I didn’t attend this match, hence the speed of the post going up and the general lack of detail. I watched it on DAZN but I don’t feel that me writing lengthy blog posts about games I watched on TV does anyone any good, so this will be short. We won, thankfully, and stopped this run of awful 1-1 draws. But to be honest, the performance didn’t seem that much better and the scoreline probably flattered us a little. If Jubilo hadn’t been so wasteful in front of goal and Sung-Ryong hadn’t made a lot of good saves in the first half, this would have been a lot closer. Still we are persisting with Kurumaya at right back. I can’t imagine anyone apart from Oniki thinks this is a good idea and I’ve heard rumors that Maguinho is off back to Brazil this summer. Who can blame him? I guess that leaves us with Mawatari and Suzuki who I believe are both injured at the moment. Kurumaya had a decent game though, but I don’t want to say too much about that because it undermines my moaning about Oniki. Before we get carried away about scoring three times we should remember that Kobayashi did his best to put it straight in the keeper’s hands and avoid scoring, but once again an opposition keeper seemed to be doing his best to avoid stopping it. Obviously I'm pleased he scored though as confidence will do him good. Our other goals came in fast breaks as Jubilo pushed forward to try and get back in the game. We only had five shots in the whole game, despite dominating possession. We weren’t that great, but Jubilo were pretty wasteful and it looks like they are in big trouble. Their manager has now resigned, so once again, losing a game to the reigning champions has been the final straw for a manager’s job. You’ve got to think that after our last few results though, maybe anyone who can’t get a 1-1 draw with us clearly isn’t doing the right thing. Oh, and that was another late late goal we’ve conceded so that’s something else for me to whinge about and presumably now makes it a more frequent than once every four matches thing. That’ll do for this post I think. We’ve got an Emperor’s Cup game on Wednesday which I’m really looking forward to. I hope we can get a chance to see some players who aren’t getting a look in. We might even get someone playing at right back who isn’t Kurumaya! After that, it’s home against Sagan Tosu next weekend.
Another hugely disappointing result. And many more things for me to moan about. My pre-game thoughts were ‘I’m not sure we’re going to do very well tonight'. I was right! You’ll have to trust me on this, but as the weeks progress and I keep typing these pre-game thoughts and they are increasingly insanely wrong, you’ll probably realise I’m not cheating on these. The huge 7-0 victory last year was always unlikely to be repeated, and our middling to poor performances this year made it doubly unlikely. Sapporo aren’t in the best of form this season, but that’s no problem for a team coming to Todoroki! We’ll always oblige with a point or three. Thank goodness we can concentrate on the league now our ACL campaign is finished. Oh… actually we’re playing worse since it's been over, presumably as now Oniki randomly rotates less and therefore is less likely to randomly find a combination that works. Our unbeaten run in the league continues - HOORAY! Our run of absolutely tedious games also continues - AAAAAHHH. This is no fun at the moment, and while of course we don’t have any divine right to win, it’s frustrating to play so badly due to the possible insanity of our manager. Particularly when pretty much anyone in the ground could probably do a better of picking a team and making substitutions. Credit to Consadole though. They brought a decent amount of fans for what must be a hugely inconvenient Friday night fixture for their fans who had a long journey. And they frustrated us by defending and not just allowing us to walk the ball into the net and score. Friday Night J League is a mixed blessing for me. If we win it can really kick off the weekend in style. But as is happening more often than not this year, a disappointing result means that I have all weekend to mope about it before the blessed relief of a miserable return to work. This game makes three awful 1-1 draws in a row at home. Some might say we’ve played well, but that’s certainly not true if you're talking about a whole 90 minutes, and three goals in three games suggests that we haven’t played that well. Ok, bring on the misery…
The usual selections and omissions point & the usual substitutions point -
I am slightly torn with regards to my usual moan about these kind of things. It was a brave decision for Oniki to leave a now not injured Kengo out of the match day squad again. And also a brave decision to leave Kobayashi on the bench (although maybe our second half turn around after he came on suggests that was a brave and at the same time bad decision). Certainly both of them haven’t been playing very well this year and being in the form that we are right now, we shouldn’t let emotions cloud our thinking regarding their selections. Hopefully both can pick things up a little and force themselves back into contention. Presumably Kobayashi now has, after scoring in this game. Let’s be honest though, his goal was down to a goalkeeping blunder and he missed a hell of a lot of fairly easy chances aside from his goal. But goals however they come are welcome and are an increasingly rare phenomenon for us. My big selection beef again is the selection of Kurumaya at right back. He deserves to play, but as I stated in my previous post, why on earth Oniki didn’t play him at left back and Nobori at right back I will never understand. It can be no coincidence that when they were swapped around at half time we started doing a lot better. Thankfully Consadole didn’t seem to target Kurumaya’s undeniable and obvious left-footedness. Unfortunately we seemed to be targeting it ourselves, with him getting caught out time after time by bad passes from his teammates. Or maybe not bad passes, maybe just passes that you’d normally make to a right back, perhaps forgetting that this right back has no right foot. Maguinho is still missing in action, presumably still being punished for scoring away against Oita. He’s currently our only fit right back, but still didn’t make the bench. I don’t get it at all. The bench was pretty lopsided, given that it was basically Arai and Kobayashi and a load of midfielders. I know we have injuries, but maybe a bit more balance would have been nice. It seems that a spot on the bench is a reward for doing well in a previous match, but usually comes with no chance of actually getting on the pitch. I always say it, but the three players who come on seem to be decided before the game and the rest are just sitting there making up the numbers. Moving on to subs, there’s always one that baffles me. On this occasion it was the apparent punishment removal of Leandro Damiao for missing the penalty. Yeah, it wasn’t a particularly good penalty, but at least Damiao had been involved in the match. Chinen played 90 minutes without having a shot. Not exactly what you want from a striker. He also picked up a booking in the first half, making it even more confusing that it was Damiao who was changed. It seems increasingly clear to me that Oniki really doesn't like Brazilian players and will do his best to leave them out if he possibly can. Or at least that’s how it seems to be to me. I agree that the worth of foreign players is often over-estimated in the J League where there sometimes seems to be a feeling that it a player isn’t Japanese he must be better. There are plenty of examples of this not being the case but it seems that at Frontale, or at least for Oniki, the reverse is believed.
Yamamoto, back from the referee sin bin, and keen to show us what we’ve all been missing -
Presumably with an eye on bringing more excitement into the Friday Night J League concept, the league decided to bring back the always engaging Yamamoto to ref the game. Absent since his super-clanger in the Urawa Shonan game, he was clearly intent on getting back to enjoying refereeing to the max, giving penalties where there were none, ignoring where there could have been and flinging cards around like he was an overly enthusiastic casino employee on his last shift before his summer holiday. The penalty we got was soft and probably outside of the box. Their penalty was probably fair enough but came with a feeling that he was trying to even things up. Yamamoto was clearly loving being back in charge and probably was aware that any clanger he made would be dwarfed in comparison to the one in his last game. It was a pretty erratic refereeing performance on the whole. But I don’t think we can complain too much about it, as the big decisions went in our favour for the most part. But would be nice to see someone doing a decent job, wouldn’t it?
A game of two halves -
Roll out the cliches, this was a classic game of two halves. We started reasonably but crumbled later on in the first half and by the time Consadole were ahead, we looked in all sorts of bother. There were some anonymous performances in the first half. Ienaga and Chinen were nowhere to be seen. Thankfully, Ienaga seemed to turn things around in the second half. Unfortunately, Chinen didn’t really. Jesiel was doing pretty well until he gave away the penalty and then he seemed to have a bit of a wobble, so perhaps his fortunes went in the opposite direction to the team as a whole. Probably Oshima’s did too. He looked immaculate for most of the first half but faded a little in the second. Unsurprisingly we looked better after switching players around to play in positions they can actually play in. The difference when Kurumaya returned to his left back spot was startling. He linked up very well with Hasegawa and it seemed that all of our dangerous attacks were coming down that side in the second half. But let’s not get too carried away about that second half. We battered them with shots but only scored once through a fumble, so although we clearly got the upper hand in the second half, the same old lack of finishing ability cost us again.
Oniki, increasingly bringing a little of Kashima to Kawasaki -
Here is a ridiculous (and not entirely serious) theory. Oniki is a secret agent from Kashima who was sent in to destroy our club and remove any vestiges of exciting and attacking football. Fortunately for us, he was pretty bad at his job to start off with and therefore couldn’t prevent us from winning the league and playing some reasonably nice football. Sadly, he is now getting to grips with his task and slowly managing to drain the enthusiasm and excitement out of all of us. Because we’re too nice, we will keep giving him chances to turn things back around, but of course he won’t really be trying to do that, he’ll be trying to destroy and exit. Seriously though, Oniki is really starting to express himself recently. It’s a real rarity that we manage to score more than once, which is bizarre considering the chances we are creating and the players we have. Ridiculously I have been saying for maybe almost two years now that I don't want Oniki in charge but this perhaps now seems to be a feeling that is shared a little amongst other members of the fanbase. It sounds stupid, but I’d much rather we were playing a bit more excitingly, even if it meant we lost some matches that we might otherwise have drawn. At the moment it’s dull and crushing 1-1 draw after 1-1 draw with an occasional victory where Oniki’s tedium plan misfires. If you play two matches, win one and lose one you get three points. If you draw both, you get two points and a crushing sense of ennui. In the pub I was asked who I'd want to replace Oniki if I want him to leave and to be fair I don’t really have an answer, which I guess was the point of the question. Fact is though, that I think I’d settle for pretty much anyone who could inject a little excitement at the moment. This is almost certainly a moot point though as I don’t think there’s any chance of him leaving anytime soon, no matter how miserable things become. Yeah! we’ve only lost once this year. Oooooooh, we’ve drawn seven times, six of which were at home. Two wins from nine home games is pretty awful form.
That’ll do, before I sink into further despair. Thankfully, we don’t have a game next week. And doubly thankfully our next game is away from home. Sadly, I won’t be able to attend that game away at Jubilo Iwata as the Sunday evening timing makes it impossible to get home from by public transport. Nice scheduling work J League! Also, I think the Yamaha stadium is hugely overrated, at least from an away fan perspective. Difficult to get to and with some pretty dodgy views. It’s a shame, as visually it seems to be a nice stadium, but all things considered the trip just doesn’t seem worth it. Who knows where Oniki will play Kurumaya in that game? It always seems to take him longer than everyone else to notice when something is not working, but surely he won’t start him at right back again, will he? After that we’ve got the excitement of the Emperor’s Cup at home against Meiji University. I really enjoy these games, and the selection for that match could also be pretty interesting. This is the point where I usually do some kind of positive sign off…
A real mixed bag this game. Can’t really get too effusive as we 100% didn’t do the business. Kobayashi scored, but missed a real hatful of good chances. Jesiel was looking good till he gave away the penalty. Oshima had a great first half but kind of faded in the second. So neither of them can really be considered. I’ve narrowed it down to two and I’m not sure I can choose between them, so I’ll give it to….
HASEGAWA Tatsuya & MORITA Hidemasa - Hasegawa had another good game and is legitimately keeping his spot at the moment. Sadly there was no-one able to finish any of the many chances he made. All our major threats came through him. Morita seems to have come back from international duty a changed player. He was tidy and thankfully free of the sloppiness he sometimes falls into when trying over-fancy tricks. He did really well in this game and as I’ve criticised him in the past, I thought it was only right that I praised him on this occasion.
Damn, this was annoying. Plenty of fans of opposition teams would no doubt have been delighted by our last minute capitulation against Urawa on Saturday. I can’t deny that if this had happened to one of our rivals, I would have loved this. However, when it happens to your own team, particularly when you’re playing a particularly unlikeable rival, it really stings. Perhaps this has contributed to why it has taken me a little while to get round to writing this post. Although the fact that our next game is not for a couple of weeks has taken the pressure off a bit with regards to getting a post done before the next game. Now we go into this break with a bad memory very fresh in the mind. We had the opportunity to give Tokyo something to dwell on over the next two weeks if we’d got things back to a four point deficit. Instead, they managed to extend their lead over us in this round of matches. And our other noisy neighbours Yokohama caught up with us on points. Still a long way to go in the league and FC Tokyo have a tricky period coming up with a lot of away matches and their talisman almost certainly due to depart for Europe. But this was another chance missed, another figurative opportunity blasted wide. Another metaphorical awful shot deflected into our goal by our defender. Here’s what we might have learned from this game, and be prepared, there’s going to be a fair bit of moaning.
Confusing team selection (again) -
Discussion of this point is unavoidable and it seems to be coming up in every one of my blog posts recently. Once again I want to stress that I know nothing, I just have my opinions. And it’s my opinion that it doesn’t make sense to play a left back at right back. When Elsinho left at the end of last season it was always going to leave a big hole to fill. I’m sure I’ve pondered before on here on why we’d let one of our best players leave, a player who was in consecutive J League teams of the year. We replaced him with a couple of potentially interesting new players. I thought Maguinho did well in the Super Cup. I also thought that Mawatari did well when Oniki dropped Maguinho immediately after the Super Cup. It was clear that Oniki didn’t trust or rate Maguinho as when Mawatari got injured we saw Morita and Suzuki playing at right back. With Mawatari back from injury it seemed that we had returned to some semblance of normality. But then Maguinho was back in the team for the long ACL away trip to Sydney and then seemed to have won the spot back again. Quite what Mawatari had done, I don’t know. But Maguinho was doing well and he scored against Oita where we also kept a clean sheet. Clearly this wasn’t enough for Oniki who late in that game replaced him with Kurumaya who retained the right back spot for the start of this game. Maguinho was back on the bench. Oniki seems to have a bit of a thing for playing Kurumaya out of position ahead of players who naturally play in that position. Although he started the season poorly (and let’s be honest, most of the squad did), he is still our best left back. Nobori has done a good job recently, but probably could do with a rest. But no, he continues to start. The real absurdity of this selection was the fact that Nobori has played at right back in the past, so the obvious thing to do would have been to swap them round. Well the really obvious thing to do would be to play a right back at right back, but it seems we’re never going to do something so predictable! In the end Kurumaya did ok, but he’s painfully left footed and it was obvious what he was going to do every time he got the ball. I feel Urawa definitely targeted him. And although they were probably equally as confused with the selection as we were, they seemed to work out that it was a weak point in our lineup quicker than we noticed it. Well, quicker than Oniki noticed it.
Aside from this selection, one other notable thing was the return to 4-4-2, Oniki apparently being unable to not play Kobayashi up front. I’m surprised he didn’t drop Damiao, as he seems to enjoy doing this. Instead the two played up front together, with Damiao pressuring the Urawa defence and keeper and Kobayashi not really doing much. He’s not been good at all this year and this was another dodgy game for him. Kobayashi’s usual problem of needing three or four shots to get his range is probably still there, but the problem now is that he gets only three of four shots a game, so sorts out his range just in time for the final whistle. He definitely plays better when he has to do things instinctively. If he thinks too long, it never seems to work. It probably would have been better for him to play him on the right and Ienaga in the middle with a 4-2-3-1, but like I said, Oniki won’t for whatever reason play him there. Wakizaka, one of our best players of recent games, and the player who is probably keeping Kengo our of contention right now dropped to the bench and never made it onto the pitch. We did alright in the second half, but we didn’t do well enough. Apparently in his post game interview, Oniki was more upset with the fact that we didn’t score a second than the fact that we conceded a deflected goal. Thing is, you decide the tactics, don’t you, Oniki and we always seem to play to hang on to a one goal lead instead of looking for more. And you failed to make any significant changes to the team or the tactics for the majority of the game and when you finally did, you made it in a bit of a confusing way.
It ain't over till we've conceded -
This game takes us up to 20 matches in total this year. In one quarter of these matches we have conceded in the 89th minute or later. Of course this is going to happen occasionally, but to have it happen once every four games is a bit much. Three times this has changed a disappointing but possibly useful draw into a loss (Shanghai away, 89’, Ulsan away, 90+1’, Gamba home, 90+1’). Twice it has changed a victory into a draw (Yokohama away, 90+5’, Urawa home, 90+5’). I’m not going to moan too much about the ref adding on four minutes and them scoring in the fifth of four minutes as this thing always seems to happen. Is there something in the rules to say that you don’t blow up and finish the game until the ball is in the middle of the pitch. Pretty sure there isn’t, but it always seems to happen that way. Not sure why he might have felt like adding a bit more time though as there were no substitutions or injuries in injury time. Substitutions are actually my big beef with Oniki in this game and in previous matches too. I know I always moan about his substitutions, but I seem to remember once moaning when we were chasing a game, about him doing two subs a minute after another, effectively killing some of the precious remaining time we had left. In this game, with us leading he decided to do a double substitution, replacing both of the forwards in the 87th minute. I know time wasting is not a very nice aspect of the game, but it seemed totally ridiculous when we were leading to make two subs at the same time. When we concede with the last kick of the game, you’ve got to think that if he separated the subs even by a minute Urawa might not have had time to score. He also seems to favour us taking the ball into the corner flag with about five minutes to go if we're winning, so he clearly is aware of the benefits of running the clock down. Quite why he didn’t use the subs as a legitimate opportunity to do so, I will never understand. Please someone explain this to me as it’s driving me nuts. Yeah, we don’t have the Kazama ethos anymore of attacking right up until the final whistle, which might also explain why we are turning single goal leads into draws, and draws into losses. However, he can’t really lament us not being able to score a second goal when pretty much everything he does when we are leading points towards protecting what we have, rather than getting any more goals.
Urawa wankery and refereeing no-cardery -
I think my feelings on Urawa are pretty clear, but in the past my ill feeling has been pointed more towards the significant wannabe hooligan/borderline racist element of their fanbase. As per usual in this game, they booed their hearts out, focusing in particular on Sung-Ryong, Kobayashi and bizarrely Eiji Kawashima who appeared before the game. Strangely they are still applauding Kurumaya. Still no idea what’s going on with that. In this game though, they also sang quite a lot, which in spite of what most people say, seems to be pretty rare in games against us. The real wankery on show came from their players in this game. Perhaps due to their ‘new’ manager and his Yakuza-esque image, they seem to have gone very dirty. Time after time bad tackles were rewarded with nothing more than a free kick. It took an eternity for them to get their first yellow card and when Ugajin got that, it probably should have been his third yellow. Add to this the fact that Maguinho was booked for his first foul after he came on, and you’ve got to ask some questions. After our enjoyable game with what seemed like a pretty good ref last match, we were back to the usual J League weak officiating. They kicked us around the pitch and got away with it. Makino seems in real life to actually be a reasonable kind of guy, (much to my disappointment as his panto villain image is a lot of fun). But on the pitch he’s a bit of a toerag, arms around Taniguchi’s throat and then a knee in the back as he walked past after the foul was given. There was a ridiculous amount of ref haranguing too, which went unpunished. How I long for the day we get another rookie ref who actually seems to put the rules of the game into practice instead of having his own agenda.
Doom and gloom and gloom and doom. These posts are lots of fun to read aren’t they? Perhaps I’m still sulking about throwing away a win in the last minute, but there’s only so many times we can be ‘unlucky’ before we start to look at why we are being ‘unlucky’ so often. The overall performance was alright, but you can’t call it much better than alright when you consider how we dominated the game in the second half but only managed to score once. I feel like I’m constantly repeating myself in these blog posts, which might also suggest that we’re making the same mistakes over and over. If you’re looking for some optimism, perhaps you could say that some of the players did a reasonable job, but the problem is that we’re failing to finish off the very good chances we’re making. Ienaga’s late miss was a costly stinker. Kobabayshi’s toils have been mentioned above. Damiao only seemed to have one chance but he did at least put it away. Lovely passing, turning and control are all well and good but if they don’t create goals then we might as well be watching one of those ball juggling street football displays rather than an actual game. I criticized Kubo a few weeks ago, or rather people’s awe at Kubo, saying that he’s all very nice but there’s no end product. Now he’s scoring and assisting for fun and we are still beautifully possessing and failing to put away chances. Or he perhaps ‘was’. If he leaves FC Tokyo and their form collapses, perhaps that’s one bright spark we can find during this international break. Other than that, I’m going to just grumble away to myself which is good for you, as it means you won’t have to listen to me!
DF 26. MAGUINHO (Yellow card 81') (on for KURUMAYA 78')
MF 28. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
MF 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 87')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
I dunno, a lot of average performances and some below average ones. If I had to pick someone, maybe it will have to be…
HASEGAWA Tatsuya - Another decent game and was a real threat down the left. Sadly, most of the time there was no-one there to put the ball in the net. Presumably Oniki will drop him for the next game and play Kurumaya in his spot.
