Vs Yokohama F Marinos (home) 17/8/24 J League match 27

Kawsaki Frontale 1 - 3 Yokohama F Marinos

In a totally shite season, this was probably the one game many of our fans wanted to win more than any other. Which makes it all the more disappointing that we put in an absolute turd of a performance. Let’s not kid ourselves though, our previous three wins came with massive caveats and before that we had a long line of lacklustre draws. So basically we could just hope that this game went one of three ways. Apparently the only ways we can win are the massive dose of luck route (Kashiwa), the opposition self destruct route (Kobe) or the they play alright for 10 minutes and then don’t bother to do anything for the rest of the match route (FC Tokyo). Sadly, and utterly justifiably, it wasn’t to be and instead we got exactly what we deserved. So shit were we that I didn’t even get any stick from YFM fans online, the depths of our performance perhaps being so low that even our biggest rivals felt sorry for us. If you’re looking for insight into the match, please understand that it won’t get any deeper than the ‘we were shite’ that I’ve already said. But in case you’re still reading this, here are this week’s bullet points.

- In a week that we almost certainly lost two players to overseas transfers, (curse of my shirt continues, although not confirmed just yet), it was nice to see that we at least attempted to bury that bad news with the release of a new ACL shirt. Think that’s shirt number six this year, isn’t it? What a blessing that we can instead focus on the (de)merits of a new shirt rather than think about how crap we are. Talking about transfers it probably once again bears mentioning that the players who move overseas to ‘better’ clubs never seem to be the ones that Oniki favours. Don’t forget he has pedigree in this area, thinking that both Miyoshi and Itakura should go out on loan as they weren’t good enough for us, before other teams, (Manchester City in Itakura’s case), thought that they were good enough for them. Of course I guess that other teams imagine it’s easier to prise one of our players away if they’re not starting regularly, so maybe that’s why we haven’t lost Wakizaka or Tachibanada. At the same time you could probably easily make a case for the fact that Oniki is so shit that even though he sees them every day, he doesn’t know who our best players are. Remember also that he’s the guy who watched Arsenal train once and decided there was nothing for him to learn from the experience. I wish I had his confidence.

- Let’s have a bit more of a dig at Oniki, eh? I think it’s almost accepted that he’ll be leaving at the end of the season, (which I think is at least two years too late, but what did we expect, eh?), but perhaps this will give him one last chance to fuck us up in a competition, as half of our next, and judging on current standards last ever, ACL campaign will be under the command of someone who has persevered with exactly the same tactics and approach for the last seven years. For the majority of this year I’ve been moaning about his absolute dearth of ideas and his apparent resolute optimism that doing the same thing will eventually result in us doing well against all logic. In the last three games I’ve had to bite my tongue a little as it’s never a good look to whinge when you’re winning but I think this game showed the Oniki master tactics showing their true colors. The fact that we could have so many shots in one game but at the same time it feel like we were utterly outplayed and would probably never score is a real bit of Oniki magic. The one goal we got was at the stage where Oniki basically just gave up and threw on all the attacking players to at least pretend that he was giving it a go. But the fact that we’d stunk the place up and he hadn’t seen fit to make any subs before the 71st minute, a full 11 minutes after we’d gone two goals behind speaks volumes about the incisive wisdom of our great leader. Even though we’d been awful for most of the game he probably only started unpacking the magnet board after their first goal and didn’t unwrap all the magnets till about ten minutes later. Even those first subs looked pretty hopeless, particularly when you consider that they included Oniki’s usual ‘I haven’t got a clue what to do’ move of putting Tachibanada at right back. To give him some credit the whole of the left side had been crap for most of the game, (Miura’s corners were even worse than Wakizaka’s and that’s saying something), and he changed it. To take some of the credit away, it took 26 minutes of the second half and two goals conceded to actually fucking do anything. 

- Whilst we’re on players who didn’t have a good day, (actually maybe it would be easier to list players who didn’t have a terrible game), it probably deserves mentioning again that Takai had a bit of a dodgy game. Much like he has in the past, it seems that just as he gets settled and in a comfortable spot he has a blunder-filled game. I guess he won’t be leaving us this summer after Japan crashed out of the Olympic tournament early, denying him the chance to catch some clubs’ eyes, and perhaps with that in mind he’s settled in to a guaranteed starting berth for the rest of the year and celebrated it by giving away two goals. I don’t want to single him out though, as the crap was spread quite evenly across the pitch. But I think that when people are praising him for his good games they shouldn’t forget that he does tend to throw in an absolute stinker every now and then. Hopefully he’s done with the stinkers for the rest of the year. We do have potential competition for him at the back, but of course our new Colombian defender will presumably languish in the stands right up until the most pressing of emergencies when Oniki will throw him in due to a lack of alternatives. Add to this our new singing confirmed this morning, which is… a defensive midfielder! Perfect! Because with Seko leaving we really needed more numbers in this area to ensure that the level of dissatisfaction amongst players who aren’t playing continues. With almost zero rotation and plenty of players getting nowhere near the team even though we’re crap, it seems like a pretty stupid thing to do, but I guess we’ve got used to these kind of signings. After all, it seems we need to always have at least two disappointed Brazilians in the squad. I don’t know why we need to, but it definitely seems like part of the master plan. One recent disappointed Brazilian Erison was back in this game. Back for a whole twelve minutes! He scored, but don’t expect that to have been noticed by the master tactician. Yamada will almost certainly start up front by himself the next game. And play all of the 90 minutes which seems to be a privilege reserved only for him. Normally the striker, especially if they get a big wage and are foreign gets dragged off as soon as possible. As for the suggestion that I’ve seen a few people mentioning on Twitter that we should play Erison and Yamada up front together, well, let’s just see if that or hell freezing over happens first. It doesn’t matter that it seems like a good idea. The fact that it’s not Oniki’s idea, (emphasis on the singular here), means that it’s not going to happen. 

- The ref was a bit floppy I thought. Quite happy to put up with torrents of abuse from YFM players and do nothing about it. Bring back Kasahara! He does something about dissent! 😉 The penalty seemed pretty soft, but can't really complain. The VAR seemed non-existent in this game, which I don’t mind at all. This made it a bit of a surprise that we had nine minutes added on in the second half. But then again YFM were doing some top level time wasting. And who can blame them? Although they probably should have tried to score some more goals to make our humiliation all the more profound. They almost certainly would have succeeded. At the same time, it also seemed like we were time wasting at the end, perhaps happy with our 3-1 defeat, playing the ball along the defence line and not being that bothered about trying to attempt to get it forward. Bit disappointed that the ref didn’t stop Anderson Lopes from doing that fucking ridiculous run up for his penalty, where he clearly stops twice. If running on the spot apparently counts as moving forward the next time we get a penalty in a game that we are leading we should get the taker to just skip all over the pitch for the remainder of the game as part of his ‘run-up’ and run the clock down. I don’t know which out of Diego Oliveira’s ballet dance run up or Anderson Lopes’ running man dance is more effective, but I can confirm that both are equally irritating and almost certainly the work of complete tossers. But we didn’t lose because of the penalty run up or the ref, we lost because of Oniki being shit at his job. A quick dig at the Marinos fans whilst we’re here as this post would not be complete without one. I thought it was a bit shitty for them to start singing as loud as they could as our youth team graduate was presented to the fans after singing his first pro contract. A bit shitty, but very much in character as proved by a cyclist after the game. As we left the stadium pretty sharpish after the final whistle we heard someone moaning quite aggressively about how disgusting it was that she couldn’t ride her bicycle down the road that about 50% of the fans leaving the stadium use. If it had been a football hating local, well, I guess it could have been excused. But the fact that it was a Marinos fan who seemed to have left that ground as quickly as utterly pissed off Frontale fans and then seemed upset that other people had done the same thing as her, well that was a bit annoying. Particularly considering that there are numerous other routes she could have taken which would have been clearer. I hope she got a puncture. But I’m sure she’ll be the first one to back me up when I get irritated trying to drive my combine harvester across that bridge outside the Nissan Stadium and am foiled by the people who are leaving the same event as me at the same time.

- Oh, I’ve got to the end and didn’t mention Hayasaka making his debut. It was a hell of a shock and we can only presume that Sung-Ryong is injured. Hope it’s not serious. Hayasaka did a decent job, almost got to the cheater penalty and can’t be blamed for the other goals, but it can’t have been much fun for him to concede three times on his debut to our local rivals. Hopefully he doesn’t take it to heart. Equally it can’t have been much fun for Ando on his birthday to see that in spite of Kamifukumoto leaving and Sung-Ryong being presumably injured, he still doesn’t even warrant a place on the bench. Yamaguchi came straight into the squad after transferring from Machida. In previous years a move from Machida to Frontale might have seemed like a big step up for a player. Right now with our current clown in charge, it looks like the career of anyone who does so is probably going in the opposite direction. At least he won’t have to train with that twat Tani anymore though!

This was longer than I intended. Next week I’ll do my best to get it back to being a bit less of a hassle to write and read. But that will be a post about an away game at Urawa which pretty much always is filled with some kind of bitching so we’ll see. Urawa have been rubbish this year, so perhaps we can be slightly hopeful. At the same time, they haven’t been as rubbish as us, so maybe not. After that we’re away to Sapporo. I don’t know what it says about me that I’m more hopeful for the Urawa game. We briefly climbed the table a bit after our recent run of wins but the truth is we’re still only six point off the drop zone. And still the clown remains in charge, doing exactly the same thing, mostly getting exactly the same results. I wonder if the transfer of Kawahara from Tosu is partly to try to weaken one of our relegation rivals. Any chance we can tempt away some other rivals’ players to allow them to train in a different training ground and watch games from the stands instead of actually play them? It’s not the most exciting way to assure our J1 survival, but to be honest, any way is good right now.

Team

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki

DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 63')

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for MIURA 71')
FW 9. ERISON (on for IENAGA 78')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for OSHIMA 78')

MF 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 71')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 71')

Goals

SOME WANKER (Yokohama) PEN 58' 0-1
SOME WANKER (Yokohama) 60' 0-2
SOME WANKER (Yokohama) 79' 0-3
ERISON (Frontale) 89' 1-3



My Frontale Man Of The Match

Seems a bit strange to give this to a defender when we lost and conceded three goals but I think it has to go to…

SASAKI Asahi - some great defensive work in difficult situations and did equally well when he had to shift to left back after Oniki’s master level substitutions. And crucially unlike most of his teammates wasn’t absolutely shit.

Highlights