Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 0 Yokohama FC
Perhaps it was somewhat convenient that the 2023 version of my new calm persona, a persona which it seems I always try to adopt halfway through a horrible season, didn’t need to be tested on this occasion, as we won fairly comfortably against YFC. I say fairly comfortably, as aside from the first ten minutes of the game, they didn’t really do much. At the same time we suffered from the usual issues of not being able to score very often from the numerous opportunities that we had. This is something of a common theme in 2023. It was nice for once to come away from a game with some kind of good feeling though. Many people in our usual post home game pub said the same thing. The atmosphere was a lot better! There might have also been some extra good feeling to get some ‘revenge’ after YFC ‘pumped’ us in the away fixture. I think it’s unfair to talk about revenge though when the reason for your problems is completely your own doing. You can’t hold that against the opposition. We were for the most part terrible in that game. In this game we were a bit better.
I was delighted to see Oniki make some long overdue changes. I would have liked to have seen a few more, but the fact that he made some was a good start. I feel bad about constantly mentioning it, but Kamifukumoto hasn’t really had the best of starts with us. People continue to mention his distribution, but as far as I can remember, it’s only been useful on the one occasion so far and his mistakes whilst trying to unnecessarily get involved when he doesn’t have to are a lot more numerous. Sung-Ryong is not blameless in this respect either, the clanger against YFM still lingering in the memory, but as he got dropped for apparently making errors, it was only fair that the same thing happened to Kamifukumoto after he had given the opposition a goal head start in consecutive games. I saw someone on Twitter saying that Sung-Ryong better suited the style we were going to play against YFC. I’ve also seen people on Twitter saying that COVID never existed and that the earth is flat. I think that Twitter user is also massively overstating Oniki’s willingness to actually change anything tactically. As I’ve said in the past, I’m not sure he ever really considers who we’re playing. Well, ok. he did once against Consadole, when to counter their style he played our strikers on the wing and put Ienaga up front. Although, perhaps that was as a result of the magnet board getting knocked on to the floor by an intern who hastily put the attacking magnets back, but accidentally put them in the wrong place and didn’t want to tell anyone what they’d done. We’ll see who starts the next game, I guess. It’s a cup game away at Mito, so normally you might expect the reserves to play. But given that we’re out of the Levain Cup and effectively out of the title race already, maybe Oniki will target the Emperor’s Cup. (Uh oh, knockout competitions aren’t exactly his speciality. I guess they’re not as bad as the group stages of cups though). I’m also in agreement with Oshima being dropped. Sorry to the Oshima lovers, but I think the midfield of Oshima and Wakizaka in front of Joao really didn’t work, so at least one of them had to go, and there’s no way we should ever consider dropping Joao.
It was nice to see Yamada start and he scored, so that’s got to go down as a good decision. Feel a bit sorry for Tono though as he seems to always do the business but never seems to get that many starts. Likewise, Ominami who has played really well when he came on at right back recently. And as for Sasaki, I’m not sure what’s happened to him this year. Nobori seems to be veering between playing really well and then not so well but seems to be someone Oniki is unwilling to drop. And of course we still have the Ienaga conundrum. Like Nobori he seems to oscillate between two extremes, not really looking that bothered until something goes against us and it gets him worked up and he becomes a beast for a bit. But playing him on the right up front makes us really unbalanced, as of course he doesn’t stay in that position. In this game we had Miyashiro sticking resolutely to the left, Yamada in the middle and absolutely no-one on the right. I don’t know, but maybe we could play Miyashiro and Yamada as a front two and put Ienaga in behind them in a free role or something? I don’t think he should be starting every game in that front right position though. But maybe Oniki is scared to rest him and risk upsetting him. And I guess we have been losing attacking midfielders and potential replacements for him on a weekly basis recently. Will anyone be coming in the other direction or are we going to stick with what we’ve got? I was thinking during this game, that there can’t be that many members of the entire squad who aren’t involved in the match day squad at the moment. Not including those who are injured and goalkeepers, I think it’s only Sasaki, Myogan, Matsunagane and Ozeki who weren’t involved yesterday. Anyway, that’s a lot of writing about starting members I guess. So let’s talk a bit about the game.
Like I said, we made a pretty bad start with YFC having most of their chances in the first ten minutes. I don’t know why we always start so badly. I wish we didn’t always start so badly. I guess this year we will always start so badly. But then we settled and I thought it was mostly one way traffic for the rest of the game, with us making some wonderful opportunities… Note that change from my normal blog posts where I usually say we made lots of chances. In this game I don’t think we really made that many chances. We’d break dangerously but fail to make the pass that would usually lead to the inevitably missed shot. Against Nagoya we had chances galore and failed to take any of them. In this game, we moved one step further back and instead focused on making opportunities to make chances that we wouldn’t take. And as we failed to make many chances, we really needed to take the ones we did. Thankfully, we scored from a corner and then got a penalty which many people are saying was not a penalty. I’ve had a look at the replay loads of times with my Frontale glasses on and I really can’t work out what happened. Perhaps DAZN didn’t slow it down enough for what happened to be clearly be seen, but the fact that the decision was referred to VAR and upheld must count for something, right? Because VAR never gets anything wrong in the J League. In the second half, the YFC defence was really creaking, looking really fragile, but it wasn’t until quite late on that we managed to get a third, and it was the nicest goal of the lot. At the start of the game, it looked like both teams were quite scared of losing the game and I was worried that we’d be playing out a dull 0-0, or probably most likely losing late on to a YFC hoofed clearance and one of their players totally leaving our defence for dead and scoring a winner. Thankfully that didn’t happen. But most of he second half was really dull stuff. Maybe that’s not completely fair. Maybe I should say it was exciting from an attacking point of view until we left the middle third of the pitch when whoever was breaking with the ball just stopped and looked for the backwards pass to break up their own attack. Whilst I’ve praised Oniki for changing the starting line up earlier in this post, you could see that he was quite scared to change anything in the second half, with the first sub not coming till the 67th minute and even then only being a single change, and after that only three more other changes, all of which came very late on. When the final two changes were made you could really see a difference though. Around the 80th minute it looked like pretty much everyone was knackered, but still Oniki clung on to what we had, hoping we wouldn’t concede. Bringing Ominami on for Wakizaka in the 82nd minute meant that we changed to a back three, presumably to strengthen the defence. Can’t help but feel that maybe we should have tried to be a bit more positive. But what do I know? We scored seven minutes after that, so I probably know not much at all. The slightly amusing thing was that after Segawa had scored our third, Oniki was still trying to explain the tactics to Kurumaya on the touchline as other players celebrated. When Ominami came on there was a lot of gesturing between players after play had restarted and no-one really seemed completely sure what was going on. I said before that we just need a little run of results to get things ticking over again. I think shortly after that we lost to FC Tokyo and then YFC with two truly horrible performances. Hopefully the same thing won’t happen this time. But even if it does, we’re already done for the season really. It would be nice to have a bit more of a feel good factor though.
A few words about the ref. Matsuo’s name rung some ominous bells with me. But that seems to be the case with pretty much every ref. I thought his VAR performance was fantastic. As we endured the interminable wait for a decision to be made Matsuo trotted around the pitch keeping away from all the players perhaps to keep his conversation private, perhaps to keep his focus. He seemed like a man on a mission to exceed his daily step count record. I’m pretty sure in the few minutes it took for the VAR decision to come through he covered more ground than many of the players on the pitch did in the whole game, his loops getting bigger and bigger and then shrinking back, changing the angle and starting again, like he trying to do some kind of spirograph style GPS illustration. I think perhaps someone had a word with him at half time about his penalty decision being contentious as in the second half he seemed to be on a mission to book as many Frontale players as possible, in short little bursts of card waving. The cards seemed to anger Oniki who was really having a go at the fourth official. They definitely seemed to only be going one way, but of course I’m biased. Kurumaya was probably a bit lucky to not add to this season’s list of red cards though with a truly terrible challenge. Not necessarily from the point of view of it being a bad foul, but definitely from the point of view of it looking absolutely agricultural. Perhaps something like you’d expect if a goalkeeper was required to fill in at centre back and stepped into their new role with a bit too much gusto. Inconsistency is something about refs that really annoys fans and players and I thought Matsuo had an extremely inconsistent game. He wasn’t the worst we’ve had this year though, which is somehow both a relief and depressing at the same time. Oh, and I've just realised I didn't mention that we had a racing car driving round the pitch before the game and YMCA at half time, just to add an extra element of surreality. In the past the team we play when we have (the slightly cringey but very popular and enjoyed by most people so who am I to be snobbish about it) YMCA sing and dance-along have in the past gone on to be relegated. This hasn't been the case in recent years but it was consistently true for a while. Thankfully this time they didn't bother with getting the weird impersonator to sing the song and just played it instead, significantly reducing the cringe factor. It probably helped that we were winning at half time, but I think our fans are so positive that they probably would have been equally up for it even if the scoreline had been reversed.
Next up Mito away, a game that even if it finishes without extra time will still prove difficult to return home from on the same day. Last time we were there it went all the way to penalties and our train was stopped half way home due to an electrical storm and a power cut. We finally got home around 3am and I decided to stay up and watch England take an early lead against Croatia in the World Cup semi final and then end up losing in extra time just as most people in the country were getting up. Not sure what drama might follow this next game but it would be nice if we managed to get home the same day. After that we head to the Nissan Stadium the following weekend to attempt to string two league wins in a row together and avoid a 2023 double defeat against our local rivals. Even though we’re out of the title race, it would be nice to disrupt our neighbours’ chances of winning the league. I don’t think it’s very likely though, but we can dream, I guess.
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 29. TAKAI Kota
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 61')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 33. MIYASHIRO Taisei (Yellow card 55')
Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (on for WAKIZAKA 82')
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for SEKO 87')
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for YAMADA 87')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 71') (on for MIYASHIRO 67')
MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Lots of dullness where nothing much was happening in this game with the mediocrity occasionally being broken by an extremely brief moment of excitement. Once again, for the umpteenth time this year, one player who seemed to be doing well for the whole 90 minutes, was…
JOAO SCHMIDT - absolutely undroppable now. Feel for Tachibanada, but there’s no way Joao shouldn’t play a game if he’s available and we’re looking to play our best eleven. He’s having a great season!
JOAO SCHMIDT - absolutely undroppable now. Feel for Tachibanada, but there’s no way Joao shouldn’t play a game if he’s available and we’re looking to play our best eleven. He’s having a great season!
Goals
YAMADA (Frontale) 13' 1-0
MIYASHIRO (Frontale) PEN 36' 2-0
SEGAWA (Frontale) 89' 3-0
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