Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 5 Jubilo Iwata
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I think there’s no other appropriate reaction to another horrible performance but this time at least we had a crazy game to take the edge off a bit. 'Friday Night J League' is not something I get particularly excited about, but maybe that’s just me. If you win, well maybe it’s a good start to a nice weekend. If you lose, it has weekend ruining potential. In this case, the game was just… stupid… and in its stupid weirdness, it actually worked quite well when it came to just putting it behind me and just getting on with the weekend. Well, apart from the fact that I have to write this blog post I suppose. In a game where we conceded five times to a newly promoted team who only had nine shots in 107 minutes it was something of a surprise to see that people didn’t seem to be absolutely furious at the final whistle and instead sank into another one of those late defeat post game silences. To be honest as they scored goal after goal there also didn’t seem to be much anger or frustration in the stands and more, well, ironic laughter at the absurdity of the situation.
In the pub before the game I heard someone say that we were looking pretty good this season. At the time I found this more than a bit of a stretch, but now, well it looks almost like trolling. I dunno though, I’d probably say that we have a better squad this year than last year. We’ve got a player who looks like he will score in every game he plays. But sadly for 2024 Oniki Frontale, scoring a goal a game is nowhere near what we need to end up taking any points. We’ve now played five games this year, two at home and three away from home. The fact that we’ve won every game away from home might make it look like we’re having a great year. The win away at Shandong was looking like a decent result until we just started slinging out goals for free. The win away at Shonan showed us just about coming out on top over a team many people have down to be relegated in a generally fairly low quality game. The only one where the performance looked in any way assured was the Super Cup final against Kobe where what Oniki considers to be our B team kept things tight at the back against last year’s J League champions and won. At home, when Oniki puts out his A team we’ve lost 4-2 and 5-4, conceding for fun against teams we probably could have beaten quite comfortably. Nothing to worry about here, we only concede an average of 4.5 goals each time we play at home! It’s wonderful value for money when it comes to entertainment for the neutral. Sadly there probably usually aren’t that many neutrals in the stadium, and even last night when the atmosphere in the stands was much better than it deserved to be considering what was gong on on the pitch, there’s probably only so much that even the happiest clappiest of supporters can put up with. Well that would be the case at most clubs, but somehow people seem to be on Twitter trotting out the usual, oh well, on we go to the next match, it was probably just a blip stuff. I have a horrible feeling the maybe we might have peaked already this year by being in sixth after the first game.
Unsurprisingly, we went with the same line up as against Shonan, perhaps not noticing that we weren’t very good in that game. There were changes on the bench and people were delighted to see Kobayashi and Tono fit and back in the matchday squad again. Well, some people were. Probably Ze Ricardo and Gomis weren’t so happy, especially considering that neither of them had even a minute on the pitch in the last game but were dropped. There is a huge irony in that this was the first game when we didn’t have a defensive midfielder on the bench and Oniki chose it as the game in which he’d sub off the defensive midfielder at half time. To be fair to him, you probably can’t really complain about Tachibanada being taken off as he hadn’t done much. In fact the whole midfield hadn’t done much at all again. All we seem to get from this midfield recently is the occasional attack and nothing when it comes to stopping the opposition from just having a run at our defence. I felt a bit bad about having slagged off Wakizaka so much recently but that corner in the ACL still really irritates me. Of course I understand that everyone makes mistakes, but I dunno, he’s starting to become a bit Yamane-esque to me, interested mainly in scoring and not much else. Apart from getting irritated at his teammates. In this game, our best midfielder was again the one that has only been with us a few months. But I bet Wakizaka and Tachibanada will both start the next game.
When Seko came on and took a set piece, we immediately scored from it. Presumably this irked Wakizaka and he took the set pieces afterwards and we didn’t. I think the only reason Seko had the chance to take it was because it came straight after a corner on the opposite side and Wakizaka wasn’t making it across the pitch quickly enough. Miura took the free kicks against Shonan last week and they seemed to be ok I thought. Well he took the free kicks where we weren’t shooting. In this match, whenever a shooting opportunity came about you could be sure that Wakizaka would be there to put it over the bar. Perhaps it’s something similar to the situation with Tachibanada last year, in that when he became captain, he simultaneously became not very good at playing football, but because of the captaincy, was not dropped until much later than he should have been. I don’t know if the pressure of being captain is weighing on Wakizaka, but he shouldn’t be starting the next game, as far as I’m concerned. So yeah, the midfield was a bit of a mess. At the back, Takai seems to be repeating his 2023 season, where he came in, had some great games and just as he looked to be settling, had an absolute mare of a match where he was at fault for numerous goals. I feel really sorry for him. He’s definitely a good player, but I’m sure he’ll be affected by having another horrible game. Definitely not helped by our lack of midfield though.
Perhaps more infuriating though were the tactics, which let's be honest, I shouldn’t be that angry about, as they are more predictable than the sun rising every morning. Perhaps some kind of nuclear winter / meteor strike extinction event would be what is required for Oniki to change our tactics. You could perhaps draw some comparisons between yesterday’s game and Kazama Frontale games. I don’t remember them being quite so depressing though. And even though we scored four times, the fact the majority of the first half was spent with us passing the ball sideways along the defence line, over and over again, until launching a long ball forwards for Marcinho to run fast with and then lose without threatening the goal meant that our attacks were neither exciting nor effective. I guess our approach this year is a bit like the one that those guys who do the trick shots online have. Hours and hours of failed attempts of which only a handful are shown before the basketball launched off a shovel from about 50 meters away finally goes through the hoop. Sooner or later it will happen. Just keep repeating it, over and over and over again.
When Seko came on and took a set piece, we immediately scored from it. Presumably this irked Wakizaka and he took the set pieces afterwards and we didn’t. I think the only reason Seko had the chance to take it was because it came straight after a corner on the opposite side and Wakizaka wasn’t making it across the pitch quickly enough. Miura took the free kicks against Shonan last week and they seemed to be ok I thought. Well he took the free kicks where we weren’t shooting. In this match, whenever a shooting opportunity came about you could be sure that Wakizaka would be there to put it over the bar. Perhaps it’s something similar to the situation with Tachibanada last year, in that when he became captain, he simultaneously became not very good at playing football, but because of the captaincy, was not dropped until much later than he should have been. I don’t know if the pressure of being captain is weighing on Wakizaka, but he shouldn’t be starting the next game, as far as I’m concerned. So yeah, the midfield was a bit of a mess. At the back, Takai seems to be repeating his 2023 season, where he came in, had some great games and just as he looked to be settling, had an absolute mare of a match where he was at fault for numerous goals. I feel really sorry for him. He’s definitely a good player, but I’m sure he’ll be affected by having another horrible game. Definitely not helped by our lack of midfield though.
Perhaps more infuriating though were the tactics, which let's be honest, I shouldn’t be that angry about, as they are more predictable than the sun rising every morning. Perhaps some kind of nuclear winter / meteor strike extinction event would be what is required for Oniki to change our tactics. You could perhaps draw some comparisons between yesterday’s game and Kazama Frontale games. I don’t remember them being quite so depressing though. And even though we scored four times, the fact the majority of the first half was spent with us passing the ball sideways along the defence line, over and over again, until launching a long ball forwards for Marcinho to run fast with and then lose without threatening the goal meant that our attacks were neither exciting nor effective. I guess our approach this year is a bit like the one that those guys who do the trick shots online have. Hours and hours of failed attempts of which only a handful are shown before the basketball launched off a shovel from about 50 meters away finally goes through the hoop. Sooner or later it will happen. Just keep repeating it, over and over and over again.
Perhaps the tactic might work a bit more often if a couple of things changed. Firstly it might work a bit more often if Marcinho could pass the ball a bit better or earlier. We know he can, but this year he seems to be nowhere near as good. Even when we scored from this tactic in the first half it came after Marcinho lost the ball, we had a shot from the loose ball which was saved, and then luckily bounced to Erison who scored. The other thing that might make this tactic a bit more effective is if it weren’t our only method of attack. It’s probably quite easy to prepare for playing us, just get the strikers to stand a little bit off our defence whilst we pass the ball amongst ourselves, then when you are sure that the rest of the team are in the correct position, pressure us a bit, at which point we’ll hoof the ball to Marcinho who’ll run and then lose it. It’s not fair of me to say that Oniki has no other tactics. In this game he switched Erison to the right and put Ienaga in the middle. When this happened we had two approaches instead of the usual one, and some attacks went up the right! Sadly though, there wasn’t anyone in the middle as Ienaga was probably doing his own thing somewhere around the left back spot at the time. Oniki switched them back after about four minutes. He also did change things up a bit later when we were desperately trying to get back into the game, doing a quadruple substitution and changing the formation to…. I dunno really, but Sasaki was kind of playing centre back but going forward a lot, Segawa was at right back and as for what was going on ahead of them, who knows really? Probably don’t need to point out that the handball that gave them the penalty for their winning goal came from Segawa, who once again has proved that he’s not the best defender. Which obviously isn’t a surprise as he’s a striker. But you know... Oniki, eh?
As I’m slinging around the moans everywhere here, I probably should say again that maybe Ienaga shouldn’t be playing as much as he is. Wherever he is played, the most notable thing is his absence from that area. That’s why we’re always playing it to Marcinho. There’s nobody on the right, so no other option. Ienaga is nowhere near as effective as he used to be. Of course this is the case as he’s getting older. His one arm stretched out holding off of the opposition doesn’t even seem to work as well anymore. Yet still he’s starting every game. Which once again means we’ve got to turn the blame back to Oniki. I don't like criticising the players. I know they are good players. Believe it or not, I don’t particularly like criticising Oniki either, but I would be really interested to see how someone with anything more than the one approach Oniki has would do with the same group of players. Surely some of the Oniki lovers must be having at least some doubts now? Surely he must have realised that what we’re endlessly repeating doesn’t work? Surely! SURELY!
Much like us, Jubilo employed just the one tactic in this game. However, there was a significant difference in that their tactic worked. You would have thought that after a first half of Oniki watching them sit back and then hit us with a fast counter attack, (and more often than not score), he might have tried something to stop them in the second half? Naaaah. It’s not like other teams haven’t played with those tactics against us over the last five or six years and quite often succeeded with them. So we’re really talking about five or six years of Oniki pondering on how to deal with teams who play like that against us. As of yet, still no ideas. Jubilo striker Germain, who has scored 19 goals in the last seven years put four past us in one game whilst Oniki watched and probably fiddled with his magnets. I mean two of them were penalties though, so let’s be fair. If you take the penalties out, Germain only scored one quarter of the goals he scored in the whole of last season in J2 against us in one J1 game. This is not sour grapes though. They stuck to their plan, which they had thought about before the game, and did a job on us. I don’t have any complaints about them, aside from Ricardo Graca, who seemed to be claiming he’d been elbowed in the face by Erison in the build up to our first goal. Well, he said he was elbowed by Erison, but in the replay you can clearly see Graca hack Erison down, get back up, run to inadequately defend his goal, and then after the ball went in, drop to the ground clutching his face, the apparent pain of the assault on him by a waft of air only then sinking in. Was quite funny to see him give away a penalty later on. And yes, it’s these small things that you have to clutch close to your heart on these occasions. Clearly he got the last laugh though. But at least after another horrible defeat for us, we could gain some pleasure in discovering that YFM had lost to Avispa. But clearly they had the last laugh too, as they’d only conceded once to a team who finished 7th in the league whilst we conceded five to a team who weren’t even in J1. Hmmmm. We don't even get the last laugh. This game was so shit that even the Schadenfreude isn’t hitting the spot….
A few words about the ref. I don’t really like Iida, and even though he’s considered to be one of the best in the league at the moment, I think he’s pretty bad. However, I thought he had a decent first half, aside from the fact that I thought Miura was fouled in the run up to their first goal but he wasn’t interested or didn’t notice it. In the second half the game went VAR crazy, to the extent that the final whistle only went in the 107th minute. I’m not sure what was going on when he was checking what seemed to be Jubilo’s winning goal for an attacking handball, only to find a defending handball and then award them a penalty instead. I guess it was because both teams had handled. If it had worked in our favour and the penalty hadn’t been scored, I think there would have been some very angry Jubilo fans in the stadium. And probably rightly so. Without a doubt, this was a crazy game, but I don’t think Iida helped matters. Considering his seniority, it did seem that quite a lot of his onfield decisions were proved wrong by VAR. Which I know is the point of VAR, but doesn’t say much about the quality of the ref. And just the whole messy feeling of the game was undoubtedly enhanced by a chaotic refereeing performance. It’s a real quality of mine, that in a blog post that has been mainly about moaning about my own team, I found time to praise the opposition a little, very faintly and with an undercurrent of having a dig, and still take time to go in two-footed on a ref who had a decent first half. I should say though, that we lost because of the way we played and didn’t lose because of the ref, and he probably got most of the decisions in the game right. But still, and with not much evidence on this occasion, yeah refs are shit. Yaah!
In past seasons we’ve been slow starters. I don’t know what kind of starter we are this year. Mixed starters? Mmmmm, that sounds quite delicious actually. One thing’s for sure, we’re slow starters in absolutely every match we play this year. Next up we have Kyoto at home, when we’ll have to do our best to not concede in the opening eight minutes like we have in the last three games. As I write this, Kyoto are losing to Shonan, so surely we should beat them, right? And they did draw with Kashiwa who have just beaten Vissel Kobe. Who we beat with our B team. So if my calculations are right, if we play the B team we should be able to beat the team who drew with the team that beat the team we beat and who are losing to the team we beat. Right? Well, 'if we play the B team' is a massive if. If this was 2023, I’d be pretty sure that Oniki wouldn’t change the team for the next match. I’m not sure 2024 Oniki is that different from 2023 Oniki, but I think after conceding nine goals in two home games, he is probably going to have to change something. Bet it will be one or two players though and not any kind of approach or tactics. Expect plenty of sideways passing. At least it won’t be on a Friday evening. That will be our third league game of the season and the third which you could say are against teams expected to finish in the bottom half. If we don’t win it, I think it's quite likely that we will be finishing in the bottom half.
As I’m slinging around the moans everywhere here, I probably should say again that maybe Ienaga shouldn’t be playing as much as he is. Wherever he is played, the most notable thing is his absence from that area. That’s why we’re always playing it to Marcinho. There’s nobody on the right, so no other option. Ienaga is nowhere near as effective as he used to be. Of course this is the case as he’s getting older. His one arm stretched out holding off of the opposition doesn’t even seem to work as well anymore. Yet still he’s starting every game. Which once again means we’ve got to turn the blame back to Oniki. I don't like criticising the players. I know they are good players. Believe it or not, I don’t particularly like criticising Oniki either, but I would be really interested to see how someone with anything more than the one approach Oniki has would do with the same group of players. Surely some of the Oniki lovers must be having at least some doubts now? Surely he must have realised that what we’re endlessly repeating doesn’t work? Surely! SURELY!
Much like us, Jubilo employed just the one tactic in this game. However, there was a significant difference in that their tactic worked. You would have thought that after a first half of Oniki watching them sit back and then hit us with a fast counter attack, (and more often than not score), he might have tried something to stop them in the second half? Naaaah. It’s not like other teams haven’t played with those tactics against us over the last five or six years and quite often succeeded with them. So we’re really talking about five or six years of Oniki pondering on how to deal with teams who play like that against us. As of yet, still no ideas. Jubilo striker Germain, who has scored 19 goals in the last seven years put four past us in one game whilst Oniki watched and probably fiddled with his magnets. I mean two of them were penalties though, so let’s be fair. If you take the penalties out, Germain only scored one quarter of the goals he scored in the whole of last season in J2 against us in one J1 game. This is not sour grapes though. They stuck to their plan, which they had thought about before the game, and did a job on us. I don’t have any complaints about them, aside from Ricardo Graca, who seemed to be claiming he’d been elbowed in the face by Erison in the build up to our first goal. Well, he said he was elbowed by Erison, but in the replay you can clearly see Graca hack Erison down, get back up, run to inadequately defend his goal, and then after the ball went in, drop to the ground clutching his face, the apparent pain of the assault on him by a waft of air only then sinking in. Was quite funny to see him give away a penalty later on. And yes, it’s these small things that you have to clutch close to your heart on these occasions. Clearly he got the last laugh though. But at least after another horrible defeat for us, we could gain some pleasure in discovering that YFM had lost to Avispa. But clearly they had the last laugh too, as they’d only conceded once to a team who finished 7th in the league whilst we conceded five to a team who weren’t even in J1. Hmmmm. We don't even get the last laugh. This game was so shit that even the Schadenfreude isn’t hitting the spot….
A few words about the ref. I don’t really like Iida, and even though he’s considered to be one of the best in the league at the moment, I think he’s pretty bad. However, I thought he had a decent first half, aside from the fact that I thought Miura was fouled in the run up to their first goal but he wasn’t interested or didn’t notice it. In the second half the game went VAR crazy, to the extent that the final whistle only went in the 107th minute. I’m not sure what was going on when he was checking what seemed to be Jubilo’s winning goal for an attacking handball, only to find a defending handball and then award them a penalty instead. I guess it was because both teams had handled. If it had worked in our favour and the penalty hadn’t been scored, I think there would have been some very angry Jubilo fans in the stadium. And probably rightly so. Without a doubt, this was a crazy game, but I don’t think Iida helped matters. Considering his seniority, it did seem that quite a lot of his onfield decisions were proved wrong by VAR. Which I know is the point of VAR, but doesn’t say much about the quality of the ref. And just the whole messy feeling of the game was undoubtedly enhanced by a chaotic refereeing performance. It’s a real quality of mine, that in a blog post that has been mainly about moaning about my own team, I found time to praise the opposition a little, very faintly and with an undercurrent of having a dig, and still take time to go in two-footed on a ref who had a decent first half. I should say though, that we lost because of the way we played and didn’t lose because of the ref, and he probably got most of the decisions in the game right. But still, and with not much evidence on this occasion, yeah refs are shit. Yaah!
In past seasons we’ve been slow starters. I don’t know what kind of starter we are this year. Mixed starters? Mmmmm, that sounds quite delicious actually. One thing’s for sure, we’re slow starters in absolutely every match we play this year. Next up we have Kyoto at home, when we’ll have to do our best to not concede in the opening eight minutes like we have in the last three games. As I write this, Kyoto are losing to Shonan, so surely we should beat them, right? And they did draw with Kashiwa who have just beaten Vissel Kobe. Who we beat with our B team. So if my calculations are right, if we play the B team we should be able to beat the team who drew with the team that beat the team we beat and who are losing to the team we beat. Right? Well, 'if we play the B team' is a massive if. If this was 2023, I’d be pretty sure that Oniki wouldn’t change the team for the next match. I’m not sure 2024 Oniki is that different from 2023 Oniki, but I think after conceding nine goals in two home games, he is probably going to have to change something. Bet it will be one or two players though and not any kind of approach or tactics. Expect plenty of sideways passing. At least it won’t be on a Friday evening. That will be our third league game of the season and the third which you could say are against teams expected to finish in the bottom half. If we don’t win it, I think it's quite likely that we will be finishing in the bottom half.
If any Sorare players are reading this hoping for a line up prediction for the next match, well, forget it. Some people who’ve contacted me on Twitter asking have been quite nice and polite, but some are really rude once they have received my opinion, and to be honest, I can’t really be bothered to deal with people like that. I don’t know anything that I haven’t said in this post, so if you didn’t find an answer here, you won’t get it elsewhere from me as I don’t know. Sorry to any Sorare players who have read this far expecting something and who have been subjected to and now targeted by my moans. For me, and I’m sure for many, football is an emotional thing. Plenty of things I say on here are huge exaggerations of what I might really think if I sat down with my lab coat on and got my clipboard out and that’s because I care about how my team does. The reason I end up arguing on Twitter with analyst experts is because I watch the games with some emotional investment rather than just to count passes and describe passing moves, all to bolster my self-appointed status online. I don’t really understand people who support the league rather than a team and are interested in every Japanese player that plays anywhere in the world. Anyway, seems like I’m in danger of offending an even larger amount of people than usual with this post so I should probably leave it here.
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong (Yellow card 79')
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 36')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong (Yellow card 79')
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 36')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 82')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for TACHIBANADA 46')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 82')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for TAKAI 82')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 90+6') (on for YAMAMOTO 82')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
Goals
UEMURA (Iwata) 6' 0-1
GERMAIN (Iwata) 18' 0-2
GERMAIN (Iwata) 29' 0-3
ERISON (Frontale) 36' 1-3
ERISON (Frontale) 55' 2-3
MARCINHO (Frontale) 59' 3-3
GERMAIN (Iwata) 7' PEN 3-4
YAMADA (Frontale) PEN 24' 4-4
GERMAIN (Iwata) 7' PEN 4-5
Not a huge appetite to do this, so let's just quickly give it to...
ERISON - second time in a row, but he just scores goals which is exactly what he should be doing. Big fan favourite already. And well done to him for letting Yamada take the penalty. Must be wondering what he has done to deserve signing for us. I'm sorry Erison! Sack your agent!
Highlights
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