Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 2 Consadole Sapporo
The best thing to do after another evening of Todoroki disappointment is to do something completely different the next day and forget about the existence of a sport called football. With that in mind I took myself off to the far west of Tokyo. Unbelievably, even further west than the Ajinomoto stadium, which I thought was on the prefectural border with Yamanashi. After spending the day looking at mini mountains, not checking the internet and just generally relaxing whilst drinking a few beers in bizarre places, I came back home feeling slightly refreshed. And then I opened Twitter and saw Man. Utd. and Nottingham Forest fans arguing about the poor standard of refereeing in their game, both sets of fans so sure that they’d been robbed, puffing away with their opinions and it made me realise I need to take a good hard look at myself. In recent times I’ve cultivated a feeling of detachment from our results. Calm is the way to go in 2023. We’re utterly shit and it is infuriating, but if you try your hardest to not care, it’s much more tolerable. I’ve been saying recently that I can’t understand how Frontale fans are so accepting of the situation we’re in, where the manager seems to fuck up to a higher level every week, but they always look forward optimistically to the next game, not dwelling on the previous one, not pointing the finger and instead focusing on who did well. I now understand that this is probably the way to be. Us changing our manager mid-season and Oniki working out why we keep playing so badly are equally unlikely. I’d say not more than a 1% chance of either happening. So why bother going on about it and getting annoyed about it? Actually, the truth is, we probably should express our irritation at our current form somehow, whether that be by starting a Twitter campaign or by booing the team, (although in reality, I think neither are the thing to do). It was telling that as we left the stadium immediately after the final whistle, it seemed that more people than usual were doing the same. Perhaps next game we can all leave before the final whistle and perhaps the club might notice. But it’s the hope that kills you isn’t it? That’s why we all stay till the end, hoping that our team with one extra player who are totally dominating the game (particularly when it comes to the backwards and sideways pass stats), might be able to score a winner. Although actually, we seemed equally likely to concede another late goal as we did to score one. I’m really rambling today, but anyway, what I’m trying to say is that those Premier League fans were deeply irritating and so sure of the depth of their knowledge, but I’m not so blind that some of the things I have been saying could very easily be described that way too. So I’ll try to shut up a bit. I never really wanted this blog to be one of those in-depth-analysis-and-descriptions-of-the-goals-and-the-talking-points kind of blogs. It was supposed to tell you about the stupid and fun stuff that you might not see on the stream, which I normally find infinitely more interesting than reading people struggle to put into words something I could easily watch with my own eyes. The problem is, there aren’t many fun things to write about at the moment. Even poking fun at the away team and their fans is leaving me a bit cold. I’ve always tried to make it clear that I believe myself to be speaking from a position of at least partial if not complete ignorance. I’m sure there are many things going on behind the scenes that I haven’t noticed and wouldn’t even understand. Does seem weird though that we keep making the same horrible mistakes that seem easily avoidable. What’s going wrong seems obvious to me, but I have to admit that people whose job is football have a far deeper understanding of what’s happening. Wouldn’t mind one of them explaining to me why we’re so crap. And I don’t include Oniki’s post game platitudes in this. All I seem to hear is that we’ve lost too many good players to transfers to European and Middle-Eastern sides. You’ve got to think there’s more to it than that though.
So here are the entertaining and amusing parts of the game that I noticed… Errrrmmmm. Perhaps the half time presentation to a randomly selected family who got a prize to celebrate us reaching 50000 members of our fan club. They got a little fake J League title shield and were able to raise it in league winning style. Cue the music. Out blasted the song that they play when we win a game. What a blast from the past! It’s been a long time, the start of July actually, since we heard that music at Todoroki. So long that the nice feeling that washed over me when it started playing totally disorientated me. Would be nice if we could actually hear that music for a win rather than a promotional activity sooner or later. Jeez, this was supposed to be the amusing and interesting observation part and there’s not really anything amusing or interesting here. Let me say briefly a few of my opinions coming from my position of football ignorance. I’ll do it in one sentence bursts with no rambling to hopefully puncture the pomposity and get things over and done with quickly.
- We now have 5 players who want to play up front in the middle and only one spot to play them in, so presumably they’ll have to take turns.
- This game’s first half with zero shots and conceding twice was perhaps the worst half I’ve ever seen from us, although I know I’ve said that plenty of times already this year.
- Trying to speak diplomatically, it feels to me that there are some players who have played way too much this year, and now look either shattered or not bothered and they should be rested before they completely break down.
- We played for over 40 minutes with an extra man against a team whose line up on the scoreboard included only one defender and still couldn’t get a winner.
- Let's be positive! We didn't concede a last minute goal to lose the game.
- We only had two shots on target, both of which were goals, the rest sailing high and wide or being blocked immediately as they were taken.
- The referee was appalling (in my opinion) and for once I think my opinion is shared by quite a few others, regardless of who they were supporting.
- Feel sorry for Kobayashi as he had absolutely nothing of the ball, but this seems to be the case whoever plays in that position, so we shouldn’t blame the players.
- And it seems that whoever starts anywhere on the pitch has a bad game, and the subs look better because by the time they come on, the game plan has been mostly abandoned.
- Don’t say Oniki never comes up with tactical genius as in this game he introduced a new goal kick routine where we pretend to be taking it long and then one defender scampers back to collect a short pass, to absolutely no benefit at all.
- Perhaps people are starting to realise where the root of our problems lies as Oniki got a lower rating than anyone else involved in an online review of the game.(Actually, that’s not completely fair as the ref got an even lower score, but as bad as he was, missing foul after foul, (perhaps distracted by thoughts about what he was going to have for dinner. Would it be petty to hope that he was equally distracted when he was cooking the dinner and ended up burning it? Perhaps it would), he wasn’t the cause of our downfall in the first half).
Even that list has peed me off with regards to the game and to my reaction to it. We’re doomed to repeat this same cycle for the rest of the year, so why get upset? Next up, Albirex away in the Emperors Cup on Wednesday, so there a very real chance we could have nothing at all to play for this year by Thursday. And then on Saturday we have Cerezo Osaka away in the league. Both of these are games in which we never seem to do very well. But at least we can enjoy a little ride on a train and some drinks in different bars, right? Away fixtures are the only thing worth hanging on for at the moment. Oh, by the way, this game was our Thai special game. Wonder if we'll do that next year... Seemed to inspire Supachok to score. Must have been the massive Thai flag on the pitch before the game that is pictured above. One of the other photos was one I took intending to use it to suggest watching the photographers was more fun than watching the game in case you were wondering. Anyway, I hope this post hasn’t been too annoying. I think perhaps this blog is pointless in a season when we’re relentlessly awful. When we’re occasionally awful, I can come up with some vaguely amusing whinges, but when it’s every game with the same failures, well, I’m just out of interesting things to say. Sorry!
Team
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
Highlights
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