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