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.
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
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