Vs Gamba Osaka (home) 17/3/19 - J League match 4

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 1 Gamba Osaka

Praise the lord! We now have no games for two weeks. That means we won’t put in any disappointing performances and won’t lose a game for two weeks! I probably still stand by my assertion that Wednesday’s win against Sydney was our worst performance of the season, but boy oh boy, this game ran it close. We looked a bit brighter, but on this occasion decided to trade the usual back-pass style shots for just off target shots. We had 18 shots in the game apparently with only four on target. The fact that Gamba had half the amount of shots but managed to top us in the shots on target count speaks volumes. To be fair, neither team deserved to win this game. It had 0-0 written all over it. I know we often hear games referred to as a ‘great advert for the J League’. This very much did not fall into that category. This was a ‘great game to make you hate football’, making the whole concept of the sport seem pretty pointless. Perhaps the quality of play wasn’t as bad as Wednesday and there were probably less rotten performances. But the whole thing just felt pretty pointless and very unexciting, although now maybe this is just me introducing you into the private hell of the inside of my head. I’ll say it again, no games for two weeks! Hooray! Here’s what we’ve learned from this rotter of a match:

What could it all mean...? -

This is becoming a bit of a common refrain for this blog this season. When I saw the line-up for the game I really wondered what was going on in Oniki’s head. But in a good way, if that makes sense. I was interested to find out why he’d made the selections he had and if he had some secret plan up his sleeve. Admittedly, discovering that Kobayashi was injured solved one of the mysteries of the line-up. I thought Oniki might have dropped an ‘undroppable’ who also happens to be one of our most out of form players. But no, that decision was not his to make. Was Morita dropped? Or was he rested in order for him not to get injured before his international games? If it’s the former, I think it was probably justified. If it was the latter, I have no idea why we are doing such a thing as we’re not in a position form wise to start making these kind of kind gestures at the moment. Hey, look what I’ve done there, I’ve managed to simultaneously say he should and shouldn’t have played. This whole football thing is messing with my mind at the moment. Yamamura got his first start in defensive midfield alongside Ao. Damiao was dropped to the bench. Suzuki started at right back but Maguinho was back on the bench. Manabu wasn’t particularly rewarded for his goal on Wednesday, merely retaining his place on the bench. Sure some players have done alright recently, but you can’t exactly say that anyone has played well and had cemented their place in the starting line-up.
The subs once again didn’t make a whole lot of sense, with Oniki reverting to the Kazama favoured technique of turning one change into two, reshuffling the team each team before finally finding his preferred positions for players. Kengo had another average game, but instead of replacing him with Saito and moving Ienaga inside, Yamamura came off, Kengo dropping back alongside Ao. Is this some kind of warm down for him? He was finally replaced by Shimoda on 82 minutes, but I don’t really know why it wasn’t him who made way when the first change was made. But Oniki does love to shuffle the midfield. Once again it was to no purpose. Damiao coming on for Hasegawa necessitated another midfield shuffle. Of course, if one of these shuffles had resulted in a goal, I wouldn’t be saying this. But I can’t help but feel that our subs very rarely have any positive effect (aside from Manabu on Wednesday I guess, which I suppose pretty much undermines everything I’m saying here).

Spin the wheel of (bad peformance) misfortune -

Whose turn was it to be a bit rubbish today? And who would stop being rubbish? Kurumaya made a good claim to be man of the match with a much improved performance. But then I saw a replay of the goal, and he really could have done something to stop it. To be honest, if he’d done anything apart from watch the ball roll past his feet, we probably wouldn’t have conceded. Nara had a pretty shaky game but improved slightly in the second half. Ao wasn’t very good. Ienaga drifted in and out of the game but did more than he has recently. Kengo was mediocre, particularly with his corners. But pretty much everyone was pretty much rotten. Perhaps the only shining light was Sung-Ryong, who pulled off some good saves, but even he couldn’t do anything about the goal, so poor was the defending leading up to it. Once again, you’ve got to ask what kind of atmosphere there is behind the scenes. Is there something going on? We are looking increasingly hopeless, and when you consider that this team is on paper probably better than last year, (well, if the team selections followed logic it would anyway), you’ve got to wonder what’s going on. The buck has to stop somewhere. I’m not sure where, and I’m not sure who we should blame. Players are playing badly, but you’ve got to think that it’s the job of the manager to make the players play well. It’s not just that people are having an off-day. We’ve had around half of the team having an off-day for pretty much every game. I’m not pointing any fingers, but I’m pleased I’m not going to have to think about this for a couple of weeks.

Perfectly balanced bias -

This was another slightly weird refereeing performance, but this one was a little different from usual. Normally, I like to imagine that the ref favours the opposition as it then gives me something to moan about. In this game it seemed that the ref (on this occasion Kimura), gave everything to the team attacking in a southerly direction. The first half saw us get plenty of marginal decisions and this was almost completely reversed in the second half, with Gamba getting pretty much everything. I wonder if Gamba had a word with him at half time and he thought he had to try to even things up. Still, I suppose favouring the team shooting in one direction means that at least over the course of the game he’s impartial!

Sing when we're stinking... -

Once again I am going to flip flop between extremes from blog post to blog post. Last time I moaned about the long periods of silence during the game when the opposition had the ball. This time I am going to complain about us singing too much. Well, it’s not exactly that black and white I suppose. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but I am all in favour of supporting the team as much as possible during the game, even if we’re playing terribly. However, I’m not sure about singing them off the pitch and into the changing rooms for about 10 minutes after the end of the game after them having put us through such a load of rubbish. I’m not saying we should boo them. Just pick up your stuff and go home. Sure, if they’d done their best and been cruelly denied, fair enough. But 90 minutes of poor play, culminating in a soft goal being conceded doesn’t count as being song-worthy to me. Perhaps this is just me being a bad loser though. Am I insane? I’m slightly worried by the fact that Damiao apparently didn’t come round with the rest of the squad after the match. Instead he walked back round the pitch in the other direction. I hope this isn’t a sign of something bad going on behind the scenes. But at least that would give us some inclination as to what on earth is going on.

This now is more than just a slow start -

Gamba had conceded eight goals in their previous three games but we looked like we still wouldn’t have been able to score if we were still playing now. Another late goal conceded but this time to lose three points instead of two. Woeful shooting when it finally did come, the team tactics apparently being to try to pass the ball into the net. Ponderous and pointless build ups with little direction and a whole load of sloppiness. It doesn’t feel like we’ll ever score again! Four games played, three draws and a loss. Only three goals scored and four conceded. What’s happened to us? It’s still early in the season, but even the slight step forward of a fortunate ACL win after a rotten performance has been followed by a big step backwards. Our big money signing is sitting on the bench, and apparently doesn’t seem that happy about it, and I guess who can blame him? Last year I moaned about us not having a plan B but this year we don’t even seem to know our plan A. It is still early, but it will take time for us to get out of this mess (if we do manage to do it) and by that time we could already be out of touch. I don’t know what the solution is, but then again, I’m paying to go to watch this, rather than being paid to be there so it's not up to me to fix it.

So let’s forget this match and let’s hope the two weeks off do us all some good and we can start afresh away to Matsumoto. At least we have the consolation of having a nice trip for that game. We need to catch a break some time. Let’s hope it’s soon.


Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7 KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
FW 20. CHINEN Kei

Subs
GK 21. ARAI Shota
MF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (Yellow card 84') (on for HASEGAWA 68')
MF 19. SAITO Manabu (on for YAMAMURA 56')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto (on for NAKAMURA 82')
DF 26. MAGUINHO

My Frontale Man Of The Match

No shortage of players undeserving of this, I probably should just forget about it, but in the interests of saying at least one slightly positive thing in this miserable diatribe, let’s give it to….

JUNG Sung-Ryong - made some saves and wasn’t rubbish, unlike many of his teammates.

Goals 
 

MIURA (Gamba) 90+1' 0-1

Highlights

Vs Sydney FC (home) 13/3/19 - ACL Group Stage Match 2

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 0 Sydney FC

We won a game!!! It feels like it’s been a while and I’m glad we finally broke our run of draws. But it wasn’t exactly a convincing performance. But the result is a step in the right direction. I’m going to try to keep this a brief post as the games are coming uncomfortably quickly at the moment and it’s making it difficult to keep up with blog posts. What’s undeniable is that we needed this win badly and that was evident by the big celebrations from the players and the fans at the end. This was a result with a significance that I guess outweighed the flatness of the performance. Hopefully it will help us kick on a bit now and get started properly in the league against Gamba at home on Sunday. Fingers crossed anyway. Here’s what we’ve learned from this game:

Today's favourite 11 -

After some confusion over possible rotation against Yokohama and some very real doubts over what our priorities are and what Oniki’s first choice team is, this line up further muddied the water. Kurumaya dropped to the bench. Was this due to his recent questionable form or was he being rested? Who knows… If you looked to right back, you might think there was some kind of resting going on, as Mawatari, who definitely seems to be Oniki’s favored option in that position dropped out of the squad after completing 90 minutes against Yokohama. But as this was after he seemed to have been injured in the previous game against Shanghai, I was all in favour of giving him a break as he’s done well so far and we don’t want anyone picking up a long term injury. However, his place was, in my view, illogically given to Morita. I don’t know what Maguinho has done to Oniki, but after a couple of promising early performances he seems to have now completely dropped out of contention. Is he going to be this season’s Edu? I hope not! Right back clearly isn’t Morita’s best position, and I don’t know why he’s being played there with Maguinho and Suzuki being much more natural options. Aside from these changes at the back, the other notable change was Kengo being moved back alongside Ao and us apparently reverting to a 4-4-2 with Kobayashi up front, Hasegawa on the left and Ienaga wherever he wanted. But it felt more like the usual formation with Kobayashi on the right and Ienaga in the Kengo role to me. It looked like a line-up that could do Sydney quite some damage but it didn’t really turn out like that.

Blame the pitch and the balloon -

After a bright start with Damiao forcing a decent save out of the Sydney keeper (who people praised, but I wasn’t so sure about. More to come on that shortly), we quickly reverted back to playing the useless football we played for large periods of the first three league games. Our passing was horrible. It looked like the ball had been replaced by a balloon, with relatively simple passes skewing off at weird angles. I know when we pass badly we usually moan about the pitch. I heard some complaints about the Yokohama pitch, which for some reason affected our passing a lot more than it did theirs. But this was a home game for us, so I have no idea what we can blame for our inability to move the ball around. Sure it was a little windy, but unless the wind was a ground level hurricane, we can’t really blame it. I always feels guilty about singling people out for bad performances (but I guess it doesn’t usually stop me doing so), but once again Morita wasn’t at his best. Neither were Ienaga, Kobayashi or Kengo. I don’t understand why everyone might be having rotten games at the same time. Is there something going on behind the scenes? Is it just a lack of confidence due to our flat start to the season? Aside from a few glimpses of decent football, this was pretty plodding stuff. Sydney didn’t look any better, looking like they’d come to play for the draw and perhaps snatch something on a counter attack. If they’d watched any of our previous three games they could probably have expected that we’d gift them a goal sooner or later. But they didn’t really trouble us too much. Think they only had two shots in the whole game. Conversely, we had plenty of shots, but to be honest, to call them shots is being a bit generous. Some of the ‘fantastic’ saves the Sydney keeper pulled off required him to catch the ball, moving at back pass speed, at perfect height without having to move his feet, which he did with aplomb! And that was when we actually managed to shoot. Once again, it was all a bit ponderous, with us trying to work the ball into a position where we could pass it over the line.

ExSAITOment -

The change many of us were calling for in this game did finally come. When I say the change we were calling for, I really mean the introduction of Manabu. I don’t think Hasegawa did anything wrong in particular, but the game was begging for a bit of exSAITOment (hmmmmmm…. does that work?). He duly supplied it within two minutes of coming on, slotting the ball home. He was named man of the match, and whilst I would usually rail against someone playing for ten minutes getting that honour, presumably just because they scored a goal, I think he fully deserved it. He managed to score!!!! And he does seem to lift both the crowd and his teammates when he comes on. And there wasn't a wealth of other options. I don’t know why we don’t play him more often. Surely we could use him a bit more centrally too as another option, getting the ball to him to run at opposition defences. He must be wondering why he joined us given the lack of playing time he’s had so far. Think we have to get him more involved this year as he can’t be too happy with, at best, sitting on the bench. You could probably say this about a few other players too, but it does seem that even with this talk of rotation, there are still some un-rotatables. I still think Oniki picks the players first and then tries to fit them in to his formation after.

Wahey! Boom, boom, boom, boom _________________ -

This wasn’t the biggest attendance, but it was a decent one, considering it was a week night game with a bit of an early kick off. Somewhat reflecting the quality of what was going on on the pitch, I’d say it was a bit of an underwhelming night for the supporters too. This resulted in something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen. I think a rival group to the regular Kawasaki Kazoku started a chant! Not hugely exciting, but it seems slightly noteworthy. I do wonder why we sometimes stay quiet aside from a little jeering and some drum rolling when the opposition has the ball and passes it back to their keeper. It seems that people don’t like to make any noise unless it is a noise sanctioned and started by the call leaders. Was nice to see something starting almost naturally. The Kazoku do a great job, and I understand that if the game is dull it’s difficult to be excited, but if we believe that our support helps the team, we shouldn’t just confine it to when we have the ball.

Japan/Australia ACL love in -

Finally a couple of less Frontale focused points. After seeing some nice interactions between Melbourne Victory and Hiroshima fans at the previous days game on twitter, it was nice to see that the A League and J League love in continued. Sydney left us a nice message in their changing room and there was seemed to be some good feeling between the fans walking back to station. I don’t know how many fans Sydney actually brought with them, and how many were people actually living in Japan, but it’s always good to see fans integrating nicely. Contrary to what fans of some clubs might think, (including some in the J League), you don’t have to hate the opposition with every part of your being. Of course it’s easier to say that after a win, but I hope I’d be able to feel it in defeat too.

Mullet! -

What a haircut that was! Have no idea what’s behind it and whether it is a post modern interpretation with an ironic wink or just a good old fashioned shocker of a mullet, but wow! Hats off to you Rhyan Grant (see, he’s even wild with his spelling of his name!). Definitely hats off, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to see the full effect of that cut.

So, next up Gamba at home. Hopefully this win will give us a bit of confidence. Even if it was a thoroughly average performance, it was a win. If we can now do that in the league, we might be able to get a bit more optimism flowing and we might even see a few more goals. Gamba have scored quite a few and conceded quite a few so far so it should be an exciting game. (Presumably now though, it will be another 0-0 draw).  Let’s get the league campaign and title defence properly started and hopefully stop people talking about Yokohama and get them talking about us again. Go Frontale!


Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

Subs
GK 21. ARAI Shota
DF 7 KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 19. SAITO Manabu (on for HASEGAWA 81')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 64')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto (on for MORITA 61')
MF 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya


My Frontale Man Of The Match

Yeah, I know it’s stupid but I’m going to give it to... 


SAITO Manabu - took a shot, scored a goal, made (almost) everyone happy.


Goals

SAITO (Frontale) 83' 1-0


Highlights

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (away) 10/3/19 - J League match 3

Yokohama F Marinos 2 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

This could have been a great way to get the season finally started after misfiring against FC Tokyo and Kashima and losing unluckily to Shanghai. A nice victory against our local rivals would have been lovely. Especially as they had started the season pretty well and people were raving about their ‘beautiful attacking football’. However, as often happens when beautiful football and a local derby come into contact, the result was an exciting match, a bit lacking in quality but making up for the lack of quality with a load of grit and fouling. We can’t really complain about the result, as we didn’t deserve to win. Everything was pretty even really, and in keeping with our poor start to the season, the little bits of luck or inspiration that come your way when you’ve been playing well were completely absent from our game. Our cause seemed like it wouldn’t be helped by an injury to Oshima in the warm up, meaning that although he’d been named in the starting line up, come kick off his spot was taken by Ao, who it actually turned out, put in one of our best performances. The ref, Iida was a constant presence giving pretty much every tackle as a foul. There was some pretty tasty play in this game though with Yokohama picking up four yellows, and in my completely unbiased view, deserving a few more. I’d love to check the highlights to find a reason why Yokohama’s late equalizer shouldn’t have been allowed, but I won’t. I don’t really want to watch the highlights and it was probably fine anyway. Of course, I’d have loved to have won this game. Yokohama seem to be a lot better this year. And although they still look very shaky at the back we only managed to score twice against them. Admittedly, that’s the most goals we’ve managed to score in a game so far the season, but they looked a mess and we were unable to take three points off them. This fixture does tend to be a tough one for us though, so I guess it’s not all doom and gloom just yet. But this would have been a good opportunity to send a message to both Yokohama and the other teams in the league. We probably have still sent a message, but it’s a significantly less robust one than we might have hoped to send.  Here are some fairly lacklustre and quite many points about the game.

Rotation situation -

Certainly, we’ve had some issues with Oniki’s ‘rotation’ in the past. At times last year it seemed that he thought that making massive changes in one area of the pitch whilst leaving the rest intact counted as good squad rotation. He seemed to abandon this towards the end of the season in the domestic cups, reverting to keeping pretty much the same players starting the games and even making the same substitutions at almost exactly the same time in each game. I’m not sure if this represented a lack of depth in the squad or a lack of ideas as far as Oniki was concerned. It worked out alright anyway, didn’t it? This year, we seem to have started rotating a bit more subtly. Perhaps Saito was left at home for the ACL to save him for this game against his old team. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Damiao wasn’t quite fully fit yet so, in spite of him being our great hope for the ACL, he was left on the bench. But then he played 90 minutes today in spite of looking pretty tired from about an hour onwards. In retrospect, it seems like a bit of a waste of time to take him to Shanghai and then only play him for a couple of minutes. Rotation meant that Kobayashi and Kengo started on the bench in this game. But given his recent form in front of goal, perhaps Kobayashi should have been dropped rather than rested. Anyway, all this is just a long winded way of saying that we apparently still can’t really do rotation. Although considering our performances in the last two games, perhaps we are rotating perfectly, putting it identically mediocre performances in the league and the ACL, with players playing equally uninspiringly in both competitions. Given what we’ve seen on the pitch, it’s hard to tell which competition we’re favouring. Perhaps we’re aiming for disappointment in both.

Consistently underwhelming -

Can we have the old Kurumaya back please? Because this new version hasn’t had a good game for ages. And Morita, we know that you might be attracting some attention from overseas and from the national team. Honestly, you don’t have to try to put them off by pretending you can’t play. I know this is a bit churlish to players who’ve been extremely important for us in the past and I apologize for that. But it’s weird that the two players who’ve attracted the most attention have been so out of form. They are probably our closest two players to the national team, but are making errors again and again. Perhaps it’s case of us expecting more from them as we know they’re great players. Or perhaps something is troubling them. Of course, they’re not playing terribly, it’s just repeated little unforced errors and sloppy passing. It’s a bit weird. Kobayashi has been well off the boil too, but when he came on in this game I though he made a real difference. Whichever way you look at it, we need to get our best players playing like they are our best players sooner rather than later. The longer this winless run goes on, the more it’s going to play on everyone’s mind.

Positionally challenged bench and logically challenged subs -

The line up for this game came as a bit of a shock, what with the rotation and the change of formation to two up front. But then again I suppose the last starting line up was a bit of a surprise too. Two up front seemed to work ok in this game, but it can’t have been that great as we didn’t win and we only scored twice against Yokohama’s at times shambolic defence. From the announcement of the line up I was a bit worried given the relative lack of options on the bench. Of course the loss of Oshima immediately cut these options further, but even before this happened we had one keeper and six midfielders on there. Of course, some players can play in other positions, but having Hasegawa and Saito on there seemed crazy as they are both competing for the same spot. I guess that it was due to be Saito’s turn, but Hasegawa did well on Wednesday so he also got the nod. When we finally came to use these subs, I wasn’t sure about some of the changes. It’s a shame Ienaga was changed for Kobayashi as he was playing much better than he has recently. But I’m with Oniki on this one, as Ienaga was reaching boiling point and a second yellow looked like a possibility. This was almost like an enforced change to be honest. Changing Nobori also made sense as he looked like he might be struggling a little with a slight injury at times. I think it was a golden opportunity for Saito though. The final sub was just weird. Sure, Morita had been having a bit of a dodgy game, but I don’t understand why Oniki replaced him with Kengo, who himself looked decidedly rusty when he came on. It just seemed like a waste of a chance to mix things up. And another missed opportunity for Saito to come on for maybe Chinen or Damiao who both looked tired. Of course, Damiao scored, so that shows how much I know.

Hate thy neighbour -

It’s always pretty annoying to concede late in the game, especially when it’s with the last kick (or header) of the match, and especially especially when it loses you two points. I guess Yokohama owed us this though after our injury time comeback from one goal down to one goal up a few seasons ago. That was a great time to be a Frontale fan. And it seemed that today was equally good for Yokohama, even though they only rescued a point rather than snatched all three. Whilst a draw was a fair result in this game, the celebrations of the Yokohama fans suggest that they haven’t really enjoyed our recent success that much. For some rival teams’ fans the fact that we still haven’t won in the league this season seems more significant than how their own team is doing. It’s still early days though and Yokohama have only beaten Sendai, who many people are picking as hot relegation favourites, and Gamba, who seem to start seasons worse than we do. Gamba are above us in the table though… And they incidentally are our next league opponents. Something’s got to give in that game

When does a slow start become a bad season? -

Guess it will be pretty soon if things don’t improve. We’re three games in, which is still early, but we can’t depend on us being able to claw back a team well in the lead again this year. We can’t even consider being able to do this till we actually manage to win a game. I said that this game would be a crucial one, but the result has just shifted the crucialness (I guess that’s probably not a word…maybe cruciality) onto the next league game and has also notched the tension up a little. Our ACL loss was a bummer, but it was unlucky and was probably our hardest group game. If we fail to beat Sydney on Wednesday at home (probably our easiest group game on paper) we can start really reaching for the panic button. Bizarrely, given my past feelings, I’m not piling all this on Oniki. There have been too many average and below average performances on the pitch. Hopefully Oniki can motivate us to do a bit better going forwards. Hopefully…

That’ll do I guess. This blog post has already gone on too long. It doesn’t really logically follow, but hopefully throwing away three points against our local rivals will cause us to get ourselves into gear a bit more. Bring on Sydney on Wednesday and you know, maybe we could, like, perhaps win a match. Not promising anything, but surely sooner or later we’ve got to win one, right?


Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 17. MAWATARI Kazuaki
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7 KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 58')
MF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

Subs
GK 21. ARAI Shota
MF 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 66')
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo (on for MORITA 80')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for NOBORIZATO 68')
MF 19. SAITO Manabu
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto

My Frontale Man Of The Match

This could have been Damiao’s for two goals. Or Ienaga’s as he had a much improved performance, but his stupid yellow and consequent blood-boiling rage and necessary substitution snatched it away from and handed it to….

TANAKA Ao - wasn’t even supposed to start, but somehow seemed to be better prepared for the game than most of our players. Looked a lot better than Morita in this game and did really well for such a young talent.

Goals

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 4' 0-1
JUNIOR (Yokohama) 23' 1-1
LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 88' 1-2

OGIHARA (Yokohama) 90+5' 2-2

Highlights

Vs Shanghai SIPG (away) 6/3/19 - ACL Group Stage Match 1

Shanghai SIPG 1 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

A disappointing night away in Shanghai for us. I didn’t go to the game and only saw it on a tiny, blurry screen so I’m not going to go into any kind of detail about this. Hasegawa starting was a surprise, but perhaps Oniki had done his homework as he caused them all kinds of problems in the first half. Not sure why our ACL challenge special signing Leandro Damiao wasn’t on the pitch until the final two minutes though. Presumably some will use this as a stick to beat us with about not putting out our strongest team. This accusation would be quite frankly ridiculous. It was an unfortunate way to lose a game that we’d dominated possession in. You can’t blame Morita and you can’t blame the ref. It was the right decision. Just all a bit of a shame. One other dark cloud is the injury to Mawatari. Hopefully it's not serious. The necessary tactical shuffle due to his removal didn't help, but wasn't why we lost so let's not dwell on it. Looking on the bright side, that’s probably our toughest group game out of the way and Ulsan and Sydney drew. Looking on the dark side, neither team really deserved to win, and Shanghai didn't look that good, but we managed to lose. Discounting the Super Cup, that’s three games, two draws and one loss. One goal scored, two conceded. Not the most thrilling of openings to the season, it has to be said. Hopefully, sooner of later, we might remember how to score from open play. Fingers crossed it’s Sunday, which now is looking like, (and I know it’s ridiculously early in the season to say this), a must win game. Forget this match, it wasn’t to be, and let’s concentrate on paying a bit better and getting a better result against Yokohama.


Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 17. MAWATARI Kazuaki
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki (Yellow card 69')
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7 KURUMAYA Shintaro (Yellow card 43')
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (Yellow card 26')
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs
GK 21. ARAI Shota
MF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for MAWATARI 51')
FW 8. ABE Hiroyuki (on for HASEGAWA 79')
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for MORITA 89')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
MF 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya

Goals  

HULK (Shanghai) 89' (PEN) 1-0  

Highlights 

Vs Kashima Antlers (home) 1/3/19 - J League match 2

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 Kashima Antlers

 

Looking to kick on from a disappointing performance against FC Tokyo last week, we welcomed Kashima to Todoroki on Friday night looking for our first goal and our first win of the season. Well, mission half accomplished. We scored! I know it’s a bit early still to be calling this a bad start to the season, but leaving aside the Super Cup, we’re starting the year in our usual sluggish way. At least this is how it feels to me. In 2017 our first five league games featured two wins, two draws and one loss. 2018 was three wins, a draw and one loss, So perhaps the figures suggest that the reality is that we don’t start so badly. But both of those years we got our first league win away from home, and the reality is that this year, our first away game is our next one and it’s away at Yokohama. Good time to kick things off, I’d say. We’re overdue a win there. But I’m not exactly brimming with confidence at the moment. Before then, we’re away to Shanghai in what could be our most difficult ACL group game. Have to say, I’m a bit worried about that one too. But it would be lovely to be typing my next league game blog post with two wins under our belt. We can dream, I guess. The fact is, this was a slightly more promising performance than against FC Tokyo, but still a draw with only one goal from a set piece and a clanger of a long ball goal conceded against a Kashima team with a lot of injuries and us with our first choice eleven available. There is clearly work to be done. Let’s hope it’s done soon. Anyway, here’s what we learned from this game.


Kashima are slowly reassembling their beloved Zico but don’t like any other former players

- I know I always make a bad joke about it, but Kashima’s ‘Spirit of Zico’ flag always carries a feeling of a tribute to a passed-away club legend. As I also always like to say, that Zico spirit of petulantly spitting on the ball after conceding a penalty and getting sent off isn’t exactly something I’d want to celebrate. As far as I know at the time of writing, he’s still alive but their new ‘Heart of Zico’ flag suggests that they aren’t so sure and are thinking of making some kind of Frankenstein’s monster player from some parts they have found lying around in the stadium. I’m looking forward to future Kashima flags ‘Buttocks of Zico’, ‘Beard of Ogasawara’ and ‘Hair of Uchida’ as the project continues. I guess Zico is back with the club (or at least was recently. Don't know if he's still there), but similar good feelings were very much absent regarding other former players. Whilst we normally applaud former players (more on that kind of niceness in the next point), Kashima were strong on the booing for both Yamamura and Oniki, as well as the usual booing for our big name players and this time Nara, obviously still reeling for the apparent injustice of him not getting sent off last week. Didn't know they cared so much about FC Tokyo's games.

Frontale fans are on the whole nicer than I am

- This was a thoroughly underwhelming performance as far as I’m concerned, but our fans still sang the players off the field at the end of the game. There is definitely something to be said for this as we should support the team through good times and bad, but after the final whistle yesterday, personally speaking, I just wanted to scoot off home. Yesterday, once again there were way too many bad performances that a nice free kick from Kengo and a point against Kashima don’t paper over I think. Kobayashi’s usual three terrible shots then a goal ratio seems to have increased exponentially. He’s clearly a confidence player and needs to get going this year, and some of his support play was useful, but his shooting has been really disappointing. Morita and Oshima were pretty average and at times pretty awful, giving the ball away time after time. Really out of sorts. Kurumaya and Taniguchi had pretty bad games too and were far too error prone. Ienaga was better than last week but is still failing to reach the heights of last year. Damiao was better but still doesn’t seem to have quite built up and understanding with his teammates. At least he was getting the ball a bit more this game. Mawatari did well but is still a bit raw and Nara had a good game aside form the goal we conceded, which was a bit of a hoofed ball nightmare goal to give away, but can’t really be pinned on anyone in particular. In the face of such mediocrity, it’s surprising people apparently thought we’d put in a good effort, and well done to them for their positivity, but personally I struggle to be so positive.

Who needs goals when you have passes?

- We passed, and we passed, and we passed again. Occasionally we’d shoot, but not very well. Passes are all well and good, but goals win games and in 180 minutes of league football so far this season, we haven’t troubled the opposition keeper much. I know our style is a patient kind of football, but we need to make our players more willing to shoot sometimes, particularly when we have the ball on the edge of the opposition box. We’re way too predictable at the moment, trying to slowly work the ball into the penalty area and then walk it into the net. Mawatari starting seemed to lead to us crossing the ball into the box a bit more which was nice. Sadly no-one got on the end of any of them. With the game delicately poised at 1-1 and with two Kashima players on the same side of the pitch booked, I would have though it would have made sense to get Saito on to run at them a bit and commit them to making tackles. But instead we persisted with the same tactics. We had chances, but we didn’t put them away. No goals from open play yet…

Oniki’s not afraid to make changes, but maybe he actually is

- The introduction of Mawatari shows that Oniki isn’t afraid to make some changes in our starting line up. I don’t think Maguinho had done anything wrong in particular and could feel a bit aggrieved to be dropped right out of the matchday squad but Mawatari did seem to briefly change things against FC Tokyo and did well in this game too. I couldn’t argue with the starting line-up to be honest. The problem I have though, is that we will probably persist with players who are not playing at all well whilst leaving people on the bench and in the stand who are chomping at the bit for an opportunity to show what they can do. I also feel that yesterday’s subs ignored the players who were stinking things up and failed to address the problems we were having. Kurumaya probably deserved to be subbed, but when we were desperately trying to get a winner, changing the two full backs seemed a bit of a weird decision. I’m not going to get on Oniki’s back this early in the season as I feel he’s being let down by some poor performances at the moment. But, I hope he pays attention to some of the stinkers that people are having. It would be a bold move to leave out some ‘big names’, but it might be what we need to do to get things moving.

The referee…

- He seemed to actually have a decent game! Of course I disagreed strongly with many of his decisions in the way that only a hugely biased fan could, but yeah, well officiated Sato. It makes a really nice change to not be moaning about this for once.


Yeah, so I’m a bit pessimistic about this game, and a bit worried about the away ACL game against Shanghai and next weekend against Yokohama, against whom if we can’t score, we really have got some issues. Perhaps we’ve been a bit unfortunate to have to start the season with a couple of derbies and a game against Kashima, as we need a bit of momentum to build up. But in both of our league games so far we’ve had good periods where we’ve attacked and attacked but have failed to score. I’m not sure about removing Damiao so early, but perhaps he’s not completely fit yet. I wonder what happened to those new tactics we used against Urawa. Were Urawa just really bad? Were those tactics just a lucky mistake? We’ve now got a big name striker with some pedigree who’s on a big wage, so we should probably be giving him the ball a bit more often and encouraging him to shoot a bit more. I’m very concerned that some people are saying we should use him as a super-sub and bring Abe back, presumably putting Kobayashi back up front. Kobayashi hasn’t exactly been troubling the keeper so far. I think maybe Oniki is picking the players first and then trying to fit them into the system. Ienaga on the left doesn’t seem to work very well and for periods in this game, Kobayashi was playing there with Ienaga switching back to the right. When we have so many players whose position is on the left that seems a bit strange. If we’re going to stick to this starting eleven, I’d much rather Kobayashi pushed further up alongside Damiao and Kengo and Ienaga had more of a free role to roam across the pitch behind the strikers. But I’m no tactical expert (clearly), and it’s probably more important for our players to stop playing so badly before we start tweaking the formation and tactics. A decent result against Shanghai would probably steady the ship a little and bring some confidence. A bad result would probably have the opposite effect. Our next league game is probably more significant though. If we could get five points from three games things would feel a lot better. If it were two or three points, we could be looking at a longer slump. Fingers crossed. Actually, everything crossed I think. 

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 17. MAWATARI Kazuaki
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7 KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (Yellow card 66')
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

Subs
GK 21. ARAI Shota
MF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for KURUMAYA 86')
FW 8. ABE Hiroyuki (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 69')
MF 19. SAITO Manabu
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for MAWATARI 85')
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Not a great deal of choice with far more bad performances than good ones. I don't like to always give it to the goal scorer but with it going to Mawatari last time and in spite of a solid performance it would be a bit of a reach to give it to Nara after we conceded that goal, I guess it has to go to...

NAKAMURA Kengo - lovely free kick and a much improved performance from last week. Still lasting 90 minutes which is encouraging and even if he's not quite reaching the heights of previous years yet, had a solid game.

Goals 
 

NAKAMURA (Frontale) 9' 1-0

ITO (Kashima) 21' 1-1

Highlights