Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (home) 11/6/23 J League match 17

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 0 Sanfrecce Hiroshima

Better late than never, (possibly), here is a long overdue blog post on what was basically a pretty bad performance, (albeit one with a lovely goal), that was made actually quite enjoyable by the fact that we won whilst playing so badly. In 2023 it seems that we don’t have much to get excited about or enjoy. The number of truly awful performances easily outweighs the even slightly good ones. But we have been blessed by some late winners, (Kashima, Kyoto), and wins in games where we probably didn’t deserve it, (this one), which we can enjoy to the fullest, whilst hopefully not forgetting what a dire state we’re in. As the next game is fast approaching and this one has faded quite a lot from my memory already, let’s get this out of the way in a fairly perfunctory manner before I forget anything else.

 

A great goal! Lovely work from Wakizaka, Ienaga and Damiao made us think for a second that we were back in the good old, (and not absolutely mind numbingly dull football), days. This was all the more surprising given that for the first 35 or so minutes of the game we looked like we’d never even seen a football before, let alone played the game. Perhaps it was the conditions as it was quite rainy. But that didn’t seem to be posing the same problems for Sanfrecce though. At the start of the game Ominami took over from Takai with the whole, absolutely horrific five minutes thing, but thankfully we managed to avoid conceding. No one seemed to be capable of completing a pass. Our great leader Oniki once again tried the Yamane moving into central midfield thing. Once again it didn’t work. Maybe it takes about 30 attempts before we start seeing the effects, which would mean that we’re probably over half way there now as it seems that Oniki tries and abandons it almost every game. I’m still not convinced by Kamifukumoto. I keep hearing people say that he’s being selected for his ball skills, and whilst halfway through the second half he beautifully controlled a high ball near the centre circle, he seems equally likely to scuff a pass to the opposition attacker. We’ve managed to get away with that recently somehow. And as for his distribution, well, I think one of his many long balls to create an attack actually did that, and the other ten or so just went either to the opposition keeper or straight off the pitch. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t think our woes are down to him. I think they’re down to Oniki. But seeing Kamifukumoto boot the ball off the pitch numerous times is quite emblematic of our ‘keep doing it, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that it’s not working’ 2023 mindset. A quick word on injuries. Apparently Oshima only had cramp. And I did think at the time that him leaving the pitch on a stretcher might have been a semi-pre-planned time wasting ploy. Kobayashi, well, probably not looking so good. Perhaps that means we’ll see more of Damiao. Perhaps that means Yamada will reappear. (No idea what’s happened to him). I’ll finish the section up with the one super positive thing I can say about this game. Our time wasting was superlative! It’s perhaps another sign of how far we’ve fallen that this is the one thing we can grasp on to. To be honest, Oniki has always been a fan of keeping the ball in the corner flag to hang on to a 1-0, but this was next level stuff. In 2023 let’s really enjoy that time wasting! Aside from the attack that lead to the goal, there wasn’t much else to be positive about. So if we have to watch about 80 minutes of horribly ineffective attacking, let’s at least fill the last 25 minutes of that with amusing time wasting. 

Some words on the opposition and the ref. Sanfrecce looked like they would be tough opposition. And perhaps they were when it came to build ups. The good news is that they are even less effective than us in front of goal! Lovely! They had almost twice as many shots as us (17), but only managed to get two on target! We beat that with three on target from nine. Let’s not crow too much though as they are clearly having a better season than us, and there weren’t that many green shoots of recovery in this game for us. After they started brightly, I think we dragged them down to our level. It wasn’t a case of us getting better, but them getting even more ineffective. It’s very familiar for Frontale fans to see a team who is making chances but utterly failing to take them. Thankfully for once, it wasn’t us who was doing it. I thought the ref wasn’t that good, but where’s the surprise in that opinion? Once again we had the situation where there was a massive delay due to a problem with the officials communication equipment. Does this only happen in our games or have the J League picked up a job lot of cheap stuff off one of those discount electronics websites? We’ve got no idea whether the VAR worked in this game as were didn’t seem to have any incidents. Shortly after the communication equipment problem though it seemed like the ref was pretending to do some kind of VAR type thing, but I suspect it was more of a display for the crowd perhaps intending to give the impression that the knock off electronics were actually working properly when in fact he just had blasts of white noise interspersed with updates from anyone broadcasting radio signals in the surrounding areas. Anyway, who cares? We won, and ugly wins are the best we can hope for in 2023. The fact that we scored a nice goal was a massive bonus, but perhaps now we’ve used up all of our allotted attacking verve for June and it’s going to be pretty grim from here on.

Next up Shonan away in the Levain Cup, a competition that our leader has contrived to pretty much get us knocked out of with a game to spare, even though we were top of the group at half time in our previous game. We can still get through via a lot of results going our way but it looks unlikely. The fact that there is still a glimmer of hope has probably ruined the chances of us getting any interesting player selections too, so it’s really the worst of both worlds. No chance that Einaga might play anyway as we’ve decided to send him on loan to Mito for the rest of the season. Quite why we decided to do that halfway through the season, I’m not sure, but in Oniki we trust (well, some of us). After that we’ve got consecutive away games against Urawa (who’ve recently beaten us) and Nagoya (who are riding high in the table). Perhaps we can get a couple more fortunate results. It would be quite amusing and quite amazing if we did!

Team 

 
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto

DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (Yellow card 18')
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyoehi

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 33. MIYASHIRO Taisei

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for KOBAYASHI 27')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki

FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MIYASHIRO 79')

FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for WAKIZAKA 79')

MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for IENAGA 90')

MF 47. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for OSHIMA 90')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

As welcome as the win was, I think we'd all admit that this wasn't a good game and to single anyone out for special praise would be a bit disingenuous, I think.
 

Goals

 

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 56' 1-0

 

Highlights