well worth him getting a yellow card for. We looked to be seeing the game out without too many worries when they got a free kick on the edge of the box from a Nara handball. Felt a little harsh to me as he was jumping and turning at the time, but I understand why it was given. Sadly they scored from the set piece, (with a tiny hint of offside although I haven’t checked it), and we were unable to take away a clean sheet from the game. A shame as we’d defended pretty solidly for the most part, and Sung-Ryong seemed back to his old self. We’d probably brought the five minutes injury time on ourselves, and we really shouldn’t have played on much further after their goal. I didnt need the couple of nervous minutes that were played. But we saw them out in spite of an early start to our victory song and a few heart in the mount moments, and took home the three points. Lovely!


Positives and negatives. Not so much in the way of negatives this time. It was a good result against a decent team. Perhaps the other J League results are the negative. Big positives were the defensive solidity for the most part of the game and Sung-Ryong being on hand when the defence was breached. Kobayashi seemed a lot livelier than he was against Mito and took his goal well. Hopefully he can get a run of goals going. Nice dribbling from Elsinho too! And another big positive were the Consadole fans, (aside from the booing...). They were very helpful after the game when we were debating how to get back into town. One even offered to share a cab with us. If you’re reading this, see you at Todoroki!


Next up we have Nagasaki at home tomorrow in the league. After that we’re away at Shonan the following Saturday. So, a couple of teams towards the bottom of the table. We normally struggle in these games, but we can’t afford to drop any points right now. Fingers crossed for six points from these games and a big ZERO points for Hiroshima against Nagoya and Urawa. Go Frontale! 

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki 
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 25. MORITA Hidemasa (Yellow card 8')
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (Yellow card 63')

Subs 
GK 30. ARAI Shota
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for NAKAMURA 77')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 90+3')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto (on for ABE 82')
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES


My Frontale Man Of The Match

Tricky one, given that there were a lot of decent performances, particularly at the back. For the fact that it looks like he's coming back into form and the well taken goal, I think I'll give it to...

KOBAYASHI Yu - worked hard, made chances and scored a cracker


Goals 
 
ELSINHO (Frontale) 42' 0-1
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 52' 0-2
TOKURA (Consadole) 90+5' 1-2


Highlights

The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that a previous 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.

Monday 16 July 2018

Vs Mito Hollyhock (away) 11/7/18 - Emperor's Cup 3rd round

Mito Hollyhock 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale (AET) (2-4 on penalties)

We’re back to playing football again. This is a bit of a blessing as I was getting fed up with writing posts about players leaving and I think people were probably getting fed up with me expressing my opinions (mainly negative, naturally!), on the bizarre goings-on at the club. On the other hand it seems that it’s a bit of a shame that the season is lurching back into action as judging on this performance we’re very rusty and only just managed to progress in the Emperor’s Cup against lower league opposition for the second game in a row. It’s certain that this game and the 3-2 against Sony Sendai which bookended the World Cup break were far from our best performances of the season. In fact they probably are vying with the majority of the ACL games and a few clangers in the league for the worst performances of 2018. At least we managed to get the win in these games though, even if it did take a very unwelcome extra time and then penalties in this match. Sorry for taking so long to get this post done. I’m sure plenty of people are having their schedules messed with by the World Cup at the moment and that’s partly my excuse here. The journey back from Mito followed by the World Cup semi final on TV looked a bit challenging even before we went to extra time and penalties. After that, plenty of us were left waiting on Akatsuka station platform for 50 minutes as a huge storm prowled around us, waiting for the optimum time to strike and cause the maximum disruption. It hit as we reached Sanuki station, where we were told that we were not going to be going any further with the station lights going off and on as lightning seemed to be striking very close by and some higher force seemed to be using a giant jet washer to try to dismantle the platform. We made it home just before 2am, my plan of having a nice nap before the England game in tatters, and my Thursday at work looking a bit tricky. Sadly for me, England couldn’t get the extra time and penalties result that Frontale had grasped. I can now say that a second helping of extra time in one 24 hour period is a bit of an ordeal for the spectator, particularly if they are sleep deprived and have a banging headache. This banging headache kept me subdued for the majority of the game. In spite of going through what I think was around eight PET bottles of water and Pocari Sweat, it seems that I still managed to get dehydrated. Because I’m a pasty Brit I guess. Anyway, this is all just an excuse to explain why this post is a little lacking on detail. The terrible performance also contributed to this, but I’m prepared to shoulder some of the blame. I also apologise in advance for the moaning that’s coming up quite soon.


The team for this game was a surprisingly strong one. Particularly given that Mito, who were playing a league game a few days later, put out the reserves. Even though Oshima didn’t get on the pitch during the World Cup, it was no surprise to see him absent. Of course Neto (and Okubo) were also absent, having departed the club in the break. So we started with Morita and Moriya in the defensive midfield positions. Most of the rest of the team was our preferred starting eleven. However, Saito made another start in place of Abe, after disappearing from the matchday squad for a while. And Michael James started alongside Taniguchi which was a bit of a surprise. I’m not aware of any injuries to Nara or Edu, but they weren’t even on the bench. Perhaps they’ve got themselves into Oniki’s bad books again. The sole defender on the bench was Noborizato, if you consider him a defender. Shimoda also appeared on the bench again alongside some more familiar names. It seemed a bit of a weird bench and I think demonstrates how stretched we are in the middle at the back at the moment. A couple of injuries to a centre back and a defensive midfielder would put us in a very difficult situation with regards to cover. No sign of any new players coming though, and presumably they'd be short attacking midfielders if they do appear. We did start the game fairly well though, scoring an early goal through Taniguchi, which seemed to suggest that maybe we’d overdone it a bit with the first teamers. No worries though about us going on to comfortably sew the game up with a Mito morale sapping high goalscoring first half. We were mediocre at best, making more chances than them, but not really threatening to actually put them away, aside from Ienaga hitting the bar. It was quite comfortable though. Mito weren’t causing us many problems and apart from a bit of sloppiness in possession at times, things looked fairly safe. Elsinho was having a good game in defence and attack, but no-one else was really standing out. Well, actually Taniguchi was, as he was a lot less composed than usual and was having a bit of a mare, but somehow getting away with it. Saito didn’t seem to be getting much of the ball and still seems to be struggling to find his way into the Frontale system at the moment. Guess the limited pitch time isn’t helping, but you’d have to say that his first brief substitute appearance against Yokohama is still the best he’s played for us so far. Michael James was doing alright, but still looks a bit like he has an error in him waiting to happen at any time. His limited pitch time presumably also contributes to this. You probably wouldn’t have picked it as being J1 versus J2 though as it looked more like two similarly sloppy teams playing out a meaningless end of season game with nothing at stake. So far, so mediocre.


I’m not going to write much about the second half as it was abysmal. We didn’t appear to have much desire to try to score again, which inevitably would come back to haunt us in the 93rd minute when we conceded and plenty of people’s journey home was thrown into turmoil. The main thing that was clear from the second half and extra time was the mess that the bench was. Hasegawa replaced Saito. Fair enough, Hasegawa deserves a chance, but Saito was getting no service and is unlikely to be able to find some form if he is constantly being hauled off or not even put on the bench. He is after all our big signing this year, but is another one who is suffering from 90% of our squad wanting to play in the same few positions on the pitch. Chinen on for Kobayashi was fair enough too, but once again Chinen is getting the ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ thing from Oniki, who apparently thinks he will solve all of our problems from the bench, but doesn’t give him a chance to do so for more than 45 minutes as a starter. The next sub was Shimoda on for Moriya. All of the changes in this game were like for likes, which makes a change from the usual way Oniki does subs. And I suppose it’s better than the somewhat random changes he makes sometimes, but you couldn’t really say any of them had much effect on the game. And I wonder if once again we could do with a plan B which consists of more than just making subs apparently decided on before the match. We were a lot less effective going forward in the second half with Mito having three times as many chances as us and Sung-Ryong had to make quite a few saves from decent Mito chances. Maybe the writing was on the wall, but it was a bit harsh on them leaving it until the 93rd minute to get their equaliser. It was nothing less than we deserved though. We looked a bit shaky at the back and kind of clueless going forward. I don’t want to suggest there is a morale problem in the squad, but they didn’t really seem up for it. The recent departures can’t have failed to cause some kind of upheaval though.

So, on to extra time, which turned out to be even worse than the second half. It was also a little weird as the drums and megaphones were put away by both teams’ fans. I guess this was perhaps something to do with the circling thunderstorms, but it certainly made for a disjointed lot of singing with the spread of fans meaning that songs quickly degenerating into chaos, out of time and sounding like they were being run through a big reverb unit. We had a few chances, one very nice one which Elsinho unfortunately put just wide. But they did too. Mito were being a bit more physical and we couldn’t cope with it. Our extra time extra sub showed up the crazy bench selection with Nobori coming on for Morita who seemed to have taken a knock. Our centre back pairing became Kurumaya and Michael James and Taniguchi pushed up alongside Shimoda. How we had gone from almost the regular starting eleven to this line up, with a couple of totally unfamiliar pairings at the back seemed almost impossible using only four subs. So it’s no surprise that we looked hopeless to be honest and at stages looked like we wanted to hang on and take it to penalties. Maybe we did, as we proved pretty good at them, scoring four out of four. Penalties are taken in the ABBA format in this competition, which makes it slightly confusing to work out what’s going on, but fortunately they sent one over the bar and hit the bar with another whilst we put ours away fairly comfortably, so it was pretty clear we’d won. But we’d been taken to penalties by a J2 team’s reserves. Yeah, maybe we’re rusty, but it’d be a shame if we have used the World Cup break to reset to our usual crappy start of the season form. Remember, it was supposed to be FC Tokyo and Sanfrecce who were disrupted out of their good form by this break and ACL teams were supposed to get back into the groove of things. Let’s hope this was a blip, but 120 minutes in pretty sticky conditions isn’t exactly what you’d want to kick off the second half of the season.


I’m not going to talk about positives and negatives in this game as it’s hard to find anything particularly positive. Sure, we’re though to the next round, but we look a mess and this was for the most part the regular starting eleven playing. I’ve been losing my mind a bit recently criticising Oniki and I don’t think it’s doing anyone any good, least of all me. I am deeply worried about him as our manager, particularly from a team morale point of view. I don’t think he’s a nasty person, but he doesn’t seem to have any awareness of the consequences of his actions on the players’ morale. I have no idea why we didn’t have Nara or Edu on the bench. We’re leaving ourselves very short in important areas and it’s almost impossible to understand the thinking behind it. We were lucky in a way that we had this game, as if our first game back was the away game against Consadole, I think we might have got smashed. I’m not sure we won’t do when we go there next Wednesday. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a real sense of impending doom at the moment. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the fan event and thought that going to games again would pull me out of my malaise, but this isn’t exactly what I was hoping for. I get the sense that people are getting fed up with me moaning about Oniki so I’m going to try to stop doing that so much, but I’m really worried. I feel like we’re in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean and our leader has just decided to start a fire with the oars in the bottom of the boat. This is stressing me out!


Next up we return to league action away against Consadole Sapporo on Wednesday. Miyoshi won’t be playing as he’s not allowed to, but maybe he’ll come out and give us a little bow like Itakura did. Let’s hope we can be a bit more convincing than we were in this game. After that we’re back at Todoroki the following Sunday against V-Varen Nagasaki. Six points please from those two games and then you can all call me a complete idiot.

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro
MF 25. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 37. SAITO Manabu
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs 
GK 30. ARAI Shota
MF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for MORITA 98')
FW 8. ABE Hiroyuki
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for SAITO 58')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 70')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto (on for MORIYA 83')
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Let's not beat about the bush on this, plenty of players were pretty ordinary and anonymous at best. In spite of him missing a good chance for us to avoid penalties and maybe get home at a more reasonable time it has to probably go to...

ELSINHO - wasn't rubbish

Goals 
 
TANIGUCHI (Frontale) 4' 0-1
TOMITA (Mito) 90+3' 1-1

Penalties
TOMITA (Mito) 1-0
CHINEN (
Frontale) 1-1
SHIMODA(Frontale) 1-2
KISHIMOTO (Mito) 2-2
FUNATANI (Mito) 2-2 (over bar)
NAKAMURA (
Frontale) 2-3
HASEGAWA (Frontale) 2-4

SAITO (Mito) 2-4 (hit bar)

Highlights