Vs Shonan Bellmare (away) 26/9/18 - J League match 18

Shonan Bellmare 0 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

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...

 

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo (Yellow card 23')
MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

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.