This will be a pretty short post as I think I’ve said before that I don’t particularly want to write much about games that I haven’t attended. This was the away trip I was most looking forward to this year, and we were all booked and ready to go before the monster typhoon intervened. You could say we’re quitters, but with a cat at home, we couldn’t really risk getting stranded in Kyushu, as I believe quite a lot of Frontale fans are as I write this. Putting aside those stranded fans’ feelings for a moment, I was quite pleased this morning to find out that our gut instinct had been right, and we wouldn’t have been able to get home. I’m still gutted I missed the game though, as the way things stand, we might not be visiting Nagasaki next year. Hopefully, they can get a run going and escape relegation. Things are pretty tight down there, but V-Varen are bottom, so obviously have most to do.
After the disappointment of Wednesday’s performance and result against Shonan, this was a welcome, and crucial return to winning ways. Once again, we were in the slightly fortunate position of playing later than Hiroshima, so were no doubt boosted by the fact that they lost again, knowing that we could potentially go top if we won. I was wondering how Oniki would respond to Wednesday’s game. I’m still not really sure what happened there to be honest, but I think it was just a combination of us still not knowing how to best play against super defensive teams and plenty of our players concurrently having an off day. Dropping Shimoda and Abe seemed a bit weird though, but I’m not trying too hard to understand Oniki’s decisions now as he clearly knows a lot more than I do about football and us sitting top of the table makes it difficult to criticise what’s going on without sounding slightly insane. Surprisingly, we switched to two up front with Chinen alongside Kobayashi, I guess to combat the increased numbers of defenders. If only he’d thought of that against Gamba! It all seemed to work anyway, as we cruised through the first half scoring twice, well in control. I don’t know if we thought the job was done by half time or whether Nagasaki sticking the big man on up front threw us, but we were woeful in the second half. But we hung on, in spite of conceding a late goal, and took the three points back to Kawasaki. Not the most exciting of games, but an effective result and given that we’re now sitting on top of the pile, I think we’d all take six more lacklustre wins. But now we are leading, we’re the target. Hiroshima’s form has been pretty bad recently, but dropping behind might just give them the kick up the backside they need to get back in gear. And I can’t say with confidence that I think we’re going to win the rest of our games this season! It has certainly got interesting now though, and we managed to avoid falling foul of any clangers from Tojo, back refereeing us for the first time since that Hiroshima game ‘offside’.
Next up, Kashima away, who unfortunately have just moved into third place, so now have something to play for. We just have to hope that still being involved in four competitions means that even their moneybags squad gets a touch thin and they gift us the three points. The game is sandwiched between the first leg of their ACL semi-final and the first leg of their Levain cup semi-final. Who knows where their priorities lie, but the league is the competition they have the least chance of winning, isn’t it? I’m sure they’d be happy to derail our chances though, given what happened last season. We go into this game without Ienaga, who somewhat foolishly picked up a late yellow for kicking the ball away and now will miss a match due to accumulated bookings. Probably could have done with having him play as, with a few exceptions, he’s been great recently. It doesn’t seem popular with Oniki, but I think we could play Kobayashi on the right and maybe continue with Chinen up front or play one of the many attacking left midfielders we’ve got up top. Or even Akasaki as I know Oniki likes to get players involved against their former clubs. I guess he’ll probably go with Suzuki on the right, but personally speaking, I’d like to see Kobayashi out their again as he always looks dangerous in that position. Fingers crossed that the interminable post match coach journey back from Ibaraki is a positive one! Go Frontale!
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.
I’m going to knock this post out quickly as there’s not much I can remember from the game. And I say that, writing this on the train home. This is always a fun away game given the fact that it’s a local derby, but if we’re being honest, it’s not a great view, with the stadium being a very shallow bowl, and we never seem to do very well against Shonan. Also, during this game, the rotten weather added an extra level of obscurity to what was going on on the pitch. This match was postponed last time due to a typhoon. It seems that the typhoon like conditions had also been postponed till today. The first half wasn’t so bad with the rain stopping on occasions and otherwise varying from a sprinkle to a shower, but the second half was unmitigated misery from a weather point of view. Just about the most exciting thing I can say about this game is that among the officials, we had one called Kawasaki and one Fujisawa, which I found pleasantly amusing whilst at the same time being a perfect impartial balance.
In spite of league positions, this game was always going to be a tricky one. Shonan were not going to play the way we wanted, and this could well be a situation that we find obstructing us again this season. Some people seemed to be presuming that the game in hand was effectively three points in the bag, but as Shonan seem to delight in doing, they ruined our evening. At least we didn’t lose, I suppose. In spite of us controlling the game, we did give them a few chances to nick a goal and destroy all our built up confidence. Thankfully, they didn’t manage to get the goal, but I fear they might have taken a hammer to our morale. The fact is, whilst we dominated possession and chances, we didn’t really do enough to test their keeper. The penalty looked like an opportunity to snatch a win in unlikely circumstances, given that we didn't look like we'd ever score, but, and I think I’ve said this before, Kobayashi probably shouldn’t be taking them. He never looks particularly confident, has missed a few and has been very much off the boil recently. Both Chinen and Abe looked a lot more assured when they have taken recent ones, but Abe was off the pitch, and it was never going to be handed to Chinen ahead of Kobayashi. Hopefully, we can find someone else in the squad to take the next one we get, and hopefully Kobayashi is happy to pass on the mantle. Can't blame it all on the penalty miss though, the whole performance was very subpar. We didn’t really deserve to win and this game was us back to our ponderous worst. I don’t want to jump back on Oniki, but the subs were a bit confusing. We seem to be back to the old shuffle half the team with every change technique. Why we didn't bring on Manabu, I don’t know. We weren’t succeeding at passing it through their defence and the long balls we tried weren’t being collected by our front players, so why not try something different? It's the same old story of us failing to break down a team who come to the game with a plan to disrupt us and pack the defence. As we still struggle to play against these tactics, I can't believe anyone bothers trying anything else against us.
Well, there’s not much else I want to write about this game. I don't really want to think about it, as it went exactly as we might have feared it would. Let’s wrap this post up and move on to the next game, which is now a totally crucial away fixture against Nagasaki. Win that and if Gamba beat Hiroshima, we’ll go top. Given that I’m a pessimist, I think that Gamba will do their half of the deal and we might stumble again. But yeah. Let’s just put this behind us and move on. Seven games to go...
Subs
GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for ABE 61')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for IENAGA 83')
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto (on for SHIMODA 71')
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
MF 32. TANAKA Ao
MF 37. SAITO Manabu
Goals
None
My Frontale Man Of The Match
It clearly can’t go to any of the front players who all misfired to various degrees. Taniguchi was misplacing passes willy-nilly at the start of the game and both full backs were back to our recent lethargic worst. As Sung-Ryong hardly had anything to do, and I'm running out of options, I’m going to give it to...
NARA Tatsuki - because I like him, and he wasn’t rubbish. In fact, some of our better attacks came from his passes. Yeah, maybe ridiculous, but if it’s going to go to anyone, it might as well be him.
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.
The games are coming thick and fast again, and in spite of the numerous public holidays over here, I’m still having trouble getting these posts done on time. So this is another slightly rushed one. Nagoya seemed to have turned the corner a little in recent weeks, pulling away from the relegation zone, due to them getting themselves in order and signing some good players (Hello Neto!). So this was potentially a trickier game than the league table made it look. It was another decent performance though, with an unchanged starting line up from the 7-0 demolition of Consadole last week. Sure we didn’t score as many, and we conceded, but it’s another win and crucially our neighbours FC Tokyo managed to halt Sanfrecce Hiroshima, with a 1-1 draw, cutting the gap at the top to four points, with us having a game in hand. I still think all the pressure is on Sanfrecce as they have blown almost all of the huge lead they had earlier in the season. Crucially though, that lead is still partially intact, and if we want to win successive titles, we need them to slip up again. At the moment, this seems like it could happen, but we also need to keep winning. I’m probably more confident of the former happening than the latter, but it’s undeniable that we’ve just started to build a nice run. Still, plenty of potential banana skins on the road to the end of the season though, starting with our next two games away against Shonan and Nagasaki, both of whom are fighting for J1 survival and will probably not come at us like Consadole and, to a certain extent, Nagoya did. If we can get through those two games with two wins, maybe we can start dreaming. But, personally speaking, I’m going to keep talking our chances down until the season is over, as I just feel more comfortable this way!
This game looked like it would be similar to the Consadole one. With Kazama in charge, you’d expect Nagoya to play in his normal attacking way. However, they seem to have toughened up a bit in the middle of the pitch and taken their foot off the attacking football accelerator a little. I was surprised by how dirty they were, with quite a lot of nasty little fouls flying in. I should say though, that we were pretty clever with respect to Neto. I love Neto and still think we would be much better off with him rather than without him, but it’s always been true that he does on occasion get a little caught up in the game and lets his emotions get the better of him. Right from the start of the game, Kengo was getting right in his face with some meaty challenges, some of which were possibly fouls… maybe… It worked though as he finally kicked back and got a yellow towards the end of the first half, significantly reducing his effectiveness in the second half. Nice work Kengo! But yeah, Nagoya were playing a pretty smart game with us, not letting us settle but also not pushing up on us as much as you might expect, and a lot less than Consadole had. They were defending in numbers and Langerak was having a good game. Just as I made a note saying that, we scored, so I’ll take credit for it, thank you very much. Our first goal was a beautiful headed finish, in off the post past a stranded Langerak. Unfortunately for Nagoya, the finish came from one of their own defenders and whilst we were making chances, it was pretty generous of them to put one of them away for us. Our second was an absolute screamer from Abe. A really nice goal and two in two games for him. Hopefully he’s about to hit a rich vein of goals. He had a great game, all over the pitch, making a lot of important challenges in defence and always in the right position when attacking. The same couldn’t be said about Kobayashi, who was having a bit of a nightmare, and was apparently not feeling too good after the game due to dehydration. He missed a couple of absolute sitters but did manage to eventually get on the score sheet, although it looked to me more like another own goal at the time. And actually looking at the replays, it still looks like an own goal, but I guess in these cases the striker wants to get it and the defender would probably rather not have it. The encouraging thing about this goal is that it came very shortly after we’d conceded. The goal we conceded was a little unfortunate as Nara missed a challenge and the two defenders behind him didn’t really move. But, scoring shortly after conceding is good from a psychological point of view for us and the opposition. This game wasn’t one way traffic. Sung-Ryong made some good saves and aside from the goal, the defence had a good game. When Chinen came on for Kobayashi he did a good job, winning pretty much everything in the air. At this stage, the game was almost in the bag. Nagoya had to push for goals and consequently were giving us more space than we’d had all game. Abe almost got another beauty when he hit the post from outside the box with the keeper rooted to the spot. It’s really nice to see someone shooting from distance as Oshima doesn’t seem to do it so much recently and long distance specialist Moriya is still injured. Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of this game though was the fact that even when two goals ahead we were still pressing the opposition and winning the ball time after time, breaking up their attacks and nicking it off them in their own half too. It seems to be something we’ve got a lot better at in the last two games and I think this is almost certainly contributing to the better performances and results. Let’s hope we can keep it going.
Apologies, this post is a bit rambling and again light on details but I’m running out of time before the next game and right now I’m trying not to change anything in the hope that I’ve somehow hit on a lucky combination of pre-match rituals and blog posting styles that is contributing to us winning and Hiroshima not winning. As long as these results continue, I’ll keep on with these slightly random posts. It’s certainly been a lot more fun to go to games these last two weeks. Of course, every good run comes to an end, but lets hope we can stretch this one for another couple of... months. Is that too much to ask? Next up, a couple of away games, Shonan on Wednesday (our game in hand) and Nagasaki on Saturday. You’ve got to think that we need six points from these two games, but they’re just the type of games that we sometimes tend to mess up. Hopefully though, we can take the confidence we must be gaining and perform to the best of our abilities. Fingers crossed! Go Frontale!
Subs
GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for NAKAMURA 78')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 72')
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
MF 32. TANAKA Ao (on for OSHIMA 90+2')
This is a bit trickier in the last game where Ienaga was involved in everything and was an easy selection for MOTM. Once again, he performed well and he seems a natural in the Kengo role which he takes up when Kengo is substituted. Kengo did a great job too. Shimoda and Oshima went fairly unnoticed to me, which in recent times I’ve come to think means that they were doing a good job. Sung-Ryong made some good saves when he needed to, but unfortunately couldn’t stop the goal from going in. And Elsinho and Kurumaya seem rejuvenated recently. But for both sheer excitement and also doing the dirty work it goes to…
ABE Hiroyuki - great goal, and almost a great second goal too, but gets it mainly for always being involved, up front and in defence and even when he inevitably gets switched to right wing for the last 15 minutes of the game.
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.
Jeez, where to start with this one. There was way too much action to be able to go into any detail about particular goals. There were so many of them that it was at times difficult to gather thoughts in between. This was a fantastic game to watch apart from those moments when human compassion kicked in and my thoughts inevitably turned to the opposition players and fans. It’s never nice to get beat and it’s always horrible to get thrashed. This game seemed to be something of a perfect storm contributed to by a few notable aspects which I’m going to break down into bullet points rather than try to construct any kind of coherent narrative out of what was just a really exhilarating blur. Bit of a cop out I know, but I’m a little baffled as to whether this is us showing our true colours or a real freak of a result in a bit of a strange season. Anyway, here we go.
- Finally we’re back to playing players in their best positions, and covering absent players with players who play in the relevant position rather than trying to put bigger name square pegs in round holes. I was delighted to see both Nara back alongside Taniguchi and Shimoda get a chance alongside Oshima. Kurumaya was much improved back at left back too. This is the first game in ages where I can have no gripes about any of Oniki’s decisions. Sure there was a bit of shuffling done when Nobori replaced Oshima, but the game was already won by then, and the confidence surging through the team meant that we could probably have put Abe in goal and Sung-Ryong up front and still kept the scoring going. Bringing on Tanaka was exactly the right thing to do in the situation and he got a great reception coming on, and the place really erupted when he scored. Can’t say anyone had anything near a below par game. They were all great. When a few players are in bad form, well, that’s life I guess. But when the majority of the squad is out of form, you’ve got to think there could be something going wrong behind the scenes. Which brings me on to my next point…
- Morale has seemed so low in recent games. Elsinho has looked uninterested, Nara’s few appearances saw him lacking his usual enthusiasm. The end of the last game against Kashima was a real low for us I think. The support had been great, but the performance terrible. We’d been dismantled by a side who have been pretty inconsistent this season. Perhaps this result caused some behind the scenes soul-searching or clear the air talks. Whatever happened, and maybe nothing happened, this game saw a team who were all playing for each other and giving 100%. The start was pretty ragged from a few players, but they were bailed out by their team mates. Of course team spirit is going to be boosted by a goal fest, but even in the early stages it seemed to be back after a bit of an absence. The reactions when Shimoda and Tanaka scored were great with big celebrations on the pitch, the bench and in the stands. Whether this boost in spirit is a reaction to this last game, a reaction to some ‘discussion’ within the squad and management or down to to people once again playing in their favoured positions I don’t know. But it’s very, very welcome!
- Poor Consadole probably played exactly the way we’d want a team to play against us. We should probably bear this in mind before getting too carried away. They are very much in the minority in this league, being a team who want to actually play positive football and we’re gong to have to try to recreate this performance against teams who will sit back and occasionally hoof the ball long. Their pressing of us in all areas of the pitch caused us quite a few problems early on, but also allowed us to start picking them off with counter attacks. The start of this game was nuts. Both teams were really going for it and there were plenty of chances at both ends. They could have taken the lead early on when the ball looped into net but Tokura was given offside (I think…or maybe it was a foul). If he hadn’t challenged for the ball which was already going in (I thought), and hadn’t fouled Sung-Ryong, the game could have been a lot different. Once again, poor Consadole, as they also seemed to be facing us on a day when everything we hit was on target and rebounds were coming straight back to us (see Ienaga’s goal, give him a second chance and he’ll make sure it goes somewhere you can’t stop it).
So a big victory. Seven goals, seven different scorers. Everyone wanted to score (especially Elsinho, who kept running into goal scoring positions right till the end of the game. A big change in his demeanour from recent matches!). But there was no greediness and everyone was playing for the team. This has really helped out our goal difference which was quite some way behind Sanfrecce’s but now is right up there. The fact that we knew Sagan Tosu had beaten Sanfrecce must also have given us a boost before the game. Everything seemed to fall into place and we should enjoy it, as these kind of things don’t happen very often. However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that there was an earthquake in Hokkaido the previous week, which can’t have seen Consadole turn up in perfect condition for this game. But unlike in previous encounters where we’ve sat back when one goal up, we kept playing, and scoring, right till the end. Hopefully this performance will give us some belief that we can go on and take the title. The belief has been lacking in many quarters recently and this should really give us all a bit of confidence. Hiroshima are still six points ahead (with us having a goal in hand), but you’ve got to think that the pressure is back on them now. They’ve slipped up significantly (again), and we have emphatically taken advantage. Let’s hope we can keep it together! Next up, another team who could potentially try to take the game to us and attack, Nagoya Grampus at Todoroki next Saturday. In a way, I hope they do, and I hope that we can perform like this again! Go Frontale!
Subs GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for OSHIMA 52') MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 73') MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES MF 32. TANAKA Ao (on for SHIMODA 84')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
With so many good performances and so many different goal scorers this could be tricky. I felt Abe ran him close with his excellent tracking back and defending and a cool finish for his goal, but it can only really go to…
IENAGA Akihiro - Totally bossed this game. Had a hand in pretty much all of the goals. After a few anonymous performances, (and being totally missing from the second leg against Kashima), he is back to his best in emphatic style. And he looked pretty cool…
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.
Ugh, there’s goes the positivity. Wednesday’s first leg left me feeling pretty happy, maybe even optimistic. This game sent me right back to the misery, although the all round experience was a slightly confusing one. The big highlight, and actually, thinking about it, almost certainly the only thing even slightly resembling a highlight was the support. Although officially speaking this was a home game, we had given up any notion of home advantage by moving it to the Ajinomoto stadium. Perhaps this home/away feeling explains the intensity of our support. We were really making some noise and even as the goals kept going in, we didn’t waver. We even sang through most of half time. Sadly, it had very little tangible effect on what was going on on the pitch. The impressive boost in support intensity was mirrored in stature by the drop off in the quality of performance from the team. As is my wont when we have a stinker, (and there’s a few to choose from this year), I’ve dispensed with the usual blog post format and replaced it with a load of whinges. The weird thing is, at the end of this game, I wasn't whinging so much. Just bitterly disappointed. We’d thrown away another good opportunity for a trophy. Most of the teams remaining in the competition should probably be more concerned with trying to remain in J1. I really hope that one of them nab this trophy though. Not due to sour grapes, just general and all-encompassing dislike for Kashima!
So what went wrong? Wednesday perhaps gave us false hope. Our makeshift defensive midfield which I was worried about before the first leg performed really well midweek. Sadly Kashima seem to look at previous matches when considering their upcoming games, unlike Oniki who just ploughs on with the same plan as usual. I don’t know if they particularly targeted Taniguchi and Kengo, but the confidence and ability that they had last Wednesday evapourated into endless misplaced passes and missed challenges. It was maybe too much to ask of Kengo to play 180 minutes out of position within the course of five days. Sure, we were a little unfortunate to lose Oshima and Morita at the same time, but the fact that there was a natural replacement for that position, (Shimoda), sitting on the bench for the whole of the 180 minutes is a bit baffling. Sure, when they were playing well in the first leg it would have been stupid to change them. But, this part of the pitch was the real area of concern in the first half of the second leg, but instead it was Akasaki, who’d probably had one of our few shots that made way. Once again, Oniki finds it impossible to substitute one of his favourites, unless it’s in a ‘you’ve done great, now have a little rest’ twenty minutes to go change.
It’s a bit unfair to single out those two though. This was a rotten performance right through the team. Arai could have done better on at least two of the three goals. Our attack was relatively toothless, but were also pretty isolated, siting in front of a huge empty area of the pitch. It seems Oniki’s only tactical plan B is to push what would normally be Kengo up front alongside what would normally be Kobayashi. It never really seems to work very well and it didn’t on this occasion. I feel that it only comes from Oniki’s lack of faith in either Chinen or Akasaki playing there by themselves, rather than any kind of attempt to shake things up in a positive way. It felt on Wednesday that Kengo was getting forward and filling that gap whilst Taniguchi stayed back and shielded the defence. It really didn’t seem to be happening in this game though.
It was a bit baffling when the inevitable half time change saw Hasegawa replace Akasaki, pushing Abe up front with Chinen, rather than try to alter any of the problems that were staring us all in the face. To be fair though, it looked like it was over by them. Conceding the first goal gave us a mountain to climb. The second goal shortly after added an extra few thousand metres to the summit. But still the support stayed strong. Hasegawa did have a brief positive impact though and it fleetingly looked like we might be about to stage a great comeback, putting together a few nice moves and getting a goal back from the penalty spot (again). But after a few time wasting stoppages the momentum cooled a little and we were back to square one. And obviously, the inevitable third goal went in from a counter attack. It’s no surprise we’d been caught out on a counter, as we’d been unable to defend when we were nominally ahead in the tie, so it figures that we wouldn’t with players pushing forward attempting to get back in the game. Once again Manabu wasn’t really able to have an impact. He makes some nice runs but either the other players aren’t reading them, or he doesn’t know when to pass the ball on and overdoes everything. It’s probably fair to say that things aren’t exactly going to plan for him at the moment. Like plenty of others in our squad if we’re being honest.
So here it comes, the inevitable Oniki moans. I'm confused about a few things. Was this cup a priority? Not for the first time our selection sat on the fence between being our best possible side and the scrapings of our squad. There are no league games for these matches to clash with yet players who probably didn’t particularly need resting were rested and others who could do with a break played 180 minutes. Again it speaks volumes about the total imbalance in our team. One thing of note was the fact that our new signing Caio has now been added to the pre-game player rundown video. No sign of him anywhere near the team though. And let’s be honest, another attacking midfielder was probably the last thing we needed. Why were not replacing absent players or patching the obvious holes in the squad, I’m not sure. Neto hasn’t been replaced. We clearly shouldn’t have let him go, but Oniki pretty much pushed him out it seems. The Caio transfer reeks a little of being another late-season one that is more intended to keep us with three Brazilians on the books, presumably made by club officials rather than our manager. I’d rather not have Oniki as our manager, but whilst he’s in charge he should be deciding on transfers. There are already enough players in our squad that Oniki will do his best to never play as it is. Perhaps he’s not fit, but if that’s the case, you’ve also got to wonder what the logic is in signing an out of condition player at this stage of the season.
I know I endlessly moan about Oniki, and some people strongly disagree. Not long ago I had a tougher time justifying such moaning. After all, if the team is getting results, it seems a bit petty to moan about the manager. But we’ve lost a lot of the excitement of Frontale. We used to be a free attacking side, scoring plenty. I have to say Oniki has done well to tighten things up at the back. But now we’re not exciting in any way. Our last three games have seen us score two goals, both from the penalty spot and concede six. They have been two losses and one draw. We’re now out of the ACL and the Levain Cup, both at the first stage of asking, and both in very limp fashion. Even when we play with our ‘best eleven’, we’re not setting the world alight. In fact we’re limping to some lucky results. I’ve said all year that our results have been really flattering our form. We haven’t played well all year and it now seems that we’re taking a downturn in the part of the season in which we most need to push on and put results together. The kind of run that won us the title last year looks like the stuff of dreams. Sure, we might beat some of the more average sides in the league, but when we come up against anyone who actually thinks about tactics before the match we struggle. Likewise, if we’re up against anyone who is down around the bottom and scrapping for their lives. It’s all a bit depressing to be honest. But it seems like there needs to be a major rethink. Yes, we were not at full strength. But, we know that we won’t always be and we should have some idea of how to cope when we’re not. Recent experience suggests we don’t. And the build up of yellow cards suggests that we're going to have more problems like this in the near future.
I’m sorry to moan so much. And repeat myself so much... I don’t enjoy standing at the games whinging about our inadequacies. I try to support, but there's been far too much to moan about recently and far too little to support. We do our best though! To be honest, it’s really not much fun at the moment. I don’t require us to win every game to be less moody. I just wish we could perform somewhere near our capabilities and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to under the current system. Watching this team recently just seems like self-flagellation. Last Wednesday was fun, but recently, that's really an exception. On Wednesday we did a decent enough job on the pitch, the team seemed to care, the atmosphere in the stands was great. Only a tiny part of that can be said about this game. It was loud and the unconditional support was unbelievable. But the performance was ridiculously weak. With games coming up against Sapporo and Nagoya, two teams in pretty good form, I can't imagine things will get much better in the next few weeks. It seems to me that there is a black cloud hanging over the club or to mix my metaphors with only a common thread of blackness, perhaps a black hole, sucking all the positivity away. Of course, we’ll still keep going to the games, hoping that we can get a ray of hope, and hoping that we can hang on to an ACL spot, but I can’t see us ending up with anything this year. And the prospect of another season of Oniki’s inflexibility and chronic man management is filling me with dread right now.
Subs GK 30. ANDO Shunsuke MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke (on for ELSINHO 79') MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for AKASAKI 46') MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto DF 23. EDUARDO MF 28. WAKIZAKA Yasuto MF 37. SAITO Manabu (on for SUZUKI 75')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Terrible stuff all over the pitch, no-one coming out of the game with much credit, so have to give it to...
THE FANS - Somehow the volume of the singing and the endless optimism actually took the edge off the disappointment of such a rotten game. It felt like an away game, (which in a way it was), but away game intensity with home game type numbers. Well done to all of us. We didn't deserve that performance.
It’s fair to say I’ve been a bit disillusioned with most things Frontale recently. Even when we’ve won I’ve found ways to get upset about it. I’ve had plenty of issues with team selection and transfers, (us getting rid of one of our best players and not really signing anyone when the rest of the league strengthened around us). It’s also true that I’ve had a few issues with Oniki, which I’ve bored on about in writing on this blog and orally on the recent episode of the J Talk podcast (listen here if you dare). There has also been a distinct lack of enthusiasm from me for going to games, which I feel seemed to also be present in some of our players. For some reason though, an away Levain Cup game in the notoriously pain in the backside to get to Kashima (at least as far as I’m concerned. I’d much rather travel much further on a train than that distance on a bus), seems to have rejuvenated me somewhat. I had a surprisingly good time at this game, having a good old pantomime moan at the officials and the opposition and not being made despondent by what was going on on the pitch.
This was a weird game with a real hybrid line up. Our starting eleven, which has been set in stone recently was distinctly disrupted by the absence of Kobayashi, Kurumaya and Morita on international duty and Oshima who is injured again. With this kind of hole ripped out of our team it was clear that there was going to be some shuffling done. Thankfully, we reverted to playing two centre backs in central defence. Although the combination of Nara and Michael James looked a bit shaky at times, aside from the goal they committed themselves satisfyingly well for a pairing that has had very little pitch time recently. The goal was a bit of a clanger though, but I’ll let you examine that yourselves on the highlights video. Ahead of them in the defensive midfield spots, we had the potentially disastrous pairing of Kengo and Taniguchi. When Kengo had to move back to this position in the Gamba game he didn’t do particularly well. And although Taniguchi wants to play in this position, I always feel he’s better as a centre back. It did seem a little strange to start with this pairing given that we had Shimoda on the bench, a player who naturally plays there. But I was forced to eat my words as, all credit to Oniki, they were pretty damn good there. Perhaps the balance was a bit clearer than against Gamba, with Kengo attacking more and Taniguchi doing more defensive work, rather than both Kengo and Morita not really knowing what they should be doing. Completing the new guts of the team, we had Chinen and Akasaki up front. Oniki really loves to play players against their former teams it seems. It also seems that either Akasaki wasn’t very popular when he was at Kashima, or they didn’t take too kindly to him leaving as his pre-match announcement was greeted by fairly loud boos from the Kashima fans. Spirit of Zico, eh? (spitting on the ball after giving away a penalty etc...) Their usual 'Spirit of Zico' flag was less prominent than usual, hidden off to the side. I always like to make a joke about this flag but on this occasion, was completely outdone in this respect by my wife, who suggested it was less prominent as after his return to the club in some kind of chief interferer position, they were embarrassed to discover that he was still alive. I should probably take some time to moan about their fans actually, as they seem to be as unsporting as Urawa’s, booing nearly all of our possession and in equal amounts clueless to the rules of the game. Quite how they had the nerve to boo off the officials at the end of the game I don’t know, as I thought Iida had given pretty much everything aside from our clear cut penalty, (right in front of them), the way of Kashima, particularly in the second half. Quite how we came away with five yellows to their two is a mystery. Quite how Leo Silva didn’t get booked when I was pretty sure he’d done enough to get sent off twice was also a mystery. In any case, I know football is all about opinions, and the fact that I came away from the game thinking that it was fairly even but we’d had a bit of an upper hand means that taking aside my natural bias, it was probably an even game and a fair result.
As I’m now skirting round these match blog posts in a fairly random and slightly less verbose way, I should probably circle back on a couple of other notable aspects of the match. Chinen and Akasaki again showed hints of something interesting. I think they could make a good front pairing. It would be interesting to see one of them up front with Kobayashi at some stage, but that probably isn’t going to happen any time soon. Akasaki was unlucky not to score when he belted the ball in from a tight angle but was given offside. To be fair, it looked offside even from where we were, directly behind the goal, but i still enjoyed robustly questioning the linesman’s decision. Chinen caused them quite a few problems. It looks like he’s picking up Kobayashi’s nice sharp turns and he won the penalty doing one of these, completely wrong-footing the defender. He also put the penalty away pretty calmly. A good game from him I think. In spite of us coming agonisingly close to finding a winner when we hit the post, shot from the rebound, only to be denied by a goal line clearance, and then hit the post again from that clearance, we had to defend at times and Arai, a somewhat surprising selection in goal, claimed quite a lot of balls that I would normally expect our keepers to punch. That was pretty pleasing to see to be honest. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a vintage Frontale performance. Five shots in each half tells you it wasn’t exhilarating, but there seemed to be a spirit there that has been in short supply recently. Although this could entirely be all in my head. Perhaps it was because we were up against a ‘big team’ whose pre-game animation of their title stars bursting onto their crest was tacky at best, and presumably designed almost entirely to irritate opposition fans. Perhaps the cup gave us a welcome break from what is looking like an ultimately unsuccessful league campaign. Perhaps some of the players missing haven’t exactly been shining recently. Whatever it is, and I’m by no means saying all or any of these are true, I came away from this game feeling pretty happy with the performance and experience. Let’s just hope we can play with similar spirit in the ‘home’ leg on Sunday and send Kashima packing. Last year’s Levain game at the Ajinomoto stadium was pretty fun, and even though we were the away team on that occasion, and the opposition are different, a similar result this weekend would be most welcome! Go Frontale!
Subs
GK 30. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki (on for CHINEN 76')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for SAITO 59')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
DF 23. EDUARDO
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 90') (on for AKASAKI 72')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Like I said above, there were a decent amount of decent performances. Given the shuffle of personnel though, I’m giving it to...
TANIGUCHI Shogo - won tackle after tackle in the middle and distributed the ball well. I’ve had my doubts about him playing in this position, but it seems that every time he’s asked to, he does a great job. Bravo!
Ugh. Where to start with another horrible performance. If you’re pressed for time, remember everything negative I’ve said in recent blog posts and remove the bits where we have any decent shots or manage to scrape an underwhelming result. This was a game where Oniki’s first choice eleven failed to turn up, almost to a man, and we were devoid of any hint of excitement or spark of passion. A game against a big name team in horrible form and in the relegation zone always looked like it could be a banana skin. We always struggle against teams at the bottom. Of course we don’t have any divine right to win these games. But you’d hope for the many supporters that had spent plenty of money on traveling to the game and on accommodation that the team would at least show up. In the interest of preserving my sanity, I’ve attempted to keep this reasonably brief. If you’re not into hearing the same old whinges, which I believe are proving increasingly accurate week by week, I’d suggest you stop reading now and go and find something better to do. Save yourself! Bring on the bullet points:
- In spite of us having around 60% of the possession and around 50% more shots, we conceded two ridiculously soft goals from corner kicks, which apparently disappointed Oniki. Not as much as it disappointed us! Both times we had multiple opportunities to prevent the goal and failed.
- We had around ten shots, none of which threatened in any way. I don’t understand why we can’t seem to combine shot accuracy with power. It always seems to be one or the other. Every one of our ‘shots on target’ went straight at the keeper. I don’t think he had to dive at any point in the game. Kobayashi seems to recently be alternating between being unstoppable and deadly or utterly toothless from game to game. Today was obviously the latter.
- Don’t want to single him out though, there were rotten performances all over the pitch. Morita had another mare, Taniguchi and Kurumaya always looked to be a couple of seconds away from a catastrophic mistake. Elsinho again looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. Ienaga was error prone, Kengo anonymous. Oshima got injured again, possibly ruling him out of the national team next week, again.
- But, and I realise you were expecting me to say this, the real stinkers once again came from Oniki. Kobayashi alone up front had no chance against three Gamba centre backs. Apparently Oniki didn’t spot this. Somehow, we seemed to be getting overrun in all areas of the field. Perhaps the players are tired, as it’s the same people playing every game. Perhaps it’s a morale thing. It does look like they’re enjoying their football as much as we’re enjoying watching it. Oniki doesn’t have a plan B and has by now probably alienated so many squad members that even if he did have a plan B, he wouldn’t have the players to implement it. The Oshima injury meant he needed to make a change. Instead of replacing him with the natural replacement sitting on the bench, (Shimoda), he brought on Manabu and totally shuffled everyone’s positions. Does he have so little confidence in Shimoda? If so, why is he on the bench? I guess the reason is, and I apologise as I know I’ve said this numerous times before, the players he’s going to bring on appear to have been set in stone before the match. Having to deviate from one of his usual changes (time-wise and replaced-player-wise) must have made Oniki really uncomfortable. Almost as uncomfortable as Kengo would feel playing in the defensive midfield position... To be fair to Kengo, he was a lot more noticeable when playing alongside Morita and he did his best, but it’s such a waste to have him there. On 66 minutes Oniki finally seemed to spot Kobayashi being outnumbered up front and brought on Chinen for Kengo. He gave it a go, but it was too little too late. From the moment we conceded the first goal and Gamba and their ball boys started time wasting (7 minutes in), it seemed apparent that we could play for days and probably still not score. Suzuki coming on for Elsinho reduced the chance of us being reduced to ten men, given Elsinho’s early first half yellow, but honestly speaking, I don’t think that would have changed things much. Our attacking couldn’t have got much worse and we really only had to defend against long ball counter attacks (which we seemed to be doing ok at, possibly more due to the low quality of these attacks more than anything else) and set pieces (the less said about them, the better). The game ended with the usual total mess up front, with so many shuffles being made that no one seemed to know where they were supposed to be playing. One final ridiculous image showing the depths we’ve reached was the fact that Oniki seemed to finally realise that Kurumaya is better at left back, switched him there and Nobori into the middle and pushed Taniguchi up. So now the excluded from the squad centre backs sitting at home get to see that the 1.68m wide player is probably also now ahead of them in the centre back pecking order. Of course all our changes had already been made by this stage but it did reek of Oniki totally running out of ideas and just slinging mud at a wall in the hope that he’ll somehow create a masterpiece. It didn’t. We were just left with a pile of mud and a dirty wall.
This post has gone on too long so I’ll wrap it up. Nine points behind Hiroshima (although with a game in hand, against a local rival in a slightly precarious position, so eminently losable...), the league looks to be finished for us unless the robotically tedious Hiroshima implode. We’ve played so badly at times this season and so underwhelmingly at other times, that we don’t deserve anything in the league this year, much like we didn’t deserve anything in this match. Our next two games against Kashima, away on Wednesday and then ‘at home’ (at FC Tokyo’s ground), next Sunday could see us out of Levain Cup at the first time of asking. Which would then leave us with just the Emperor’s Cup, a competition where we’ve struggled to beat a JFL side and were taken to penalties by Mito’s reserves. I believe that as long as Oniki is in charge, we’ll continue to toil and bore our way to mediocrity. I’d much rather we won the treble and then Oniki was snatched away to manage another J League team, but if our abject failure on four fronts gets him the boot, then I guess there will be a small silver lining in a season of massive cloudy disappointment.
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for NAKAMURA 66')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto (on for ELSINHO 77')
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
MF 37. SAITO Manabu (on for OSHIMA 41')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
As I said above, there were far more candidates for a clown of the match if I were doing one (of course 🤡niki would have taken it). One tiny redeeming feature of this almost 100% rotten game prompted me to give it to…
NOBORIZATO Kyohei - when moved to centre back (LOL) committed himself a lot better than any other defensive player on the pitch had done. Always gives 100% and was running right to the end.
Goals
WATANABE (Gamba) 7' 1-0
FABIO (Gamba) 54' 2-0
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.
