We’ve done it! It looked like we were getting a bit wobbly but it’s lovely to have won the league in quite some style, 5-0 against the second placed team. Perhaps given the consequences of the result and my general lack of notes, the actual details of the game have already faded a little from my memory. But then again, if you really need to know the details I’m sure it’s pretty easy to re-watch it on DAZN or somewhere else. Instead, I will waffle on a bit and get excited about an achievement that everyone seemed to think would 100% happen, but I doubted right up until the final whistle on Wednesday. Better not to jinx anything etc. All I can jinx now is us setting a new goals scored record (having set a new single-stage season points record on Wednesday), but I’m still not going to count on anything positive happening. Just my way, I guess! By the way, I’m on the latest J-Talk Podcast where I say most of the things I’ve written here and some other stuff too so if you are interested or don’t like reading, you can listen to that here
The main thing to take away from this game aside from the title is the fact that we’re back to scoring goals again. After a couple of very disappointing defeats to Consadole and Oita which sandwiched a delightful win against Yokohama F Marinos where we shot a lot but left the actual scoring late, and an away draw at Kashima which was pretty low on quality in front of goal from either team, we’re back to scoring lots again. Five against the only remaining team who could challenge us for the title was a lovely way to secure it. I felt that Gamba, after conceding the first two goals found themselves in but of a horrible situation where they didn’t know whether to stick (with a two goal defeat and preserve some of their goal difference in pursuit of a second place finish and an Emperor’s Cup semi final place) or twist (and try to get back into the game and keep their slim title hopes alive but risk getting a walloping). In the end though, it didn’t really seem to matter what they decided to do as we were clearly smarting from an awful choking away at Oita and had a point to prove. Three goals for Ienaga was magnificent as we all really love him, don’t we? Damiao scored a beauty to set us on our way from a Nobori cross. Who knows how many he might have scored if we’d tried crossing it to him a bit more previously? And Manabu put the icing on the cake right at the end, also delighting the crowd and getting him off the mark in the league this year. Perhaps the most startling thing was that everyone seemed to be really keen to set up everyone else. Mitoma was unbelievably unselfish in setting up Ienaga for his hat-trick, which was magnificent. When Kengo came on, everyone was laying it off to him to shoot but sadly he couldn’t score. The way we have spread the goals around this year suggests that we are quite an unselfish team and on occasions in this game I think we were perhaps excessively unselfish, but as we had a handsome lead at that stage we were all able to just enjoy it. Hopefully this kind of goal scoring form will continue for the rest of the season and perhaps we can get a few more players on the scoresheet. (After all, only 17 different players have scored so far this year…).
The celebrations at the end of the game were slightly weird, but not as weird as I thought they would be. Social distancing and Covid rules meant that we were denied the chance to sing our songs and do our victory routine but it was still a wonderful experience. I really felt for Taniguchi, whose red card against Oita prevented him from lifting the league title as captain. But instead it gave Kengo the opportunity to raise one of the trophies and Oshima the other. Of course winning the league is a season-long and squad-wide achievement, but being on the stage and lifting the cup is something that is apparently restricted to only the match day squad. I hope the fact that not lifting it himself hasn’t upset him too much.
Honestly, it seems that I don’t really have much to say about this game. It’s all about the feelings I guess and I’m sure if you’re reading this as a Frontale fan you’ll be feeling them and if you’re reading this as an opposition fan you will have just vomited. Next up, a weekend of wild celebration. Well for me anyway. Hopefully the players will limit themselves to mild celebration and save the wild stuff for when we’re all finished. Hopefully we’ll carry this form on into the remaining games which start with an away trip to Shimizu next weekend which hopefully won’t be ruined by the increasing number of new Covid cases here in Japan. After that, it’s Sagan Tosu away, Urawa home for the last home game of the season and then a season finisher away to Kashima which has got to be the crappiest place to finish the season given their absolute disgust for opposition fans and the tiny allocation we receive. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess. For now, GO (CELEBRATE) FRONTALE! And then get back on it and hopefully make some more history!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for TANAKA 90+4')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 83')
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo (on for OSHIMA 86')
FW 19. SAITO Manabu (on for MITOMA 86')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 30. HATATE Reo (on for IENAGA 83')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
In a game where a player scores a hat-trick it seems weird to not give him the man of the match award, but I’ll cop out like they did in the stadium and give it to….
THE WHOLE SQUAD - yeah, bit lame isn’t it? But this game was emblematic of a season where the good performances have been so widespread that they all deserve it. Normal service will probably resume in the next game.
From an exhilarating result (in what wasn’t the best performance) against Yokohama F Marinos to this crushing disappointment (in what was an utterly awful performance, particularly in the first half) in only three days. Amazing! Or probably more accurately, shocking! Oita away was a game that we scraped through in last year thanks to a Maguinho goal. This year, no Maguinho, no goals. And if we’re being honest a lucky 1-0 defeat. When I woke up without a hangover I should have known that something was going to go wrong. When we managed to get a seat on the train I should have know something was going to go wrong. When the bus to the stadium was relatively painless and the weather was nice I should have known something was going to go wrong. And when we played like absolute shit for the first thirty minutes I should have… You get the point. People might say that this game turned on the red card for Taniguchi but the truth is we were already really struggling at that point and in fact in the second half with ten men we were considerably better than we had been with eleven. But we lost. And one shot on target in the whole game tells you why. As we approach the finish line we’ve been stuttering more and more and we’ve now got to pray that we don’t fluff our lines again on Wednesday in another title deciding game at home against Gamba. As this blog post is coming pretty late and the next game is fast approaching I’ll not go into too much detail but here are a few things that we might have noticed from this game.
Curse of Kyushu title deciders -
Reflecting on this horror show I was reminded of another day in Kyushu with a player returning to their home town and the wheels coming off. In 2016 with two games to go of the first stage we visited Avispa with Yoshito Okubo’s family in attendance and totally failed to beat the bottom team in the league and effectively throw away a potential (if a bit underwhelming) first stage title. This time round it was captain Taniguchi, born in kind of nearby Kumamoto, who had his family in attendance. The family could have gone home before half time and missed the traffic though as his part in the game was over early on. Kyushu away games are a lot of fun, but it seems like we always make hard work of them. Hopefully this might change in the future. I don’t think we can complain about the red card. I have to admit that I don’t really understand this double jeopardy thing where you can’t get a red card and a penalty at the same time, except sometimes you can, but I’ll defer to people who do know the rules. The Oita striker went down pretty easily but Taniguchi floundering and letting the ball bounce over his head and straight to him meant that he was going to get a chance to make the most of any contact and win a penalty and get a better opportunity to be able to beat Sung-Ryong, who it’s fair to say played a bit of a blinder in this game. If it weren’t for him we could have been really embarrassed. Interesting though that the ref Kasahara has now sent Taniguchi off twice, so if you’re looking for some subtext, let’s fabricate one saying that he doesn’t like ikemen players. Or perhaps he just knows the rules.
Where have all the defenders gone? -
Perhaps when Jesiel picked up his fifth booking of the season and therefore a ban for this game in our last match, the seeds for some defensive trouble were sown. Or perhaps it was when Yamamura picked up a muscle injury away at Kashima. More likely, and this is something that I’ve said before, but thankfully haven’t had reason to trumpet too much this season, the real problem is the fact that we only have three central defenders in our squad. It seems that Kamiya is nowhere near starting so that takes us down to two. Jesiel being banned meant that Kurumaya had to step in, which is never something I want to see as I’d much rather he were playing on the left. No Yamamura to cover on the bench meant that if we had any problems at the back, (like a red card, just picking an example out of the air here), we were really going to have some issues. However, Morita did a pretty good job there in this match, I thought. I recently remembered that Yamane played at centre back for Shonan so I wonder why we haven’t tried him there. Would come as a bit of a shock though given that he spends most of the game in the opposition’s penalty box. It’s pretty bad though that in a potentially title deciding game we played more than half of the match with no recognized centre backs. The same problem is coming on Wednesday against Gamba where Jesiel will be back and Taniguchi will be suspended. Against the team in second place in the league… So no worries there, eh?
Choking point -
I thought we’d put to the bed the accusations of us being chokers but it does look quite like that is exactly what we’re doing at the moment. After scoring boatloads of goals earlier in the season we are now struggling to get more than one a game (except when we play teams with absolutely shambolic defences). It didn’t occur to me that quite a lot of our squad haven’t won the league. Ao, Wakizaka, Mitoma, Hatate, Miyashiro, Damiao, Jesiel and Yamane all weren’t around the last time we won the league and perhaps they are feeling the pressure a bit now we’re so close. I really feel for Ao who looked utterly dejected and bowed for so long and so deeply after the game, in spite of being one of the best players in the game. (For some reason he was on the right wing towards the end and looked pretty damn good!). This pressure is only going to increase as we blow subsequent chances to take the title, so I really hope we can do it soon. Otherwise what was looking like being a wonderful record breaking season could turn into the choke of all chokes. Considering that we’ve already surpassed the final points total of many previous champions it would be pretty shocking if we too were surpassed in the same season. Obviously it would have been ideal for us to win the title by winning the game in Oita. We had a potentially underwhelming but still welcome opportunity to win it on Sunday but Urawa failed to prevent Gamba from beating them. Wednesday is a massive six pointer in which we actually only need one point. If we don’t get at least a point you’ve got to think the momentum will have really swung in Gamba’s favour and we’ll probably spend the rest of the season losing and praying someone can take a point off Gamba and hand us the title. Winning the title by any method would be great, but it would be nice if we could do it by beating our nearest rival but I’m not ultra confident after watching the last few games. No pressure guys. Fingers crossed.
Big names back but not really doing anything -
We are now relatively injury free so it should be plain sailing shouldn’t it? Well, it hasn’t really been. Hasegawa looks to still be lacking some sharpness after his long lay-off. He’s got nowhere near back to where he was at the start of the year. Similarly with Kobayashi, and you can’t imagine that penalty miss against Yokohama will have done his confidence much good, (seriously, please stop taking them! You’re only punishing yourself). Damiao has been pretty quiet recently and doesn’t really seem to get a chance in most games. Kobayashi gets the chances but misses them. I’m a bit worried that Oniki is picking the team based on memories rather than on what is happening in front of him. It’s Kengo’s last season but I’m not sure he should be starting too many games. He lost the ball in midfield for the attack that led to the red card. Saito seems to be trying hard but nothing much is coming off. Oshima seems to play better from the bench than from the start (like many others actually). And recently Yamane has been more noticeable for going missing at the back than doing anything going forward. I should temper all of this with a big caveat that it has been a long and tiring season and bodies and minds are knackered. I just think that Oniki has to make his team selections with form rather than reputations in mind. What’s happened to Miyashiro? Hatate seems to have fallen out of favour a bit. Maybe Diogo could come in to give Yamane a rest. I don’t expect Oniki to change the whole 11 but I think he probably needs to change a few players to get us over the line.
Support -
We took a big crowd to Oita but our support was pretty poor. Oita don’t allow drums, which is a bit annoying when they have pre-recorded drumming and singing they can play and then clap along with. We didn’t, although I wonder if they would have allowed us to bring in a mini-amp attached to an mp3 player with some of our own recorded stuff. Probably not. The Kazoku attended this game in full but weren’t leading the clapping. I have no evidence for this, but I feel somehow that the recent criticism of them has upset them a bit. In case you haven’t heard there are voices online saying that people preferred it without them and that since they have come back to coordinate the support we have been rubbish on the pitch. You can’t really argue with the evidence on the pitch but I’d say it has nothing to do with the drumming and clapping coordination. The atmosphere against YFM at home was great I thought and I for one am really happy the drums are back. In the first half of this game the Kazoku sat towards the back not getting involved. Some brave soul tried to start some kind of clapping but the whole experience, much like our performance on the pitch was pretty flat. In the second half the Kazoku struck, with the big drummer down the front to try and get some more organized clapping going. It was much better but still a bit lacklustre but that’s probably due to the lack of drums. There was definitely a feeling on my part though that the difference between the standard of first half support and the second half support was being clearly demonstrated. If they were trying to make a point that they are needed, I totally agree with them. Maybe many fans don’t like everything they do, but without them to lead us, it's pretty lame.
That’ll do. This has probably been a disappointment for any rival fans looking to come and see me have a meltdown. Put simply we were crap in this game and got what we deserved. I’ve heard words said about the surface, but we can’t blame the grass every time we don’t turn up. Hopefully we can put it behind us and get the job done on Wednesday, perhaps with a bit of a change of personnel. You’ve got to imagine that Ienaga will be back in the side against his old team. Hopefully someone will manage to get a few shots on target. We might even challenge their keeper. Oh, I can dream… Anyway, fingers crossed we can dazzle our way to another title. But I guess I’d settle for an utterly quality free goalless draw too. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo(Red card 34')
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
FW 19. SAITO Manabu
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for SAITO 76')
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for YAMANE 79')
DF 17. DIOGO MATEUS
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru (on for HASEGAWA 46')
MF 25. TANAKA Ao (on for NAKAMURA 46')
MF 30. HATATE Reo (on for KOBAYASHI 60')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
In a game as bad as this, there was never going to be many players to choose from. Honorable mentions go to Morita and Kurumaya for just about hanging on as a defensive partnership and to Ao for his endless enthusiasm and energy. But it really has to go to…
Sung-Ryong JUNG - Went a long way towards saving our blushes by keeping us in the game when we were having an utterly awful first half. Some amazing saves and can’t in any way be blamed for not saving the penalty.
One more win and we’ve done it. And how nice it was to get what could be the second last win before a title against our noisy local rivals. So now we have the opportunity to win our third league title in four years away against Oita this weekend. Even if we don’t win we can take the title with a draw and a Gamba loss but that would mean having to wait till Sunday. And I think we’d much rather do it ourselves than having someone else do it for us. The 2018 title sealing game was a weird one. Losing away to Cerezo and then still clinching it thanks to other results. If we win the title on Saturday it’s going to be an equally weird one, given that we’re not allowed to sing or high five or do the ‘Vai la de Frontale’ dance thing. But obviously it still would be pretty great. We’ve played so well for the majority of this season that many people imagined that the title was sealed a long time ago. But it would be nice to get over the line and then I can stop worrying so much about jinxes and we might see some of the other squad members. Given the fact that the next game is coming up pretty soon, and this week I have been pretty busy with work, and we are leaving for Kyushu tomorrow I’m going to speed through this blog post in pretty slapdash style. You probably already know what I’m going to say anyway, so maybe I don’t even need to write this. In any case, here we go.
The usual Marinos rants -
Do they only play like this when they play us? If not, I have no idea how they have such a reputation for beautiful football. Sure they attack a lot, but nowhere near as much as they foul. Junior Santos aside, who for some reason I have decided is a bit of a gent (check out his recent life story on the latest J Talk Podcast), this is a team of hackers and divers. (Note to Marinos fans reading this, that’s the bit that you should copy and paste onto twitter. Or possibly something that’s coming later…). Of course I’m biased but they have to be the dirtiest team we’ve played this year. They finished the game with one red and four yellows, but there were numerous incidents where the utter nonsense refereeing protocol that seems to be being followed this year prevented the game finishing with loads more cards. Theeraton ‘head-butted’ Yamane and didn’t even get booked. I say head butted having only watched the replay once and thinking it was one of those stupid head-pushes more than head-butts, but there’s no way you can not book a player for doing that. Marcos Junior who I’ve previously railed against but in recent times have come to see more as a forward who really really can’t tackle, made more than a few awful fouls. My real ire though is for the walking areshole that is Erik. I say walking, but diving would probably be more accurate. Erik’s ability to find an elbow in a complete lack of any contact is amazing. I suspect he could also find a penguin at the North Pole and an iceberg in the Sahara. Apparently he has recently become a father again and you have to wonder what kind of example he’s setting his kids with his flopping and whinging. I think we’d all like to see an FC Tokyo Yokohama F Marinos game with a Leandro and Erik face-off. With one of them being so willing to dish out the elbows and the other so willing to create them out of nothing. Really something for all those elbow fetishists out there. (I looked for the technical word, and couldn’t find a satisfying one). For some reason Sung-Ryong raced halfway up the pitch to shove Erik in the second half, apparently randomly, but you just know the little arsehole had probably been doing something arseholey for the preceding 80 minutes. Definitely worth taking a booking for the satisfaction that seeing the tiny shit put on his backside gave the majority of the crowd, I’d say. Oh, and no Marinos grumblefest would be complete without a mention of the surly old gaffer Mr. Postecoglou, who was complaining to the ref at half time. The cheek of it! Presumably he thought a (hilarious) handball outside the box shouldn’t have counted or that Theeraton’s non-existent punishment for his head-butt was way over the top. Probably thought Yamane should have been booked for irritating one of his players. I’m sure he wouldn’t get away with the comments that you can pick up on the pitchside mic if they were being made in Japanese instead of English. You can clearly hear him telling the referee that he doesn’t know the rules of the game. And see him wagging his finger a lot. Pretty rotten really. Maybe there’s something slightly Trumpian about Postecoglou (who much like Boris Johnson, should be called by his last name and never be referred to by only his first name is that is making something friendly and fun out of what is truly a detestable human being), and equally about some Marinos fans on Twitter in that they don’t seem to be particularly willing to accept events. (Apologies to the nice Marinos fans here for even slightly associating you with that comparison). We’ll see how well they do in the ACL, but given that they’ve been playing their first team quite a lot recently and not doing well enough to get much higher than 7th in the table even though they’ve played up to four games more than the teams around them, they might not find the ACL as much of a breeze as some think they will. One final comment is that in a way the red card might have hindered us a bit, as the replacement keeper was damn good so props to him. Bit annoying that both of our local rivals have what seem like excellent young prospects between the sticks. Well played Obi.
Ref -
Yeah, I know I’ve moaned a lot about the dirty Marinos players but don’t think that means I’m gong to let the ref off the hook. Another gutless performance letting a game get totally out of hand with an inability to actually show cards when they are required. Can only imagine that this is a league diktat this season as the crappiness is spread extremely widely over all officialdom as far as I can see. And the linesman down our end was rubbish too.
Nice things -
After all that negativity, let’s say at least some nice things. This wasn’t a vintage performance from us (particularly in front of goal again), but we got a lovely result. With our opponents down to ten men we still couldn’t really fashion that many decent chances for most of the game. But we did when it mattered (in injury time, three times, hehe). Kobayashi missing the penalty seemed so inevitable that it actually wasn’t really upsetting somehow. Lots will be said about Mitoma’s run for the final goal and it caused a bit of an explosion in the stands. I found the experience pretty moving I have to say. From a Frontale point of view, there was something of a Hollywood feel to this game. The bad guys being bad and nasty and us unable to take advantage due to some tragic misfortune (not being able to shoot…) only for everything to get wrapped up late on with a rousing finale. Jesiel’s goal was celebrated wildly on the pitch. Mitoma’s great run which even included a nutmeg for the cameras and resulted in a successful pass and a successful finish from Kobayashi left players strewn across the pitch in bizarre little groups of emotion. It was nice that we could get within touching distance of the title with a win against not only one of our biggest rivals but also last season’s champions. Quite an emotional time really.
Running out of time... -
I really need to finish this post so everything else will be reduced to a sentence or two without explanation (readers breath a sigh of relief…). Here we go in no particular order. Our distribution out from the back was horrible in this game. Jesiel is banned for the next game. Kobayashi’s late goal was the first from one of our main strikers for 5 games. We’ve definitely been struggling there recently. Manabu’s one-two off the ref was hilarious and I was delighted he put in a lovely cross for the first goal. The goal we conceded was soft, but I don’t care as we won. They only had two shots on target but they still scored once… We struggled against ten men and they looked dangerous at times, but hell, so did we too and with a few tweaks we might be back to scoring for fun again. I am really into the new drumming song that starts with a soft bass drum gradually building in volume till the snares come in. I hope we can keep that one and add some words when we can sing again. Possibly a stupid idea, but are we allowed to hum instead of sing? I want us to hum out a few songs on Saturday. Oh and finally, I don’t think I mentioned it, but Erik is a little shit.
Next up Oita and potentially something special. I’ve got to wrap this up and start packing my bag for the trip. Maybe the next blog post will be less catty and more informative. Fingers crossed for that and the next game. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG (Yellow card 81')
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL(Yellow card 50')
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 19. SAITO Manabu
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for TANAKA 46')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 65')
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo (on for WAKIZAKA 82')
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru (on for HASEGAWA 46')
MF 30. HATATE Reo (on for SAITO 65')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Not going to mess around and think about this too hard. It’s a crappy thing to do to just give it to goal scorers but…
MITOMA Kaoru & JESIEL - not Mitoma’s best match but was definitely his best and most eye-catching run and dribble for Kobayashi’s goal. Lovely! And good to see that Jesiel is in goal scoring mood even if the forwards aren’t. Both players really showed what the goals meant to them. Lovely!
A trip to Kashima is never a particularly enticing prospect. Doing so in a pandemic year adds a little something extra. In a way, it’s a shame that due to Corona virus we had to sacrifice some nice away trips yet still got lumbered with this one. But given that it is Kengo’s last season and we are potentially on the verge of something quite special we decided to go for it and make the trip. Little were we to know that on Saturday morning it would be announced that Kashima had a Corona virus breakout in their camp and there were some doubt as to whether the game would actually be able to go ahead. In a normal season we would gave probably already been well on our way to line up for an hour before and then sit the stadium for three hours until kick off twiddling our thumbs. So in a way we can be thankful that this wasn’t a normal year. The late call to go ahead with the game came a little after 13:00 which was thankfully an hour before our bus was due to leave. The bus journey is always a bummer, but a bus journey to a canceled game would have been a bummer of huge proportions. I heard that if the game was called off when we were en-route the bus would turn around, which to be honest shows the benefits of booking a football game specific bus rather than the regular one. But as it was, none of this happened. Kashima apparently had one infected player and only a handful of others were deemed to have had close contact so they were able to put out a team which didn’t contain any of them and the game went ahead. Perhaps this corona tinted selection was the reason that we got to see Nara who it seemed has been hugely out of favour this year. Typically, this left him with something to prove. To show the manager what he’d been missing and to show his new fans that he doesn’t have any lingering Frontale feelings. He annoyingly did a good job, but as a past Nara super fan I would have expected nothing less. As for the rest of the Kashima line-up, it seems that only Yamamoto has spent a similar amount of time off the pitch this season as Nara, so it seems that Kashima were very lucky with the extent of the contact their Corona’d player had with the first team. Hopefully none of the players who actually played will turn out later to have actually had the virus and potentially passed it on. To be honest, after the Sagan Tosu/FC Tokyo Corona game debacle, I would have expected the league to have been a bit more careful and just called the game off. Neither Frontale or Kashima have ACL commitments, so potentially it could have been rescheduled. Hang on, I thought Kashima were in the ACL this year, weren’t they?… Oh… (We at least make it to the group stage before we supremely disappoint in spite of us playing our strongest line up). Anyway, this is enough Corona talk and Kashima baiting for now and let’s move on to what we might have learnt from this match.
Back! Back! Back! -
One big surprise in the selections for this mach was the return of Hasegawa to the bench. People often mention Oshima’s mystery injury absences but Hasegawa seemed to have totally disappeared from public view. There were some pictures of him in training but he seemed to be getting no closer to returning. For weeks I have been meaning to write about it in one of these blog posts but never got round to doing it till it was too late. It’s great to see him back and I hope he can get back to his early season form and his combinations with Damiao. It didn’t happen in this match though, but it was his first pitch time in ages so I’m just going to be delighted that he’s back. Also back was Oshima. This could be a crucial time for him to come back as we’ve wobbled a little recently and could do with him playing a big part again. Oniki shuffled the midfield a little from our loss to Sapporo and we saw Ao back in the anchor position with Kengo and Wakisaka ahead of him. Morita and Hatate disappeared from the match day squad. Up front we went with Damiao, Ienaga and Mitoma. We haven’t scored many goals recently and this trend continued in this game. Damiao seems to be great with the dirty parts of being a forward but isn’t really getting any chances. Whether that is down to him or down to his teammates or down to the opposition, I don’t know. It’s a bit of a shame though, particularly considering that Kobayashi is injured, and Miyashiro was out of the squad. It seems that Yamamura is now the back up striker, (instead of being the back up centre back), but he hasn’t really been called on for many minutes so perhaps Oniki isn’t sure about it. You’ve go to think that he’s going to be a fairly similar player to Damiao though, given his height and we’re still not giving Diogo a chance to play to those strengths with his crosses, so that’s clearly not helping things either. It was somewhat refreshing to see that they players who’d had dodgy games against Sapporo seemed to be back to some kind of form. Ienaga looked a lot better. As did Yamane. But we were still pretty toothless in front of goal which is something we’re going to have to deal with soon. It’s only two games where we haven’t won, but both in this game and the Sapporo game (and the Tokyo game to a certain extent), we really haven’t been testing the keeper enough. Against Tokyo we had 27 shots with only a third of them being on target. Sapporo saw us only make 11 chances with only six on target and this game we had 17 shots with only five on target. We only managed to score from a breakaway counter attack. We were unlucky though on a few occasions, hitting the post whilst dominating early in the first half and coming close in a few goal mouth scrambles. But unlucky isn’t much help when it comes to getting points. Extra shooting practice this week I reckon.
Dirty Kashima, useless referee (what a surprise...) -
There’s not really much point me writing this paragraph, just read what I’ve said in every Kashima post for the first part of the paragraph title and pretty much every other blog post for the second. In case you can’t be bothered to do that, (and why should you?), Kashima are a nasty little team of cloggers and foulers. It’s no surprise that this is SBO Leandro’s parent club. Certainly they seem to have replaced him like for like with the pathetic creep Everaldo. At least Leandro scores goals. Everaldo must have had at least half of Kashima’s 17 shots and probably only managed to hit the target once. Of course that one went in, as always seems to happen. The pantomime villain always does something to irritate, but for most of the match it looked like he was just going to blast the ball over the ball endlessly. The reason the creep got my attention in this match was when Taniguchi received his yellow card. Can’t argue with the decision, (could probably have argued with the numerous decisions where Kashima players booted us and didn’t get booked though…), but the offence was so clearly outside the box but Everaldo did his best to roll into the box clutching his chest, past the penalty spot, looking like he was going to end up in the net, before the scientific rolling phenomenon rules of nature kicked in and he began to roll back the way he’d come from. It really is pathetic and I hate this kind of behaviour. (Have just noticed that this is extra funny if you pronounce his name in a certain way). Even more odious was his little tantrum when he realised that a free kick rather than a penalty had been given and he monetarily forgot his extreme chest wound and looked liked he was about to stamp his feet and grizzle. It was lovely when he booted the ball almost out of the stadium shooting form the resulting set piece. Sorry for the semi foul language, but the guy seems like a total wanker. Another new addition to the wanker list is courageous Kashima captain Misao, whose awful very late, very high studs up challenge on Shimoda caused him to get a red card. Although in the replay you can see him mouthing something to himself after making the foul (which I presume was along the lines of ‘oh shit’), it still apparently came as a huge surprise to him to see the red card. So surprising that it took him almost two minutes to leave the pitch, being lovingly applauded by the knowledgable Kashima fans who obviously saw such a dangerous foul as being ‘fine play’. This allows me to neatly segue into my referee attack. Sato was the ref and I’ve grumbled about him recently for giving everything Nagoya’s way and failing to punish Urawa’s fouls. In this game, he failed to punish Kashima’s relentless hacking campaign for the most part and even when he did manage to get the card out he stopped a three against two attack we were on to do it. I realise that according to the rules if he does play advantage the red card becomes a yellow, but with a couple of minutes of injury time left I would have thought a yellow or a red wouldn’t have made much difference. And even though he did show the red, in spite of Misao taking two minutes to leave the pitch, Sato added just 13 seconds for us to take advantage of the sending off that he thought was important enough to stop our attack and the game for two minutes for. (By the way, didn’t see Shimoda rolling his way towards the Kashima goal after this, did we?). Basically, Sato rewarded a horrible tackle and foul play. Nice work! I realise that I’m complaining that he didn’t book their players and then also complaining that when he did, he should have played the advantage, but I’m biased, so my opinions don’t have to make that much sense, do they?
Fair enough -
In spite of all these grumbles, (and I’m sure you were expecting nothing less than a load of grumbles), this was a fair result as far as I could see. Both teams had sustained periods of pressure and ended up with identical shot counts and shots on target counts. The possession was slightly in favour of Kashima, but also pretty even. I feel a little like we should have been able to do a bit more considering how we’ve played at times this season, but looking at the Consadole game, I’m relieved we managed to at least score once. Clearly we need to get our goal scoring mojo back. It’s all very well making chances but unless we’re testing the keeper we’re not going to score. But a point away against a team who apparently really wanted to do their best to stop us winning the league is a decent enough result. Our possible sprint to the title has slowed to a dawdle recently and if Gamba and Cerezo hadn’t contrived to lose to the bottom two teams in the league we’d probably be feeling quite different about this result. But as it is, we can cross off another remaining win. We now need two more wins, or the equivalent amount of capitulations from our Osaka rivals. Fingers crossed. I feel like we need to find an alternative to playing Damiao for 85 minutes and then replacing him with Yamamura (who apparently might have picked up an injury during his brief cameo appearance, so that alternative needs to be found even more urgently). I’d probably go with Damiao against Marinos on Wednesday, but might also give Miyashiro some time too as I think he has something to prove. We really need to win on Wednesday to make up for us gifting them the title last year with a complete stinker of a performance. I’ll also add at he end here, in the fair enough category, that the drumming and clapping was much improved this time round. Perhaps because it was an away game or perhaps because we’ve got our act together. I was clapping so much and so hard that I have cracked open the skin on my hand. Better sort that out before Wednesday I guess. Perhaps I need some kind of clapping shield. I have applied my medicated hand cream.
So, it looked like this season could be an exciting romp to an early title but we’re making hard work of it recently. Fingers crossed that will all change on Wednesday. I suspect it won’t. YFM are another team who really don’t want us to win the league and will do their best to stop us. They’ve been doing pretty good recently so hopefully Wednesday will see them have one of their regular complete implosions. After that, we’re away to Oita next Saturday. Gamba and Cerezo aren’t playing this midweek, so it’s all about us winning if we want to take a step closer to winning the league. I won’t accept that it’s going to happen till we’ve done it, which might seem an extreme point of view, but I am terribly afraid of jinxes and generally lacking in confidence in most aspects of my life, so that’s just the way I do things I guess. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL(Yellow card 90+2')
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo(Yellow card 34')
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for NAKAMURA 64')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MITOMA 78')
FW 19. SAITO Manabu (on for IENAGA 88')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto (on for WAKIZAKA 78')
FW 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 88')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Nice goal from Wakizaka but our general lacking of decent chances means that I’m going to look further back for this. Sung-Ryong made an absolutely amazing save in the first half, along with some other merely great saves, but for some reason, in spite of the yellow card, I feel it should go to…
TANIGUCHI Shogo - perhaps often overlooked by me, as I usually notice his howlers rather than his good bits, but this was a pretty great performance. He did what he had to do and if that meant picking up a yellow, then fair enough. Nice work!
Damn… From the highs of Saturday’s victory against FC Tokyo, via a bit of massive news, to this big old disappointment of a game and the end of our second history-making winning run. Writing this the following evening, I can’t believe this game only happened yesterday. Perhaps the copious amount of beers consumed after the game slowed the passing of time or it’s just been a bit of a grim 24 hours thinking about this capitulation. But whichever way you look at it, it’s hopefully only a little bump in the road to achieving something special. Let’s hope that we don’t let this rotten performance disrupt us and we can get back to winning ways in the next match. Please excuse me if I don’t go into too much detail on this game. As much as rival fans probably enjoy reading my whining blog posts when we lose, I’m just going to try and get this one done with as little discomfort as possible and then forget about the existence of football for the next ten days. Then I get to enjoy the bus journey to and from Kashima stadium. Hmmm. Here’s what I feel required to type about this game.
Finger pointing and flat performances -
I love a bit of finger pointing after a loss. Grumbling is a joy for me it seems. Problem is, in this game I don’t have enough fingers to point out all the things that we did wrong. Tactically, Consadole did us, much like FC Tokyo did in the Levain Cup, although in a very different style. They started with a weird, but not unheard of for them, formation of 3-7, playing no strikers. Naturally this meant that the middle of the pitch was very congested. Quite why we tried to pass our way through it repeatedly I don’t know. We were apparently playing with three forwards but you wouldn’t have known it. On the few occasions we managed to get through the masses of midfielders it was with one player and no support. All pretty depressing. Perhaps Kengo’s announcement had a similar effect on the players as it did on the fans who seem to have spent the last few days emoting on twitter in a bit of a flap. Certainly his absence is going to be felt next season but we need to make sure our anticipation of it does not affect us for the remainder of this year. I’m not sure that was the reason for this performance though. We’ve been going flat out for most of the season and whilst we’ve rotated a fair bit, it hasn’t been particularly wide rotation with the same 16 or so players taking part in most games. Certainly in this game some players who’ve been wobbling a bit recently really wobbled their wheels off. Yamane has played all but two games this year I think. He has been great at times but the occasional mistake that is understandable has escalated a bit recently I feel. He needs a rest. You can’t really say that Diogo looked dodgy when he came in. We really should have used him a bit more I think. Similarly, our defensive partnership of Taniguchi and Jesiel have done more than their fair share of work with only the occasional rest. The cracks have started to show a bit recently and we generally got away with it in recent games as we’ve been pretty exciting going forward. Sadly, when our attacking falls to bits there’s a lot more pressure on our defence and it cracked in this game. Although to be honest, both of their goals were gifted to them by us in this game. However, the fact is Consadole were on top for large parts of this game and for most of this game we couldn’t even manufacture a chance, let alone a good one. Both of their goals came from us pretty much giving them the ball. The first saw the recently excellent Morita get the ball stuck in his feet and get robbed and the second saw Ienaga inexplicably dribbling back towards his own goal, only to give Kengo a horrible uncontrollable pass, losing the ball and we conceded again. It was notable that for both goals Taniguchi seemed to be well away from covering the area you’d think he should be in. I’m not sure that the Consadole changes were super subs. More that they coincided with brain freezes for a few of our players. It’s not a good look though that Consadole played with no strikers for most of the game, then brought two on and scored twice within four minutes. And I can’t say the goals particularly awakened us from our hopeless slumbering play. Scoring even a consolation looked unlikely, let along the two goals needed for a draw or three for a win.
Subs -
Subs are a great way to change a game, (just ask Petrovic in this game!), and Oniki has done much better with them this year than previously. In this game though it was all a bit mysterious. Wakizaka and Hatate were withdrawn at half time much to my surprise, as it looked like Ienaga should have gone as he was even more badly calibrated than in the previous game. Give the man a rest! We used all of our remaining changes after the two goals, bringing on Nobori, Miyashiro and Kengo for Jesiel, Damiao and Manabu. Admittedly Manabu and Damiao hadn’t managed to get anything going, but quite why we wasted a sub on reshuffling the defence is a mystery. I thought it would have made more sense to bring on Yamamura up front and start trying to be a bit more direct given that we couldn’t break though in our normal way. Miyashiro had a go, but I would have liked to see him on the right and Yamamura in the middle. Also, I don’t get what is going on with Mitoma. Recently, he starts on the left and then seems to go wandering. He was all over the pitch, but it didn’t seem to be to particularly any effect. I don’t know if this was a tactical instruction from Oniki, but if it was, it didn’t work. He’s fast and likes to run with the ball but we persisted in the patient (turgid) build up that hadn’t worked for the whole game. Sure we had a few chances towards the end of the game but we never really looked like scoring and 11 shots with only six on target in 90 minutes tells the story I think.
Nishimura master class -
I’m not blaming Nishimura for our defeat in any way, but just feel the need to once again state how utterly shit he is as a ref. As always, he seemed to want to be the centre of attention. I don’t know why he kept doing weird little double whistles for things like throw ins. His reluctance to book anyone (of either team) for anything contributed to things heating up. His response was to tell people to calm down although it was clearly a problem of his own making. Unlike Matsuo in the last game who had gone slightly under the radar for me in spite of me slagging him off in the past, the announcement of Nishimura at the start of the game is always guaranteed to get a groan and in this game he didn’t disappoint in his ability to disappoint.
Drums and atmosphere -
The drum was back! It was a bit weird clapping some chants without being able to fill in the bits with the words. Timing is surprisingly difficult when you don’t have the singing bit. I did think it made the support a bit more cohesive though and was definitely a positive thing for me. More positive though was the fact that the crowd seemed to be overruling the drum a bit, filling in some of the gaps in the songs and on one occasion starting a clap themselves which the drummer then joined in with. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will enjoy blaming the Kazoku and drum on our change in form in this match but that would be ridiculous. It did feel though that there was a slight change in the balance of power somehow between them and the regular fans. In contrast to us, Consadole had got the drumming and clapping thing sorted. Their coordination was much better and I found myself tapping my foot to their rhythms on a few occasions. I know the away team support is always a bit more passionate and exciting, but I feel like we were shown up a bit on this occasion both on the pitch and in the stands. Hopefully things will have improved a bit for the next game.
Move on and forget this. That is my intention and I hope the players feel the same way. Unbelievably, despite losing we were still able to cross off one of the remaining wins we needed to take the title, thanks to a draw in the Osaka derby. So now nine points will do it. Hopefully this was a blip and we can get going again in the next match which is in ten days and is away to Kashima. A rest will probably be a good thing for some of the players, but maybe we actually need to do a bit more organizational work. I wonder slightly if we hadn’t really tried out some of the combinations on show in this match on the training pitch as it all looked a bit disjointed. Looking back, our starting midfield three looks a bit inexperienced, doesn't it? Hopefully we’ll learn from this, players and manager alike. We've bounced back well from previous disappointments so hopefully we can do so again. We’ve been absurdly
fortunate to witness some great football so far this year so we
shouldn’t moan too much about a bad day at the office. As long as it doesn’t turn into a bad week and then a bad month. Fingers crossed and Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 6. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 30. HATATE Reo
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 19. SAITO Manabu
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for JESIEL 70')
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo (on for SAITO 70')
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru (on for HATATE 46')
FW 20. MIYASHIRO Taisei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 70')
MF 25. TANAKA Ao (on for WAKIZAKA 46')
FW 34. YAMAMURA Kazuya
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Can’t think of anyone who even slightly deserves it really.
