Vs Consadole Sapporo (away) 28/8/21 J League match 27

Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

A totally dominant performance! All the best chances, loads more shots, more possession… oh, sorry, I was looking at the stats the wrong way round. Back on track with a wholly undeserved win but we’ll take it! It does feel a bit like we haven’t had luck on our side with injuries recently. But at the same time, our play has got the results we deserved so I’m not going to moan too much. Thankfully we seem to have come out of this match with no new injuries! Now if only Kashima could do us a favour this evening by absolutely smashing YFM that would be lovely. I’m not sure this was a game anyone will really want to remember particularly but we had a couple of nice goals, rode our luck at the back and took the points. After a very wobbly period where we looked to have lost all confidence, hopefully this game will help us get back on track a little. There’s still a lot to play for this season so a change of fortune is a very welcome thing right now. Would like us to play a bit better of course, but results are more important at the moment. Fingers crossed. There’s not a great deal I want to say about the game. I think I’ve covered it all already by saying we were lucky. So let’s keep this brief.

Our starting line up might have looked a bit weird but to be honest, I don’t think we have that many options at the moment. On the injured list we have Oshima, Taniguchi, Tsukagawa, Hatate. Mitoma and Tanaka have obviously gone and we have only one reinforcement who is maybe now in quarantine so probably won’t be ready for a while. So it was a case of play the players we have where they can. The subs perhaps confused things a little and maybe we ended up playing 4-4-2, but Ienaga moving everywhere makes formations a little difficult to work out sometimes. Kobayashi’s goal was lovely, squeezing the ball in where it looked like there was no space at all. As a follow up he assisted for Tono’s goal and then as a follow up to that he beautifully turned, losing the defender and then skied his shot. But I’m delighted he scored as we need goals at the moment. We had an amazing amount of let offs at the other end of the pitch. Although we nominally had defenders on the pitch, it seemed that we were playing with a strict ‘no defending’ tactical approach. If Sapporo had taken their chances we could have lost this game heavily and then been in second place in the league by bedtime. Only nine shots in the whole game with only three on target tells the (recent same old) story. But three points is the most important thing. And I guess I should give Oniki credit for apparently lifting our spirits sufficiently to not have us completely collapse in this game. He hasn’t got much to work with right now, and we still won. And obviously slightly dubious 2-0 away wins (this game, Oita, Shimizu in the league maybe), are eminently preferable to losing 1-0 even if we don't play very well in either scenario. So that’ll probably do for this post apart from a couple of brief Consadole things. Arano was Arano again and after telling Kengo to die in a previous game seems to have now turned his attention to Kobayashi, who he was having some ‘verbals’ with. Dunno what he said but it doesn’t seem very like Kobayashi to get upset about these kind of things. Bizarrely Arano still seems to be big chums with Damiao though. And the Consadole keeper Sugeno’s hair entertained me a lot in this game. He’s gone for the platinum dye job, but from a distance he really could pass for a white haired man in his mid 60’s. Probably not an original observation, but I like it!

Next up, a couple of games against Urawa in the Levain Cup. And then the ACL game away in Ulsan. So, by the time we play in the league again we will have more of an idea how this season and our form is going. By that stage YFM will have played a game more than us. Wouldn’t it be lovely if the gap was still four points? Might be a bit too much to ask, but until we resume in the league I’ll be fully behind Kashima and Sanfrecce. Well, fully behind them in the most negative anti-YFM way possible. Not sure either of those teams particularly want to do us a favour, but at least Kashima will want to keep up their challenge for the ACL. Right now though, I’ll post this and enjoy the thought that maybe they’ll help us out today. Go Frontale!

 

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

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta 

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (on for MIYAGI 61')

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for KOBAYASHI 84')

DF 15. ISSAKA Zain

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for YAMAMURA 84')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for TONO 71')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for WAKIZAKA 71')

 

Goals

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 34' 0-1

TONO (Frontale) 39' 0-2

 

 

Highlights

 

Vs Avispa Fukuoka (away) 25/8/21 J League match 26

 

Avispa Fukuoka 1 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

 

Our descent into shitness continues. Perhaps the two draws WERE a blip, but actually a positive blip. We look like we’ll never score again and have turned a an eight point lead three games ago into a one point lead. Add to this the obviously horrible form that goes along with doing the previous. And the fact that we are picking up what looks like one serious injury per game. We still have the best defence in the league, but probably not for long as our toothlessness going forward just piles pressure on the defence and it will probably only be a matter of time before we get another serious injury in that department. Or Oniki decides to move Jesiel to fill the Mitoma gap. What a time to be alive! Undeniably, it has been a great time to be a Frontale fan in recent years. Perhaps some of the new fans we have picked up might not be used to this kind of disappointment but I suspect they will probably be all too familiar with it on a weekly basis soon. The only hope is that this utterly shit result gives us the massive kick up the backside that the last two pretty shit results didn’t. But the problem is that there probably won’t be enough fit backsides left to kick, and no-one wants to see an already injured person get a kick up the backside. Well… unless its a particularly loathsome opposition player or manager. Or a J League referee. I’m not going to hang around much with this post. And I’ll try to not give the people who’ve been looking forward to us losing too much to crow about. I will moan though. A bit. I mainly hold two people responsible for this result so I’ll give them a paragraph each. And then moan a bit more as a conclusion. Sounds like fun, eh?

Kimura -

This was a game of two halves. So far, so insightful. To blame in the first half was the ref Kimura. He seemed determined to not give anything. I think his refereeing tolerance setting was turned down. Maybe it ran out of batteries and he forgot to recalibrate it when he put the new ones in. Regular fouls were ignored. Yellow cards resulted in a free kick. Horrible fouls by Croux only got a yellow. Well, on one occasion anyway. I think he should have had a red when he got a yellow (in the 12th minute...), or it should have at least been his second yellow for a similar assault a few minutes before, but I’ll be the first to admit that I am not particularly familiar with the intricacies of the laws of the game. But why let that get in the way of a rant? Usually I love all things Belgian and perhaps Kimura has the same feeling, as I can’t understand why Croux was still on the field to score an annoyingly good goal. I would have loved to see Kimura give him a second yellow for his absolutely ridiculous play acting late in the first half when he threw himself screaming to the ground clutching his calf as a result of approximately no contact whatsover. But those kind of yellows never seem to be given anymore, even when the culprit isn’t already on a yellow. It’s unfair to tar a whole country because of the actions of one of its cheatier citizens so I won’t boycott Belgian beer, music, literature or art (convenient that, eh?), but I do have a new target for my vitriol thanks to his dirty, dirty fouling and dirty, dirty diving. Hopefully he’ll get what he deserves from a better ref sooner or later. But anyway, this isn’t supposed to be about Croux, it’s supposed to be about Kimura. He changed things up in the second half and seemed to be giving absolutely everything and even things that didn’t even exist. I wonder if he realised he needed to recalibrate, but fucked that up, like he’d fucked everything in the first half up. A bit like adjusting your kitchen scales to perfect zero when you’ve got a bowl of flour on top of it already. I think there’s more to his useless first half showing than just not sending the goalscorer off before he could score. He let Avispa kick us around the pitch more than Shimizu did in the Emperor’s Cup. In that match a ref giving nothing encouraged so many fouls that Taniguchi ended up getting one that seriously injured him. Hopefully Hatate’s injury won’t be serious, but you’ve got to think that if Kimura had done something about the assaults in the first quarter of the game we might not have lost another player to injury.

Oniki -

You’ve been waiting for this, I guess! It’s been a while since I had a serious moan at Oniki but now is obviously the time for it. It has been said that Oniki is perhaps more of a lucky manager than a skillful manager. Certainly he inherited some tactics that he only had to slightly tweak and a lot of good players which suggests that perhaps the crucial element to his success where Kazama failed was luck. However it seems that his luck has run out. And if you’re a lucky manager rather than a good manager and you lose your luck then you’re just left as a normal manager. I have no confidence that Oniki can turn this around. I can only hope that the players know how to do it. We’re still in four competitions and to be honest, I don’t think we have any chance of winning any of them. We’re already spread so thin, and the challenge of competing on four fronts isn’t going to help. We hardly bothered reinforcing in the transfer window after losing our two best players to Europe and one of our other best players to another long term injury. Don’t know why. Unless he is 100% forced into changing anything, Oniki goes with the same 18-20 players for pretty much every match day squad. Instead of trying a bit of rotation in crucial positions he instead moves one of our first choice centre backs into midfield where he gets a serious injury. I wish someone would tell him that rotation means using different players and not just pushing the same players’ magnets round his little board and seeing how many different positions he can play Hatate in. Perhaps it seems unfair to blame this defeat on him playing Taniguchi in midfield two games ago? Ok, well how about blaming him for failing to recognise that plenty of our starters are playing terribly at the moment. I can’t remember the last time Hasegawa, Ienaga, Wakizaka or Yamane had a a particularly good game. Jesiel has looked wobbly recently too. Oniki’s subs were awful again in this game. Hatate’s injury prompted him to bring on Kobayashi and put Ienaga back in midfield. The problem with that being that Ienaga basically wanders all over the pitch doing what he wants. When he’s on fire like he normally is, this is great. But when he’s playing badly (like he has since he got his haircut… hmmm), this basically means we’re a player short. This is probably easier to deal with up front rather than in midfield. Oniki used three different centre back partnerships in this game and we didn’t have any injuries there! It’s just endless tinkering via magnets moving round a board. When we’re scoring and playing well we can enjoy this kind of fun. But when we can’t score for love nor money it becomes slightly frustrating in its utter pointlessness. Trailing in this game Oniki brought on Chinen and Hasegawa. I like both of them, but both of them are in horrendous form at the moment. Not exactly who you want to bring on if you need a goal. This change probably spurred Avispa on as they knew we were out of options and ideas. Oniki needs to get on with motivating the players now. Sadly, I don’t think he’s up to that job. Apparently he has taken the blame for the defeat, which I actually think is pretty good of him. It’s a good idea to deflect the pressure from the players who seem to be absolutely lost and devoid of confidence after losing Mitoma and Tanaka. You have to say it looks like we’re going to bottle it again. But at the same time, it would be quite fun to see YFM take the lead and then totally disintegrate afterwards. We can dream I guess. But once again, it’s a sad situation when the only real joy we can hope for is that our rivals do badly. But one goal in 270 minutes of league football, with only 12 shots on target out of 45 suggests that as much as I would like to blame Oniki and Kimura, the blame might also lie elsewhere. In the same games YFM have had only five shots more but have managed to get almost half of them on target. Against Sagan Tosu they apparently had four shots on target and scored four times, which suggests that either they are having a lot of luck at the moment or they are a lot better than us when it comes to taking chances. Or both perhaps.

It’s fair to say that there was a liberal use of expletives in this household during this game. I’m quite pleased that there were no away tickets for this game. There did seem be quite a few Frontale fans there though which is a bit weird. Unless we have a surprisingly large fanbase in Fukuoka. People traveling to the game from Fukuoka prefecture were apparently allowed to wear Frontale shirts. Not really sure how that was enforced but it probably involved showing some receipts from the previous few days and probably a fax of some sort. I feel that we have the last laugh though as it was possible for most homebound Frontale fans to turn off the computer at any stage of this horrible game or perhaps even to smash their computer. Those in the stadium weren’t so lucky. And the state of emergency in Fukuoka means that they wouldn’t even have been able to go out and get wrecked afterwards. Perhaps they could do it in their hotel rooms. Oh, sorry! I forgot, they were apparently all Fukuoka residents weren’t they? If we’d been allowed to attend we would now be sitting in a dry city knowing that our return home via Sapporo (with probably another defeat) would not be for three days. Instead, I can sit here typing away on my computer as quickly as possible and with as little attention to detail as I can bear trying to get this post out of the way as soon as possible. It now looks like the highlight of my week will be drinking that barium liquid stuff and spinning myself around on that big x-ray machine at my health check on Friday. I will shy away from making any recent form / bottling it comparisons with the inevitable outcome of drinking the barium liquid and then taking laxatives after the x-ray but I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. So yeah, Sapporo away on Saturday. This game was a must win and we lost it (and a ten month or so unbeaten record), so that game needs to be labeled something more dramatic to raise the stakes but I can’t come up with it sadly. Instead I’ll end on a bright note. We finally lost a game, but it wasn’t to a team I hate. Think how bad that would have been if it were YFM, FC Tokyo, Kashima, Urawa… (stop me please, I’m just going to type out the whole league table here). I don’t hate Avispa. I do quite dislike Croux as a player now though. I wouldn’t say Avispa really deserved to win, but we certainly deserved to lose. Damn, even my positive ending has soured. I’ll stop here. 

Team

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

DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (Yellow card 90')

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

DF 4. JESIEL (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 64')

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for HATATE 39')

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MIYAGI 64')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for NOBORIZATO 74')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 74')

Goals   

KASHIWA (Hiroshima) 27' 1-0

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 73' 1-1

 

Highlights

 

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 21/8/21 J League match 25

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Oooof. Well that wasn’t much fun. But at the same time, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming. We’ve been a bit rubbish recently because we’re tired, right?… Oh, maybe not. We’ve been a bit rubbish recently because of the refs, right?… Maybe not. Because we’ve lost our two best players and have done nothing to replace them?.. Probably getting closer, but… One thing we can all agree on, whatever your interpretation of this recent rubbish spell, is that we’ve been rubbish. Given that I delighted in the early Muscat Out hashtags recently, it’s only right that I should give credit to YFM when they play well… Sorry, what was that? I missed what you said. Never mind, can’t have been important. Anyway, moving on to the moaning, here’s what someone might say if they had watched this awful match and then wanted to get the resulting blog post out of the way as soon as possible with as little effort as possible.

Positives -  

We didn’t lose! That’s it!

Negatives -  

We were utterly shite for the majority of the game, were lucky to get a draw, in spite of Hiroshima apparently not wanting to do anything at all in the second half, and look totally clueless with a squad that has gone from one with high quality back up in every position, to one that plays like it is entirely made up of reserves, the kind of which make up J League squads but are lucky to even make the bench in Levain Cup games. If a few players play badly, perhaps you can blame the players. If everyone is shit, perhaps you can blame the manager. I dunno, I don’t have any answers, but we look like we’ll never score again, let alone win recently. Yes, we lost two important players. But even the players who were playing before we lost those players seem to have been transformed into statues by Mitoma and Ao’s departures. Schmidt didn’t have a great game. Ienaga, who knows? He was pretty much anonymous. Hasegawa had a great opportunity with Mitoma gone but seems to be going the way of Chinen recently, ie. I’m sure there’s a player in there, but more often than not, most games seem to take away from his reputation rather than enhance it. Hatate seems to be definite starter, but it seems like Oniki picks the other ten players first and then plays Hatate where there is a gap. People might say it’s a sign of a good team when the starting eleven picks itself. But in our case it seems to be the sign of a team without many options, or rather without many options that could ever possibly be taken due to us being stuck in a relentlessly repetitive rut. We didn't even make all of our subs in a game we were totally underwhelming in. Oniki seems determined to drive this system into the ground, smashing it to pieces and making it totally useless, rather than trying something new. Perhaps earlier this year there was no reason for us to try anything new. But I think we probably need to now. The results paper over the cracks a little and we still haven’t lost. But this is two league draws in a row against pretty ordinary teams. Our nice comfortable margin has almost been erased and confidence must be at an all time low. What joy! And an away double header coming up against Fukuoka, who we often seem to struggle against, and Consadole, who shocked us at our place last year. What could possibly go wrong? I was really looking forward to those games. A lovely round trip with plenty of tourism and plenty of drinking of beers, but now instead, I’ll be at home feasting on my fingernails instead of bar snacks. Can’t say I’m particularly confident, are you? To be honest, in a way, I’m kind of please they are not selling away tickets as it would be shame to have a nice trip ruined by some rotten Frontale performances. Instead, far better to stay at home and wallow in self-pity!

Suggestions - 

I don’t really have any. I’m not a manager. I’m just a whinger. But maybe… change something? Or do something better.

Other stuff -

Aoyama and Jofuku are a pair of wankers. And, I think I got more enjoyment out of the Kashiwa game when I was in bed drifting in and out of a restless sleep with a fever after my second COVID vaccination than I did out of this dire 90 minutes.

Next up Avispa away on Wednesday (1-1), and then Consadole on Saturday (2-2). And that’s me being positive with the predictions. We’ll probably lose both and be in second this time next week. Blimey. Go (do something else if you value your sanity instead of watching) Frontale!

Team

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

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 80')

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 67')

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 67')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for HASEGAWA 46')

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya

 

Goals   

KASHIWA (Hiroshima) 27' 1-0

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 73' 1-1

 

Highlights

Vs Shimizu S Pulse (away) 19/8/21 Emperor's Cup 4th round

Shimizu S Pulse 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

Due to no away tickets being sold for this 50/50 fan split game in a neutral stadium (Shimizu’s home stadium) this was another game watched on the internet. I say another game, but I didn’t actually manage to watch the Kashiwa game as you may know from my last blog post. Sometimes I feel really disappointed to have missed out on an exciting experience at a game. But on other occasions when things are quite frustrating, perhaps it’s actually better to watch from home where you have the luxury to respond to the frustration in any way you choose. Today was closer to the latter. I guess we just have to hope that we will be able to get back to some kind of footballing normality sooner or later. This seems to have happened in the UK. But at the same time the UK government appears to have hung up a sign saying everything’s fine here and then firmly rammed their head in the sand ignoring numbers that are increasingly at an alarming rate. I’m not sure this will happen in Japan. But at the same time, as people seemingly get increasingly frustrated and fed up with the apparently quite useless measures in place here, perhaps we will get to that stage via public dissatisfaction rather than via government action. I can’t see things improving in the near future here, so I guess we better get used to watching online and perhaps I can use that as an opportunity to write less in these posts and get them out of the way quicker. I think we all hope that is the case! Anyway, a few points on a slightly frustrating game, but ultimately, a job done.

The one thing I know about the last game from what numerous people have said is that we dominated the match but came up against a keeper who was in the form of his life and seemed destined to let nothing get past him. For those who saw the last match, the first half of this game must have looked like history repeating itself. Their keeper Nagai has only played in cup games this year and has been on the end of quite a few defeats. But when we turned up at the Nihondaira he seemed to become supercharged and unbreachable (if that is an appropriate word, or even a word at all). Normally I like to moan about us not having many shots on target, but in this game we had loads of shots on target. Full credit to Nagai. He did a great job. If I have to moan about our attack, I’d maybe say that perhaps we were being restricted to shooting from distance, and the few times we did manage to get the ball into the box it was from a cross and we didn’t really have the height to beat a big Shimizu defence to the ball. Obviously I’m glad we scored, but I’m extra glad we managed to score from open play finally, as if we’d gone 180 minutes without finding the net the pressure would have built a bit more on us. There is definitely a feeling from some that we are there for the taking now. It would be nice to show these people that even though we have lost two of our best players we still have it in us. And it would be nice to reassure ourselves of that fact too. A quick mention of the goals. Quite how the Shimizu defender had the nerve to complain about the awarding of the penalty I don’t know. Even if Wakizaka did make it look a bit weird with a kind of out of the pool butterfly stroke body undulation and dolphin kick as he went down, (or rather as he jerked up and then went down), it was clear that the defender on the floor hand more than a handful of his shirt and was dragging him to the pitch. It was a lovely penalty from Kobayashi, which is not something I’ve said many times. Hope it gives him some confidence. The second goal seemed absurdly simple. Lovely cross from Hatate, lovely easy headed finish from Damiao. It must be frustrating for everyone who had failed to score in the first half to see a goal look so simple, but I think it was just good play all round. Well done!

Defensively i don’t think we did ourselves any favours again with our team selection. I 100% don’t want to see Taniguchi in midfield. You know this as I’ve said it far too many times already. At the same time I would rather see him there than going off the pitch on a stretcher. More on that later. I also don’t want to see Hatate at left back. (I also have said all of this many times too…). He’s done well there at times but I feel we are wasting him there when we have Noborizato, Kurumaya and even Kamiya. Once again their goal came from that area of the pitch. It seemed a soft goal to concede but perhaps it was a good move from Shimizu. There were acres of space for the finish though as Hatate had moved in, challenged and failed to win the ball from the cross. I don’t know if that is his fault, but it did look a bit too easy I thought. We almost got caught out in the same way later on in the game too. I don’t know if opponents target us in this area but if it looks like a weakness to us, I’d imagine the opposition have spotted it too. I’m not sure how frustrated we should be about them only having four shots, two shots on target and scoring with one of them. It’s good that we can restrict them, but it’s certainly not been easy and free going forward recently and sooner or later our inability to score and our occasional random generosity with giving away goals is going to get us into trouble. I think the problem is more at the front though. We used to score for fun, and now it looks a bit like getting blood from a stone at times.

Another awful ref in this game. Ueda seemed to be following the apparent ‘drop ball at every possible opportunity’ secret Emperor’s Cup directive. When Taniguchi got crocked with a horrible tackle as he passed the ball BACKWARDS to the defence, the ref played an advantage. Or perhaps he didn’t see the foul, but the commentators also seemed to think he was playing advantage. For a horror tackle on Hatate which could easily have been a leg breaker we got a free kick but still there wasn’t a card. I mean, refs are almost always crap, so I shouldn’t be surprised. But if we don’t get a bit more protection we’re going to be down to bare bones soon. Shimizu were a pretty physical team in this match but you wouldn’t have known that from watching the ref. In addition to these two rotten decisions he took the advantage to cram in another drop ball when a Shimizu player went down as they cleared the ball and stayed down as we attacked. It was clearly not a head injury and I just felt like he was opening the door to anyone seeing an attack approaching an under-prepared defence to just drop to the floor moaning and stop the attack in its tracks. He also gave a free kick to them for a foul on their keeper for a tackle made by one of their defenders. Of course goalkeepers deserve protection and need to be treated slightly differently from other players, but it seems like all you have to do as a keeper is go down after attempting to punch or catch a ball and you’ll get a decision in your favour. I know Tani is flavour of the month at the moment after his performances in the Olympics, but I won’t forget him whining and wailing when Damiao had the cheek to jump and head a ball in the net that Tani thought he was about to catch. Is there anyone else I can moan about?… OK, back to the post.

Taniguchi’s injury looks like it could be not so good. He tried to play on and then almost immediately went down. You’ve got to wonder why we played one of our two best central defenders in midfield in a game where Oniki was trying to rest some players. If we’re without Taniguchi for any length of time that decision will look pretty bad I think. Kobayashi left the pitch not looking great either. I think perhaps it was just some cramp from a lack of match fitness but he doesn’t look like he’s in perfect condition. Oshima is still injured. Maybe… I think I heard he was back running but we probably can’t expect him back too soon. Mitoma and Tanaka are gone. Tsukagawa has disappeared. I’m sure he can’t still be suffering from the crack on the head he got in the ACL. We had a Corona case in a player too apparently. Perhaps that person is the same as one of the injuries. Any way you look at it, we’re definitely quite a few bodies short. We have signed a new Brazilian, Marcinho, to play in Mitoma’s position which is great, but he has to go through the lengthy quarantine process before he can get anywhere near the team. I might have thought it would have made sense to pick up a few reinforcements from other J League teams. I was thinking Fujimoto would have been a good option but maybe Kobe didn’t want to loan him to us or maybe we weren’t interested. Anyway, I think the window has closed now so I guess we’re going with what we have. I think we probably have enough players but I’m not sure we are particularly open to playing some of them in certain positions, and conversely are all too open to playing others in certain positions. Yamamura is a midfielder apparently but Oniki seems determined to play him only in defence whilst at the same time pushing Taniguchi a good defender forward into midfield. Yamamura could also be used up front as the big man in the middle as he played there for Cerezo but this too seems to be out of the question. I don’t know what the reason for these and other seemingly set in stone rules are, but I wonder if we might need to be a bit more flexible in the next few months, particularly if our luck with injuries continues. Anyway, we’ll see I guess.

Next up, Hiroshima away on Saturday. Then next week I will weep silently as we play Fukuoka away on Wednesday and then Consadole on Saturday, thinking about all the exciting things we were going to do on our nice little away game double header round trip which of course is now canceled. Oh well, never mind! Hopefully we can play ourselves into a little bit of good form and wouldn’t it be lovely if YFM could slip up two or three times too! 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 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

DF 4. JESIEL

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (on for KOZUKA 69')

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for TANIGUCHI 23')

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for TONO 69')

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MIYAGI 69')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for KOBAYASHI 77')

 

Goals   

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 57' PEN 0-1

NAKAYAMA (Shimizu) 64' 1-1

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 74' 1-2

 

 

Highlights

Vs Kashiwa Reysol 14/8/21 J League match 24

Kashiwa Reysol 0 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale 

If you've seen the highlights of this game you probably know more than me about it. This was another game I missed after having a COVID vaccination. But at least this time I wasn't supposed to actually be attending it as there were no away tickets on sale. This should be last game I have to miss due to COVID related things... unless I get very unlucky. Looks like it was a good one to miss though. I'm not going to say anything about the game because I know nothing about it. Seeing the stats and the results, I thought it best to not even watch the highlights. All I will add about this game is two comments my Frontale friends sent in our Line group. 'The ref isn't giving anything' and 'Their keeper had a great game'.

Up next, Shimizu away in the Emperor's Cup. I've already moaned a couple of times about it being a 50/50 support game at a neutral venue and it's being played at Shimizu's stadium in front of only their fans. If we lose, I'll bring this up many more times in the next blog post. Go Frontale! (and we really need a GO! as it feels like we're wobbling a bit recently even if most of the results haven't really looked that bad).

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

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for NOBORIZATO 85')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 85')

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

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for WAKIZAKA 77')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (Yellow card 65') (on for HASEGAWA 58')

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya

 

Goals

not a sausage

 

 

Highlights

 

Vs Oita Trinita 9/8/21 J League match 23

Oita Trinita 0 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

As time is fast running out before our next game and as I am bizarrely busy at the moment, this will be a bit of a thrown together in a hurry post. We were back from the ACL and all rested up and ready to go. Apart from the players who were at the Olympics. Oh, and the ones that have left us. Oh, that’s almost the same list… oh…. uh oh…. Although at this stage Mitoma had not officially departed it seemed like it was pretty much a done deal and so it proved to be the day after the game. Not sure about the reason for the timing. Or the reason for the delay. Also not sure why Moriyasu bothered taking Mitoma to the Olympics if he wasn’t going to play him unless he really had to. I guess Oniki has taken the same approach with some of our squad players in the past. I’ll give Oniki the benefit of the doubt about that but for Moriyasu I won’t extend the same courtesy. Quite how a manager is able to get a team’s best ever result in the tournament but still make things end up feeling quite so disappointing, I don’t know. Certainly a unique skill set, but not one that I would like anywhere near a team I supported. Anyway, this is supposed to be about Frontale. Hopefully Hatate will be back with us at the weekend and won’t instead disappear on a plane to Europe to play in a considerably average league. So now, having offended both national team lovers, fans of other team’s players who have gone to Europe, fans or less well known European leagues and also possibly some of our own fans I’ll get on with the post.

Last year we could have won the league here. And that was actually the last time we lost a match. Thankfully this time away at Oita we didn’t have Kasahara as the ref so Taniguchi wasn’t sent off. The last time we were there he derailed our title celebrations by terribly unfairly dishing out what seemed a wholly deserved red card if I remember rightly. Unless you consider the double jeopardy no red card and penalty unless it is dangerous play rule. I have to admit that I am struggling to keep up with the numerous and always further complicating things micro-changes to the laws that seem to happen every month or so. Seems in Kasahara’s case that he was too. But anyway this is all in the past and the only reason for me to bring it up is to say that Kasahara is a useless ref as far as I am concerned. Good to be able to slag off a ref even in a blog post about a game he had nothing to do with!

 

So far in this post, which I was attempting to write quickly I’ve waffled on about the Olympics and last season’s game at Oita. This might seem strange but I would say it has something to do with the slightly underwhelming nature of this match. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good result when we needed one and I’m particularly delighted we got the three points as YFM stumbled to a 2-2 against Shimizu. I love the schadenfreude of the fact that the ‘Muscat Out’ hashtag has already been wheeled out. Also, it was pretty dominant performance if you look at the shots stats, although not if you look at the possession stats. Aside from the two goals we scored it did feel a bit like we were struggling to get anything much going, which I realise is a pretty ridiculous statement but it did seem that way. We never really looked in any danger and apparently Sung-Ryong didn’t have to save any Oita shots. But we laboured going forward, particularly after Damiao departed the pitch early due to injury. I guess this is Chinen’s time to show us what he can do. I feel like he is a perennially unlucky player who never seems to get things going his way. But with Kobayashi probably not yet fit and Damiao looking to have picked up a strain of some sort it might be Chinen or bust. The good news about Damiao perhaps is that he didn’t go straight down the tunnel, but instead sat on the bench for the rest of the game. And he was ok to walk over and thank the fans at the end of the game. At the same time I can’t imagine he’ll be starting on Saturday against Kashiwa. Add to this the continuing Oshima injuries and the departures of Mitoma and Tanaka and it seems like we have gone from a position of great power into one which is quite significantly weakened. I’m not completely descending into worry and despair yet, but I wonder if we could do with a little bit of reinforcement in some areas. Hopefully if it does come it will be from players who are already in Japan, rather than overseas ones who won’t be available to play for months as we probably need the numbers now rather than later. Saying that, I think we have more than enough attacking players to fill the vacant spots, but given the height and bulk of the majority of them, we might have to tweak the game plan a little. But at the same time Mr. versatile Yamamura has done a more than effective job of playing up front for Cerezo in the past so maybe he’ll be called on there for us in the future. I’m slightly worried by Oniki’s continuing insistence on moving Taniguchi to midfield for a short and usually ineffective period every game though. But I’ve said that many times already. Let’s just hope we get a surprise transfer announcement or two or a surprise return from injury team selection or two.

A few random thoughts and observations to round things off. Ienaga’s new haircut is pretty special. Our support was not, as due to the State Of Emergency our Kazoku support group decided to not attend or drum or lead any kind of support in this game. Although some of them were actually there in the stadium, perhaps in an unofficial capacity, but there all the same, so it seems like we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face. A few brave souls attempted to get some of the usual COVID era handclap stuff going, but understandably given how spread out the fans were, it was a bit like a light trickle of a piss in a typhoon. (Very topical weather reference that, given the location and the weekend!).  It’s all a slightly tricky conundrum to be honest. Tickets for this game were sold before the state of emergency in Kanagawa was announced. As soon as it was, they stopped selling tickets but honoured the ones that had been sold already. I feel like it’s all bit of a mess when it comes to ticket sales and COVID policies to be honest. Buying the ticket for the game is more often than not the last thing to organise when it comes to an away game that is quite far away. Transport and accommodation need to be arranged as early as possible if you’re not loaded. We had flights and hotels booked for an away double header in a few weeks to Fukuoka and Sapporo but have had to cancel them due to there being no away tickets being sold. Our Emperor’s Cup game against Shimizu which is supposed to be with neutral support will now be at Shimizu’s stadium with no away fans so we’ve been scuppered again with a no support away game like we were in the ACL. Of course there are serious questions regarding any travel in the time of COVID. And we were unsure if we should really be traveling. Without wanting to get too political, (although I enjoy whinging politically quite a lot, just not on here), the government seems to have dithered and dallied its way to having no new ideas about what to do, having played all of its not particularly effective cards early. And through us constantly being in a state of emergency, which to all intents and purposes doesn’t look that different from no restrictions life, they have worn down public confidence and tolerance so much that many people are now basically ignoring it. I’m sure I can’t have been the only person to have noticed more maskless people recently in spite of the situation seemingly being worse than ever. But when you consider that in Tokyo there has been only three or four weeks this whole year when it apparently hasn’t been an emergency you can quite understand that there’s a boy who cried wolf thing going on when it comes to people listening to government messaging. And that’s not even mentioning the Olympics and the bubble, which I don’t really understand given that volunteers must have been entering and leaving the bubble area and going home on public transport every day. Perhaps in the end, it was actually safer to be in the bubble and that the huge numbers of overseas visitors were being protected from the Japanese public rather than vice versa. Anyway, no more quandaries about the ethics of attending games as now Kanagawa is in a State Of Emergency there presumably won’t be any possible games to consider the ethics of attending. 

 

Next up, Kashiwa away in the league on Saturday, (no away fans), and Shimizu in the Emperor’s Cup next Wednesday, (no Frontale fans in the neutral venue which also happens to be the Shimizu S Pulse home stadium). So considering how flat this game felt in the stadium, the next few are going to be even flatter watching on the internet. Let’s hope the players can ignore that flatness and keep this run going. Go Frontale!

 

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

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 75')

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 75')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 27')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for HASEGAWA 75')

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for TANIGUCHI 90')

 

Goals

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 10' 0-1

TONO (Frontale) 77' 0-2

 

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

I thought a few players had decent games. Noborizato looks increasingly important to us every game. Tachinbanada is growing in stature constantly (thankfully given the departing players and injuries), but for me it has to go to…

JESIEL - part of the reason Sung-Ryong didn’t have any saves to make was due to Jesiel stopping everything that came past the halfway line. He sealed this award with a gut busting run up the right wing the length of the pitch in about the 80th minute. Sadly we couldn’t score because hardly anyone could keep up with him in the middle. Gotta love those increasingly common surges out of defence that he does. Bravo!

 

 

Highlights