Vs Shonan Bellmare (away) 24/2/24 J League match 1

Shonan Bellmare 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

Now the season has kicked off properly we can just pretend that what happened in the ACL was just all a bad dream and concentrate on the league. It’s fair to say that we’re not really fancied to do anything at all in the league this year and I think I’d go along with that. In spite of our squad looking pretty good, I don’t get the feeling yet that we’re particularly organised and have a plan that can get the job done. Hopefully we can do a bit better than last year, but let’s be honest, that’s not a very high bar to clear, is it? In a way, having a very early season meltdown after a truly terrible, (yet wholly predictable), performance in the ACL has allowed me to gain a bit of perspective on where we are this year. In the same way that it’s ultimately pointless and probably not great for anyone’s health to get too angry about a bad defeat, we probably shouldn’t get too excited about a win. Perhaps this is all just a roundabout way of saying I’m really trying to scale back these blog posts a bit as I really don’t have much time to write them at the moment. It seems like a better idea to cut back rather than stop altogether. Anyway, this is probably of not much interest to you, so let’s get on with it.

Us -

When we conceded after seven minutes in this game to a team that we have struggled a lot against in recent years, it’s fair to say that I was a bit irritated. Particularly as it was a goal that came from a horrible error we made again. Wakizaka, after booting the ball straight off the pitch with his first touch of the game gave the ball away cheaply for a second game in a row and this time it ended up with a free kick for them which they put away after the ball broke free. It looked like a bit of a soft goal to concede and suggests that we’re still in a bit of a mess at the back. This was our fourth game of 2024 and featured our fourth centre back pairing. Somewhat bizarrely I’d say that the one clean sheet we have got in this time came when we played the strongest team out of all those we have faced so far. I guess Shandong might disagree with that though. Also somewhat surprisingly, the only clean sheet came when we had Kamifukumoto in goal. I don’t know what to think about this really. In contrast to the fact that the centre back positions are still very much in flux, it seems that Oniki has decided that his best left and right backs are Miura and Sasaki. It’s quite a turnaround for Sasaki who last year couldn’t get a look in at left back, which is presumably his strongest position and is now first choice on the right. Aside from the defence, it was business as usual with the same midfield and same forward line named again. Any thoughts that Ienaga might be played a bit less this year seem to have been disproved already.

After I got quite irritated about Wakizaka’s poor start to the game/season, which had been slightly inflamed by him saying in a recent interview that he wanted to take the lead in getting Frontale back to where they should be not long after a horrendous cock up by him had helped us get limply knocked out of the ACL, I was delighted to see myself proved wrong and look like an idiot (again) when he blasted in a goal from a long way out at the other end of the pitch. There was an element of justice for me too as in the celebrations I got elbowed in the face. The celebrations weren’t that wild either, so I can only presume it was karma that did it. Our other goal, which came quite a bit later was an extremely amusing goal, with the Shonan keeper doing his absolute best to haul Erison to the ground, but being unable to do so. He can be thankful that Erison was trying to score a goal, rather than running for a train, as so strong was his grip and so unaffected was Erison, that if it were the latter, he would have been dragged up the escalator and onto the train and now be clinging to Erison’s shirt on the next Tokkaido line train out of Hiratsuka. Probably the only other thing of note in this game was the fact that, perhaps with Wakizaka’s ACL opposition assist in mind, it seems that Miura is now taking our set pieces. Perhaps that will not be the case when it comes to us having a free kick in a shooting position, but in this match it was Miura who was taking the ones where we put the ball into the box. I can’t speak for the corners as we only had one in the whole game and I can’t remember it. It would be a very welcome thing though if we had some variation from our corners. Positive variation that is. I guess you can say giving the ball away directly is a kind of variation. Perhaps the fact that we only had one corner, coupled with the fact that Ienaga was encouraging his teammates to take the ball to the corner flag to waste time with five minutes to go suggests that this wasn’t a vibrant performance from us. It’s definitely preferable to conceding in the last minute but I think it does hold quite a bit of danger and sooner or later if we try to do it for the last 5% of every game it’s going to come back and bite us. But on this occasion it didn’t. As I said above, we weren’t great and as I’ll say in the next couple of sections we got a bit lucky at times, but not losing is a good step forward from our ACL trauma.

Them -

Shonan always cause us trouble and this game was no exception. However they are doing in any particular season, one thing you can guarantee is that form goes out of the window and they give us a real challenge. As this was their first game, we can’t really talk about form on this occasion I guess. But we can remark that they had one shot on target and scored with it. They also hit the bar and had a goal ruled out for offside, which I somehow ‘spotted’ from the other end of the pitch but didn’t realise how close it was until I saw the replay. I guess I spotted the deflection more than anything, but looking back it was a lucky, but just about justified escape. Praise the lord for VAR! Or maybe not, as I’ll come on to shortly. In spite of the stats being slightly one sided in our favour when it came to possession and shots on target, you can’t say that they didn’t cause us quite a few scares. I don’t have much else to say in this section apart from a plea to them to turn down the PA system a bit that was directly behind our area. Pre-game they played a whistle sound effect for some reason which caused a significant amount of people to jump and hold their ears. Similarly, the sound they play for every sub was blasted at such a level that the correct preparation when you saw a sub about to be made was to cover your ears before the attack. There was probably a clue for them in the fact that even normal speech sounded like it was being played through a Big Muff (or other similar distortion pedal). I suppose that part of the point is to cover up the opposition’s singing. I know a few clubs who definitely do this. But they should probably be careful with that whistle sound as they could have a lawsuit in their hands and someone’s audiologist bills to pay.

Ref -

The ref on this occasion was Koya, or as he used to be known on Flashscore, 'K. Hut', the app deciding for some reason to translate his surname. I don’t expect much from J League refs anymore and it’s pretty rare to think a ref has had a decent game. It’s also quite rare to think that a ref hasn’t had an awful game. On this occasion I think he was alright. I didn’t write down anything about being extremely angry about anything he did, so that must be a positive. He did give the two big decisions in the game different ways, which I’m not sure about really as I thought we should have had a penalty but I suppose he was trying to even things up as the previous marginal decision to disallow their goal went our way. I don’t think refs should do this kind of thing, but I understand that they are human beings and this probably seems like the right thing to do if your whole job is showing impartiality. He probably shouldn’t, after his lengthy look at the VAR screen, have whistled loudly and pointed in the direction of the penalty spot though, even if the incident had happened in a similar area, as I think everyone in the stadium thought he’d given it. But let’s be honest, if the biggest complaints we have about a ref are that his hand signals were ambiguous and that he gave each team one of the two big and kind of marginal decisions, he’s probably done ok. Blimey….

So a thoroughly meltdown free blog post for our first league game. Let’s see how long that lasts. I guess it helped that we won. There were some very enjoyable results over the weekend and our 2-1 win sees us sitting in sixth. Hopefully this won’t be the highest we get this year. It’s nice to get one of our biggest banana skins out of the way early on in the season, and even nicer to come away with a win. Next up we have Jubilo at home on Friday. At least this game won’t be kicking off at 5pm. If we can get another win it would be very nice. I suspect we’ll be going with exactly the same players again. And I haven’t seen any evidence of this new approach that I heard we’d be adopting. But I’m not particularly surprised about that either. However, as long as we keep winning, I guess I should refrain from whinging.

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 71. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 51')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for YAMAMOTO 72')
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 84')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MARCINHO 84')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for WAKIZAKA 90+6')
MF 6. ZE RICARDO

Goals

IKEDA (Shonan) 7' 1-0
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 24' 1-1
ERISON (Frontale) 56' 1-2 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

It wasn’t the most polished performance but we got the job done. With no one really standing out I’m giving this a bit randomly but with some slight justification and it’s going to…

ERISON - looks like a brute up front and is doing the business nicely at the moment. Gets this mainly for the pure entertainment of him dragging the Shonan keeper along behind him whilst he slotted the ball home. Oh, and the goal celebration too, of course! Three games, three goals so far!

Highlights

Vs Shandong Taishan (home) 20/2/24 ACL round of sixteen

Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 4 Shandong Taishan (5-6 on agg.)

What an awful performance. And an awful performance merits an awful blog post, so here we go. 6 Football is crap, isn’t it? Or rather, we’re crap, aren’t we? How far we’ve fallen. 2 Ugh. Where to start with another horrible performance. 3 This was awful again. The game plan didn’t work, and we had no response to going behind. 2 Of course, you know I’m going to blame Oniki for this. 2 What a shit manager. 7 Still grimly sticking to the same formation and tactics. 7 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. 1 It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t know where to go from here. Our system has been found out and there’s no sign of any other ideas. 2 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. 1 If I had access to a replay of the whole game, I would ideally get a screen grab of the shot of Oniki in the 88th minute with his magnets and whiteboard trying to work out something... anything, and then not bothering. As usual, too little too late. 2 I believe that as long as Oniki is in charge, we’ll continue to toil and bore our way to mediocrity. 3 If one player is playing badly in one game, well, that’s unfortunate, but it happens. If all of the players are playing badly for the whole of the season, then you’ve probably got to look elsewhere. 4 I realise you were expecting me to say this, the real stinkers once again came from Oniki. 3 The one constant is Oniki’s useless safety first approach. Could we just once take a free kick in midfield and play it into the box, rather than constantly playing it short, especially if there’s an opposition player standing very close waiting to take the ball. 5 We’ve got plenty more players to choose from but a manager who hasn’t got a clue who to pick. 7 Every week a little bit more of my sanity gets chipped away by having to watch the same old shit. It feels a bit like finding the person that irritates you the most on Twitter and blocking everyone else in the world aside from them, basically giving them a funnel to pour a torrent of horror directly into your brain without relief. It can’t be good for our health to watch these games. I’d have no problem if we just weren’t that good, but it’s just that the clown in charge keeps making the same stupid decisions apparently unaware of any detrimental effect they might be having. 6

Perhaps that first paragraph seemed a bit weird. Or perhaps it didn’t. It’s made up entirely of direct quotes from various blog posts over the last six seasons (see the footnotes at the bottom). I guess the point I’m making is that nothing changes, and we’re still dealing with the same problems we have been for years, which were only swept under the carpet by us fortunately having some very good players who mismanagement couldn’t stop from playing well. I’ve long said we have succeeded in spite of Oniki and not because of him, but unbelievably there still seems to be confidence in and good feeling towards him from the majority of our fans. It’s taken me four days to write this blog post. Not because I am so traumatised by our defeat but more because I’m just totally fed up with writing about Oniki Frontale and with arguing with people about it on Twitter. On paper this is probably a tie that we should have won. We stormed through the group but once again totally shat the bed when it came to the knockout stage. Funny that, eh? Oniki is a manager who in the past could deal with the league format reasonably well as more often than not his one tactic worked, as the players were good. In a one off game though, he can’t rely on being able to back up the bad performances with some good ones afterwards and instead has to think on the go and actually make some changes that might affect the game. I don’t know if it’s all his fault. There is clearly a malaise at the club at the moment, particularly since the new and apparently clueless chairman joined. After the game our main supporter group the Kazoku demanded to see him. Apparently, (and really don’t quote me on this as it’s only information I’m getting second hand), they were upset at the club’s failure to get more fans in the stadium for the game. I’ve got a couple of issues with this, as while the attendance of about 12000 was pretty low, the game was at 5pm so 12000 seemed kind of decent. I have my theories about why the kickoff might have been so early but have yet to have them confirmed, and instead have been told by people who don’t actually know anything about the J League or Frontale that my theory is almost certainly wrong. And in any case, like I said, our support was actually pretty good. Much better than the performance of most of the players. I don’t think an extra 5000 supporters in the stadium would have changed anything when it came to the three major cock ups that our players made that led to three of their four goals. Like I said in the introduction though, one player playing badly or making a horrendous error can be blamed on the player. The same thing happening with three different players in one game, well, you’ve probably got to look at the manager. So basically, I don’t know if the Kazoku’s complaint to the chairman was right, but I am totally with them when it comes to wanting to complain to him. The exodus of important back room staff speaks volumes about something not being right behind the scenes. Anyway, if I went into detail about every moan I had about this match, this post would extend to novella length and much in the way that I don’t think anyone wants to read that, I don’t want write it. So instead I’ll just whinge away in bullet point form.

- Shocking from Ominami for their first goal, dodgy from Maruyama giving the ball away for the late attack that lead to their fourth, but the one that made me the most angry was the ridiculous corner from Wakizaka that lead to their second. His corners have long been terrible, but this was really sinking to a new low. Please can someone else take them.
- Oniki’s lack of a clue is perhaps evident in the fact that the two games in which he’s played what he thinks is our strongest line up, we’ve played worse than in the game when he played what he considers to be the second team. Kind of weird that the only changes he made from the first Shandong game to this one were to drop Jesiel for Maruyama, (who was ok in the Super Cup but not immediate-elevation-to-starter level ok) and to change the left back. Quite concerned how little confidence Oniki seems to have in Jesiel now. At the same time, a bit confused that Takai had a great game in the Super Cup and wasn’t chosen to start this game if a change had to be made. Similarly, perhaps the one player who didn’t play that well at the Super Cup also jumped into the first team. In the case of Miura replacing Segawa, it was quite welcome to see a left back playing at left back instead of a striker. And to his credit, the things that looked a bit dodgy about Miura, (kept getting knocked off the ball very easily), in the Super Cup seemed to have been completely eradicated in this game. He had a decent game I thought and his goal was nice. So I guess I’m saying credit to Oniki here…
- By the way, the rumoured line up for the Shonan game only has two changes. Sai replacing Sasaki and Takai replacing Ominami. If this is the line up, I guess it shows that Oniki was on the whole quite pleased with how this game went…
- The above point is backed up by the fact that it took him till the 84th minute to make any changes in a game that we were losing and had looked generally clueless in. And even then the changes were pretty bad. The whole front three were replaced, but instead of removing a tiring Ienaga, he was instead moved into the midfield where his do-what—I-want style proved to be a lot more dangerous for us. So basically no change of approach, just ploughing on with the same formation and tactics. The change of approach came on 90+9 minutes, three minutes after the game should have ended, when he brought on Takai and Jesiel and sent them up front for one hoofed ball. 84th minute subs seemed to be the wrong changes, way too late, but par for the course for a manager whose only new idea is to grow a beard so that he looks less young for the benefit of the refs. So,  actually I should apologise as I’ve long been saying he has no new ideas. He had one - grow a beard!
- I think the big aim for 2024 was to make the most of getting through to the knockout stages of the ACL and have a real good go at it. Our aim for 2024 has bitten the dust before our J League campaign has kicked off. Because we were in the ACL, we won’t be joining the more exciting looking than in previous seasons 2024 Levain cup till the later stages, so now we can ‘concentrate on the league’ with our squad that contains players who will almost certainly have almost no involvement. Poor Matsui, Yui, Kanda and probably more, whose season is now probably done before it began. But this is all a bit of a moot point anyway, as Oniki was never a great fan of rotating that much, was he? There is some irony in the fact that this year we probably have a decent amount of centre backs and now Oniki doesn’t appear to know who to play. We’ve had three games with three different combinations so far. The Paradox of Choice seems quite relevant in this situation. Still, never mind, we’ll probably start getting the injuries and red cards flowing soon and he’ll be back on more comfortable ground.
- The ref started the game pretty well I thought, playing a decent advantage and seemed to be in control. This didn’t last long though and he really should have sent off at least one Shandong player in the first half for a second yellow, (for his third of fourth bookable offense). In the second half he was all over the place and the game got quite physical, but by this stage he was only interested in booking numerous staff on the Shandong bench. He did also award Shandong the corner that they scored their winner from after the six minutes were already up. But obviously his performance wasn’t why we lost the game. That was down to us being useless and Shandong really wanting it. They were a different team in the second leg. Or perhaps I should say they were a different team after we gifted them their first goal in the first leg. After that, the gifts continued to flow, our manager watching as the tie slipped away from us, perhaps hoping that sooner or later the boost of him having grown a semi-beard would kick in. It didn’t. They were by far the better team on the day. The only aspect that we bettered them in was with the ‘giving the ball away in potentially fatal areas’. We were SO much better at that.

Anyway, let’s tie all this up with a suitably meandering last paragraph. As I’ve been stewing in my frustration for the last few days, dreading another whole season of this crap, the one image that keeps coming into my head is a strange one. It is of Oniki, whose job is to move some water from one bucket to another, and is trying to do it using only his hands. He keeps stopping halfway between the two buckets water pouring from his inadequately cupped hands whilst he looks at his magnet board and considers perhaps a slight change of the colour of the buckets, all the time not realising that he could have just carried the first bucket to the second one and poured it in to complete the job in an efficient way. There were many people in the stadium on Tuesday who’d taken time off work to watch what they hoped would be a solid performance, seeing out the tie in what was supposed to be the easier second leg. Little did they realise that Oniki and most of the players had also booked time off work and hadn’t showed up. If we agreed to or even didn’t protest the ridiculous early kick off, diluting the home advantage and inconveniencing ourselves, there really is something wrong with the club. I love that fact that we are a family club and welcoming and friendly to all. I don’t believe this should extend to changing kick off times for the benefit off the opposition, (if this is what happened). This was also displayed when Shandong scored their winner and one of their fans jumped the barrier, did a quick turn, leaving one of our security staff on their backside, ran to celebrate with the players and still eluded the security for a while before being ‘apprehended’ and gently ushered back to their seat. Even when we’re supposed to be throwing people out of the stadium we just let them go back and have a sit down. They probably got him some refreshments after his exertions. After these kind of disasters I usually try to be optimistic and say that hopefully this will give us a kick up the backside going forward. Whether that happens remains to be seen. Tomorrow we’ll be going to play Shonan away and kick off our league campaign. We have a pretty mixed record there. If, as it seems, we go with almost the same line up and get another shocking result, don’t expect the next blog post to be very long. Now we’re out of the ACL, (at the first time of asking), Oniki presumably has time to get going with his new tactics and approach that wouldn’t have been ready for the ACL game. Whether I did actually read this online and it’s true, or if it was just a dream I had where my subconscious was trolling me, I don’t know. I don’t believe he has any new tactics or a new approach and now we’ve seen that the grow a beard thing doesn’t work, I suspect we’ll just be stuck with the same old stuff for the whole of 2024. And what better way to finish this rotten post on that note of bleakness!

1 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/08/vs-gamba-osaka-home-6823-j-league-match.html

2 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2019/12/vs-yokohama-f-marinos-home-301119-j.html

3 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2018/09/vs-gamba-osaka-away-2918-j-league-match.html

4 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2022/05/vs-shonan-bellmare-home-25522-j-league.html

5 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/04/vs-gamba-osaka-away-9423-j-league-match.html

6 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/07/vs-nagoya-grampus-away-1723-j-league.html

7 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/05/vs-urawa-reds-away-24523-levain-cup.html

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 71. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 89. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 69')

Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 4. JESIEL (on for WAKIZAKA 90+9')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS (on for YAMAMOTO 84')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 84')
MF 25. MATSUI Renji
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
DF 29. TAKAI Kota (on for IENAGA 90+9')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MARCINHO 84')
DF 52. Sai VAN WERMESKERKEN
MF 55. ZE RICARDO
 

Goals

CRYZAN (Shandong) 8' 0-1

GAO ZHUNYI (Shandong) 25' 0-2

MIURA (Frontale) 30' 1-2
ERISON (Frontale) 59' 2-2
CRYZAN (Shandong) 73' 2-3
JADSON (Shandong) 90+7' 2-4


Highlights

Vs Vissel Kobe 18/2 Super Cup

Vissel Kobe 0 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

It’s February 18th and already we’ve played our second game of the year. By the time 16 out of the 20 J1 teams kick off their first competitive game of 2024, we’ll be starting our fourth. And there’s no time to sit around enjoying not writing blog posts because game number three is fast approaching. After our first eleven just about did enough against what looked like a not particularly strong Shandong team last Tuesday we turned up at the National Stadium with a completely different first eleven. I think I expressed my doubts that Oniki would rotate much for this match, but he totally did so I have to eat some humble pie. Maybe he really has changed his approach. I guess that will become clearer as the games continue to come thick and fast. I know I always make a joke about the Levain Cup being the most prestigious of all Japanese football titles, but the Fujifilm Super Cup, as I believe it is now called, is most definitely the title all teams take least seriously and care the least about. Well, unless you are the troll Marinos fan who always finds something to criticise us about and expressed his disgust at us not taking this prestigious cup final seriously by rotating too much. Perhaps he’s still a bit sore after his side threw away a two goal lead against Bangkok United. I think a competition that only two teams have a chance of winning and which is usually crammed in between the last pre-season friendly and the season opener is absolutely the least admired trophy to add to the cabinet. But I am delighted that we snatched it away from Vissel Kobe’s clutches. Actually, that makes it sound like they were cruelly denied the cup by some misfortune, but I think we looked much better than them. To add a bit more detail and heat to that burn let’s say I think our second team looked much better than their first team. And even if they want to use the excuse that we’d already started our season, I’d like to add that any start to the season that our starting eleven had had, was basically sitting on a plane, and then sitting on a bench. I’m sure Mikitani could have funded a similar trip for their players if they’d wanted it. Anyway, this introduction has already gone longer than I wanted the whole post to go on, so I’d better get on with rolling out some more insults, as I’m sure that’s why you’re here. Let’s use the usual headings.

Us -

Massive changes as I said above. First pitch time for Ze Ricardo, Patrick Verhon and Yamauchi.  First starts for Van Wermeskerken and Maruyama. And I thought everyone did alright! There was no-one on the pitch for us who didn’t show some real positive promise. Certainly there were a few dodgy moments, but that’s to be expected with a team and partnerships that have never played together. And presumably there was a bit of a language barrier between Ze Ricardo and Patrick as they’ve only been in the country about a month. Sai almost made the perfect start to his Frontale career, coming very close to scoring with a backwards header very early on in the game. He later went on to actually make the perfect start to his Frontale career by scoring in the second half. It doesn’t bother me that he basically blocked a clearance which was then deflected into the net. I’ve seen goals that have more egregiously been not designated as own goals. I thought the rule was that if the ball was going on target before the final deflection it’s not an own goal. But anyway, I’m sure he’s happy to be credited with it and us fans are just happy it went in. To be honest, I couldn’t see a great deal of difference in the way we approached the game to how we did last year, but it just felt a lot better than it has recently. I guess this is due to the novelty factor of there being different players. I don’t think it’s particularly apparent that the ‘first choice’ team is better than the ones who started this match, which is something that if Oniki agrees with, will give him some difficult decisions to make. Certainly in the past I have been frustrated by us not changing anything much when the one plan we had wasn’t working. Seems like I’m easily placated by seeing some new faces though. Oh, and perhaps by winning! As I said above there were plenty of decent performances. I’m a bit biased as I like him a lot, but I thought Seko had a really good game and was unlucky to see his free kick hit the bar. His corners looked better than Wakizaka’s 2023 corners too. (I do remember thinking his corners were a bit better in the ACL game though). Takai was the other stand out I thought. He was clam and assured at the back and dealt with Osako pretty easily for the most part. He also looked good coming out of defence too. He showed this kind of promise in his first few games, so it’s good to see that kind of thing coming back after he had a bit of a wobble. I felt a bit sorry for Gomis in this game as he’s coming closer and closer to scoring but just doesn’t seem to have any luck. When he did put the ball in the net, (see below), the ref wasn't having it and he was denied an almost certain goal when after Marcinho came on and did one of his trademark dribbles, he tried to shoot rather than pass to an unmarked Gomis. Hopefully he’ll score soon, as I think that when he does he’ll start banging them in for fun. So, a much improved performance from our last game in this stadium and maybe some reason for optimism. Hopefully that doesn’t come crashing down in the immediate future.

Them -

After years of laughing at Vissel Kobe’s splashing of the cash to no effect I think everyone had to admit that last year they were deserved champions. Certainly their ability to sign plenty of high profile and effective players, somewhat in contrast to some of their recent more high profile foreign imports, helped them do well, but they more than earned their success. This is especially easy for me to say as they stopped YFM winning the league and did so with an extremely dodgy decision, hopefully rubbing salt in the YFM wounds. Not sure what’s happened to them since last year though. Now they seem like an ineffective long ball team. I particularly enjoyed the English language interview of Sai (van Wermeskerken, from now on just know as Sai as it’s a long name to have to keep typing), where he singled out the fact that it had been a challenge because we had to deal with a lot of long balls from Kobe. I don’t know if this was a wonderfully taken dig, but I kind of hope that it is. I guess their shooting was pretty bad in this game and that helped us out. Sakai was particularly awful when it came to getting shots or passes on target. I wonder if they’ve turned into 2023 Frontale. I saw they had plenty of possession and a decent amount of shots but failed to score. Got to love it when one of the three teams who people seem to be tipping for the title start out their year like that.  Their keeper looked awful too. I’ve been trying to think of a more amusing second half to the following comparison but haven’t quite been able to find one so you have to make do with this. Maekawa had more flaps than a migrating Arctic Tern in these 90 minutes. And one of these set up our goal. It’s a bit of a shame that we couldn’t have taken advantage of more of them though. One final point on Kobe. Seeing Arai and Miyashiro in their colours was a bit of a wrench. Arai was much loved at Frontale and we were kind of surprised when he left. The fact that he went down to J2 for a few seasons with JEF and then ended up at the J1 champions is a surprise, but I guess he’ll be playing a back up role there. Perhaps judging on how bad Maekawa played though, he could be getting more action than anyone expected. Miyashiro is a tough one. I had his shirt last year, (curse of the shirt, basically it’s my fault he left), but can’t begrudge him leaving us as he was underused, never really played in his best position and even though he scored more goals from open play than any other player in far less minutes, it was clear that Oniki wasn’t going to either make him his first choice striker or change our system to suit him. I was a bit shocked to see how many of our fans booed him before, during and after the game, and kind of disgusted that it happened when he and Arai came to greet us after the match. I don’t know if it’s because they resent him for leaving for a bigger pay packet, for the reigning champions or just because he was a youth team product who didn’t stay with us for the rest of his career. It seems that no-one has a problem when our players leave for foreign teams, regardless of the level, but if they leave to a J1 rival they should be hated. Of course it wasn’t everyone booing, but it was a significant amount of people. Perhaps these people think it would be better for him to stay with us forever, playing fewer and fewer games as the years pass, but still being there to take pictures with bananas for themed match day events and to make everyone in the crowd feel comfortable and warm inside. I don’t know what 2024 will hold for him, but maybe Kobayashi is an interesting comparison. He turned down some offers to go to teams where he’d definitely have played more and is apparently going to have a career with us after he stops playing. I can’t imagine it’s much fun for him though, particularly in a season like 2023 where the rotation was really minimal. Fingers crossed for him in 2024.

Ref and VAR -

This game had the potential to be a perfect storm of absolute shitness when it came to officials. The ref was Ikeuchi who is notoriously bad, but who I faintly praised in the last game we had with him saying that I ’didn’t find much if anything to get irritated about’. Perhaps he read this and was infuriated and determined to prove that there is always something to get irritated about when he’s in charge. The first note I made during the game said ‘four mins till first absolute shit decision’. I can’t remember what it was now, but I guess it was one of many, in my opinion, absolutely one-eyed decisions he made in the game. I knew we were in trouble when he decided to apparently warn Tanabe after a tackle that he didn’t even give a free kick for. Then unsurprisingly, the very next tackle Tanabe made he was booked. Gomis pointed this out to Ikeuchi but perhaps that only encouraged him, and it wasn’t long before he was able to book Gomis too. It seemed like everything was given Vissel’s way. I wouldn’t be surprised if you checked his fridge you’d find a massive bit of Kobe beef in there and a big pile of Rakuten gift cards on top of it. Of course I am naturally biased in favor of Frontale and my Vissel supporting friend seemed to think he’d done ok in the game. I find though that in the J League, if you feel like the ref has had a decent game, he’s probably been biased in your favour. I think a ref having a decent game is rarer than a cross that Maekawa doesn’t flap at. Or a bit of Kamifukumoto distribution that doesn’t end up flying off the side of the pitch,(this is hugely unfair, as I thought he had a decent game yesterday). The most egregious Ikeuchi cock up though was him blowing for a free kick when Yamada absolutely fairly won the ball by the goal line, passed it back to Gomis who put the ball in the back of the net. He clearly blew up for a free kick as it looked like some of the Kobe players had stopped. So I guess he must have been confident he was right, or does that 'let the play go on and get VAR check it' thing only work with offsides? I can’t remember if it was Ikeuchi who previously decided to blow the whistle for a goal that we scored that was incorrectly flagged offside, but crucially blow the whistle before the ball went in, so ruling out any possibility of VAR coming into play? I don’t know if it was him, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. I know it’s not a good look for our fans to boo the ref as he went up to receive his medal for a job truly terribly done, but to be honest, I thought he was awful, so probably got what he deserved. One thing that I thought was interesting was that the stadium screen which was broadcasting the action throughout the game stopped showing the action or replays as soon as there was any kind of hint of a decision which could have been contentious. I guess they are fed up of the referee’s incompetence being clearly shown to all in the stadium, and I suppose if you have incompetent refs it’s easier to try to hide their incompetence than try to actually make them not incompetent.

Next up, Shandong at home in the second leg of our ACL knockout game. We did our best to try to make the second leg interesting by gifting them a few goals late on in the first game, but it would be nice if we could put in a good and confident performance in what will be a library of a stadium given that the kick off has been set for 5pm on a Tuesday. I can only imagine this is due to us being obliging with the opposition's request which was probably intended to minimise any home advantage we might have. Certainly, there isn’t a rational reason to start at 5 when it comes to other time zones. Fingers crossed for a good result. I’m hoping that these posts might become a bit less rambly, a bit funnier and a lot less moany in 2024. I’m not sure I’ve started that particularly well though. And I guess a lot depends on what’s happening on the pitch. Definitely it’s a lot easier to not moan when the team isn’t playing badly, but I’m honestly trying to be less critical and a bit fairer to people who are doing their best. I’m sure Ikeuchi would be happy to hear this. Of course the useless bastard would. 😉

 

 

 

Team

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 31. Sai VAN WERMESKERKEN
DF 2. TAKAI Kota

DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (Yellow card 15')

MF 6. ZE RICARDO

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS (Yellow card 25')

FW 28. PATRICK VERHON

Subs

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 90+3') (on for YAMAUCHI 80')
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for TANABE 46')
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for PATRICK VERHON 65')
MF 25. MATSUI Renji
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 80')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for SEKO 85')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

This game and the team showed something of a work in progress, but some of that work was more complete so I have to give it to...

TAKAI Kota - looked great at the back and also bringing the ball out from the back. Really pleased to see him back on track after a little wobble.

 

Goals

VAN WERMESKERKEN (Frontale) 48' 0-1
 

Highlights

Vs Shandong Taishan (away) 13/2/24 ACL round of sixteen

Shandong Taishan 2 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale

We’re back and banging! Erm… With a pretty average (and that’s being generous. Losses to Ryukyu and Machida and a draw against Okinawa SV…) pre-season behind us, we’re slap bang back into action with the first of three games in eight days. Quite how it’s possible for us to have such a packed schedule so early in the season, I don’t know. I presume the J League was aware of when the ACL games would be but perhaps expected us to fail to get out of the group and by doing so, avoid a busy start. A new year brings new players and often brings new hope. When I guested on the J Talk Podcast the night before this game, my feeling was that our season could go one of two ways. If the new players and the teased new approach start working quickly we could have an exciting year. Equally, if the new approach proves to be as successful and original as last year’s new approach, and the like for like signings we made for players who were leaving continued in their predecessors’ foot steps, we could have another dodgy year. After that second half, it seems more likely it’s the latter. Of course, it’s too early to make any kind of judgements after one game. Especially one which we somehow won! Also, I read, (or perhaps hallucinated), that Oniki had a new idea (!!!) but thought it wouldn’t be ready in time for the ACL so was going to go with the old idea that had proved so stultifying over the previous 12 months. It’s probably too early to draw any concrete impressions on where we are after this match, so I’ll try to just skim over everything in a couple of short paragraphs and be done with it. Here we go.

In the first half we looked pretty good. Well for about half an hour. Shandong didn’t look that good and it seemed that their best route to goal would be us giving them the ball directly in front of our goal whilst not really under that much pressure. I stupidly mused that we looked like we were playing much better football than them and that there were some reasons to be optimistic. At the same time, I noted that there was barely anyone in our team who hadn’t made a horrendous error which had somehow miraculously not ended up leading to us conceding. So perhaps there was something new! A new and original way to not really get the job done. How foolish of me to underestimate Oniki and his new ideas! After scoring our second goal on 33 minutes after we’d previously been gifted an absolutely undeniable penalty, surely things were looking bright, right? Perhaps yes. So bright that we found ourselves dazzled for the remainder of the match aside from when Ienaga scored with our ONLY SHOT OF THE SECOND HALF. Add to that nugget, the 29% possession we ‘enjoyed’ after the break. Still I suppose we can be positive about how well we were taking our chances, with more than half of our shots on target and about a third of them being goals. It seems that we still can play the ball around nicely, (well, actually not as much as we usually do perhaps, but you know, got to grasp on to something), but once again after a slightly bright start absolutely failed to attack in any meaningful way. After they made some changes near the start of the second half, it seemed like it took Oniki about 15 minutes to notice we were getting swamped at the back. 15 minutes during which we had conceded. I suspect he was looking at his magnet board at the time and probably hadn’t spotted that they’d restarted the game after making their subs. But this is all a bit unfair and a bit premature as we won, even if it was a bit too close for comfort at times. And maybe Oniki’s going to roll out those new tactics on Saturday for the Super Cup, right? But wow, anyone who came into the season with any optimism and watched this match without having that optimism firmly smashed out of them is much more positive person than I am. But yeah, most people are, aren’t they? Hehe.

Normally we’d be saying, ‘Oh well, these things take some time to gel and you can’t expect a team with so many changes to hit the ground running immediately’. Sadly for us, it just happens that two of our first three games are really significant ones for us to try to make 2024 a bit better than 2023. As far as I could see in this match, Erison has come in to replace Damiao and looked like he will do things a bit differently. I suspect he’s going to be more like Okubo than Damiao, but to be honest, it won’t be such a bad thing if we have a striker who the opposition are really going to hate. And if he can score like Okubo did, well, that will be very welcome. Not sure about his penalty run up, but loved his goal celebration. A promising start for him, I think. But maybe when I say start, I’m only talking about the start of this game and ignoring anything that happened after we’d scored our second as after that point no-one did anything. Sasaki came in for Yamane, which was a bit of a shock as I’m sure everyone expected Van Wermeskerken to play there. Perhaps he’s not settled in yet. I thought Sasaki did a good job when it came to going forward but got exposed whilst defending a few times, so actually quite like Yamane at his peak! Noborizato was replaced by Segawa, because yeah, of course, who would expect the only international we signed to play at left back when we could play a striker there instead, right? And Yamamoto came in for Seko. Perhaps he’s been playing better in training or perhaps Oniki just sees Seko as an eternal sub. It’s a good thing that we’re talking a one goal lead into the second leg. Naturally, (because this is the ACL where none of the rules ever seem to make much sense), away goals have no significance, so scoring three times in the away leg will be ultimately pointless if we concede twice in the second whilst failing to score. I hope the Shandong that played the first 30 minutes turn up rather than the one that played the rest of the game. It would be a huge understatement to say that their approach was quite a physical one. They got away with absolute murder in the first half, but to be honest, you’ve got to blame the ref for being so flaky. Perhaps its not such a good idea to have a ref from a league that only has nine teams in it, an average attendance of significantly less than 1000 per game and has no relegation in charge of an important game. I don’t want to be too mean to him though given that as bad as he was, there are plenty of equally bad Japanese refs, and a few that are worse too. He seemed to enjoy VAR quite a lot. The amount of discussions they had made me think that they were probably on a ‘pay as you VAR’ rate when it came to their salary. Hopefully we’ll have a ref in the second leg who can control the game a bit better. The knee in the back to Segawa was surely a red card, but neither the ref or VAR thought so. The way they were just kicking us around the pitch in the first half makes it astonishing that we ended up with four yellows to their two. Not saying ours were undeserved at all. To be honest, I can’t remember most of them. It was that kind of game. Shandong will come to our place hoping to continue their second half onslaught. I guess only time will tell whether they really upped their game, or whether we were just absolutely useless in the second half. Right now, I think probably both actually. But they are sure to be cowed by the electric atmosphere that they’ll find at Todoroki at… 5pm on a regular working day. Dunno if they needed to start early to get a plane home afterwards. Or maybe we wanted to try to save some money on the floodlights or something. But wow, what a useless time slot for pretty much every country in the whole of the federation. And our usual pub won’t even be open afterwards….

Well, that went on a lot longer than I expected and a lot longer than the game deserved. I guess there’s more to write about when the game is bad and there’s plenty of moaning to be done. Next up the Super Cup against Vissel Kobe at the always disappointing National Stadium on Saturday. If the team we started with today was our first choice team, there is no way we should be going with the same players on Saturday with the second leg only three days later. So expect some rotation. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. If my initial impressions of Shandong were accurate, we could be in for a much sterner test at the weekend than we were in this game. Fingers crossed, I guess.

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 59')
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 90+8')
FW 89. ERISON (Yellow card 31')
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke
DF 15. TANABE Shuto (Yellow card 90+1') (on for SEGAWA 89')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for YAMAMOTO 64')
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 72')
MF 25. MATSUI Renji
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
DF 29. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for MARCINHO 72')
DF 52. Sai VAN WERMESKERKEN (on for SASAKI 90')
MF 55. ZE RICARDO
 

Goals

ERISON (Frontale) PEN 28' 0-1
MARCINHO (Frontale) 33' 0-2
FERNANDINHO (Shandong) 67' 1-2
IENAGA (Frontale) 79' 1-3
JADSON (Shandong) 85' 2-3


Highlights

New player songs 2024

Here are the new players' songs and a few other new songs too, one of which includes quite complicated looking dance moves. To check the songs of players remaining from previous seasons, please check the posts here.

6. ZE RICARDO

Ze Ricardo
Ze Ricardo
Ze Ricardo
Oh Ze! Ze!

 
9. ERISON

Erison goal
La La La La Laa
El Toro Erison
Tsukisusume

13. MIURA Sota

Oh oh o, oh o oh
Kakeagare yo
Miura Sota

15. TANABE Shuto

Tanabe Shuto, Tanabe Shuto
Run Run La la la la
Run Run La la la la
Tanabe Shuto

24. MIYAGI Ten

Ten ten ten
Miyagi Ten, ten te ten te ten
Miyagi Ten, get goal
Kawasaki sodachi no Miyagi Ten, hey!




25. MATSUI Renji

Go fight!
Vamo Matsui Renji
Misero Matsui Renji
Ok! Alright! Shori o kono te ni

26. YAMAUCHI Hinata

Yamauchi Hinata
Kagayake Hinata
Yamauchi Hinata
Hinata la la la

31. Sai Van WERMESKERKEN

Van Wermeskerken Sai
Tsukisusume yo, shori e

34. YUI Kota

Yui Kota, Yui Kota
Kawasaki sodachi no Yui Kota
Yui Kota, Yui Kota
Sekai e habatake Yui Kota

35. MARUYAMA Yuichi

Maruyama
Maruyama
Oh o, oh o o oh.

77. YAMAMOTO Yuki

La La La La La La Laa
Yamamoto Yuki
Yamamoto Yuki go!




Vamos

Vamos, vamos
Kawasaki vamos
Vamos, vamos
Frontale




Cosmic Love

O o o o, o o, o oh
Kawasaki Ole (Ole)
O o o o, o o, o oh
Let’s go, uo uo uo uo
Sha!




Kawasaki Odori

Mita ka Kawasaki hataraku iki o
Migoto hyaku man saita hana
Uki uki, uki uki
Kira kira, kira kira
Kawasaki odori

And here's the dance...




Ale Kawasaki

Allez allez oh Forza Kawasaki
Koe agero tamashii komete
Tsukamitore kokode shori o
Hibikasero oretachi no koe
Laa la, laa la la, la la la, la la la la
Laa la, laa la la, la la la, la la la la
Laa la, laa la la, la la la, la la la, laa la
La la la la, laa la