Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 4 Gamba Osaka
Oh jeez. Where to start with another horrible result? Actually it doesn’t really matter where I start, just as long as I get this post out of the way as quickly as possible. The misery of 2023 Frontale continues. We’re still wildly inconsistent. We still look like we’re just clueless most of the time. The manager still veers from one stupid plan to another. Perhaps the one bright spark in this game is that we lost to a team who are at least in some kind of decent form this time, unlike when we lost to them earlier in the season when they were struggling for anything and they managed to score twice against us and shut us out. And also perhaps you could say that at least we’re keeping things interesting, in that we’re coming up with a variety of routes to take to get to the underwhelming results. I think this is the first time this year we’ve come back from a big deficit only to throw it away right at the death. A fresh and exciting way to cock things up! It’s been a lovely few weeks for me without Frontale games and without having to write these awful blog posts. But damn it, we’re right back in Frontale Rabbit hell again. Let’s get whinging.
As usual, I’m not going to go into details in this post. And please excuse me if there aren’t the usual light-hearted observations. There’s just nothing funny about us or our games anymore. Instead I’m going to bang out my moans as fast as possible. In my opinion, Oniki used to be a lucky manager, getting much better results than his aptitude deserved. Now his tactical genius is rewarded with exactly what it merits. Perhaps he’s used up his whole career’s worth of luck and it’s all going to be last minute opposition winners from now on. I thought he was appalling last year, but little did I know that 2022 was actually a good season for us. 2023 is abysmal. His tactical genius on this occasion included reverting back to the midfield that never seems to work (Joao AND Tachibanada. Although on this occasion we did manage to score with it, instead of the usual hang-on-for-a-0-0 way games go when we play them together), and bringing Marcinho straight back into the starting line up after injury even though he apparently wasn’t even able to play even a couple of minutes against Bayern (Marcinho stating that he hoped to get at least a few minutes in that game might have been his undoing. Oniki seems to love a power play. ‘You want to play against Bayern? Ok, I’ll leave you out, but bring you back shortly afterwards to show you who’s boss’). Marcinho seemed to get injured again in the first half and didn’t reappear for the second. Perhaps it had something to do with the appalling state the pitch was in. No idea what had happened to it, but it looked terrible. I’m not blaming Oniki for that, although such is the depth of his incompetence, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that his ‘new tactics’ included getting a groundsman to take a few spins round it on a tractor pulling a plough in order to disrupt the opposition’s game. Still very much in evidence is our utterly plodding approach that can only come from the man at the top. In the past we’ve said that Frontale’s play style at times resembles a modern art exhibition, where the artist makes a comment on the futility of life and the inanity of repetition. (Personally, I love a bit of repetition, but I don’t think it’s very well suited to football). In this game our attacks would progress forward slowly, every few metres the ball being passed one player to the left, (even if the recipient was unmarked and in the box with an open goal, keep those passes moving), and when it got to the furthest player on the left, it would get booted across back to the right so the process could begin again. Oniki in the past has talked about drawing the opposition out with his tactics, but it doesn’t really work if the opposition just don’t bother getting drawn out. And why would they? They know that if they just stay in position, we’ll continue the passing, and sooner or later will lose the ball. In the first half, aside from the goal we were absolutely terrible. Three shots, astonishingly resulting in one goal, but at the same time conceding three times, on average once every other shot for Gamba. Takai had a nightmare in this game, giving away one goal in the first half with a howler of a back pass, and then giving away the corner at the end of the match and failing to defend it. I don’t want to get on his back though as I really like him and he’s definitely one for the future. The problem is that due to Oniki’s complete failure year on year to sort out our defence, our ‘one for the future’ is having to play every game and be the rock of the defence. I was wondering if perhaps it was a subtle ploy from us to make him make just enough absolutely horrendous errors in order to not get transferred too soon. In spite of some of our fans thinking Takai should be crowned king of the universe, I can’t imagine any team who has to pay some money, (probably not much money judging by J League transfers to overseas teams), to sign him would be able to ignore his multiple cock ups. But like I said, I don’t blame him. I blame Oniki. Naturally.
In the first half, aside from conceding three times, we did seem like we were in control of the game. I enjoyed writing that sentence as it’s clearly an insane thing to say. Perhaps that would be Oniki’s positive way of looking at it. Something along the lines of ‘it’s unfortunate that I’ve just completely destroyed your house and all of your possessions, but some local kids have done a great job of painting some nice pictures on the box you’ll be living in from now on. Oh, and let’s all do a nice dance whilst we take you to your new box home’. In the second half we were much better. Well in a way. We scored twice, but we missed an unbelievable amount of good chances. We could almost have had double figures in this game if the majority of our shots didn’t sail miles wide. And once again you’ve got to look at the fact that Oniki can’t pick a starting line up or starting tactics. Aside from Kobe away, in which let us not forget we managed to end up drawing, and in which we’d mainly made a good start due to them making a terrible start, we pretty much always do absolutely nothing until our great leader abandons the brand of genius he has decided on at the start of the game. Whoever the players are who start, we start badly. Sometimes he can turn things around and get a draw by randomly throwing players on in a panic. But can you imagine what it would be like to have a manager who could actually get something right before the match? Perhaps he has too much time with the magnets in between games that he overthinks things. Can you imagine if we ever went back to three subs? We’d be screwed. In his post match analysis Oniki commented that he’d chosen Damiao for this game in order for him to be the focal point of the opposition’s defending and allow the wide players to take advantage. An interesting tactic to use our star striker and perhaps one of our biggest wage earners to basically be a decoy. And when you consider that one of these wide players who should have been taking advantage was Ienaga who never stays on the wing, it just all becomes even more confusing. Maybe it worked well on the magnet board. Perhaps taking every fucking single free kick short also worked well on the magnet board. I never thought I could find a way of taking free kicks so annoying but it was really grating in this game. Take everything short, even if the intended target is surrounded by opposition players. Mind-numbingly annoying and utterly useless for trying to proactively score a goal. And similarly, even when Seko was on the pitch Oniki persevered with Wakizaka taking every corner and placing it perfectly on the head of the first defender. Infuriating! I don’t enjoy moaning constantly about Oniki and I’m often told he’s a nice person, so it doesn’t feel good to just moan and moan, but he’s useless and totally without ideas. I really wanted him to put up his hands at the end of last year, admit he’d fucked it up and move to pastures new. Instead he’s opted for staying and trashing his reputation further. He’s not a good manager as far as I can see. He inherited a good system and made a basic tweak to it which everyone in the world apart from Kazama could see was necessary and has been blessed with some good players. In fact maybe I’d even go further and say that his mindless refusal to sign defenders and his stubborn desire to play players who are hopelessly out of form meant that his interventions actually made us worse than we should have been, even when we were doing well. Perhaps a little hyperbolic, but what did you expect. Perhaps he’ll have a spell at a big money club next year where he’ll struggle because he’ll have to start from scratch, before dropping to a relegation battling team the year after and then after that an unsuccessful spell with a J2 giant, before ending up being an advisor for the national team. I don’t wish him ill, but I just don’t think he’s up to the job at all.
A few words on the opposition and the ref. I wondered where Tani was in the starting line up before being told he’d transferred to the Belgian second division. The stuff of dreams for a football player! But given how blunder prone he was, probably a good move for the club as well as for him (presumably he imagines it’s a good move). All this shows how much I have switched off from the J League in recent weeks, which in turn might explain why they’ve been a fun few weeks! Gamba employed a prestigious amount of time wasting in this game, both when they were winning and even after we’d caught up, with them trying to hang on for a draw. Apparently it really enraged Oniki. But perhaps that was just a cover for things going wrong due to what he perhaps realises are his own inadequacies. Even when a team are time wasting and hanging on for a draw, somehow Oniki tactics can gift the opposition a goal that they aren’t even trying to score. My final opposition comment is that for most of the game it was difficult to work out whether there were more shirts off in the Gamba end than there were old nationalistic rising sun flags. Imagine that some of those guys would get on quite well with Urawa’s fans. Oh, and the ref was absolutely useless as were his assistants. Particularly galling was an offside given against Ienaga when a long ball was played forward, the Gamba left back tried to control the ball and totally cocked it up, losing the ball and Ienaga raced about 10 metres across the pitch only to be given offside for the position he was in when the initial ball was played (which I don’t even think was offside anyway). Perhaps people will tell me that I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem right that even if you’re offside but nowhere near the ball, that the play can be pulled back and your given offside if the opposition player gives you the ball. Anyway, Tanimoto was useless regardless of whether I’m right about this or not, but what do you expect from Tanimoto anyway? And it wasn’t him who lost us the game, it was Oniki and the result of his terrible short and long term decisions.
Next up Vissel Kobe at home on Saturday. Presumably we’ll win this game making all of these losses against apparently weaker teams even more frustrating. Presuming we’ll win does suggest though that Oniki’s negative influence won’t be able to mess things up, so maybe I’m being a bit optimistic in that respect. I suspect we’ll see Kamifukumoto back in goal as my feeling is that Oniki has been waiting for a chance to put him back in. What other ridiculous selections he’ll make, well who knows? As the game is on Saturday we’ll have a bit longer in the pub afterwards which is nice. But we’ll also possibly have Sunday ruined by the hangover from more Oniki cock ups. It might be hard to believe, but I am still employing my new chilled out approach to Frontale in 2023. I wouldn’t like to think how deranged this post would be if I were still as raging as I was earlier in the season. Calm is definitely the right approach though, as it seems almost certain that 2023 is going to be our worst season for quite a few years. What a positive note to finish on…
Team
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 23. MARCINHO
Highlights
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