2023 season round up

2023 is probably not a season that will live long in the memory, even though we ended up being more successful this year than we were in 2022, when we finished with absolutely nothing. Anyone who has read this blog in 2023 will probably know how little enjoyment I have taken from most of our games and from writing blog posts in 2023. With that in mind, perhaps this year’s review will be a bit shorter than usual. After all, there are only so many ways you can say ‘we did the same thing we always did and once again, failed to be successful’. I think the photo I've used for this is quite appropriate considering how poor and blurry most of the year was. I’m going to divide this up by competition so you might be able to find some positivity in some of the sections. Probably not this first one though…

J1

2023 saw us achieve our worst J League finish for 11 years. The last time we finished as low as 8th was 2012 and the last time we finished lower was the previous year when we finished in 11th. To be honest though, I think 8th kind of flattered us when you consider the rubbish we were playing in the league for most of the year. Clearly we’re coming out of a period of success with us being a strong team since our first ever title win in 2017. Whether that period is now over and we have reverted to type a little or whether this is just a blip remains to be seen. Regular readers will know that I am not the biggest fan of Oniki. I feel like this is actually a bit harsh though as clearly he’s done a lot for the club and has achieved great success since he took over the manager position. Nothing lasts forever though, and although a lot of the blame for our recent decline has to go to the departure of important players to European (and Qatari…) clubs, I think too many casual fans and observers have overlooked the impact that a lack of ideas from our manager might have contributed. Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be an Oniki bashing session, so instead let’s focus more on the misery of our league campaign this year.

We probably should have guessed what was in store for us from the first game. Perhaps it’s a little unlucky to have to take on your local rivals and last season’s title winners in your first game. We were scoring goals for fun in pre-season but as soon as it came to a game that actually mattered we looked totally useless. In my post at the time I said we ‘looked a mess at the back’ and that it was ‘a challenging game to watch’. I also said, and yes you can tell me how much of a genius I am if you want, ‘I get the impression that this will be quite a difficult season’. And that truly came to pass. The opening game also gave us some other omens for the year. We got a red card, something which plagued us in 2023, although to be honest playing with ten men sometimes made us do a bit better, and we got a defensive injury, throwing us into a first wholly predictable defensive injury crisis. We were long overdue one of these as we’d miraculously scraped through with the bare minimum of players over the course of quite a few years where we’d steadfastly refused to sign defenders. We followed up this red card with another one in the next match in case the writing that was on the wall wasn’t clear enough to read. I don’t really know what else to say about us in the league in 2023. We persevered with the same dull and pointless tactics and got what we deserved more often than not. So I guess I should just highlight a few games that stood out. Standing out for the wrong reasons were Gamba away where we were a complete waste of space against a team who had failed to win in the league until we turned up. The two away games in a row against FC Tokyo and Yokohama FC were a disaster too, where we just looked totally incapable of either attacking or defending. For positive reasons, the games that stand out are probably Kashima away, YFM away and Avispa away. Kashima was a ridiculous game where we conceded after five minutes to a goal from a player who’d left us in the summer, struggled to hit the target for the whole 90 minutes, got a red late on and an equaliser after that and then somehow ended up winning with a retaken penalty deep into injury time. YFM away was great because of a bundled in winner with two defenders and no attackers in the box, again deep into injury time, and was special mainly because I really don’t like YFM and we can say that this helped when it came to them not retaining the title. Avispa away was great because it rained ridiculously and I got totally soaked but sang so much I became hoarse. Obviously it’s not great when you get so wet at a game, but getting totally soaked is somehow better than getting just a bit wet as far as I’m concerned.
Let’s just finish up this section with a quick note that in our games against the top five teams we took 15 points from a possible 30. Against the bottom five teams we only took 17 from a possible 30. I guess that means from the middle seven teams we took only 18 from a possible 42. I guess this shows that we can stink it up whoever we’re playing. 50 points from 34 games, only 51 goals scored and 45 conceded, compared to 66 points, 65 scored and 42 conceded in 2022. I think the difference is that we were lucky in 2022 and in 2023 we got what we deserved.

Emperor’s Cup

Some positivity! We won the cup! The final was, aside from the penalties, truly terrible though, wasn’t it? And that wasn’t the only game we needed penalties to get through. I think we were slightly lucky to get Avispa in the semi-final as at that stage they were still involved in both cups and were going for their best ever league finish so clearly were spreading themselves quite thin. Before we got to the penalties and tired opposition stage, we’d swatted non league opposition away quite easily at home, had huffed and puffed a bit away at Mito and then needed a late Sasaki goal to get past Kochi United. I guess we were quite lucky with the draw we got. But unlucky that the Kochi United stadium was pretty much completely inaccessible without a car as I would have liked to go to a new stadium. But at least we got the chance to visit Mito again and it was nice to come away from Niigata with a victory, (albeit on penalties, which severely cut into post match boozing time). In the past we used to be terrible in knock-out tournaments, so it’s good to see that we don’t have that problem so much anymore. And it’s good to see that our luck didn’t completely desert us in 2023.

Levain Cup

Not so much fun in this tournament for us. In spite of us ending up on the same points as the group winner with a significantly better goal difference, we crashed out at the group stage. The group was pretty even/pretty bad with lots of people taking points off each other which messed it up for all of us apart from Urawa in the end. Once again, our first game in the competition gave us an omen of what was to come in 2023. Getting Shimizu in our group seemed like a doubly good thing as it provided us with an opportunity to go to a ground that we wouldn’t be able to in 2023 as Shimizu had been relegated and presumably would give us a chance to pick up six easy points for the group stage as Shimizu were very much focused on getting promoted back to J1 and were also in shocking form when we played them. Naturally we were 2-0 down after seven minutes and things didn’t get much better from there. They were even playing a bit of a reserves team as far as I can remember. Myogan got his first involvement and was then subbed at half time, which seemed to be a bit of an Oniki thing with various players in 2023. When we got back into the game though a Chanathip goal we then conceded again five minutes later. I probably had some more concrete moans when I wrote the biog post but I can’t remember why we were crap now. After this we got a couple of 0-0 draws, further demonstrating how 2023 would be. It’s a bit worrying that we had so many warnings very early on in the season but the manager was still unable to do anything about it. A big 6-0 win against Shimizu at home did wonders for our goal difference but that didn’t count in this group stage for some reason. And then a defeat to Urawa away pretty much sealed our fate. The last game away at Shonan was for the most part another truly awful performance with us going 2-0 down and then staging an unlikely but ultimately pointless comeback to win with a late goal. I like the Levain Cup more than many people do. I think it’s a good chance to go to some games in interesting stadiums and see players we don’t normally see. Sadly this year we got Shonan and Urawa in our group, negating the first part and after some initial rotation, Oniki reverted to the same old players for the ‘important games’, so the second part also was a wash out. Next year we have a new knockout format for the competition which could make things more interesting. I hope it means we can visit some interesting stadiums. I bet we’ll draw a boring team in the first round.

ACL

Perhaps the big surprise of the year was the way we navigated though the ACL group stage. In recent years the ACL has proven tough for us. We have been accused of not taking the competition seriously which is completely inaccurate, but understandable from the completely abysmal way we’ve dealt with ‘easy’ games in the past. Once again the draw wasn’t that kind to us either from the point of view of getting exciting away trips or beatable teams. Two of our opponents were in our group last year so there wasn’t even much novelty value. But this year we did better! After squeaking a win away at Johor in the first game we managed to do what has in the past been almost impossible for us to do, and beat Ulsan. They were pretty poor though. After that game we went slightly goal crazy and scored plenty, won five out of five and secured first place in the group with a game to spare. It all looks quite rosy from a distance but I would say that if felt like our opposition weren’t as good as we might have expected so perhaps it's a little early to book those flights to the middle east for the final. I suspect that we will draw Ventforet Kofu in the next round and lose to them. But this is just my natural pessimism. Our progress is definitely one of few highlights of 2023 though. Group stages are where doing the business is the most important thing and you don’t need to particularly set the world on fire. And the goals that we got in the later group games gave us all a much needed boost of positivity. The last time we got through we were terrible and went out against Ulsan. The previous time we threw away a great first leg lead in the away game against Urawa. Both times we’d won the group so let’s not get too carried away. But at the same time, we can enjoy finishing the year still in the competition.