Vs Beijing Guoan 30/6/21 ACL Group stage game 2

Beijing Guoan 0 - 7 Kawasaki Frontale

If you thought that last blog post was a bit pointless in its flakiness  then this one is really going to up the ante. But to be honest, I’m not wholly to blame for this. This year’s ACL, (AN EASY RIDE! TYPICAL THAT YOU GET IT SO EASY! YOU’RE CRAP IF YOU DON’T WIN EVERY GAME 20-0! cry the rival fans… again…), is a weird beast. I quite like seeing plenty of teams from ‘smaller’ footballing nations so thanks to the Australian teams for sorting that out. The significant difference as evidenced by this game is the fact that the Chinese teams have sent the kids. The oldest player who started the game for Beijing Guoan was 23 and he was the goalkeeper. He also had the lowest squad number which is not unusual when you consider he is the keeper but when that number is 25 there’s definitely something going on. Incidentally, the highest number on display was 88. And it showed on the pitch as they looked pretty awful. So awful that any real discussion of this match is pretty pointless I’d say. I can’t imagine we have ever had so much space in a competitive game before. After an initial flurry of goals at the start of the game they did manage to stem the flow slightly. But I’d say that this was more due to us not just taking our foot off the gas, but more pulling over into the motorway service station, turning the car off and spending the majority of the rest of the first half browsing the magazines in WH Smith and getting and eating a Cornish Pasty. We scored goals and any dissection of the goals is kind of pointless, I’ll just mention that it was good for Hasegawa and Yamamura to get one, Chinen to get a couple and for Wakizaka, Tono and Tachibanada to keep their goal counter ticking over. Nice.

A few words on our starting lineup. It seems that Noborizato is injured after he left the pitch in the last game. It also seems that Kobayashi could be joining him on the sidelines after picking up a knee injury and having to be subbed after 34 minutes. Hopefully it won’t be too serious as if we continue at this rate of one important injury every game we could end up with lots of players missing by the time we get back to playing J League fixtures. Of course, I’d like to blame the pitch like I did last time, but to be honest it looked a bit better. Or rather I didn’t notice it being totally horrible. Perhaps this was due to the game being considerably less challenging than our last fixture against Daegu. Also, I was attempting to watch the England Germany game at the same time so there is a real possibility that instead of taking in two games at once, I ended up not really paying any attention to two games at once. It was made all the more confusing by the fact that the two games were going quite different ways when it came to tension and the level of the tactical battle going on. Oniki made a few changes when it came to the starting line up. There were various interpretations of the formation after the line up was announced. Not sure that any of them were right to be honest. Basically we had a centre back pairing of Kurumaya and Yamamura, with Hatate at left back and Taniuguchi in the defensive midfield spot. Because, you know, it’s been a little while since we tried that and yeah, it didn’t work, but why not give it another go, eh? I always moan about it because it never works and once again it didn’t, so I will register a moan about it again. Moan. Perhaps it’s telling than Taniguchi was withdrawn at half time. As we are pretty light on centre backs I would have thought he could have been rested for this game anyway. Perhaps that was Oniki’s thinking when he took him off at half time. I hope though that his thinking was ‘Weird… I tried this same thing again and for some reason once again it didn’t work’. He clearly knows a let more than me about football but please let me know if I’m off the mark with my desire to not see Taniguchi play in midfield. It was nice to see Issaka and Kamiya get some time on the pitch again. This time it was more than a minute for Kamiya and I thought he looked pretty good at left back. But like I said I wasn’t fully focussed so probably only noticed when he was involved in some kind of action. I wonder if he might start the next game if Nobori is still injured. I’ll draw this post to a conclusion with a couple of stupid observations. I liked Chinen’s new sideburns. Surprisingly long. Or at least that’s how they looked. And an observation that the low budget feel to these games and their coverage continued with the fake digital subs boards with day-glo stick on numbers being used. I wonder if they had enough of the larger digits given that they probably don’t usually need to do a substitution where player number 88 is replaced by 68. (These numbers are for demonstration purposes only. Truth and accuracy, as you’d expect from this blog, is abandoned in order to make a stupid joke. The TV director and cameramen still seem obsessed with long lingering shots of managers or players uninvolved with the action whilst the game continues unobserved off screen. I find it adds to the excitement though, as particularly given that there is no crowd reaction noise, literally anything could be happening and you only have the facial expressions of the person being focussed on to use as evidence for a guess as to what’s going on.

Next up we have United City of the Philippines on Friday at 11pm so it won’t be such a late night. They lost 7-0 to Daegu in their second game so I guess we probably won’t be putting out the full strength team and hopefully will see some more squad players getting a chance. Can’t help but feel though that if we started Damiao in this game and the other two games against United City and Beijing Guoan he might end up breaking the all time ACL scoring record that Dejan Damjanovic has just broken. He’s probably about 32 goals behind still, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Certainly we’d be seeing a few more overhead kicks! There is a lingering feeling that this whole tournament group stage is a bit pointless but I have to say, I’m quite enjoying it! Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki  (on for TANIGUCHI 46')

DF 4. JESIEL

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for WAKIZAKA 76')

DF 15. ISSAKA Zain (Yellow card 85') (on for YAMANE 54')

FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 34')

DF 26. KAMIYA Kaito (on for HATATE 54')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

 

 

Goals   

HASEGAWA (Frontale) 7' 0-1

TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 8' 0-2

TONO (Frontale) 41' 0-3

CHINEN (Frontale) 47' PEN 0-4

YAMAMURA (Frontale) 51' 0-5

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 56' 0-6

CHINEN (Frontale) 59' 0-7

 

 

Highlights

 

Vs Daegu FC 27/6/21 ACL Group stage game 1

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 2 Daegu FC

Another ACL campaign kicked off with some hope that we’ll do a bit better this time. Our last attempt was pretty awful in spite of us actually going for it. We were unlucky on a few occasions in that attempt and at times it looked like we were going to also fluff our lines in this game. But we managed to come through relatively unscathed in the end. Already people are bitching about how easy we have it this year in the ACL. We are in a no win situation as far as opposition fans go. If we win, we’ll be told that this year was a freakishly easy competition due to Australian teams pulling out and Chinese teams sending mostly their youth teams. If we fail we will be told that we’re useless for the same reasons. Given that we’ll get criticised both ways, hopefully we can go for the former option and make a decent stab of it. So, onto this game.

We got off to the worst possible start, looking like we were all over the place defensively, conceding within eight minutes and then going on to give away a penalty, (which thankfully Sung-Ryong saved, again!). To be honest, we generously gave them both of these chances as their goal came from a Joao Schmidt ‘assist’ and Jesiel was all over the place in giving away the penalty. Their second goal was equally sloppy from our point of view as the scorer was free in acres of space and then Jesiel helped them by blocking Sung-Ryong’s view. To be honest our usually reliable Jesiel had a bit of a nightmare in this game. Thankfully we and he were doing slightly better at the other end as it was Jesiel who provided the ball for Damiao to do his usual ‘set myself up for an overhead and score another lovely goal’. In the same way that we assisted Daegu with their first, they helped lay the ball off for Damiao for his second after a nice Mitoma run and cross. It was nice to see Joao get the third as it was his first goal for us and particularly good for him after you could have said he inadvertently helped them with their first. Daegu looked pretty comfortable with their tactics of sitting back and hitting us on the break. We really should be used to teams doing this by now! They weren’t helped by a few injuries, but I suspect for some of the ‘injuries’ whilst they were ahead, there was an element of time wasting involved. The camera tracking left to right showed a Daegu player kneeling down tying his laces. When the camera tracked back the same player (I think) was rolling around on the floor. The first time I have seen someone get injured tying their laces. Perhaps it was lace burn or maybe he tied them dangerously tightly. Equally, a Daegu defender seemed to injure himself hoofing a clearance. I think he really was injured though as he seemed to get subbed shortly afterwards.

On to some gripes. The pitch was atrocious. In the Emperor’s cup game I compared the ‘special’ ball to one of those super bouncy balls kids love. This ball seemed to be the same, except this time we were playing with a super bouncy ball on a cobbled town square. Simple passes gamboled along boinging up and down and occasionally shooting off at tangents. We have five out of our six games on the same pitch apparently… And if it’s bad now… Yikes. Also there was some interest on Twitter about what I would say about the ref. I thought he seemed like a nice guy, quite smily and seemed to congratulate Damiao on his spectacular goal. He did also seem to be on a super focussed mission to book players in blue. I don’t have any problem with the penalty he gave. I think that maybe we didn’t get the rub of the green when it came to getting free kicks though. And we got more yellow cards in this match than we did in the previous seven games combined. Guess this is something we are going to have to get used to when we’re in ACL games though. Bit weird that they didn’t get any though. Oh, and is it just me or are ACL refs always from Oman? Presumably this point will be proved completely wrong in our next match. Final moan is that the DAZN feed seems to have been purchased from a local Uzbek Del Boy character who has got his mates in to film and direct the match. A few times the camera didn’t keep up with the ball and there were times when we have a long close up of a player jogging and watching an attack build at a distance from him before a harsh cut to a ball flying wide with no idea who kicked it. Interesting from the point of view of observing the emotions of the players but not exactly great for watching and understanding the game. The commentators seemed to have the same pictures as they seemed genuinely surprised by a harsh cut to Daegu almost scoring as we were watching a replay of a defensive header or something. The commentators also were having quite a lot of trouble identifying our players. But I guess it was late and the camera angle seemed slightly weird. And I suppose there is a few players of similar stature with similar haircuts. That is why they put the numbers on the shirts though, so I would have hoped for a bit more accuracy.

I probably should also mention the news that everyone probably already knows. Ao has left us and transferred to Fortuna Dusseldorf. Fortuna(tely), Oshima is finally back from injury so hopefully this will soften the blow a little. Good luck to Ao. Of course it’s a shame to see him go, but hopefully he’ll do well.

So a good opening win. Daegu are probably our biggest rivals in the this group and of course we have the toughest game of the group to come when we play them away from home (lolz, I had to put this hilarious observation in somewhere. Does seem a bit weird that we have to do home and away in the same stadium only a week apart without even any opportunity to get some money from fans attending, but never mind…). Next up is Beijing Guoan’s youth team (apparently). They got a draw against United City of the Philippines but from the stats it seems that they were comfortably out possessed and out shot in that game. I guess we’ll know a lot more about the teams relative strengths after the next round of matches. And I guess we’ll see quite a bit of rotation in the next match. Or maybe Oniki will save that for a time when we have a few more points in the bank. It’s another 1am kick off so expect another slightly flaky blog post like this one. Go Frontale!

 

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 28')

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (Yellow card 52')

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 47. HATATE Reo (Yellow card 45+1')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for NOBORIZATO 66')

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for WAKIZAKA 63')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for MITOMA 87')

 

Goals   

HWANG (Daegu) 8' 0-1

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 40' 1-1

CESINHA (Daegu) 47' 0-1

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 51' 1-1

JOAO SCHMIDT (Frontale) 55' 1-1

 

 

Highlights

 

Vs AC Nagano Parceiro (home) 9/6/21 - Emperor's Cup 2nd round

 

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 AC Nagano Parceiro (AET) (4-3 on penalties)

Phew! We scraped through. Coming into this game unbeaten and with us playing a J3 side who were struggling there seemed only one logical outcome in this game. Yes, that’s right, a real wobble from us, just about managing to avoid losing. At certain stages of the night it looked like being a great evening for either us, YFM or FC Chofu fans as within the trio of rivals there was always one team who seemed to be doing their best to embarrass themselves. I guess the one positive from your team losing to weaker opposition would be if your rival also did, particularly if it were to even weaker opposition. However, Frontale, perhaps the team who have the strongest rivalry with the other two (not downplaying the FC Tokyo and YFM rivalry, especially after events in recent years, but both of them almost certainly hate us more than they hate each other), managed to come up smelling of roses again with a slightly nervy win on penalties, with the added bonus of their two neighbours going out to a university team and an amateur team. I don’t want to hear about Honda FC’s strength and how they are actually better than some J1 teams. It’s much more fun to concentrate on the fact that they are in the JFL. Why let facts get in the way of fun? The win sees us take on JEF United in the next round, although that will probably have to be rescheduled as we’ll be away on ACL duty. Which will also be the competition our next game, (against Daegu on the 26th June), is part of. So a bit of a break now. Lovely! Get the international players back and have a bit of a rest and then get ready and firing for the ACL hopefully. Here are the usual bullet points before we all have a couple of weeks off.

Us -

In usual Frontale cup style we started with our probably strongest line up and toiled. Of course this is with the caveat that we had those five international players still missing. Probably the big surprise in the line up was Kozuka starting in midfield. Oniki has done this before, and much like the previous time he was replaced at half time. I thought this was a bit unfair both times as I couldn’t see he was any worse than anyone else, but maybe he wanted to put some players together who have played more alongside each other as we were trailing. Clearly Oniki sees something in him to have given him a couple of starts but I’m wondering how much longer that will go on. Personally, I wonder if he’d have more joy playing further forward. He’s apparently a more attacking midfielder so perhaps playing up front would suit him better. Another starter who was withdrawn relatively early was Issaka, who I thought did OK again. But his replacement at right back Tachibanada did really well, so you can’t argue about that change. Tachibanada has been growing in stature recently. (Metaphorically speaking. Literally, well if that were true he would have had to have started from a very low place if he’s grown to where he is now!). In both this and the YFC game I think he’s really seized his opportunity and looks like a great prospect. Another interesting prospect who got a surprise runout was Miyagi Ten. He came on for Hasegawa and it seems that he’s been learning quite a lot from him and Mitoma as his game seemed to be all about dribbling, beating the man and shooting. He could have scored a beauty. Which is a nice link to talking about almost all of the front players. They all could and probably should have scored but were denied by wayward targeting and last ditch defending. We hit the bar a couple of times and there were numerous goal line clearances and scrambled blocks. Full credit to Nagano for this, but you’ve got to wonder if we’ll get so many opportunities in our upcoming ACL games.

 

We did our best in this game when we moved the ball forward a bit more quickly. Nagano were understandably defending in numbers, particularly when they were ahead. We spent much too long building slowly. I say building, but it was building in the way that you can build a really long wall that stretches for miles but if you don’t add a few layers and a roof and join it up with some other walls you’re never going to get an actual building but instead will just have a long line of bricks. When we moved forward quickly and ran at them we made chances. And then missed chances, but that’s slightly beside the point. When we pondered we didn’t even make chances for us to miss. The big standout thing for me in this game was our passing and control. It was pretty bad! I would be surprised if we completed more than 60% of them. They were weirdly hit and off target. Attempted traps pinged off the boot or the body. Of course, I’d love to blame the ball, which seemed to be behaving like one of those little hard rubber super bouncy balls, which when I was young we referred to as ‘bouncy balls’ (perhaps not the technical name, but pretty descriptive, I’m sure you’ll agree). I wish we’d been able to adjust a bit more quickly to it as if the ACL decides to use a beach ball for this season's competition we need to be prepared to adapt a bit quicker. All in all, we looked a bit tired and a bit off the pace, but we really did have a lot of possession and a lot of shots and aside from some stout Nagano defending we would have won this easily. But you can guarantee that other teams will defend like that against us, so I’d hope we get a bit better at taking our chances soon.

Them -

There’s not much to say about Nagano that I haven’t already referred to. They were very unlucky. They defended well and scored a wonder goal. They had a player called Kammera Shuto which delighted me. You’ve got to feel sorry for them losing this game, but at least they did it on penalties to a team who are unbeaten and leading the division two above them. Full credit to them. I’m a bit worried how poorly we dealt with their long throws. I hope this won’t be picked up on by other teams. I never imagine these games will be easy, but they made it a lot harder than everyone expected it would be. Nice work Nagano!

Ref and VAR -

This was the best game for VAR so far this season... because it’s not used in this tournament. The ref was a new name for me, Sendachi. I thought he looked a bit out of his depth, perhaps being unwilling to make any bad decisions and as a consequence not really making any decisions. He wasn’t bothered about time wasting or shirt pulling and even if we played for days I don’t think Damiao would have got a decision given his way. He also tackled Kozuka, which I don’t think he’s really supposed to do, causing us to lose the ball and he didn’t stop the game for a drop ball as I’ve seen other refs do. I’m not going to complain too much though as given that this is the first time I’ve seen his name I guess he’s not that experienced. (Turns out from some research that he's not refereed a top flight game before and before this match has only taken charge of 8 games. He's only 31 too!). If it had been Nishimura or Iemoto doing the same I’d be far more inclined to have a rant.

Other stuff -

We had an earthquake before the game. It was the first time I’ve felt one whilst in the stadium I think. The JFA is still flexing their muscles and showing they’re in control of the Emperor's Cup by controlling the build up music before the game and it’s the same horrible crap they played last year. Endlessly looping guitar-solo-funky-rock-workout and then slightly traditional sounding intro song which gear changes into a soft techno beat mess. Rotten stuff! But quite funny I suppose and it does mark this out as a different competition. Oh and one point that could have gone in the ‘us’ section. Jesiel attempted an overhead kick in this game. At FC Chofu Leandro seems to be spreading grumpiness to his countrymen. At Frontale Leandro Damiao is instead convincing his compatriots to try an overhead at every opportunity. Lovely stuff!

This could have been a very different blog post if we hadn’t managed that equaliser. Full credit to Tachibanada for putting the ball in the net! We were really motivated toward the end of the game but couldn’t do actually score, so without his goal we would have been screwed. Maybe we should try the same insane formation we had at the end of the match for the ACL games, with everyone playing everywhere and loads of attacking players on the pitch. (Kurumaya was definitely left and centre back with Nobori and Jesiel up front). Probably best not to, but it was clear that Oniki was throwing every attacking option he had at the game in order to avoid an embarrassing defeat. And he did. Next up, the ACL. No one has the TV rights at the moment but hopefully that will change nearer the time. Otherwise the upcoming blog posts are going to be very brief. Probably a blessing. Let’s have a rest then get ready and then hopefully make a decent stab of it this year. Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 15. ISSAKA Zain

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 81')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for ISSAKA 65')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 81')

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KOZUKA 46')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for HASEGAWA 85')

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for HASEGAWA 112')

 

Goals   

FUJIYAMA (Nagano) 42' 0-1

TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 90+1' 1-1

Penalties
FUJIYAMA (Nagano) 0-1
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 1-1
MIZUTANI (Nagano) 1-1 (saved)

YAMAMURA (Frontale) 2-1
AZUMA (Nagano) 2-1 (saved)
KURUMAYA (Frontale) 3-1
YAMAMOTO (Nagano) 3-2

TONO (Frontale) 3-2 (saved)

YOSHIMURA (Nagano) 3-3

IENAGA (Frontale) 4-3

 

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

This was a weird game where things just didn’t seem to be going our way. For most of the game it would have been difficult to pick someone for this but I’ve ended up going with two people for different reasons. Let’s give it to....

Sung-Ryong JUNG and TACHIBANADA Kento - Sung-Ryong basically won us the game by saving two out of the five Nagano penalties. If you save one penalty in a shoot out that’s great so two is definitely deserving of this prestigious accolade. Tachibanada gave us a lot more drive when he came on and he scored the goal that got us back in the game so he clearly deserves this too. Bravo to both of them!

 

Highlights

 

Vs Yokohama FC (away) 2/6/21 - J League match 21

Yokohama FC 0 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

Today, a blog post full of excitement and enthusiasm but, as usual, almost completely lacking in detail or analysis but this time for a different reason. This was the first time I have been to Mitsuzawa as we weren’t able to attend the game last year due to COVID restrictions and there’s no chance that one of our games against YFM would ever be moved to a smaller stadium given that they can usually almost fill the Nissan stadium for that fixture (mostly with Frontale fans, wink emoji). A new ground always brings a new sense of excitement for me, check out the local bars and restaurants, enjoy the sights, make a weekend of it. However, this was a Wednesday evening fixture a few stations down the line from our home and during a pandemic enforced ban on alcohol sales. But it was a new stadium anyway! We also had the added excitement of losing five players to international duty, so it was something of a mystery as to who would start. More on that later. Mitsuzawa is a really fun stadium. It’s a nice size, your close to the pitch and the action, you get a lovely view of a big hospital, and the occasional whiff of animal poo. I was a bit confused and thought that maybe we’d wandered right out into the countryside but a quick check of the map showed that there’s an equestrian centre nearby and therefore when the wind was blowing in the right direction it brought with it the delicate aroma of the by product of a load of horses' digestion. One other draw back is that it’s up a pretty formidable hill if you’re walking from Yokohama station. As I reached the summit, holding back the urge to pretend I was about to be crowned king of the mountains in a Tour de France Pyrenean stage I was greeted by the Frontale team bus arriving at the stadium. I like to think that the players, seeing me at the point of elation having conquered a tough mountain stage were motivated to give that little bit extra in the game. If not, well I hope that they had a good laugh at the panting and sweaty Brit, who had clearly only just dodged a medical emergency walking up a hill. The view from the stand behind the goal was great from the point of view of proximity, but not so great for the other end of the pitch if you were sitting in the third row as we were. Giving the lack of elevation it basically looked like the game was being mostly played in only two dimensions. Perhaps I should have been wearing my glasses, but I still can’t get on with glasses and a mask so it’s the glasses that have to make way. Because of this, most of what I know about what happened up the other end of the pitch I have learnt from replays and that ever reliable news source Twitter. Which all hints at a load of rubbish coming soon in this blog post. So, normal service eh? Here are the usual bullet points.

Us -

The best thing about this game and the reason for my enthusiasm and excitement was the enforced changes we had to make. Oniki totally surprised me by giving Issaka Zain his first ever minutes on the pitch. And it was 90 minutes at right back in place of Yamane. Some people might have not been surprised to see Oniki choose our other right back at right back but I feel that it’s not something he ever really wants to do. In previous seasons he’s played numerous people out of position there rather than go with someone inexperienced. But perhaps on this occasion he was left with not many other options. Delighted to see Zain get a chance and after looking absolutely petrified before kick off I thought he grew into the game and did a pretty good job. Some teething problems, but on the whole, well done, and I’m delighted we now have some cover there. Add to this another debutant! Blimey. Kamiya made the bench and made the pitch for about thirty seconds. He managed to head the ball! A flawless performance. He came on for Nobori so we have a bit more cover there as well as at centre back where he also apparently can play. The new Kurumaya maybe. Nobori was captain for this game which is the first time I’ve seen that I think. Perhaps if this was the regulars playing I might say that we toiled quite a lot and the fact that we couldn’t make more breakthroughs was emblematic of us being off the pace. In this game though it seemed that I was feeling a lot more generous. Clearly this was a makeshift starting line-up, the likes of which we almost certainly wouldn’t see in normal circumstances. Therefore it was great to see people playing together for the first time and building understandings. I actually also think that YFC defended quite well. We rarely looked in danger of conceding but they did a good job of stopping our attacks too. Probably some reasons for that explained in the next section. It was really nice to see Kobayashi score a couple of goals to follow up his late winner against Kashima. He could have had a hat trick too if he hadn’t basically missed an open goal. This makes it even more important that he got his second I think as he might have needed it to get his confidence back on track. He hasn’t had that much pitch time recently and has struggled a little to make an impact. If we can get him and Damiao both firing at the same time that will be awesome as we haven’t smashed in that many goals recently. Don't think that I'm complaining about this, but it's just that we don’t seem to be scoring as many as last year and aren’t tonking people quite so often. (A bit of stats bashing shows that we’re ten goals behind last years pace after 21 games so my gut feeling was right). A few other highlights were Damiao attempting either an overhead shot from a 90 degree angle to the goal, or perhaps it was an overhead cross. Whichever you look at it, it was another overhead! Tsukagawa hit the post which was a real shame as I feel like he too has maybe felt a bit like things haven’t been going his way recently and I’d love to see him score a goal. Probably most people’s highlight of the game from an amusing point of view was Ienaga doing an insane ball stuck to the foot dribble in the box setting YFC defenders on their arses, and then just as some space opened up for a shot seeing Kurumaya do an absolutely amazing scuff of a shot causing Ienaga to have a little hissy fit. Clearly it was going to be a goal of the season contender if Kurumaya hadn’t got involved. Thankfully it didn’t turn out to be crucial. And also thankfully, Ienaga and Kurumaya seemed to be laughing about it after the game. It’s worth checking the highlights to see Ienaga’s reaction. It was quite funny.

 

Them -

In their pre-match entertainment YFC displayed a kind of magnet board graphic of their line up and formation. This suggested that they were going to play an unconventional 6-2-2 formation. The fact that they’d had some COVID cases in the day before the game might have limited their selection somewhat but naming six defenders to start with and having two more in the bench felt like something of a power move, flexing the fact that they had more defenders in their starters and subs (sorry, they were not called subs, they were called IMPACT MEMBERS!), than we have in our whole squad. The other way of looking at this would be that they were looking to defend defend defend and if they could, snatch a goal on the counter attack. Which is pretty much how it panned out. You could say that their tactics perfectly matched their season slogan ‘Record the blue’. Well you could say that if anyone had any idea what that was supposed to mean and if it had any relevance. It’s all a mystery to me. As slogans go, I have to say I quite like it. Certainly less annoying than some other teams. And enjoyably enigmatic in meaning. I do wonder why more teams don’t get their English slogans as least looked at by a native speaker before they go ahead with them, but at the same time, I’m very happy they don’t. In spite of them not scoring, I thought YFC did a better job in this game than the fixture at Todoroki. In that game they only seemed able to do anything after we’d totally stopped playing in the second half. In this game their defence stood pretty firm for long periods of the match. This might hint that they are a little unlucky to be at the bottom of the table. At the same time playing six defenders does certainly limit your options when it comes to scoring goals, so maybe that balance is something they are struggling to find so far. Perhaps they’ll be able to start picking up some points soon. In a way I hope so, as there are plenty of teams I’d prefer to go down. But at the same time, survival looks like quite a tall order for them.

 

Ref and VAR -

Fresh from his nonsense VAR decision to rule out a goal for us against Shonan, Iemoto decided he fancied ruling out another one, but this time at a distance in the VAR box/booth/office/cupboard/tactics truck. To compound the cringe that the ref who can’t help but give everything against us to prove that he doesn’t favour us was on the VAR, we also had Kasahara on the pitch. A perfect duality of rotten officials to give us the fewest decisions possible. Kasahara must have been gutted to realise that Taniguchi had been called up for the Japan squad. He already had him penciled in for another red card. I don’t know if I am wildly off the mark due to my bias but it really seems like Kasahara in particular, and a lot of refs in general, just don’t give us anything when it comes to 50/50 calls. There were an absurdly large number of free kicks given against us in the first half. We were so much in the ascendancy in this respect that any challenge, irrespective of instigator was fated to end up with us conceding a free kick. We had numerous YFC players attempting to disrobe our players, with more than a handful of shirt, pulling us to the ground and still it resulted in a free kick to them. Weird. Perhaps someone had a word with him at halftime as he seemed to ease back a bit but you could guarantee that if there was anything marginal it wasn’t going to go our way, even if the margin was in our favour. He also let YFC kick off with Jesiel well out of position on the other side of the pitch having drunk some water. Perhaps he was making a point about us not wasting time but I thought he was at least supposed to check everyone was ready before restarting the game. Maybe I’m being paranoid but I can’t help but feel that some officials have an agenda against us. Us having a goal ruled out by VAR is now becoming a weekly thing. Perhaps it took a while to get it going but now they’ve tweaked it to such a degree that we can now count on one being chalked off every game. This time it was for offside and was pretty close I thought (from replays of course. From my view at the game the goal could have been ruled out for a UFO landing on the pitch and an alien jumping out and fouling one of the many YFC defenders available). It’s a shame as Hasegawa could have done with a goal. The decision again took over 2 minutes. (exciting picture of the wait below). Just lovely isn’t it? The drama of the reveal was slightly ruined by Kasahara strolling back towards the keeper away from the centre circle still doing the VAR dance move. If it wasn’t already clear that we weren’t going to get it (because we hardly ever do), this did give it away a bit.

So that’s the league fixtures over for a while. The next one will be Shimizu away on July 17th. We can just cross our fingers were allowed to go to that one. Then it’s another month till Oita away. In the meantime we have an Emperor’s Cup game against Nagano Parciero next Wednesday and then the small matter of our ACL group stage matches in Uzbekistan at the end of June and start of July. That will be pretty interesting. Fingers crossed. The Emperor’s Cup game next week will be interesting too I think. Oniki tends to go with quite a strong line up for these games I think, but he won’t be able to pick the internationals who will still be away. I suspect it'll be a similar line up to this game, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind if he gave some of the less used midfielders a start and kept the big guns on the bench in case of emergency. We’ll see I guess. Very much looking forward to that game! Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 15. ISSAKA Zain

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (Yellow card 61')

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento 

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for TACHIBANADA 72')

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for KOBAYASHI 77')

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for WAKIZAKA 90+3')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for HASEGAWA 77')

FW 20 CHINEN Kei

DF 26. KAMIYA Kaito (on for NOBORIZATO 90+3')

 

 

Goals

 

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 39' 0-1

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 67' 0-2 

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

More accurately on this occasion, men of the match. Not sure what to do here as there were a decent amount of decent performances and some man of the match decision swaying emotional issues involved too that I am a sucker for. The danger is that I name so many players as man of the match that it basically becomes a snub for those not mentioned, so don’t take it that way and just enjoy my sentimentality. Here we go, let’s give it to…

NOBORIZATO Kyohei, ISSAKA Zain, TACHIBANADA Kenta, KOBAYASHI Yu & HASEGAWA Tatsuya - (reasons mentioned in the same order as the names) Well done on the captaincy and for  a decent performance / decent debut and stepped up when he was needed with no previous experience / maybe the best game I’ve seen him play, was like a slightly more aggressive and raw Ao / scored twice, looked delighted and we all love him / unlucky to get his goal ruled out, lovely assist for Kobayashi’s second and maybe getting back towards that early 2020 form.

Highlights