Saturday 27 February 2021

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (home) 26/2/21 - J League match 1

 


Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 0 Yokohama F Marinos

We’re back at Todoroki, the best stadium in the J League according to a few of my Frontale survey responses. Personally, I disagree, but it is good to be back there and kick off our league campaign for 2021. And what better opposition to do it against our local rival Yokohama F Marinos, who for the purpose of brevity I will refer to as YFM from now on. Given that we always seem to start our league campaigns in slightly lacklustre fashion, perhaps YFM were not the best opposition to face on the opening day. But shock beyond shock, we actually managed to win an opening league game! It wasn’t completely plain sailing though and looking at the players’ faces at the end of the game it looked almost like we’d started the year in our usual crappy style. But thankfully we hadn’t. I think I said before I’m going to try to knock these posts out quite quickly this year and leave most of the technical talk to others who are more qualified or more able to do it. These posts will hopefully be a bit focussed on the experience and more hazy on the details, a bit moany, a bit bitchy and hopefully at least a bit amusing or entertaining. No pressure, here we go.


Corona football party time! -

Since us season ticket holders had our pre-purchasing privileges removed it seems that buying tickets in a state of emergency has become like Primark on Oxford Street at the start of the Boxing Day sales. (Bit niche that reference, and a bit risky, particularly as I have no experience of it other than seeing footage on the news). At the agreed time, the masses who are poised with their mouse fingers ready burst onto the website, elbows flailing and grab whatever they can, whether they want it or not. Everything is gone in seconds and then random tickets get slung back onto the rails as people get to the till and find that their basket is full of five of the same XXXL jumpers and a pack of 20 left foot socks and no right ones. My wife, the ‘ticketmaster’ couldn’t manage to get tickets for the Super Cup so we were spared having to trek all the way to the Saitama Stadium and instead were able to enjoy almost exactly the same atmosphere in a quiet living room. Same atmosphere but with comfier seats! For this game we were in the main stand. Normally, this is an extremely placid zone with an atmosphere akin to an old folks home when one of the staff gets the karaoke machine out and has a go on a Vera Lynn classic, ie. lots of soft and slightly out of time hand-clapping with the ‘residents’ occasionally turning to each other and benevolently smiling, safe in the knowledge that they are sharing QUITE AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE! Thankfully for us, the state of emergency capping attendances has blessed every area of the ground with the old folks home vibe, so we were able to enjoy the good views of the match without having to sacrifice any involvement in atmosphere. All of this is basically a long-winded, (on this blog, never!), way of saying that the lowest level of Corona football match attendance is still a very weird thing with not many advantages over watching the game on TV. IN fact maybe watching on TV is actually better, but at least we can say ‘WE WERE THERE!’ It was pretty cold though, so maybe home would have been better.

First half exciting -

But there’s no way I would have wanted to watch this first half from home! With a lot of parallels with the Super Cup match this was a quite exciting first half. We scored twice through the same player. We blazed a shot way over the bar when an open goal was gaping. We played some exciting stuff. And the opposition looked rubbish. I guess it’s not so much of a surprise that we’ve carried on where we left off last year as the starting line up hasn’t changed much at all. It’s nice that we have though. The two goals we scored were lovely. I don’t think I fully appreciated Yamane’s assist in the moment. But Ao’s lovely cross and Ienaga’s blasting finish and blasting header were 100% clearly wonderful at the time. We totally dominated the first half and YFM looked awful apart from their new youngster Kabayama who looked exciting but is thankfully still quite raw. Their keeper was annoyingly good again and sadly didn’t make any of the howlers he’s become slightly known for recently. If it hadn’t been for the two of them and some slightly dodgy finishing from us we could have been out of sight by half time.


Second half not exciting -

Maybe watching at home would have been better for the second half. And perhaps Oniki has started experimenting with demotivating half time team talks but we weren’t very good in the second half. Thankfully YFM decided to shake things up by withdrawing their only outfield player who’d done anything in the first half. The highly trumpeted visionary 3-3-1-3 formation (going to change the world and all that), that had been talked about pre-season and with which they started this game was abandoned and they went for something a bit more FC Tokyo-ish and plodding. I’m only saying this to attempt to annoy both of our local rivals. They more possession in the second half but it was traded off against shots on target. According to my stats they managed 11 shots in the whole game, and the only two which were on target were in the first half. But they had possession! Beautiful sideways passing possession! Perhaps reminiscent of 2019 Oniki Frontale, totally dominating the area between the two penalty boxes, with relentless passing and refusing to break up this passing with any shooting! We occasionally got the ball and had a shot but there wasn’t much to see in the second half. Thankfully we were sitting behind the subs so could watch them warming up without being distracted by the ‘action’ on the pitch. Perhaps this dull second half is why the players looked a bit down after the game. But to be honest, we should be pleased that our defence held firm and we protected our lead. Not as exciting as 2020 Frontale in this second half, but a win is a good way to start the season so let’s be positive for once. I was waiting for a last minute Kobayashi goal to complete the comparison with the Super Cup. Of course these comparisons are have let down by us not conceding twice, but I’ll use that as another opportunity to taunt YFM, who clearly were never going to get as close to scoring as Gamba did. (wink emoji)

Oniki's Eleven (not the first in a series of films...) -

It seems like this is Oniki’s preferred first 11 as he’s selected the same one for the first two games. On the whole I agree with it, but of course from my absolutely uninformed position I’m going to have some grumbles about it. I think this game showed that we really shouldn’t be playing Hatate at left back. He’s not a defender and whilst his combinations with Mitoma going forward are pretty exciting, I’d much rather have a left back playing there and Hatate playing elsewhere. Whether Oniki will agree, we’ll see on Wednesday I guess. I thought Damiao had a great game up front. Well, apart from the fact that he didn’t score. But I’ve never seen a striker enjoy hassling and chasing down keepers so much. Once again he punched the air in celebration of blocking a clearance. He also ‘almost’ deflected a YFM keeper clearance into the net. I say almost as I couldn’t see how close it was, but if you block a clearance from the keeper you’ve always got a chance. Bravo to Damaio who seems to be really up for it this year, perhaps due to him being given the vice captaincy. Would love to see him get the armband at some stage. He seems like a really nice guy and when you compare the attitude of our Brazilians with other teams Brazilians, (at least from a highly biased and uniformed point off view), it is very satisfying. Perhaps one small problem we had in this game is that none of the subs really did anything. I know Oniki last year liked to make a change at half time, freeing up some more flexibility for later changes, but I think in both games so far we were probably quite pleased with how things had been going at half time so didn’t feel the need to do this. I guess we were up against it a bit in the second half, but Tachibanada after almost being involved in a goal shortly after coming on seemed to drift out of the game. Kurumaya and Kobayashi were involved but didn’t exactly shift the momentum of the game and the Chinen and Hasegawa change was so late that they barely had time to do anything. I’m not blaming the players in any way, I just feel that we can use five subs to change the game and maybe in both games so far, we haven’t managed to really do that.  Yes, aside from Kobayashi scoring the winner in the Super Cup, completely undermining this argument.

Official officials grumbles section -

If ever there was a referee who was completely made for VAR, it is our old friend Nishimura. I swear that sometimes he was just doing that left hand on the ear and right palm outstretched wait a minute pose without anything actually being said on his earpiece. He loves to be the centre of attention and VAR gives him a new way of doing this. I’m surprised he didn’t run over to the pitchside monitor to check on a throw in / play a quick game of solitaire / check #西村 on Twitter as this would have intensified the focus on him. We had no awkward VAR goal awarding delays in this game which was a very welcome thing, but that doesn’t mean VAR is not shit. One other new rule moan. What’s the point of this delayed offside flagging thing? YFM’s smallest midget was way offside in the first half and the linesman didn’t raise his flag till they’d lost the ball and we were moving out of defence. Perhaps the thinking is that an offside flag might distract the ref from an attack which might not be offside and might lead to a goal that VAR could allow? But if this is the case, what’s the point of raising it when the attack is over and the defending team is breaking? I don’t really understand it. But then I don’t really understand plenty of things.

Taunt your neighbour -

So, let’s finish us with a bit of teasing of the opposition. A quick look at Twitter saw the usual YFM fans complaining about Frontale cheating. Actually, I’m still waiting for an answer to the question I asked one of them last season when they moaned that they had been cheated by big decisions in the last game we played against them. Apparently they were going to get back to me when they had analysed the game a bit more. If they don’t do it soon they’re going to have a big old backlog of moans to try and justify. At the end of the game though, there seemed to be a consensus between fans of all teams that YFM had been pretty bad. The YFM manager always makes me think of that guy hanging around the town centre at closing time, hoping he can irritate someone sufficiently and get in one last fight before he has to go back home. He seemed to be quite angry at the end of the game, blaming the players. It probably said something though that his revolutionary new formation that had been employed in the first half had resulted in a rotten performance and when he switched to something else in the second half they were better. I know it’s a common theme that when teams lose it’s the manager’s fault and when team’s win it’s the players that did it. It seems with YFM though that it’s the reverse. I guess when your whole management style is constantly buying new players for every position a state of emergency preventing new overseas players entering the country is going to interfere with your strengthening. There can’t be many teams in the league who buy and discard so many players. Maybe it’s an infinite monkeys with typewriters / Shakespeare approach. Perhaps this was a good time to play them or perhaps this game is going to be representative of how the whole of their season is going to go. No ACL for them to use as an excuse this year, so we’ll really see where they are, I guess.


So another very welcome win, but again another second half which was quite difficult to get excited about. I’m not going to moan too much about us not taking chances in this game as starting the league with a win is a significant improvement on what we normally do. And starting YFM’s season with a defeat is pretty satisfying too! Next up, we have Cerezo Osaka at home on Wednesday. Historically a bogey team but one who we dispatched with ease last year. They look like they are all over the place this year so on paper you’d say we were the favourites. So, probably we’ll stink the place up and lose. Hopefully though we can keep up this tradition of one player blasting in a couple of goals in the first half. And hopefully we can boot into the stand this trend of us having a very disappointing second half. Go Frontale! 

Team 

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG 

DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 4. JESIEL
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT
MF 25. TANAKA Ao

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 (on for WAKIZAKA 76')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 76')

MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MITOMA 88')

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for IENAGA 88')

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 64')

 
My Frontale Man Of The Match
 
My inclination is to start making these quite oblique to jazz up the end of season stats post a little. To begin that trend I'm going to give it to multiple players today in an attempt to make us the 2021 most man of the match awards in one season. Today...

IENAGA Akihiro & LEANDRO DAMIAO - Another lazy decision to give it to the guy who scored twice but they were great goals. And Damiao was a total pain in the neck for the YFM keeper and perhaps I'll give it to him every time his celebrates a block as much as he did in this game and the last one. (And in this picture it looks like we are playing only Damiao vs the whole YFM team).


Goals

IENAGA (Frontale) 21' 1-0
IENAGA (Frontale) 43' 2-0


Highlights
 

Saturday 20 February 2021

Vs Gamba Osaka 20/2 Super Cup


Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 2 Gamba Osaka


A new season starts, so off we go again on this blog. Feels like it’s only been a few weeks since I last had to write a blog post on here. But what a joyful few weeks that was! It’s good that I’ve made an early start to the whinging this season. I think as we’re going to be experiencing another quite hectic season, (although probably nowhere near as hectic as last year), I’m going to slightly adapt the format on here again. Also, it looks like it might be more difficult to get tickets to games this year as our season ticket holder privileges have been revoked. (Not just ours, but all season ticket holders. I didn’t do anything bad). Writing lengthy blog posts on games I’ve watched on the internet seems to be a bit of a waste of time as clearly the majority of my readers know what they are talking about more than I do. So, perhaps there will be a slight change in focus. But I always say that and then end up reverting back to the same old things. So, we’ll see I guess! For this game, I’m going to go with the tangential bullet points that occasionally seem to work. You are not going to get much in the way of useful information, but I guess you never really did. Hopefully there will be something worth reading though! Here we go…


The heady thrills of a silent stadium on TV -

Football is back and, due to the state of emergency, so are crowds limited to 5000. I’m sure that in the stadium there might have been a slight wash of excitement at various points, but watching this game on TV, I found it quite hard to focus at times. 5000 crowds means no drums but we do seem to be able to do some kind of rhythmic clapping so perhaps the latest research has proved that unlike soldiers marching in step over a bridge, people clapping at the same time isn’t a danger to everyone involved. We’ll find out whether it is as flat an atmosphere as it sounded on TV next Friday I guess. Although given that we only managed to get tickets in the main stand, it might be hard to tell. Let’s hope that the state of emergency is lifted on March 7th and we can get back to at least 10000 crowds and just a bit of atmsophere as soon as it is safe and possible.

MITOMA SHOOTING!!!! (said in the style of a Japanese TV commentator) -

We have been firing in goals galore in our preseason games. I’m never sure if this is a good thing or not as preseason form often bears little relation to how teams play when the real stuff starts. But we did start this game in kind of exciting fashion. Perhaps taking a cue from our Kanagawa neighbours YFM, who after winning the league in 2019 started the next season in pretty haphazard style, we started this game looking good going forward (up until it came to shooting) and looking pretty dodgy at the back (until it came to conceding). All of the excitement without any of the goals! After an absolute howler of a miss from Taniguchi after Joao Schmidt was unlucky to not open the scoring with a header from a corner, we did kind of get ourselves together a bit and managed to score twice. It will come as no surprise to discover that it was Mitoma with both goals, who seems to have not got too disheartened by not being able to move overseas yet. So far so good! Damiao even was trying to the overhead kicks again. However, judging by the second half, it seems that we are equally capable of conceding goals in quick succession as we are of scoring them. This was never a comfortable game for us, but I guess at least that makes things exciting. Anyway, this is getting dangerously close to talking seriously about the game so I’ll move on.

New year, new players -

This game gave us an opportunity to get a look at some of our new players. We had a new guy called Tanaka playing in the number 25 shirt… oh hang on, it’s just Ao, whose face seems to have changed again. Apparently he’s also growing still which isn’t something you can normally say about players who’ve spent a couple of years as an important member of the first team. Joao Schmidt was perhaps the biggest of the signings and it looks like he’ll be slotting into that Morita-shaped hole in the team. I thought he looked like he had settled in already which was nice, but he shouldn’t get complacent. There have been quite a few singings in recent years who went straight into the team only to gradually disappear from view, as if on one of those really long travelators at Haneda, slowly receding into the distance, only ever appearing in training ground videos and occasional autograph singing sessions. Three other new players played a part from the bench. Tsukagawa looked pretty exciting in the tackle I thought, giving back to the Gamba players as good as he got, getting VERY involved with some hard but fair challenges. A perfect person to take over Nara’s number 3 shirt. Was a shame to see him have to leave the pitch after a particularly hard challenge but he seemed ok and it did give us an opportunity to see the 6th sub rule come into effect for the first time. I’m not 100% sure of the details but it allows a team to replace a player who’s had a bang on the head rather than having them play on and risk their health. Tono got a bit of time on the pitch at the end in place of Ienaga. It seems that unlike Kobayashi, he is willing to play in that position on the right. And he did provide an assist for the very enjoyable last minute winner from Kobayashi. It’s nice that we have another option in that position as Hatate seems to be a left back now. Tachibanada had been touted as being ready for the first team and I’d say that seems to be true. He was also said to be a defensive midfielder but in his time on the pitch it seems that all the other midfielders had a go in that position apart from him. Whether this line up represents Oniki’s best eleven and subs, who knows. The game had a bit of a feel of a warm up fixture to it, (for me too, judging by my attention span). Guess we’ll find out next Friday.

CONVERT! -

Oniki is a religious zealot! Oniki is a fly-half after a try is scored! (Maybe… I know nothing about rugby and had to google this). Oniki is a bigoted parent of a LGBT child! What I’m trying to say is that he seems obsessed with converting. And I don’t mean converting Brazilian singings from athletes into people for the translators to take shopping. Who needs to sign defenders when you can covert players from all over the pitch into defenders! Hatate started this game at left back and it looks like it will be him playing there till Nobori is fit again. Yamamura who was a midfielder and was then converted in a defender seems to have been converted back into a midfielder again judging by the clubs grouping of players in Instagram posts. Oniki loves converting players into defenders so much that he even converts defenders into different position defenders. It seems that Kurumaya is now going to be playing centre back, (or probably covering for centre back), rather than left back. Which made it slightly amusing that with our emergency 6th sub Oniki had to put Kurumaya at left back. There was even a rumour pre-season that he was thinking of converting Taniguchi in a defensive midfielder to replace Morita. Which is also funny as that was where he used to play before he was converted into a centre back. If Claudio Ranieri was the tinker man, surely it’s only a matter of time before Oniki has to be referred to as the tweaker man. Hmmm, sure there is a better word for that but I’ve been searching for it for a while and can’t find it so that’ll have to do.

VAR -

VAR, it’s crap, isn’t it? It allowed our second goal, which looked offside but wasn’t, but I’d still love to see it launched into space or thrown overboard in the middle of the Pacific. In theory, decisions will now be correct. Although even some refs have said that there will still be an element of personal judgement involved. But whether it is worth ditching the exhilaration of scoring a goal for the sterile thrill of accuracy I’m not sure. In fact, I think I am kind of sure that it isn’t worth it. As I tweeted,
‘The VAR delay makes the celebration so much sweeter!’ said no-one, ever. The big VAR decision in this game for our second goal was particularly weird as on the TV coverage they didn’t even bother showing a replay until the decision had been given. Perhaps they were too worried that something said by a commentator or analyst might contradict the official verdict. I dunno. I’m sure there will be disasters with VAR this season and ridiculously marginal calls which cause uncomfortable vibe-killing delays. While at the same time decisions that aren’t covered by VAR will be totally bodged by the ref. I’m pretty sure that Gamba’s late free kick in this game came from one of their own players elbowing a teammate. Of course I wouldn’t have been too happy if they’d scored from that free kick, but at the same time there’s no way I’d be calling for VAR to run the rule over all the decisions in a game. Better for consistency’s sake to just bin it, right? Hehe.


So, this post seems to have just gone the same way that all the previous ones did. I guess it will take a while for my new blogging style to bed in. Unlike our new players who seem to have hit the ground running! The Super Cup is a competition that winner is delighted to win whilst at the same time every other team in the league says is meaningless. Certainly though, it was nice to get off to a winning start and irritate plenty of opposition fans with a last minute winner. Hopefully we can keep this going on Friday against YFM at home to kick off the league campaign. We’ll probably need to iron out a few of those dodgy crinkles at the back though and probably take our chances a bit more. We won’t always be able to rely on a last minute winner. Fingers crossed we won’t need one! Go Frontale!
 

Team 

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG 

DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 4. JESIEL
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT
MF 25. TANAKA Ao

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru


Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta 

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 64')

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for TSUKAGAWA 90+1')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 72')

MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MITOMA 72')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for IENAGA 83')

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for WAKIZAKA 64')

 
My Frontale Man Of The Match
 
I definitely could have paid a lot more attention to this game than I did, but the experience of watching a game played almost in silence on TV didn’t exactly grip me. (Still managed to write all of this crap on it though didn’t?). Going to give it to…

MITOMA Kaoru - Maybe a lazy decision to give it to the guy who scored twice but he really can shoot can’t he? While others fluff their lines he seems to more often than not do the business. Long may that continue!

 

Goals

MITOMA (Frontale) 29' 1-0
MITOMA (Frontale) 32' 2-0
YAJIMA (Gamba) 60' 2-1
PATRIC (Gamba) 67' PEN 2-2
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 90+6' 3-2
 

Highlights