How am I going to write a blog post about this? This was a pretty dull 90 minutes of football with an all round lack of quality from both teams and not many incidents to talk about. Guess it’s going to be another quick post. After scraping our way to a win against local rivals Yokohama FC on Wednesday we might have been hoping to get back firing again against the league’s bottom team. Sadly we didn’t, but I guess we did just about enough to get the three points. We had a massive four shots on target in this game. Thankfully they only had one. Those two stats should probably tell you everything you need to know about this game. The cliche goes that in a local derby the form book goes out of the window, and it kind of did here, even if the result went the way people would expect. Our race to 100 league goals has hit a bump in the road in a game we might have hoped to get a few goals in. At least we got a clean sheet though and now have the best defensive record in the league. That’s not to say that Shonan didn’t threaten. We were hanging on at the end, unable to get the ball and when we were gifted it, unable to keep hold of it. Perhaps the conditions didn’t help with a pretty soggy pitch holding the ball up a bit but let’s be honest, the pitch didn’t make us pass the ball around aimlessly and endlessly for the majority of the game. Right up until we gave it away. Again and again. Credit to Shonan, they got a much better result against us than other teams further up the table have, but I wonder if maybe that was more down to us than them. The good news is we now have a free Wednesday and a chance to rest before next weekend’s crucial away game against Cerezo Osaka. Not sure it’s a six pointer quite yet as we still have a handsome lead, but if they were to beat us (and judging by our recent results at their place it’s really not out of the question), it would give them a great boost and give us a great kick in the guts/nuts (delete as per your preference).
So what else is there to talk about? Not much. Kurumaya was maybe a bit unlucky to get withdrawn at half time but I’m pleased to see that Oniki has learnt his lesson after not withdrawing Oshima against Nagoya in the Levain cup with him then going on to pick up a second yellow and therefore a red. I wouldn’t have liked to see us trying to hang on to our lead with 10 men. No complaints about the booking though. Although saying that, I think Shonan players got away with not being booked for similar fouls. Guess Iemoto was ‘letting the game flow’. Mitoma’s introduction came a little later than expected and he started pretty brightly with some nice dribbles. But he did fade after about 15 minutes which is again a bit of a worry. Where’s his mojo gone? I was hoping this would have been a good game for him to find some form but it didn’t happen. Our goal was quite a nice one, which is a relief given that if it was a rotten one I think we’d all be struggling to find some justification for spending two hours watching this. It was definitely the only bright spark in a pretty dull evening though. But winning ugly is an important part of winning the league so we need to be able to do that if we want to win the title. I’m struggling… is there anything else to say? I don’t think so. Three points in the bag, let’s move on to the next game and forget about this one.
As I mentioned above, that will be Cerezo away next Saturday. A good result there will be a big step towards something nice. After that it’s FC Tokyo at home on the 7th of October in the Levain Cup. Fingers crossed for both of those games. I’d definitely take another couple of very dull victories. Would be nice to do something a but more exciting though, wouldn’t it? Fingers crossed. Go Frontale!
Yikes! Another big let-off for us in this game. We rode our luck a bit but still managed to take three points from what on paper should have been one of our easier games. That does seem to be the way we do things though, so it probably shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise to us. Before the game it looked like Yokohama were trying to throw the match, including all three of their veterans and giving King Kazu a chance to get his first league start in quite a while. Online there was some confusion before the match as to what kind of tactical decision this was. One motivated mainly by publicity I guess. But even up against a team including three players with a combined age of over 130 we huffed and puffed through this game. It was quite ironic given their inclusion that the half time ‘entertainment’ and I use that term loosely, was an impressionist singing YMCA. The irony of hearing someone repeatedly sing ‘YOUNG MAN!’ while two players who were almost forty, one in his early forties and one over fifty were having a well earned rest was perhaps the most entertaining aspect of said entertainment. Admittedly things got a bit tricker when the Yokohama three were removed and some younger and perhaps more energetic players replaced them early in the second half. But even with the three wiley old veterans on the pitch things weren’t particularly easy for us and they didn't look particularly off the pace. Yokohama looked tidy at the back and we whilst we had thirteen shots to their one in the first half, it didn’t feel particularly like things were going our way. In the second half they outshot us and had an equal amount of possession which probably gives a more accurate reflection of the game as a whole. It’s difficult to say what went wrong really. I guess every team has these kind of games now and again, but we can definitely consider this a bullet dodged. The fact that FC Tokyo did us a big favour and beat Cerezo means that we now have an 11 point lead at the top. But we can’t be too sure about hanging on to it if we keep playing like we did in this game. Sure, I’m a bit of a pessimist and should probably be happy about winning rather than being worried about not playing well and almost losing. Here are a few bullet points about things we might have learned from this game.
Big let off -
Credit to Yokohama. They gave us a bit of a shock and we were very fortunate to get three points in this game. Saying that though, perhaps their goals couldn’t really have been avoided. The first bounced off someone’s back into the net. I guess he had got between two of our defenders though, so that’s not great, but it was a bit of a freak goal and the scorer didn’t seem to know much about it till it had gone in. We gave them way too many chances though. A sloppy ball at right back created a chance for them from which Sung-Ryong had to pull out a great save and then Morita had to clear a follow up shot off the line. Their second was an absolute beauty of a hit from outside the box. Sung-Ryong was pretty unhappy with it, but I don’t think there was too much we could have done about it. But, once again we lost the ball on the right at the back. Saito had been swapped to that side by that stage so perhaps wasn’t used to playing with Yamane but whichever way you look at it, we gave them a chance that they took with aplomb. Whether our generosity was down to the substitutions we made, some fatigue or Yokohama upping their game I don’t know. But it was a bit worrying. If we were Marinos fans we would probably complain that the rain was preventing us from taking control of the game like they did when we played at their place. Certainly the surface cut up a bit, but I don’t think we can really blame it on that. Let’s just recognise that we played a bit dodgily but got away with it and then we can hopefully sort it out for the next match. Not saying that we didn’t have good chances of our own, but the fact is, we didn’t put enough of them away.
Hatate is the new Mitoma -
Hatate is the latest player to join the more than five goals scored club. As I’ve said before, it’s very satisfying that we’re really spreading the goals around this year rather than relying on one striker to score all of them. Hatate seems to be turning into a really important player for us and is recently getting a lot more match time than Mitoma (who is getting a lot more coverage). Perhaps Mitoma’s lack of starts is a bit confusing, but Oniki clearly seems to be up to something. A while ago we suspected that he didn’t want Mitoma to shine too brightly in order for him not to get snapped up by some Belgian league behemoth or Spanish second division powerhouse. This seems to have worked whether it was actually a plan or not. Unfortunately it seems to have had the side effect of totally draining Mitoma of all of his powers as a player. Of course, it’s hugely unfair to say so, given that his early session performances have perhaps set expectations too high, but he seems to have really dropped off recently. Whether this is because he hasn’t got his move or perhaps because he is now a marked man and is getting shut out of games a bit I don't know. Certainly he seems to play better against teams who are perhaps a bit more confident and therefore don’t base their game plan mainly on stopping him. I feel though that it’s his passing that has been letting him down recently. I don’t know why, but it seems that he always wants to cross with the outside of his boot in his last few appearances. Obviously this might not work quite as well as trying something a bit more simple. I dunno though, you tell me what's happened. He’s definitely gone off the boil though. Hopefully his mojo will be back soon. I wonder if Oniki could give him a go on the right for a change. I don’t think anyone would be expecting that. Hatate on the other hand is heading in the opposite direction, seemingly growing in confidence every game and scoring more and more goals. He seems to be more dangerous when he drops back into the midfield which is a bit weird, but maybe it's somewhere where he can be a bit more free than up front where he is expected to go down the wings a lot. Wherever he plays though, he’s doing great, so hats off to him. He reminds me a bit of last year’s Wakizaka, in that he does occasionally give the ball away unnecessarily, but at the same time has quite some drive when it comes to attacking and is not afraid to have a shot.
Starters and subs -
Once again Taniguchi was rested for this game, which was actually a bit of a surprise, but gave Yamamura another deserved start. I wonder if it will be Jesiel having a rest soon. I would think that Diogo deserves another crack too, but I guess after Yamane smacked in an absolute beauty against Urawa in the last game he might have felt a bit aggrieved to drop out of the squad for the next match. Diogo in the next game though please. Nobori was at left back again and made his 200th J League appearance. Congratulations to him! Morita really seems to be making the anchor role his own recently and had another good game. Ahead of him the partnership of Kengo and Ao looked quite exciting and showed flashes of excitement until it was taken apart at half time. Ao’s goal was lovely and he really looks like he’s enjoying his football recently. We don’t really know how Oshima is after his injury in the Urawa game. As usual we don’t get any news about that kind of thing from the club but it seemed likely he wouldn’t feature in this game and he didn't. Time will tell, I guess. We could probably have done with his calming influence in the second half when we were really under the cosh though. And up front it was Damiao’s turn to play the role of first half grafter with no luck in front of goal. Unfortunately when he was changed, his replacement carried on in much the same vein. Alongside him were Manabu and Hatate. I said plenty about the latter above, so I’ll just mention that again Manabu seemed to have a great time but on this occasion wasn’t quite with it, like many of his teammates. Normally, a lacklustre first half would be blown away by an all action second half transformed by half time changes. Sadly in this game both Kobayashi and Mitoma were pretty ordinary. Kobayashi did set up both Hatate’s goals but his finishing was pretty uninspiring again. Hopefully it was just a birthday blip. We’re going Wednesday/weekend for the majority of the next month so if it’s a fatigue thing I’m a bit worried as it’s only going to get worse. I think we need a bit of a shuffle this weekend. It’s against another team who we would be expected to beat easily, so perhaps it might be another tight game.
Moritasaka -
Just saying, Morita seems to have been taking shooting lessons from Tasaka recently as he recently has been blasting them over the bar at quite a speed. Hopefully this means he’s soon going to score an absolute beauty. He certainly deserves one as he’s been playing well and he’s been denied on two occasions by dodgy refereeing in the past few weeks. Fingers crossed!
Phew! Glad that game's over and done with. Next up we have a game against another prefectural rival, Shonan Bellmare away on Sunday. Last year this was a barnstormer and Shonan are in pretty awful form right now. So probably a nailed on second defeat of the season! After that, a midweek off so a chance for a little rest and then away to Cerezo Osaka the weekend after. Another banana skin against a team that we rarely beat and who probably really want to beat us. Hopefully it will go more to the form of our first meeting this season at our place rather than the usual depressing way the away games against them do. Keep it up lads! Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
FW 30. HATATE Reo
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 19. SAITO Manabu
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu(on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 46')
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru(on for NAKAMURA 46')
FW 20. MIYASHIRO Taisei(on for SAITO 77')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto(on for TANAKA 84')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for HATATE 68')(Yellow card 90+5')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Slight shakiness in many areas of the pitch. Quite a bit of sloppiness. Feel mean not giving this to Hatate as he scored twice, but I think once again it’s going to…
MORITA Hidemasa - another great performance topped off by the goal line clearance which was pretty crucial. Real shame that he hasn’t managed to get over one off those shots yet, but I’m sure the goals will come soon.
I always say I’ll keep these posts brief but this time it will really be brief as I watched this game after quite a few beers and already can’t remember much. Another win! I had a feeling we might slip up given that Cerezo had lost and it was therefore a great opportunity to extend our lead a bit. But win we did, even if it was against an Urawa team who clearly must have been getting results several levels above their performances so far this season judging by this outing. They really didn't offer much at all with only one shot on target I think. But I guess I shouldn’t be so negative. We’ve been playing well so far so our wins might not always be down to the opposition not playing well. Whichever way you look at it, this was a very welcome win and a somewhat rare clean sheet too. Plenty to be optimistic about. If only I could remember what those positives were. I’m going to throw all of my limited notes into one paragraph and be done with it. So, here we go!
Taniguchi was back and did a decent job. Nobori too. Morita is still going in the anchor role and also seems to be doing well I think. One slightly worrying aspect of this game was that Oshima seems to have picked up an injury. But given that he walked off the pitch maybe it’s not so bad. Fingers crossed. My notes say ‘make a joke about the atmosphere at the Saitama Stadium being better than usual even though it’s under corona conditions’ so consider that done. I felt that our shooting was a bit off in general but the stats say that almost half the shots were on target. Guess they were pretty soft. Sato was pretty kind to Urawa I thought. We had a definite penalty turned away and there were some Urawa fouls that really deserved yellows I thought. And Leonardo is an angry young man. He reminds me a bit of Olunga in that he seems unhappy if the ball doesn’t come exactly where he wants it so he can score. It didn’t and therefore he didn’t. Lovely! It’s great that our big money player Leandro Damiao doesn’t behave at all like that. Yamane’s finish was beautiful but slightly undermined later on by him absolutely skying an easier chance. But let’s forget that and focus on the very nice goal. Kobayashi and Leandro Damiao both scored again. Both were pretty easy finishes but you’ve got to be in the right place I guess. I wish I hadn’t drunk so much before I watched this game. I’m sorry. I’ve let you all down...
Next up Yokohama FC at home on Wednesday and then Shonan away next Sunday. On paper, both ‘easier’ games but with our record against ‘easier’ teams in mind, both eminently loseable. Fingers crossed. And fingers crossed for plenty more goals. We’re on target for 100 goals scored in a season. I really hope we can keep that pace going as it would be a lovely touché to all the praise that was heaped on YFM recently. Am I still bitter? You bet I am! Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL(Yellow card 36')
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 19. SAITO Manabu
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for NOBORIZATO 89')
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for KOBAYASHI 72')
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
FW 20. MIYASHIRO Taisei (on for SAITO 89')(Yellow card 90+4')
MF 25. TANAKA Ao (on for OSHIMA 45')
FW 30. HATATE Reo (on for WAKIZAKA 72')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Alcohol before the game doesn’t make for either deep or razor sharp analysis so we’ll have to go with gut feeling on this one...
IENAGA Akihiro - remember thinking on a few occasions that he was playing well. That’s about as in depth as your going to get. Sorry!
Another big win! And now we even have the luxury of no game for a whole week. Lovely! Unbelievable this was the seventh time we’ve scored five or more goals this season. Admittedly, we’re half way through the season now, but 44 points out of a possible 51, and 52 goals scored in 17 league games is a pretty amazing first half to any campaign. But still we have that troublesome pink mist hanging around, not right behind us, but certainly close enough to cause a few worries, especially given that they have a game in hand. Sadly our neighbours weren’t able to stop them winning at the weekend, but I guess we can take some consolation from the fact that our tricolor chums have lost another game. Obviously a draw would have been much better for us though. A mini midweek round of games will give some teams the opportunity to catch up on some fixtures. Cerezo will play Kobe, so hopefully local pride will boost a Kobe team who can’t even lay the claim to being best team in Kansai right now, let alone Asia. So, on Wednesday night the league table will look a bit clearer. FC Tokyo who are currently in third will also be playing, but that game will put them one game ahead of us. For this game Oniki did exactly what I hoped he would and shuffled the pack a bit with Taniguchi completely left out of the squad and rested and Yamamura taking his place in defence. Kurumaya came in for Nobori. Ienaga and Oshima were on the bench and another new midfield three was tried out. I was a bit suprised to not see Diogo come in for Yamane, but Yamane did more than enough to justify his inclusion and didn’t look anywhere near as knackered and out of form as he has recently. The rest of the pitch is as always a bit of a mystery. I don’t think any of us really know who are the first choices in the front three and as long as we keep smacking in the goals that’s fine by me. In any case, it was nice to see Manabu get another start. As usual, here are a few bullet points about this match.
Goals! Goals! Goals! -
As I mentioned above, it was lovely to score a load of goals again and particularly lovely to score them against Sanfrecce, who I don’t find particularly likeable. As has happened on so many occasions, we didn’t go nuts until the second half and at times in the first it looked like Hiroshima would give us a game. They broke through the middle on a few occasions, perhaps capitalising on some confusion as I can’t say for sure whether it was Ao or Morita playing in the anchor role. I’d guess it was Morita though, given that Ao scored two lovely goals from lovely passing moves. There’s certainly more to his game than we might have been led to believe by his performances in front of the defence. Aside from these two, Mitoma dribbled as is his wont and set up Leandro Damiao for a relatively easy tap in (easy if you’re in the right place at the right time). Damiao looked chuffed as usual. Mitoma didn’t do a great deal else in this game and he seems to have lost a bit of momentum recently. This is hugely unfair though as I’m sure I wouldn’t be feeling that way if he hadn’t started the season in such crazily good form. Kobayashi put away a penalty (always a nice thing to see) and although the Hiroshima players and fans had a few complaints about it, (on the pitch and on twitter), I think it’s pretty clear from some of the replays I’ve seen and in any case, the game was pretty much done at that stage anyway. Reading the recent updates to the laws it seems that even with them attempting to clarify the handball rule, there are numerous interpretations of the language, however cut and dry they may have tried to make it. My favourite of the goals was Yamamura’s. He absolutely smacked the ball in from just outside the box after a succession of our shots and chances had been successively cleared by the Hiroshima 10 man defence. Glorious! And even more so when certain details emerged after the game. It’s clear that this game was won in the 10 minutes after half time when we just couldn’t stop scoring. It’s been a common factor that we come out blazing in the second half but I don’t think we’ve blazed so brightly yet this year. Yamamura is the 15th player to score for us this year which is a hell of a stat in half a season. We really seem like a team though rather than a collection of independent individuals, with everyone playing for one another and happy to see each other score. Sure, we are shooting a lot more than last year, but at the same time it seems that we’re encouraging everyone to shoot and score and join in the fun. Lovely! Shame we conceded a goal though, but you can’t really complain when we scored five. Sung-Ryong complained quite a bit though, but it did look like a good finish, and at that stage of the game perhaps people weren’t quite concentrating 100%. Would have loved a clean sheet, but I appreciate this comment will make opposition fans dislike me even more so I probably shouldn’t have said it.
Emotions -
This turned out to be a bit of an emotional game. Yamamura revealed after the match that he and his wife had lost their third child at the age of two months earlier this year. I imagine this explains his muted but somehow still slightly joyful celebration for his goal. When he scored my first thought was that it’s pretty good when you’re playing a midfielder/striker at the back and they have that kind of finish in their locker for this kind of occasion. Credit to him, he had another good game at centre back. I’d love to see him have a chance to play further forward again some time, but the fact that we have no defenders and absolutely loads of forwards suggests that most of his match time this year will be at the back. Kurumaya had a good game too, which I guess means that he might play at left back more and suggests that Yamamura at centre back will be even more important.
Also somewhat emotional was Ao. Apparently he was looking at this game as his ‘last chance’ which is pretty crazy, as I’m sure most of us would consider him a crucial player for us. He has had a few slightly dodgy games recently, but no-one is able to perform at 100% all the time so I wish he wouldn’t worry about it like he has apparently been. To score twice in a game that you consider your last chance is a pretty good way to give your confidence a boost. We really are spoilt for choice in the midfield right now. Whether the fact that he scored twice playing a little further forward will mean that he will continue in that position is another thing. But as he’s done pretty well for the most part further back, I don’t think we really have to worry where he’s playing. Keep up the good work!
New kind of fun -
Of course it goes without saying that the Corona football experience is a pretty different beast to a usual Frontale match day. Not saying I haven’t been enjoying the games though. I thought at the start of the year that the experience would be so sterile that I wouldn’t really want to go back till I could shout and sing a bit. Perhaps the performances on the pitch have helped gloss over the quietness in the stands. You can’t help feel that we would have had some amazing atmospheres this year with the way we’re playing though. It’s a shame, but of course there are more important things going on than singing at a football match. The club are trying to do their bit to get some socially distanced fun going though with the usual guests and on this occasion a ball kicked into the stadium from a Frontale fan working at the South Pole. Some might say that there was some kind of camera trickery involved but all I’m saying is I saw him kick the ball at the South Pole and I saw it enter the stadium from the corner, (perhaps conveniently a corner that probably no-one was really looking at). It was an orange ball too, so that pretty much proves it had come from a snowy place, right? Not sure how Fronta managed to make it from the South Pole to Todoroki so quickly though. Magic, I guess. It was weird to see him take the penalty as usually he’s in goal trying to stop it. In spite of it being Fronta taking it Cabrera looked gutted to concede, probably as it was a nutmeg. Thankfully Komuzo was on hand to console.
I guess I’d better wrap this up now as I seem to be writing more about the pre-game mascot penalty kick than any of the actual goals. Perhaps I could do with a break too. And a break is exactly what we have! Until next Sunday when we face Urawa in Saitama. Not particularly a trip I’m going to get too upset about missing. Sure, it’s not far, (at least on the train. The walk from the station is another matter), but it always seems a bit lacking in excitement. Although right now I think we’d all be very happy to be able to go to any away game. But an away game with no singing might be even weirder than a home game with no singing and would probably come down to a red-raw hands volume-related clap-off between the opposing fans. I wonder if Urawa’s ‘great’ fans will give us the welcome that we’ve been affording to the opposition at our home games. Guess we’ll never know and I guess I should shut up before I irritate any more teams’ followers in this one post. Fingers crossed we can get a good result in this game and keep our good season going! After that, it’s Yokohama FC at home the following Wednesday. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
FW 30. HATATE Reo
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 19. SAITO Manabu
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for WAKIZAKA 46')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 71')
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru (on for HATATE 46')
FW 20. MIYASHIRO Taisei (on for SAITO 71')
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for TANAKA 89')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Good performances all round and some really good ones too. With that in mind but also considering I’m a sucker for emotional stuff I’ll give it jointly to…
YAMAMURA Kazuya & TANAKA Ao - well done to both of them for the goals, the overall play given the circumstances.
Well, that’s a relief! We really dodged a bullet again in this game and probably would have counted ourselves lucky to come away with a draw, let alone the win we ended up with. Once again, I think the reason behind the dodgy performance is pretty clearly fatigue, particularly at the back. It’s hardly worth me writing this again, but the health of the centre backs is going to either make or break this season. Not sure why we didn’t get anyone in when we could. Not sure how likely Kamiya is to ever play. Not sure why we haven’t called on Kurumaya or Yamamura a bit more. I guess the answers to the last two questions are ‘not very likely’ and ‘because Oniki’s not sure about them’, both of which make the mystery behind the first question a bit more mysterious. In any case, I’m sure there will be plenty more opportunities for me to write about this in the future so let’s leave it for the time being. The games keep coming thick and fast so I’m going to do another speedy blog post on this game and give myself plenty of time to rest and recover between posts. Fatigue is an issue for fans as well as players. Which leads nicely onto my first point
So tired... -
Much like against Nagoya and then in the first of these endless Wednesdays against Kobe, we look knackered. This is exemplified by Taniguchi who has played a ridiculous amount of minutes this season, started this game with an almost calamitous error and kind of continued in the same way for the rest of the match. I’m not going to blame anyone though, as clearly they are being pushed to perform well beyond what would normally be expected. However, once again he needs a rest in the next game. I think Jesiel looked much sharper and fresher so maybe he can play, but please for the sake of his physical and mental well being, give Taniguchi a rest! Also in the close to dead on their feet club are Noborizato (huge improvement in that position when Kurumaya came on I thought), Yamane and to a lesser extent Morita and Kobayashi. Morita has had some great games recently and is continuously getting denied goals (once by the ref when the ball was behind the line, yesterday by a Kobe handball which gave us our first penalty), but in this game looked like he was running out of steam. Kobayashi had a bit of a bad game, probably only hitting the target with his penalty (thankful for that!) but otherwise looking like the Kobayashi of the lean spells in 2019 rather than this year’s ‘come on and immediately score’ Kobayashi. Aside from a couple fo lovely passes and one shot, Ienaga was pretty quiet too. And Mitoma who came on as a second half sub for Hatate who looked to have picked up a potentially bad injury (fingers crossed it’s not, get well soon!), was the Mitoma who occasionally limply starts games rather than the super sub we’ve come to know. He didn’t do much at all in this game to be honest. But like I said above, I’m not looking to blame. Let’s give the rotation thing another good old spin for one or two games and refresh things a bit. Ao should come back after having a few games out. I’d like to see Kurumaya at left back, Diogo at right back and Yamamura and Jesiel in the middle. As for the the other areas of the pitch, we’re not really short of numbers but we should definitely shuffle it a bit I reckon.
Unlucky but maybe not so unlucky Kobe -
You’ve got to feel for Kobe. Well you would have to feel for them if they weren’t so absurdly financially privileged but yet still messing things up. Apparently on the J League forums the Kobe fans were calling for Mikitani to splash some more cash after the game but you would have thought by now that they’d realise that there’s more to building a good team than constantly buying players. Marinos could probably do well to notice this too. They seem to just buy a replacement for anyone who has a bad run of form and then stick with them till the same thing happens. After getting absolutely smacked by us last week you’d imagine that Kobe would have been up for some revenge. Obviously that scoreline was unlikely to happen again in this game and it did seem that they’d learned some things from last week. Furuhashi seemed to be playing further forward and therefore denied Jesiel the option of charging to the halfway line and tackling him every time the ball came near him. They scored two decent goals (although in the interests of being biased, I’ll add that both came from them breaking through the same side of the defence where two very tired players were playing), had a lot of good chances where we can feel very relived to have got away with not conceding, and perhaps you could say our atrocious finishing was partly down to the quality of their defending. Or perhaps it was more to do with our players tiredness. They didn’t even give us any Iikura or Dankler cock-up chances which is annoying for us but probably refreshing for them. But in a game where we could barely trouble the keeper from open play, they gave us two penalties and two goals. The first was at the other end of the pitch and was a bit of a mystery till I saw the highlights and the defender’s hand clearly diverted the shot. Certainly it took a while for anyone around me to notice that it had been given. The second was right in front of us and clear as day. I think there could have been a case for sending the defender off as it was clearly a pretty nasty tackle. Looking at the replay and seeing the Kobe players protesting that he got the ball is pretty laughable. It’s long gone by the time the defender steps on Damiao’s foot and clatters through him. Kobe looked so happy when they scored their second and went a goal ahead and then to throw it away and end up losing must have been pretty hard for them to take. Especially when for the majority of the game we were pretty rubbish. But when they were ahead they were doing plenty of time-wasting, Furuhashi still can’t help but dive every opportunity he gets and when they went behind they were really putting the boot in on our players so maybe they got what they deserved and we got what we didn’t really deserve. To win a game after playing like this not only damages the opposition’s confidence, it should also boost ours. We really got away with it in this game. I just hope that Oniki doesn’t repeat the mistakes that he made with selections after our last dodgy and tired performance against Nagoya and that he instead responds as he did after the first dodgy and tired game against Kobe which followed. Come on Oniki and spin that rotation wheel!
Changes sometimes changing things -
The subs in this game were a little weird I thought. The first one was enforced with Mitoma replacing Hatate after the injury. Not sure why Manabu was moved to the right though instead of putting Mitoma there as it might have given us something different. Perhaps this limited our options a little and affected Oniki’s decision for the triple change. Sadly there weren’t really any options to change some of the players who were really struggling but to leave Kobayashi on was a bit of a mystery. I think I’ve said it before, (in fact I think I’ve probably said it about 7 times before), but if Kobayashi starts and has a nightmare first half he’s still given plenty of the second half till he’s replaced. If it’s Damiao starting he’s invariably hooked at half time. I felt that Damiao changed the game for us. It’s become a bit of a trope that whenever Damiao scores we always lose or draw and he never gets the chance to be the hero. In this match though, he really turned the game. Admittedly he only scored a penalty rather than a goal from open play. And he also won the penalty after totally fluffing a shot with a fresh air kick. But he also started the move that got our winner. The fact that Miyashiro scored that winner was very welcome. I was pondering on my recent J Talk Podcast appearance as to whether now Miyashiro had scored his first goal he wold be able to push on and really start playing well in the same way Mitoma and Hatate did and it seems he can. His finish was well taken and showed none of the nerves that he looked to have been playing with in early games this year. I’m delighted for him! Don’t take all this praise for Damiao and whinges about Kobayashi in this game too personally though. Their fates have been reversed in plenty of games with Damiao not being able to do anything and then Kobayashi coming on and totally bossing it. Perhaps this is more grist for my starting-striker-doesn’t-do-well mill. They are both crucial players for us and as long as one of them is doing the business to make up for the other’s shortcomings, that’ll be just fine. And they really seem to have a good relationship too. Good on them!
Other business -
The usual few throwaway comments here. Thorsten Fink seemed to be trying to bring the funk with his shirt and tie paired with white trainers combo. Reminded me of late eighties/early nineties UK weddings when some friends of the the groom’s late teens brother turned up looking for some dancing, some ladies and a good time. Sharp! The rhythmic clap was back in this game! Not sure we should really do it when we’re defending a corner or about to take a penalty though. Perhaps the fine details need a bit of work. And come on Cerezo, throw us a bone. We’re coming dangerously close to messing things up but somehow keep winning and then every game they win too. I can’t believe the same team we whalloped are getting so many good results. Someone give them a game please as they still have a game in hand on us, and as delighted as we are with our start to the season and our good results, as long as they are lingering there behind us, we’re always in danger of a defensive injury and some bad results handing them the lead and possibly the title. I’m trying to not get too carried away about our season so far and the pink mist in our periphery is a good reminder that nothing is won yet.
Next up Hiroshima at home in the league on Sunday. This will be another challenging one as they’ve been doing alright and they always give us a tough game. Hopefully we’ll rotate and hopefully we’ll win. And hopefully Cerezo will lose. Although as they’re playing Marinos I’d settle for a 0-0 in that game. After that, we’ve got a full week off which to be honest, couldn’t come at a better time. Any break in the schedule is very welcome right now! If we can pick up three points on Sunday that will give us a very pleasant week to rest and recuperate. Fingers crossed. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 30. HATATE Reo
FW 19. SAITO Manabu
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for NOBORIZATO 66')
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for IENAGA 66')
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for KOBAYASHI 76')
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru (on for HATATE 56')
FW 20. MIYASHIRO Taisei (on for SAITO 66')
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
My Frontale Man Of The Match
As I’ve said many times above, this was not a vintage performance so not many options. Slightly bizarrely, given that he spent less time on the pitch than anyone else, I’m going to give it to….
LEANDRO DAMIAO - didn’t have much time but didn’t need much time. Won and converted the penalty, and started the move for the winner. No overhead kicks in this game and no spectacular goals, but it was the boost he gave us that meant we won the game, so well done to him!
