Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 1 Nagoya Grampus
This blog post is almost a week late. Praise the lord for international breaks! But don’t think my slowness is all down to laziness. Sure, there’s an element of that, but we’ve also just moved house. How many weeks do you think I’ll be able to use the ‘moving house’ excuse for the poor quality and tardiness of these posts? And as a follow up question, what excuse will I use after the moving house excuse doesn’t work anymore? Anyway, you don’t come here to read about my personal life, do you? (In case you were wondering, the move is finished but the new place is still a bit of a tip). So, on to Nagoya at home then. Our first win in five! A marginally shorter winless run than the one that was killed off by us beating Urawa. Not exactly a thing to rejoice, but perhaps a sign that we’re heading in the right direction. If we’re really lucky perhaps the next winless run will only be three games long! Before the game we were promised big changes at the back. The team line up seemed to suggest nothing of the sort. Although there was a slight chance that we might be seeing three at the back and the club were being tricky with the team line up announcement graphic. But naturally nothing of the sort. It was the same old stuff with Tachibanada moving back into defence, but this time on the left hand side. Not sure what happened to Sasaki, who I thought was the only one of our defenders who hadn’t made a horrendous cock up in recent games. Perhaps he’s injured. Or maybe Oniki sees his lack of mistakes as a weakness, or something that is causing him to be isolated from his teammates who are sharing the cock ups around. So in spite of the teaser of big changes the only change was moving Ominami to right back and bringing Takai in. And given that Ominami has played at right back on previous occasions it was hardly a change. There was no sign of Segawa in the squad, so maybe he’s injured. I guess the surprise if there was one was Marcinho being dropped to the bench. Can’t say it’s a big shock as he hasn’t been at his best recently. Although we were going with the same formation and broadly speaking the same tactics, there did seem to be a bit more confidence flowing through the team than there has been recently. Perhaps the rain delay at the start of the match helped with that. By the time the players finally made it onto the pitch, perhaps Oniki’s team talk had drifted out of their minds and that’s why we started a bit better than we normally do. Hang on, a bit better? What am I saying? We scored after six minutes! And we didn’t concede immediately afterwards! This was a lot better! Should probably say here that I am not surprised we scored from a corner as in this match Seko was taking all of the ones from the right. A nice start anyway, and one which got even nicer after 18 minutes when we were absolutely gifted a goal from a Nagoya defensive cock up. The crucial thing was that on this occasion we didn’t snatch at the chance and actually scored. Perhaps this was because it was Ienaga who had the opportunity. Were we going to get another Ienaga hat-trick game? It seems that he definitely thought so as he was trying to shoot with every half chance he had. His best chance to get to take home the match ball was early in the second half but it went just wide. Well maybe a little wider than just wide, but it was kind of close. It’s a bit of luck that he had his scoring boots on in the first half though (actually one goal was a header, so should I say scoring boots and head?), as we were pretty blunt in the second half.
Of course we weren’t as blunt in the second half as we had been against Kashiwa (one shot, off target), as it would be extremely difficult to get blunter than that, but we did only have four shots (none on target) in the second half of this match. I guess these stats don’t include the two goals Gomis had ruled out for offside though, which changed the feel of the second half, but strictly speaking, probably shouldn’t as the fact remains we didn’t hit the target. After the second one was ruled out I thought that we were in a hat-trick race, Would it be Ienaga scoring a hat-trick of goals first or Gomis having a hat-trick of VAR denied goals? Certainly something to get excited about, eh? As it was, neither happened and the second half was instead dominated by us hanging on for dear life. Jesiel was taken off at half time after once again looking like he was half-injured for the whole of the first half. Credit to Oniki for (hopefully) taking him off before he injured himself further. This saw Takai and Ominami reunited in central defence, (remember, the pairing that conceded five against both Sagan Tosu and Jubilo Iwata), with Tanabe at left back and Tqchibanada being moved to the right. Maruyama was back on the bench, so maybe it was a bit of a surprise that Oniki didn’t bring him on instead. Perhaps he’s not really fit enough. (As it is so long between writing this and posting it, I can now say that Maruyama got injured whilst warming up… we never tire of coming up with new ways to get our players injured). Our bench certainly looked a bit weird. I wonder if we’re going through another injury crisis at the moment. Don’t expect that we’ll hear anything about it. I thought Tanabe did a decent job and avoided getting booked almost immediately on entering the field like he has done in previous appearances. According to the player scores on Flashscore, which I usually think are absolute nonsense but will sometimes use to back up what I think if they agree with me, Tanabe did much better than Tachibanada. The same scores have Gomis as our second worst player though, which I think shows just how ridiculous they are as he had a really good game winning and keeping the ball. Somewhat amusingly the same scores have Langerak as Nagoya’s worst player by a mile. Can’t imagine he’ll agree as the defender who tripped over the ball giving us our second goal got a much better score. It’s almost… as if… these scores… are given by someone who’s just had a quick glance at the highlights and the match data. Or as I believe they sometimes call themselves an ‘analyst’ or an ‘expert’. Who needs to watch the game with any kind of enthusiasm or excitement when you can count passes instead. (In case you were wondering, this is all a thinly veiled bitch at someone I had a row with on Twitter a few months ago). I would urge any Frontale fans who are reading this and haven’t seen the game to not get too excited about this win. Once again Sung-Ryong saved us on quite a few occasions, once with yet another amazing save with his feet. We looked a bit of a mess at the back for long periods of the game and when you combine this with our second half lack of a cutting edge, it all suggested that we were probably going to concede and then concede two more times in quick succession. Somehow we managed to avoid doing so though! I will point out that once again we conceded whilst preparing a sub. Does this happen to all teams? I think it happens with every goal we let in. Any swagger that we built up in the first half was long gone by the end of the second and we were lucky to hang on. But hang on we did, and on the final whistle there was quite some emotional outpouring, both in the stands and on the pitch. Of course, it’s only one win, but given how bad things have been recently, it’s hopefully an important one. Fingers crossed we don’t take two steps backwards in our next game.
As I’d like to finish this blog post quickly so I can get back to sorting out the new apartment and finding places to stash all the ridiculous things I have accumulated over the years, I’ll lump Nagoya and the ref into one section. Nagoya had a rotten start to the year despite some people thinking they’d do well. They didn’t beat us which I guess means that they had a pretty rotten game here. I feel like they think they are better and more skillful than they actually are which resulted in them cocking up a few times and one of those occasions giving us a goal for free. Junker is an unbelievable moaner. Nothing much else to say about that. It was quite delightful to beat them as we haven’t had a great relationship with them in recent years. Probably even nicer given that their fans were very annoyed that they lost to us and I can quite understand that as I’ve watched all but one of our games this year and we have been for the most part, utterly crap. Apparently their fans left a lot of litter in the stands according to Twitter.
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| Even with the ball in the net and the linesman flagging for offside, Nagoya still find something to moan about to the officials. |
On to the ref, who was Mikuriya, perhaps one of the referees in the league who is accepted by most people to be one of the worst. In this game he was wildly inconsistent, particularly when it came to what constituted a yellow card offence. He seemed to want to give them only to us and ignored a few situations where Nagoya should have definitely had one for cynically breaking up a promising attack of ours. At the same time, it’s utterly insane that Tachibanada didn’t get booked till the 85th minute as he definitely should have got one earlier. So, just a regular Mikuriya performance I guess. I know some refs don’t like to give cards, but if the law says they should, they probably should give them, shouldn’t they? I think they’re probably supposed to follow the established rules rather than make their own. Card shy refs are common, but I’d say Mikuriya went well past being card shy, perhaps even as far as card-incel level. Anyway, his name is quite close to ‘micturate’, at least in my mind, and I think this goes some way towards explaining why he is a bit of a pissy ref. A pretty unsophisticated way for me to finish this paragraph I’m sure you’ll agree.
So, basically a very welcome win, but not the most comfortable. The result looks a lot better than a lot of the game did. And this win is probably just enough to take the pressure off Oniki which I think was starting to build a little. Hopefully he can follow it up with another one. Our next game is in the Emperor’s Cup against Sony Sendai, another team we’ve played before. I wish we’d get some more interesting opposition in this competition. It seems like we get the same few teams all the time. I also wish we could have an away game in Sendai. It’s been a while. This game has banana skin written all over it. Whether Oniki will change the side much, I’m not sure, We have a weekend off before then, which I think he might take as a reason to keep mainly the same side. But I really would like to see Erison back in the line up, hopefully to get him a bit of confidence and form back, which is not going to happen if he plays only ten or twenty minutes at the most (or as was the case in this game, zero minutes in a game when we didn’t even use all of our subs…). After that it’s Vissel Kobe again, at the national stadium again, although this time it’s their home fixture instead of being a cup final. A home game, just around 500km from their city. Hopefully some of the new fans they picked up when they signed Iniesta are still interested otherwise it’s going to be a low attendance in a stadium that is pretty dull even when it’s quite full. The fact that a friend of mine who doesn’t have a massive interest in football has managed to win free tickets for the game makes me think they might be employing some other tactics to get the attendance to acceptable levels. To be honest though, it makes sense, as hiring a showpiece stadium hours away from their hometown and giving away loads of free tickets is probably way cheaper than paying Iniesta’s salary for a week. Fingers crossed we can get a similar result to Super Cup final.
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 53')
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 85')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 17. TONO Daiya
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
FW 9. ERISON
DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for JESIEL 46')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for GOMIS 90')
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for YAMAUCHI 66')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for TONO 81')
Goals
IENAGA (Frontale) 6' 1-0
IENAGA (Frontale) 18' 2-0
HA (Nagoya) 89' 2-1
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Sorry, I am so late with this post that I can't really remember much about the game apart from the parade of cars and vans at half time, so let's give it to whoever came up with that idea.
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