Here are the 2021 season ref stats for our games. I’ve included the usual things I do each year. These figures include all domestic fixtures but not the ACL games. If it was a cup game and we won or lost on penalties it counts as a draw when it comes to points per game in these stats. No red cards for us in any competition this year means that the cards stats look a bit better than last year. But you’d also expect this given that we were named as the fair play team of the season. This year as a bonus I’ve added total stats at the bottom. Not sure if this is at all useful but the averages are at least slightly interesting and we got a pretty satisfying average amount of points and cards this year.
Out of the 19 different refs we had, we got a perfect points record with quite a few. As some of them were only in charge of a single game, there’s probably not much to draw from their info. I’d say that of the refs who were in charge of our games on numerous occasions, we’ve probably got to say we like Araki (who only gave us one yellow in four games so probably is our ref of the year), Iida and Nishimura (!!!!) the most when it comes to points. The first two saw us take maximum points from four and three games respectively and from Nishimura’s five games we got a respectable 2.6 point average. Of the refs who reffed multiple games, the only ones in whose games we dropped to less than two points a game were Kimura, Imamura and Iemoto, who we got our worst points return from. This proves that for once I was right when I said he’s a nightmare ref for us… maybe. When it comes to cards Iemoto is the worst for us again. He gave almost a quarter of our total season yellows (5 out of 21) in only five games. Nishimura was close behind with four, but given that we did better in the games he reffed, I’d say that Iemoto is definitively the worst ref for us. So maybe his retirement is good news. Obviously there might be some kind of bias in the figures given that the big-name and supposedly better refs might be given the bigger and maybe tougher games. But I won’t let accuracy get in the way of having one final moan about Iemoto. I'm sure he's pleased he's retired! I guess we should be quite happy about it too.
G - Games refereed
W - Wins
D - Draws
L - Losses
Y - Yellow Cards
R - Red Cards
AVC - Average number of cards per game (yellow = 1, red = 3)
AVP - Average points for us per game
ARAKI
G 4 W 4 D 0 L 0 Y 1 R 0
AVC 0.25 AVP 3
FUKUSHIMA
G 1 W 1 D 0 L 0 Y 0 R 0
AVC 0 AVP 3
IEMOTO
G 5 W 1 D 4 L 0 Y 5 R 0
AVC 1 AVP 1.4
IIDA
G 3 W 3 D 0 L 0 Y 2 R 0
AVC 0.66 AVP 3
IKEUCHI
G 2 W 1 D 1 L 0 Y 1 R 0 AVC 0.5 AVP 2
IMAMURA
G 4 W 2 D 1 L 1 Y 0 R 0
AVC 0 AVP 1.75
KASAHARA
G 2 W 1 D 1 L 0 Y 1 R 0
AVC 0.5 AVP 2
KIMURA
G 4 W 2 D 1 L 1 Y 1 R 0
AVC 0.25 AVP 1.75
MATSUO
G 2 W 1 D 1 L 0 Y 1 R 0 AVC 0.5 AVP 2
MURAKAMI G 2 W 1 D 1 L 0 Y 1 R 0 AVC 0.5 AVP 2
NISHIMURA
G 5 W 4 D 1 L 0 Y 4 R 0
AVC 0.8 AVP 2.6
OKABE G 2 W 2 D 0 L 0 Y 0 R 0 AVC 0 AVP 3
SATO G 1 W 1 D 0 L 0 Y 0 R 0 AVC 0 AVP 3
SENDACHI G 1 W 0 D 1 L 0 Y 0 R 0 AVC 0 AVP 1
SHIMIZU G 1 W 0 D 1 L 0 Y 1 R 0 AVC 1 AVP 1
TAKAYAMA G 1 W 1 D 0 L 0 Y 0 R 0
AVC 0 AVP 3
TANIMOTO G 2 W 2 D 0 L 0 Y 1 R 0 AVC 0.5 AVP 3
UEDA G 2 W 2 D 0 L 0 Y 0 R 0
AVC 0 AVP 3
YAMAMOTO G 2 W 2 D 0 L 0 Y 2 R 0
AVC 1 AVP 3
TOTALS G 46 W 31 D 13 L 2 Y 21 R 0 AVC 0.45 AVP 2.3
Here is the 5th annual Frontale Rabbit Blog survey. Again, it's mostly the
same questions but there are a couple of new ones this
time. If you have any questions you think I should add, please let me
know and I'll put them in. Please reply any way you want. Leave a
comment on the post, send me an email to frontalefan(at)gmail(dot)com,
tweet them, instagram message me…. any way you can think of really. I'll
follow up collating the answers when I've got some responses. And in the interest of getting as many replies as possible,
it's in Japanese too. Thanks!
Presumably much to the delight of all followers of J League football aside from Frontale and Kashima fans, our season is over. And it’s a bit of a shame that the end came in such a disappointing way, but that’s football I guess. After all, if every game went as people expected it to and how the stats or the relative strengths of the teams suggested, it would be a very boring sport. Not going as far to suggest that I’m in any way pleased by us losing providing a welcome cup upset though. In fact, I’ll go nowhere near that far. But at least if we were going to lose, we can’t really feel too upset about doing so on penalties in a game that we played reasonably well in, and in which we can’t blame the defeat on anyone or anything. Which all makes it sound like this could be a relatively moan free blog post! So I’ll start with a bit of a moan about the tournament to make up for it. I felt like there was a bit of mixed messaging going on in this game. In the way the the JFA always likes to stamp its authority and individuality on to Emperor’s Cup games, they decided that this would be the first full capacity game of the season. To be honest, it kind of makes sense as even the most optimistic of people would probably find it hard to say that this isn’t probably the best situation with regards to Corona that we have been in for a long time and probably will be in for a long time. Maybe to counter this increased attendance from an ‘optics’ point of view, there was no alcohol for sale in the stadium. Perhaps the JFA gets a cut of gate receipts but not alcohol sales. If that’s true I guess we know why the attendance was increased. So it was our biggest attendance of the season but it was nowhere near a sell out, probably because in this competition the seating allowance is always split 50/50 between the two sets of fans. And Oita isn’t very geographically close to Kawasaki. It also now seems to be an Emperor’s Cup tradition that the two teams come out separately, again I guess with COVID in mind. Which is kind of ridiculous when you consider they will be getting very close to each other and breathing a lot heavier during the game. Guess it was mainly for show though. But it did seem slightly bizarre when at the same time you are seating people right next to each other in the whole stadium for the first time in the season. You’ll be disappointed, I’m sure, that it has been more questioning rather than moaning so far so I’ll get the proper moans going. The music is still utterly awful for this competition. Which is no surprise as it’s still the same awful songs. Please check my last Emperor’s Cup blog post for detailed whinging. The other moan is that they sell the tickets for the final before the semi-finals have been played. After our defeat, this has created a massive rush of people tweeting, trying to sell tickets for the final now. Considering that the prices for these games are higher than for regular games it does some like something of a cash grab. But I have been told that it is a kind of a tradition for fans of all teams to want to go to the game, regardless of who is playing. Perhaps they wouldn’t be buying tickets behind the goal in the main supporter section though. Given the previously mentioned distance from Oita, I’m not sure many people will be able to sell their tickets. I guess I’m going to go still, but it’s kind of weird to attend and sit in the section with the fans of the team who have knocked you out in the last match. Perhaps Oita’s opposition in the final, pantomime villains Urawa, will make it a bit easier for people to build up some enthusiasm to support the team who they don’t support but in whose section they are sitting. But to be honest, I’m not exactly that excited about going. I probably wouldn’t even bother watching it on TV if we didn’t have tickets. There is an element of sour grapes in this, but also the realisation that usually lightning doesn’t strike twice and that Oita’s dogged resistance in this game might not be so successful in the final. Hmmm, skirting dangerously close to actually talking about the game here so maybe I’d better move on to that section.
What can I say really? We totally bossed normal time in this game. Normally I would moan about us not being able to get shots on target but in this game that wasn’t the case. We shot a lot and frustratingly ex-Frontale keeper Takagi was having the game of a lifetime and was almost unbeatable. Of the two occasions where we did manage to beat him, we scored one and the post saved him on the other occasion. Absolutely typical really, particularly given that he’s had some dubious reviews of less than stellar performances this year. But as often seems to happen in football, someone playing against their old team seems to find just that little bit extra to put in an amazing performance. Full credit to Takagi, he was amazing and stopped things which looked impossible. It was pretty much totally one way traffic for the regular 90 minutes yet we failed to score. But I’m not going to moan about it. It clearly wasn’t meant to be. And the game was a lot more even in injury time with both sides giving it a go. When we finally managed to get one past Takagi it came from a Kozuka cross (who is he again? It’s been quite a while. Once again the curse of the former player!) and a Kobayashi finish. But we could only get one goal from the 41 shots we had, half of which were in extra time and around 75% of which were on target. It REALLY wasn’t meant to be! And then we conceded when we were down to ten men as we got struck with another serious looking injury. This time it was Tono who hadn’t been on for long when he somehow got involved in a tackle that another one of our players was making. He tried to continue but really couldn’t. Whether us being down to 10 men contributed to us conceding, I don’t know really, but it can’t have helped. It wasn’t very nice to concede in the 121st minute (somewhat similar to our Levain exit to Urawa), but the massive feeling of it just not being our day should have prepared us somewhat for the goal going in. Oniki’s reluctance to make too many changes till he really had to probably speaks volumes about his confidence in the players he had put on the bench. I wrote previously about the starting line up being obvious but he actually changed things slightly with Oshima starting and Marcinho dropping to the bench. I wonder if Marcinho’s honeymoon period is over now, being withdrawn at half time against YFM, somewhat bafflingly as far as I was concerned, and now dropping to the bench. With Oniki and Brazilians, things seem to go one of two ways. Either they are straight in the team as a big money or big name signing as Damiao was, or they are made to very, very patiently wait for their opportunity, which only comes when every other option is exhausted as Jesiel had to. (Remember Oniki preferred playing Kurumaya at centre back before Jesiel made the spot his own). Players in the former category do tend to get dropped at some stage and then never get their place back. I’d put Neto and Joao Schmidt in that category. Whether Marcinho will join that group too, a long way ahead of schedule, who knows? I’ve often said it, but Oniki does tend to have an approach to man management that verges slightly on the psychopathic looking from the outside. But at the same time lots of people say that the players love him, so perhaps he is honest with them, saying to Neto and Joao Schmidt, you’re only going to get in the team if my preferred Japanese youngster gets horribly broken and they take it well. If we continue to be reluctant to rotate a bit more we will inevitably end up in the situation again where a serious injury could totally derail us. Or where we have two players who have hardly played at all this season stepping up to take penalties in a cup semi-final, presumably desperate to do something to prove their worth. Poor Tsukagawa! You probably know I really like him and it was horrible to see his penalty hit the post. He really didn’t deserve to be one of the fall guys. Yamane’s decisive penalty was saved and his situation is probably the opposite of Tsukagawa. He has nothing to prove but probably can barely even move his leg to kick the ball after playing almost every minute of the season for us. He’s not even going to get much of a break as Japan has a totally stupidly timed international friendly in January. Yamamura’s situation is probably somewhere between the two others. He hasn’t been used much, but at least he’s been involved, mainly sitting on the bench. You could say that Yamamura will have bad memories of this game as he missed his penalty and he was the player who was beaten for the Oita goal (the goalscorer having more than a handful of Yamamura’s shirt but I’m not going to whinge). Kozuka had possibly the opposite kind of game, assisting for the goal and scoring a penalty in the shoot out against his old team. But let’s be honest, no-one involved with Frontale will want to remember this game, in spite of there being nothing particularly wrong with the performance. If you concede a penalty in a shoot out with the ball bouncing off the post and then in off the back of your keeper's head you've just got to accept that you were destined not to get to the final. And we just came up against a keeper with something to prove, who did exactly that, so hats off to Takagi and good luck to Oita in the final. They have had a disappointing season and I’m sure they’d love to combine a J2 promotion push with a crack at the ACL next year.
So, yes, it’s over for 2021. Losing to a relegated team in the cup would usually prompt me to say that we don’t play very well against teams near the bottom. I was prepared to say this but a bit of research has shown that it’s not really the case this year where against the five bottom teams in the league we have won all of our games aside from a draw away at Shonan and a draw at home against Vegalta Sendai. So what can I blame then? THE KYUSHU CURSE! Also probably previously referred to at length in this blog, it doesn’t really make sense, particularly when the game is at home as this one was, but teams from Kyushu do seem to have a habit of kicking us in the nuts. Last year Trinita prevented us taking the title by beating us in Oita, a result that was something of a surprise. This year in the league we dealt with them more comfortably, winning 2-0 home and away. And then they knocked us out on penalties in the semi-final of the cup… So what about the other two Kyushu teams? Yep, those games were our two league defeats this year, both happening on the island that provides great away game adventures but bad results for us. Thankfully we couldn’t go to Avispa away as I am still a bit annoyed about the winning goal being scored by someone who should have been sent off on a couple of occasions in the match before he stepped up and scored an annoyingly good goal. Would probably have been difficult to keep a COVID mandated lid on my irritation if I had been watching it in the stadium. The loss to Sagan Tosu was a similarly disappointing performance but was made up for by being able to attend the game and enjoy the alcoholic delights of Kyushu. That game came after the title was sealed so there was perhaps something of a hangover to the performance. Perhaps the same could be said about this loss as it came after Damiao got the MVP and Golden Boot, Yamane got the fair play award and our players filled seven out of the 11 places in the team of the year. I dunno, perhaps clutching at straws a bit here, but let’s add the congratulations you won something hangover to the Kyushu curse and I think we’re really on to something. You can’t really say that we’ve pulled up many trees in this tournament this year really though as we’ve struggled through on penalties against both Nagano of J3 and JEF of J2 before we finally fell to Oita of J1 on the dreaded kicks. (Damn, we’ve gone to penalties fours times in one season and lost twice if you include the ACL game). Admittedly, we did beat two J1 teams in this competition in between the JEF and Oita games though. And somewhat bizarrely, in spite of us by no means putting out the reserves in any of these games, we played a lot better in the game we lost against the J1 team than we did in the games we won against lower league opposition. It clearly is ‘a funny old game’. Now we have to start thinking about 2022 I guess. It seems inevitable that Hasegawa and Joao Schmidt will be leaving from their complete disappearance from the match day squads after missing penalties in the ACL. It seems very weird that Schmidt had made only one appearance and hasn’t made the bench for any other game considering he was a regular at the start of the season. Hasegawa was also usually involved in some way till he missed his penalty and since then has not been seen since. The same fate didn’t befall Ienaga though. When you look at who missed penalties in this match, I’ve got to day I’m worried for Tsukagawa. Yamane is clearly undroppable for Oniki and Yamamura is probably too versatile to be frozen out. Talking of Yamane, there was a slight strangeness to his answer to a question in the J League awards that suggested to me that he wouldn’t be against an overseas transfer if someone came knocking. And given that he has been in the team of the year in the last two years and is one of our internationals it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Whether he will want to extend what has already been a very intense season by transferring to Europe and completely obliterating his end of season break, who knows? Hatate looks set to leave. Please let it not be Celtic. It inevitably will be, but given the horrible manager of that team, it will be hard for me to enjoy him doing well if he does go. He was once again in floods of tears after this game so I think he knows it was his last game for us. By the way, another amazing 1-0 win for Celtic yesterday. Sadly for them, they are still bottom of what is effectively their two team league trailing Rangers by four points. The seriousness of Jesiel’s injury would suggest that we need some back-up in defence but then again, that’s been the case for the last four or five years and it never seems to come. Tanabe probably is the most favoured out of the three young defenders we have who never play, but I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t just a case of play Yamamura or Kurumaya there instead. No news about Kurumaya’s injury and I guess we won’t get it now the season is over. You can probably add Tono to that potentially serious injury list too now. Whether any of the other bright talents get picked off I don’t know. You’ve got to imagine Tachibanada will be catching some teams’ eyes. In 2022 we’ll be going for the three-peat in the league for the second time whilst trying to prioritise the ACL again. It didn’t work very well in 2019, did it? I dread another season like that. So definitely some work to be done.
Next up, nothing for the team apart from a big rest and they deserve it. I don’t think we can be too upset about how we’ve done in any of the competitions this year. We were totally dead on our feet and suffering from a defensive injury crisis when we flopped out of the Levain and the ACL, and in the Emperor’s Cup, well you know, as this blog post is about that. Next up for this blog, some end of season posts going into more detail about all the end of season things and the usual end of season survey. As we’ve finished a little earlier this year, there’s still plenty of time to do those I guess. Right now though, I’m going to have a little break from blogging and try to enjoy the festive period as much as I can. Not sure I particularly deserve it, but I’ll give it a go anyway. Cheers and Merry Frontale Christmas and hopefully a Happy Frontale New Year to you all.
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 47. HATATE Reo
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for WAKIZAKA 109')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 82')
MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for TACHIBANADA 109')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for HATATE 82') FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for IENAGA 109')
So the league campaign is over for 2021 and you’ve got to say it has been a bit of a success again. Sadly we weren’t able to get what I think I termed a few years ago, the ‘super title’. Sure we won the league, and conceded the least goals but were pipped to the post in the goals scored column by our noisy neighbours and opponents on this occasion YFM. Thanks a lot FC Tokyo for ruining that part for us when you shipped eight against them a few weeks ago. They also almost ruined Damiao’s chance of taking the Golden Boot just for himself by allowing old-before-his-years (in this case from the point of view of looks rather than wisdom), very speedy slaphead Daizen Maeda to score three against them. Before the game I said it didn’t seem right that if two players finished level it would be given to the one with most assists (quite generous considering Damiao was miles ahead in that respect). After the game, on finding out I was wrong and it could be shared I decided that it definitely should go on assists in the event of a tie-break. Coming into this game, I was naturally quite up for us winning comfortably and securing the ‘super title’ and Damiao’s Golden Boot. At the same time, I did think that it probably would be a draw. I suppose many people thought this might be a high scoring exciting game showing the best that the J League had to offer from an attacking point of view. Always looking to surprise, ‘chaos energy J League’ had other ideas and it was instead a wonderful display of not really being able to hit the target very often with both sides only managing four shots on target each. But it was quite exciting though. Well, exciting in the way that I had to run to the bar a touch early before half time for something to steady my nerves. The second half wasn’t as nerve shredding as the first, perhaps due to the half time alcoholic refreshment or perhaps due to us actually trying to play some football and succeeding at times. But anyway, we’ll deal with that kind of analysis later on (perhaps…). I can probably find some space for it between some cheap shots at the opposition and poor attempts at humour. Ok, here we go with the classic three bullet points.
Us -
Surprise, surprise, the same team and bench again! Although maybe that will be changing for the next match as Kurumaya has been the latest victim of the centre back injury curse. Looks like it might be a knee injury, and perhaps something similar to Jesiel’s as he seemed to land on his knee and at the same time jerk it. He gingerly continued for a couple of minutes (so perhaps it isn’t so bad), before having to go off (so perhaps it is so bad). We hadn’t started particularly well before this early enforced change and it certainly didn’t help settle us down. I should say though that Yamamura stepped up in fine fashion. The first half was a bit of a disaster for us. I would say the midfield were bad, but I don’t think they got a chance to show they were bad as they seemed to be wholly absent. I’d like to think that Hatate was trying to downplay his attractiveness and get any proposed transfer to a team that basically is second in a two team league taken off the table. I really hope for Frontale’s sake that the people who wanted to sign him were watching him for the first time in the first half. From his point of view, I guess I grudgingly hope he can get a transfer if he wants one. Would definitely rather it wasn’t to a team run by a certain ex YFM manager though. We did however manage to prevent them from scoring in a very dodgy first half which is something to be pleased about. But it was a very tired, end of season performance which we can’t afford to repeat in our Emperor’s Cup game. The introduction of Oshima at half time sorted things out a bit and was very welcome. Slightly confused as to why it was Marcinho that gave way though as I thought he’d done alright. Guess Oniki is trying to keep things interesting and if he is going to have the same players starting and the same ones on the bench every week he has to shake things up with some shuffling around of positions and weird subs. Slightly bizarrely the stats weren’t so different between the two halves though. Both teams having a magnificent two shots on target each per half and YFM bossing possession and shots off target. I guess YFM knew this was going to be their last game of the season, and one against their rivals who’d won the league at a canter, so perhaps were playing with less inhibition than we were and perhaps with a bit of anger. It was great to see Damiao get a goal and go ahead in the Golden Boot race and it was a nice finish from a nice cross from Ienaga, who to be honest, hadn’t really done much till that point. Inevitably the interestingly facial-haired yet possibly follically challenged Maeda got one back and it was all square again, prompting Oniki to again spin the random substitution wheel and replace Wakizaka with Chinen. Chinen seemed to be playing on the left wing, which was a surprise. As was the fact that he seemed pretty good at doing so. Hatate had previously moved from the midfield to the left wing and then moved back to the midfield. Another Oniki attempt to confuse anyone watching with a view to signing him by constantly shifting him and making him difficult to locate. The logical next step was clearly to bring on Kobayashi for Hatate. Honestly, with regards to where anyone was playing, your guess is as good as mine at this stage. And then follow this up with Tono coming on for Tachibanada. Leaving Oshima as the only real midfield player on the pitch probably wasn’t going to help us get more possession but we did have a decent crack at scoring a second. Thankfully Sung-Ryong was on hand to stop YFM who had similar ideas and more opportunities. It was all quite exciting and quite nerve wracking. We definitely dodged a bullet in this game as we were horrible for long periods. At the same time, YFM did ride their luck at times and if we hadn’t been so wasteful we could have grabbed a delightfully undeserved win. I’m going to say a draw was a fair result, mainly to attempt to irritate opposition fans. But it did seem to suit both sets of fans to a certain extent I suppose. And the fact that YFM had their end of season ceremony after the game suited us perfectly as we could give our players a clap and then make our leisurely way to the station knowing that we weren’t going to have to endure a really busy station and a really busy train. Cheers!
Them -
Of course I’m not going to praise YFM in this or any blog post so any rival fans reading this, don’t get your hopes up. I guess though rival fans would be reading this mainly for fuel for their irritation fire so hopefully I won’t fail to provide on that account. If we win it’s because we’re great and they’re shit. If they win, it’s because we’re shit. If it’s a draw everyone is shit. I must admit I have some sympathy for their fans who, after losing the admittedly quite Marmite-y (or should that be Vegemite-y? Actually I don’t even know if they use Vegemite in the same linguistic way that Brits use Marmite. And actually is he Marmite-y anyway? Perhaps it’s just me who finds him really annoying… This is a long bracketed section. Had better stop it here otherwise the flow of the sentence will be ruined. Oh, but maybe it is already) Ange Postecoglou who was an absolute god to them, have ended up with Kevin Muscat, who for many seems to be quite an unpopular choice of manager and seems determined to do things his own way, breaking down anything that his predecessor might have built. So what is his own way then? What is Muscatball? From watching this game it seems to be quite a physical approach to football with plenty of kicking and pushing but still retains the whinging arsehole aspects that Postecoglou managed to exude and instill in his charges. Marcos Junior has grown his hair a bit but still seems like he is up for the pub car park fight that his old hairdo and demeanour used to scream. I was disappointed his usually super aggro teammate Theeraton didn’t lose his rag in this game. I had a feeling he would get sent off as he always seems to get mardy when things aren’t going his way. To be honest though, things weren’t not going his way, so maybe that explains it. As I kind of said before, in the way that people often say a game is one that shows the quality of the J League, this was probably a game that perfectly demonstrated that neither team was quite as good as they thought they were. There were numerous fancy flicks and attempted tricks that didn’t come off. I would blame the pitch, but it was so far away that I couldn’t really see if it was bad. We know there’s a running track hidden under that green fake turf. Behind the goal at our end there was a small monument to something, a solitary bare orange traffic cone, denuded even of its reflective stripes, boldly poking up in the spot where four bits of fake green turf met. I should probably spend some time thinking up an amusing reason for this which is better than what I am going to write. But as this is a Frontale Rabbit post and we’re talking about YFM, I’ll plump for the lowest common denominator and say that it is a cheap plastic version of a toba (thing poking out of a Japanese gravestone. I had to look this up. Obviously I didn’t know that word before. I’m probably misusing it), marking the resting place of YFM’s 2021 season hopes which were cremated over a month ago by Gamba Osaka who put YFM out of their misery after a long and painful decline. But I guess they do have the most goals scored thing to cling on to. Once again, thanks a lot FC Tokyo! And the joint Golden Boot winner, who according to YFM fans on Twitter is ‘hard working’. Perhaps he does work hard but that is probably mainly due to him having to do so, in order to make up for giving the ball away time and time again in promising attacks. But he can run fast though. My ‘banter’ is a bit more forthright than usual as the league season is now over, so I don’t have to worry about any jinxes biting me as there is no chance that YFM will have any effect on the rest of our season. Also it is our rivals isn’t it?
Ref -
This was Iemoto’s last game before retiring. We’ve had trouble with him ever since (oh, this will be the last time I have to write this, and it was becoming a regular sentence in every blog post I wrote when he was in charge) some of our fans applauded his announcement away at FC Tokyo. Since then, and full credit to him for consistently being able to do so right to the end of his career, he has been on a mission to even things up and has given us absolutely nothing. He became something of a bête noire for me, the more I worried about him being in charge of a game and giving us nothing, the more it happened. Even so, I did manage a brief clap at the end of the game when he was having his farewell ceremony. I like to think after a run of calamitous English ‘lessons’ leading to my ‘retirement’ my students would do the same. I mean, no one in their right mind wants to be a ref, do they? Perhaps it’s a case a little like that of politicians, in that the best people to do the job don’t want to do it, and the absolute worst people to do the job are attracted to it. Judging by the political situation all over the world right now, I think I’m actually being a bit hard on refs. They are nowhere near as bad as the current bunch of crooks in charge in the UK. But anyway, what I am basically trying to say is that it’s a thankless task really, so well done to refs for giving it a go, but I just wish they didn’t have to be so shit at it. It would be remiss of me not to say that there was no need for YFM to give him one of their shirts at the end of the game as he’d been wearing one all through the match under his his ref uniform. This point is only slightly undermined by us also giving him a shirt, but why let the facts get in the way of a ‘good’ ‘joke’? To be honest, I can’t remember why I have numerous notes on the match on … how can I say this… Iemoto’s parentage and his self love habits. I don’t remember any big incidents to be honest. He did let YFM get away with booting us all over the pitch in the first half though. I think fans of both sides were horrified to see him in charge of the game but in the end, on this occasion, probably neither set of fans had anything much to get too upset about. So I guess this is some kind of nice farewell ‘ref’ section for him. You didn’t imagine it would be more positive than that did you? Guess Iemoto and Murakami both retiring means that two new refs will be getting their chance next year. Blimey… I don’t know what Iemoto is going to do after this, but you can be sure that Murakami will be putting on those leather trousers and animal print shirts, slapping on the fake tan and belting out Maggie May every weekend at tribute nights at ‘live houses’ all over Japan. Ganbatte 'Rod'!
Next up, we have Oita at home next weekend in the Emperor’s Cup semi-final. If we win that, the final is the following weekend. Actually, the final is the following weekend regardless of whether we win or lose! Next up for this blog after that will be some season round-up posts. Given that Oniki has found his side and will change only if he really has to, we can be pretty sure what the majority of the line up will be for next Sunday. So sure in fact that there are numerous squad members who could probably transfer to their new clubs already and others who could start to get on the Bonenkai party bus! Hell could freeze over before quite a few of the squad could even get on the bench. The only question is probably whether Kurumaya will be fit or not. And if he isn’t, who will be the next to be converted to a centre back to take the spot on the bench that Yamamura will probably vacate. We’ll see I guess. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for HATATE 87')
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for MARCINHO 46')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for WAKIZAKA 80') FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for TACHIBANADA 87')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for KURUMAYA 11')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Was a pretty average, if I'm being generous, performance from most and we were up against it. Therefore I have to give it to...
YAMAMURA Kazuya - With out best centre back injured and in Brazil and our left back stand-in centre back getting injured after five minutes it was a big ask for Yamamura to come in and defend our goal against the highest scoring team in the league. He was awesome though! The best I've ever seen him at centre back. Bravo!
I’ve left this way too late to start writing but it was a bit of a busy weekend. I normally have trouble recalling our matches only a few hours after so I’m going to be really reaching this time given that it’d been a few days. But I’ll give it a go anyway. With the end of the season fast approaching and the title safely in the bag a few weeks ago you could think that there wasn’t much to play for in this game. In a way this is true as our position won’t change and Gamba’s isn’t going to change in any meaningful way either. But given that our neighbours and rivals are our closest challengers and we face them next week in our final game, we probably want to attempt to squash any positivity that they might be able to wring out from this year. So, we dearly want to win next weekend, we dearly want to score the most goals in the league and we dearly want our striker to finish with the Golden Boot. Naturally, if the first one of these things happens it will significantly help us with the second one. Right now YFM are one goal ahead of us with us having conceded seven less than them. The points difference seems quite surprising when you consider how close the goal differences are. Admittedly YFM’s was helped quite a lot by FC Tokyo giving them eight a few weeks ago. Hopefully we won’t be as generous next weekend. The golden boot race is perfectly poised with one game to go with Damiao and Daizen Maeda both on 22 goals. Damiao does have six more assists though and has played one game fewer I believe. So in spite of there not being anything to play for or much at stake, there actually is a lot to play for and lots (of bragging rights) at stake. But anyway this isn’t supposed to be a match preview so let’s briefly talk a bit about what I can remember about the game.
Every time we play an Osaka team the same thing happens. Well, maybe. Our 4-1 win against Cerezo last weekend was followed up with this 4-1 win against Gamba. The scoreline wasn’t the only similarity. The score flattered us a bit in both games. We were surprisingly efficient at taking our chances in both games, and the opposition weren’t but did seem quite threatening for periods of the game. In both games we made a quick start to the scoring with Damiao getting off the mark early, and consequently catching up in the golden boot race. This time it was with his second favourite kind of finish. There has been a distinct lack of overheads recently but the crossed leg back heel finishes keep coming! In this game we kept the scoring going though, doubling the lead two minutes later with a Hatate header that undoubtedly would have been easier to hit with any part of his body rather than his head. Perhaps he gets a bonus for headed goals. It was a bit weird, as we hadn’t had the best of starts but then found ourselves two up in nine minutes. I felt like this irritated Gamba into some quite physical play and we got kicked around quite a lot with the usual inaction from another useless ref. More on him later. If this was their tactic it worked as they pulled a goal back which was apparently a pretty good one, but which I missed as I was distracted, probably by a passing bird or cloud, or someone else’s food or drink. I’m still thinking about what the lady in front of me was eating so it probably was the latter. After the Gamba goal the game was pretty open, and pretty scrappy. Our players seemed very aware of Damiao’s golden boot challenge and were looking to set him up quite a lot I felt. Which was good as Maeda had scored for YFM, taking the golden boot top spot for himself again. This kind of slightly-lacking-in-quality stalemate continued for most of the match to be honest. It’s telling that we didn’t get our first corner until the 94th minute. Our attacking clearly wasn’t the sharpest it’s been this year. At times it felt like Gamba were time wasting. Which is a bit weird as they were losing but maybe this was another manifestation of the whole end of the year feeling, the last day of school when you don’t actually want to get much done. Gamba had quite a few good opportunities in the second half and could have easily drawn level before we finally sprung into life again and got a couple more goals late on. It was nowhere near a dominant performance as the stats might suggest. I don’t even remember feeling that we had that much possession, although the stats say we had 61%. Thankfully Damiao got another goal to go back to joint first and set up a lovely final day strikers battle. It was similar to his first (weirdly his two goals against Cerezo were quite similar to each other too), and once again Yamane was the provider. And then fan favourite Kurumaya headed home with the final kick of the… erm…header of the match, the final kick of the match being our first corner. All quite fun! And once again drinks were consumed.
Suppose I should mention some other points of possible interest. This was the first game we’ve been able to fill the entirety of our main stand. Everyone in that stand (which included us on this occasion), was required to show proof of vaccination before the game or a negative COVID test and then got a pink wristband in return. Basically this meant that the entrance process was slightly prolonged being split into two stage but it was of negligible discomfort. It probably also had the benefit of making people come to the ground slightly earlier to get that part out of the way and then have more time to spend money on eating, drinking, and purchasing in FronPark. It was great to see some pre-match atmosphere outside the ground again and although it will almost certainly prove to be a false dawn, it did feel like one more step back to normality and the sunshine helped with the positive thinking. The other main pre-game excitement was the unveiling of the 2022 kit. As seems to usually be the case with these announcements, I found the new design slightly underwhelming. Personally speaking, I don’t really like the neck, and am not sure about the tile motif (a visual pun on or allusion to the fact that we are called FUROntale (furo meaning bath in Japanese) with an added sprinkle of it being our 26th year as a team (2 = Fu, 6 = Ro), which all equals a football shirt designed to look like bathroom tiles. Maybe it will grow on me. I have to say that I am quite a fan of this year’s shirt though, and I do tend to go with a LIKE/DON’T LIKE MUCH pattern with these things. As the match was the annual Rikuzentakata game we were visited by the greatest mascot in football Kizuru from Iwate Grulla Morioka. After visiting Rikuzentakata earlier this year, the significance of the connection between Frontale and the town was slightly emotionally heightened for me. I forgot to bring my Grulla Kizuru towel though, which doubles down on how great their mascot is by using such an oblique design that the towel becomes truly a piece of modern art. Fantastic stuff. Being in the main stand we got to see Fronta’s player mimes, which he does as the team is announced and could appreciate his one for Chinen for the first time. It too is a work of art, with Fronta miming scoring a goal and then falling to the floor and raising a cramp riddled leg in apparent agony. Very well observed and made me LOL. On a Gamba note, it seems mean to laugh at an opposition player when we’ve been lucky in the game, but I did enjoy the Gamba left winger at one point doing close to double figures stepovers left and right and then tripping over the ball and losing it. Oh and of course we should mention the ref Okabe. A few years ago he made a horrific blunder and was relegated to the lower leagues as punishment. He’s been back a little while now but seems like he’s determinedly meandering his way towards his next major cock up and relegation. I can’t remember anything significantly bad but it did seem like he had consumed some hallucinogens before the match and was marveling at the fast moving trippy shapes around him whilst occasionally blowing his whistle in time with the trance music pumping in his head and waving his arms in a random direction. Loving it. Well he was anyway. I found his officiating quite annoying, but as we won 4-1, I’m not going to dwell on it.
Next up, the league campaign closer against our old enemies YFM, who used to laugh and look down on us, but recently have found a whole new reason to dislike us. Congratulations to them on sealing their second place in the league at the weekend with a magnificent game of 43% possession and four shots on target. Now that’s entertainment! And that’s possibly a jinx on us at the weekend…I’m pretty sure we all know what the team will be as Oniki is not even blinking with his selections recently. After that, the league will be done but we still have a home Emperor’s Cup semi-final against Oita. Plenty to still play for in both of those games. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 78')
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for MARCINHO 62')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 78')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for HATATE 78')
DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for TACHIBANADA 83')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Honestly, I had a bit of trouble thinking of a good candidate for this on the day and failed to come up with an answer so there’s no way I can do it with the game so far in the past now. Take this as a freebie and give it to…
WHOEVER YOU FANCY - had a great game… playing football… well done.
This year’s visit to Cerezo was a bit of a dead rubber but it did provide us with the opportunity to visit their new stadium, literally in the shadow of their old stadium. It’s quite a bit smaller, but at the same time quite a bit better. No running track! Hooray! They do seem to have stiffed the away fans a little though as we were put in a pretty flat stand (can’t find a better antonym for steep, so that will have to do) so the action at the other end of the pitch, whilst closer than usual, was pretty difficult to discern. You’ll be pleased to know that it didn’t stop me questioning offside decisions from my perfect 90 degree angle viewpoint. And they stuck a load of advertising hoardings diagonally between us and the pitch, so sadly we weren’t quite as near to the action as we could have been. But it was definitely more fun than being in another athletics stadium. They also now have a beer truck outside and two craft beers made especially for Cerezo available, which made a nice change from the usual stadium fare. I say this but after sampling the Tokyo Verdy beer (containing kale for colour and DEFINITELY not taste), at their game against Ryukyu yesterday I have now been reminded that just because something is different and new, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is better. A heavy day on Friday enjoying our first Kansai away trip for two years contributed even more than usual to the game passing me by in something of a daze. The loud pumping bass of the PA system felt like a bit of an assault to my broken body, but you know, these things make us realise that we’re still alive, and made me power through the Cerezo beers to get the hair of the dog power going. A few more words on the deadness of the rubber of this match. Of course neither team really had anything to achieve in the league that they hadn’t already, what with Cerezo comfortably mired in mid table and us having won the league already. But there were some things to still play for. Okubo announced his upcoming retirement at the end of the season before the match so we were allowed to share in the experience of him playing against us for the last time. Certainly it felt a lot more positive than when he was turning out for FC Tokyo against us. We put up a banner encouraging him to get to 200 J League goals (presumably after this game). However, he’s got a lot to do in the next two games (probably from the bench) to reach that target, but we can now wholeheartedly cheer him on. And it was nice that we got a chance to say goodbye to him at the end of the game with a good old clap along with Cerezo’s Okubo song and then with our Okubo song which they generously played! Very nice of them. I will double down on this compliment by saying that they gave a nice reception for both Yamamura and Tanno and even clapped us for taking the title. Can’t wait for YFM to do that in the last game of the season… But yeah, thank you Cerezo and good luck for 9 goals in the next two games Yoshito. I guess Cerezo are quite keen to finish above Gamba. If you can’t win the league or qualify for the poisoned chalice that is the ACL, your next aim has to be putting one over on your neighbours I guess. I’m sure Gamba will be equally motivated in their next game against us to do the same. And for us, we have the ongoing aims to get as many points and as many goals as physically possible that Oniki seems to be pursuing. I’m sure it’s not just me who really wants to score the most goals in the league and I suspect Oniki has his eye on it. We need to get four more than YFM in the next two games which sounds like a tough ask, but we are playing them in the final game which affects the odds slightly perhaps. Also Damiao is now one goal behind Daizen Maeda in the golden boot race. I really want him to win that and I think he’d really deserve it if he did. So basically it was once again the strongest possible team put out by Oniki. I really feel for the players who’d been on international duty who’d put in some serious air miles in the last ten days. Oh, and Yamane even had to play some football in two glorious 1-0 wins against the Asian football powerhouses of Vietnam and Oman. Praise the lord that there is a competent manager in charge of the Japan national team who can get those kind of dazzling performances and results against all the odds. Given how much I’ve written already about things that are only tangentially about the match, it’s probably a good thing that my memory of the game is hazy, otherwise this blog post will go on forever. With that in mind, let’s do a little bit about the match.
Hmmmm, what happened again? I have limited notes but will do my best with them. If I recall correctly this wasn’t an amazing game for us but amazingly we took our chances! With us recently apparently playing more of our matches having neglected to take the handbrake off and really grinding out results, it was something of a surprise to see us scoring freely. And long may that continue! Damiao’s two goals were from quite similar positions and were both nicely taken. The first came with the obligatory VAR delay, but knowing that it was Nishimura reffing, I felt quite confident that his ‘respect my authority’ attitude would see us get the goal. He does always like to grab a bit of attention though with a surprise or two though, so there were some doubts. After the goal it was nice to see the players celebrate with Jesiel’s shirt. He was the only player missing in what we can now be pretty sure is Oniki’s preferred 11, having flown back to Brazil to get his serious Kengo-like injury treated. Looks like we won’t be seeing him for quite some time… Damiao’s second came from the diminutive Tachibanada smashing his way through the Cerezo midfield with the ball apparently glued to his boot. Great work again from him. It was nice to see Marcinho get a goal, especially after he was through and got taken out just as he was about to shoot. Ridiculously bad decision from Nishimura I confidently said from my seat, later slightly amending my opinion to ridiculously good save. It might be tough being a ref, but trust me, nowhere near as tough as it is being an ignorant bore in the stands. And the final one came from Miyagi after a great bit of work from Tono. Perhaps Damiao wasn’t so happy that he didn’t get the ball, but it was a lovely cross and a lovely finish. This might all make it sound like it was quite one-sided, but it wasn’t really. Cerezo had a lot of good chances and were let down by terrible finishing on a few occasions and stopped by great goalkeeping on a few other occasions. in the end, the stats were fairly even and whilst I am delighted it was 4-1, it didn’t really feel like a 4-1, which in turn makes the fact that it was 4-1 even more delightful perhaps. Equally delightful was Miyagi’s chicken dance goal celebration. Don’t know if it’s going to be a regular thing, but I liked the surprise of it and it would go nicely with Wakizaka’s finger thing as another goal or celebration pose. One last thing, it seems like we’re allowed to twirl towels again now, which is nice and one step closer to being able to sing once more, I guess. I think these things are decided on a stadium by stadium basis though, so maybe we won’t be able to do that on Saturday at home against Gamba.
Next up… oh, I just mentioned that. Our last home league game of a season which is fast coming to an end. Hopefully we can keep the goals coming as Damiao and us as a team need plenty to keep a few hopes alive. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 83')
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for NOBORIZATO 73')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 80')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 73')
DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for HATATE 83')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Tachibanada’s dribble was amazing, Damiao’s finishes lovely, but the reason this was 4-1 and not 4-3 or 4-4 was down to…
Sung-Ryong JUNG - Some saves which looked great at the time but only improved when I saw them on the highlights. And no way he could have done anything about the goal. Bravo!
After the elation of somewhat surprisingly winning the league last Wednesday we gamely trooped off to Kyushu to enjoy what is usually my favourite away game of the season. Given that we got a hammering in this game, I probably wouldn’t say it was my favourite this year, but to be honest it was still quite a lot of fun considering. Undoubtedly, this is down to the wonderful assortment of alcohol available in the stadium. Last year I was aiming for the Nihonshu, but finding none available switched instead to the Shochu. This year I imagined the situation was the same and started on the Shochu. My second Shochu was actually a Nihonshu but in order not to disappoint the person serving I gamely persevered with it and explained that I know nothing about these kind of things. Perhaps I looked a bit stupid, but you know, if the cap fits… I know there’s a rhyme about which order you should drink wine and beer in order to avoid any kind of problems. I don’t know if there is the same thing for Shochu and Nihonshu. If there is, it would probably be pretty difficult to remember anyway as the two words rhyme. I’m not sure if the order I drank them in was the correct one or a big mistake, but whichever way you look at it, I had a surprisingly good time considering how much we stank up the place in the first half. Our rotten first half also gave me an opportunity to get to the bar a bit early and avoid the queue. Seems like perhaps both the team and I are already proverbially on the beach. I guess you’ll be able to decide for yourself about me when you’ve read this post but I’d say it hasn’t started particularly promisingly so far. Of course, we always have a dodgy game after sealing the title… or not really actually. I thought this probably was the case but on seeing a tweet with the ‘evidence’, realised that it really isn’t the case. Including this year, in the three times in the last five years that we’ve had a game after winning the title our record is won one, drawn one, lost one, this year being the loss. Perhaps though the fact that we won the title only four days before this game meant that there was an extra level or metaphorical and perhaps literal hangover involved. Certainly I feel like I could do with a relatively quiet week when it comes to alcohol consumption. No Frontale game should help somewhat with that. Although Taniguchi, Hatate and Yamane won’t get that luxury as they will be with the national team. Perhaps they still will have a week without a game though, as knowing Moriyasu they will probably just be sitting on the bench.
Or perhaps Hatate will play at left back… With Celtic fan football experts chiming in on Twitter regarding Hatate being a good option to solve their left back problem, Oniki played a masterstroke to quieten down any interest and started him at left back. He had a bit of a nightmare. I don’t want to point fingers but I have moaned all year about him not being a good option there in my opinion and it’s telling that the first two goals both came from action in that area. Before this match we had a great record of not conceding very often. We undid this quite a lot in this game, conceding three for the first time this year in the league. As the goals continued to be gifted I was slightly worried we might be en route to an FC Tokyo-ing. Our Tamagawa rivals got a bit of pasting at the hands of our other derby rivals the day before. It’s a bit difficult to know what to hope for in a game between the teams who are perhaps your two biggest rivals. It’s fair to say that a 8-0 victory is not one of the top options. Although it would have been quite funny if that was the scoreline the other way round though… Congratulations to YFM who are now one point away from securing their second second place finish in the league in the last 10 years. Not sure what happened in 2019 as I can’t find a league table from that season. In a way, it might actually be fun to lose all of our remaining games to give YFM a bit of the Jim Bowen Bullseye, ‘let’s have a look at what you could’ve won’. That would mean losing to them in the final game though, and I’m very much not in favour of that. It would be nice if we could get some kind of form back for our remaining fixtures, especially as we still have the Emperor’s Cup to play for. If we play like we did in this game though we might as well pack up now though.
The first half was horrifically one sided in Sagan Tosu’s favour. Full credit to them, and no credit to us. We were a mess at the back and more often than not couldn’t even get out of our own half. But, like I’ve said already, our season’s work is already done in the league so I can’t blame the players for having an off day. Oniki did his big rotation thing again with Kurumaya and Yamamura at centre back, Hatate at left back, Oshima getting a start in midfield and Kobayashi and Tono up front. Somewhat surprisingly, Marcinho continued on the left up front with Miyagi on the bench, which makes the future of Hasegawa look even more of a foregone conclusion. Still no sign of Joao Schmidt…. Given how much of a run around Hatate was being given, I was a bit surprised to see Wakizaka taken off at half time and Hatate moved into midfield. Well, surprised that Hatate stayed on, but then again perhaps it was a good idea to try and rebuild some of his destroyed confidence. Surprise surprise, he did much better in midfield, and the second half was quite different. But we were still a bit rubbish and I think only got our first shot on target in the 85th minute. We did really turn up the pressure after this and I think that over half of our shots and all of our shots on target came from the 85th minute onwards. But it was a case of too little too late by this stage. There was a lot of injury time after Jesiel came on for Oshima, causing another shuffle of the formation, and then went off injured not long afterwards after landing hard right on his knee. It looked like a bad injury to be honest and I’d be surprised if we see him again this season. But then again, we have had some amazing comebacks from what looked like bad injuries already this year, so who knows? His replacement was Miyagi causing another tactical switch. So plenty of shifting around of players, (Kurumaya for example went from centre back to left wing and then back to centre back, not once even having a go at left back), perhaps creating quite a bit of confusion and ended up with nothing really coming off. We did score in the 91st minute but it was from a massive scramble and I think most people didn’t even realize it had gone in. I certainly didn’t until I saw them getting ready for the restart. I’m pleased that Damiao got another goal, but it looks like he’s not now going to be able to catch Daizen Maeda in the golden boot race this year.
Even though I can’t honestly say I’m that upset about losing this game, I was quite upset by the ref Imamura, who looking back on previous posts, seems to usually be not so bad. On this occasion he gave them a pretty soft penalty (Iemoto on VAR wasn’t much help to us unsurprisingly) and waved away a few for us that I thought we could have had a shout for, (all were right in front of us, so for once I think I probably had a semi-decent view). I’m also not very happy about him calling and ending the drinks break whilst all of our players were crowded round a seriously injured team mate. It’s good to have something to moan about, and maybe we could have got back into the game if he hadn’t given their penalty, but to be honest the damage was done at 2-0 with us looking hopeless anyway, and all we could probably have hoped for was a massive shift in fortunes and us pulling off an unlikely draw given how lacklustre we were till then. Also, it’s always nice to moan a bit about an ex YFM player, so even though Tosu were winning 3-0 an we looked awful, the Tosu keeper still felt the need to dither about which ball boy to get the ball from and then stop and feel his hamstring a little before pondering and procrastinating over every goal kick. It was very nice of them to give us a guard of honor before the match though. Very classy and I’m happy for them to have the three points in return. I’m not sure if it was connected to the match, but they also seemed to be occasionally running a steam train up and down the tracks near the ‘eki’, which is ‘mae’ the Ekimae Stadium. I saw it once and heard it numerous other times. Perhaps it was meant to symbolise YFM. Noisy and attention grabbing but ultimately going absolutely nowhere this year. We still have the Emperor’s Cup to think about, but they now can only look forward to trying to beat us on the final day of their season. Naturally, I hope they fail miserably in this. But unfortunately, they do look like they’re going to score the most goals in the league this year. Thanks a lot FC Tokyo!
So, after refuting the evidence of the existence of ‘the game after the title curse’, I would instead like to suggest a new curse. We now have the ‘never win in Kyushu’ curse. This one is also slightly undermined by us winning in Oita this year, but we did fail to take the title there last year when they beat us, Sagan Tosu were the only team we didn’t beat at all last year, and both Avispa and Tosu have beaten us this year. It’s hard to get angry about this curse though as Kyushu away games are a lot of fun normally and this year COVID spared us from being able to attend our other defeat of 2021 so far, which from watching on DAZN seemed to be a lot more irritating game than this one was. It looks like J1 might be losing Oita next year so we’ll just be left with the two Kyushu teams who’ve beaten us…. Oh well. Next up, ten days or so off until we’re away to Cerezo Osaka the weekend after next. They do like to beat us too but haven’t done recently. Here’s hoping we’re a bit less out of character and back to playing how we know we can. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 19. TONO Daiya
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for WAKIZAKA 46')
DF 4. JESIEL (on for OSHIMA 63')
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for MARCINHO 55')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for JESIEL 71')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for TONO 55')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Second loss of the season and a truly dreadful first half performance backed up with a second half that promised a little but couldn’t deliver anything more than a very little means it has to go in a three way joint decision to….
THE STEAM TRAIN, THE SHOCHU and THE NIHONSHU - if the team plays badly and loses but you still kind of have a nice time you’ve got to thank the parts of the day that distracted from what was happening on the pitch. TOOT TOOT! SUP SUP!
