Vs Albirex Niigata (home) 25/6/25 J League match 15

Perhaps I was being excessively dramatic after the last match. Certainly I was in an appalling mood after an appalling performance. But judging from the starting line up of this game it seems that Hasebe also thought that we were pretty bad against Vissel Kobe. In that match we basically started like we were on fire, scored and then turned off for most of the rest of the game. Yeah, we had some chances late on, but most of those chances didn’t actually make it to the actually-having-a-shot stage and it never really looked like we were going to get anything from the game. There were a few similarities in this match. Again we started pretty well and scored fairly early. And once again we spent most of the second half not threatening to do anything. But I guess the big difference in this match was that we were two goals up instead of one goal down. And we even managed to stretch the lead late on after Ozeki came on apparently determined to score. Conceding the late consolation goal was a bit of a bummer and it looked absolutely miles offside in the stadium. (On DAZN they only seemed to have one angle that included both the keeper and the recipient and it was a far from ideal angle. If VAR only had the same one, I can understand why they didn’t have the confidence to overturn the decision). The win takes us up to fifth and now we’ve played all of our games in hand. If we hadn’t fucked up so massively against Vissel, we would have been in second, three points behind Kashima. I think I said after our game against them that I thought Kashima weren’t very good, so hopefully that turns out to be true and they plummet to mid table where they deserve to be. A quick aside, delightfully, and allowing me to fully enjoy my post-game beers, YFM got spanked and remain rock bottom. Winning a game is great. Your enemies losing badly is great. Having both happen on the same evening is wonderful. 

Us -

Ito started this game and I thought he was great again, with so much energy and a desire to go forward instead of pass backwards. I don’t think Ienaga is past it, but I am certain he is past starting every game. Perhaps similarly with Maruyama. He’s played well this year, but at his age I would hope he gets a rest from time to time. While he was by no means the worst performer in the last game, he didn’t have a great match and probably needed a bit of a rest. So Jesiel was back and played almost all of the 90 minutes! When he did leave the field it looked initially a bit of a worry as it seemed like he might be injured again. But I think it was mainly cramp, possibly brought on by a shocker of a foul from an Albirex forward. We are clearly going to need Jesiel going forward as it seems that Takai will be leaving soon. I wonder if we might see Sasaki back at centre back alternating with Jesiel and Maruyama. I’d rather have him at full back, but perhaps feel that if we keep injury free we have more cover in those positions than we do in the middle. Another person I slagged off a little in the last post was Yamamoto who had a bit of a dodgy game. But he was back to his best in this match. I think the schedule has been catching up with a lot of people recently. Yamada dropped to the bench, and I don’t think anyone could really argue with that. Kanda made his first start which is something plenty of people have been calling for and he managed to get his first league goal. I feel a bit sorry for Yamada as it would probably have been a goal he would have also scored, but at the same time with the slump he’s been going through, maybe he wouldn’t have been in the right place. I feel like none of our (fit) strikers have shown themselves to be an undroppable definite first choice so that’s clearly an area where we have some questions to answer. I suspect either Kobayashi or more likely Yamada will start on Sunday against Verdy. But anyway, Kanda did what he was supposed to do and that’s something that can't be said about plenty of our players in recent matches, so well done to him. I also criticised Yamaguchi, probably quite unfairly in that last post. This is a tricky one for me, because I started the year a bit suspicious of him, have been won round on a few occasions by great performances, and then have reverted to my original point of view after some horrible performances. Presumably this is why when we concede a soft goal it’s my instinct to blame Yamaguchi, even though others are equally culpable. That’s not really fair of me so I apologise to him and his fans. I guess the problem is that as a goalkeeper, when you make a big mistake it more than likely ends up in a goal, so it’s very visible. In his match he made one very good save and other than that didn’t have a massive amount to do so I’ll just concentrate on praising the good save. It’s always a lot easier to be reasonable when we’ve won!

Miura back in the starting line up made a difference I think. And it was good to see Sai back from injury (probably... I don’t think anything was ever announced). Oshima was absent but I hope this is because Hasebe is just doing a better job of managing the fragile often injured players. If he can keep Oshima and Jesiel available for most of the rest of the season he will have achieved miracles. Maybe… maybe…. the injury situation is clearing up a little. Maybe. Of course we still have Erison injured who is the only striker who has really properly staked a claim for the position this year and that's clearly a blow. But maybe elsewhere, Hasebe finally has some options. Just in time for us getting the rug pulled out from under us by Takai leaving. Yamada is also rumoured to be going (to Celtic), but I’m not sure how likely that is or how much of an effect it would have on us. Hopefully we will sign some replacements and/or reinforcements in the transfer window. The season actually looks like it is delicately balanced right now. So it would be good if we tried to at least slightly push it in a favourable direction.

Them -

Not a great deal to say about Albirex really. They dominated possession in the match and had 50% more shots than us. I think these stats are partly coloured by our dodgy second half though. However, I didn’t ever really feel like we were in much danger. Before the game I would have been happy to wish them well for the rest of the season, but they didn’t give us the ball back after we put it out for an injury and that peed me off a bit. But at the same time, they brought loads of passionate fans, (more fans and more passion than Vissel and that game was on a Saturday not a Wednesday evening!),  and I enjoy the away fixture, so I would quite like them to stay up. They’re in the muck at the moment though, so they’ll need a bit of a change in fortune. 

Ref -

When I saw the ref was Kawamata I was cautiously optimistic. He definitely seems to be one of the better refs and I thought he did well in this match. What a rare thing to say! I thought he let a few things go for the good of the game and I’m all in favour of that. There was one situation where if he’d given a marginal foul against a Niigata defender he probably would have had to send him off for a second yellow card as it would have been one of those promising attack things. I’m fine with him not giving it. A referee employing some common sense is a very welcome thing. Good for him!

So that's about it rather than a quick mention for the one massive disappointment for me about this match which was the fact that the semi-secret toilet that is always much quieter than the others now has someone standing with a sign pointing to it. I’m gutted about the potentially disastrous effect this will have on my half times in the future. I’m sure you feel my pain and totally understand why I’ve mentioned it. Next up Tokyo Verdy away on Sunday early evening. Another team who aren’t in great form and are languishing at the wrong end of the table. Usually this would mean that we’d lose but that didn’t happen in this match so fingers crossed it won’t in the next one either. After that, Kashima at home the following weekend. That's going to be an interesting one…

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 90+10')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 38. KANDA Soma
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KAWAHARA 79')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for KANDA 68')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 88') 
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 68') 
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for JESIEL 79')
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro

My Frontale Man Of The Match

I’ve been convinced to award this to this player because on Flashscore he was awarded the second lowest score on our team which I thought was absolutely idiotic. So it goes to…

ITO Tatsuya - genuinely forward looking, energetic and consistently one of our best players when he starts. If Ienaga comes back on Sunday as I suspect he will, hopefully Ito can start on the left and let Marcinho have a rest.

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 12' 1-0
KANDA (Frontale) 35' 2-0
OZEKI (Frontale) 90+1' 3-0
OKUMURA (Albirex) 90+5' 3-1

Highlights  

Vs Vissel Kobe (home) 21/6/25 J League match 21

 

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 2 Vissel Kobe 

When we played Vissel Kobe away, I was lucky enough to have to work so I missed what I have heard was an absolutely awful game. Sadly on this occasion, I’d finished work by lunchtime so was not spared watching what really must be one of the worst games of Hasebe Frontale. But hang on you might be saying, we’ve heard this before. In fact maybe you even heard that in the last blog post on the game against YFC. The crucial difference was that although we were terrible in that game, we somehow won it. In this game we came out blazing for the first five minutes, scored, and then proceeded to not bother to do anything aside from concede goals for at least the next fifty or so minutes. This isn’t going to be a pretty blog post. There is going to be plenty of whinging, and most of it will be directed at us rather than vaguely ‘amusing’ quips about useless referees or the opposition. On this occasion the damage was almost completely self-inflicted and the blame is entirely ours. It was a game so poor that the only two photos I have are of the pre-game warmup and the half time YMCA, (which rather fittingly was also extremely underpowered compared to previous versions, to the extent of feeling almost pointless, therefore being an absolutely perfect filling for the shit footballing performance sandwich). This probably tells you all you need to know about the excitement of the match. I took my phone out to take some photos but every time, in between getting it out, unlocking it and raising it to take a photo we’d lost the ball or played it backwards into dreary defence. I should really try to stop mentioning him, but this was peak shit Oniki Frontale, with Tachibanada playing in defence and at least 70 minutes of pointless passing. We came away from the match with a magnificent 60% possession and almost entirely no threat at all. Let’s get this miserable post out of the way and do our best to forget about this match as soon as possible.

Us - 

After coming back from injury, Miura has disappeared again. Sai is also missing, presumed injured. As good as Sasaki has been on both the left and right this year, it’s probably asking a bit much for him to play in both positions simultaneously, so Tachibanada was back in defence again. In the past I’ve moaned a lot about this kind of thing. It will come as no surprise to hear that I will moan a bit about it again. I thought Tanabe did pretty well when called on recently. Clearly he’s not as good as our injured options, but has the advantage of actually being a defender. But he was still overlooked for Tachibanada. Perhaps this was due to Hasebe worrying that if he played Tanabe, Kobe would target him. Instead they targeted Tachibanada. Almost all of their attacks went down that side. To be fair to him though, he had a decent enough match. So the moaning about him playing in defence will be restricted to the decision this time, rather than extended to his performance. The real problem in this match were the ‘Yamas’. We had players with Yama in their name right through the spine of the team and it’s fair to say that they were all pretty bad in this match. To start off with the ones who were just pretty bad, Maruyama has really dropped off recently, perhaps unsurprisingly given his age. Yamamoto had a bad game, but everyone has an off day now and then and he saved us in the previous match where we were also awful. The real problems were at the front and the back. Yamada is back to being absolutely terrible again, after what we hoped might be a renaissance when he scored two tap-ins against a J3 side. He was anonymous against YFC and in this game did nothing apart from mess up. I really feel for him, but he clearly can’t play the role that is being expected for him right now, so we’ve got to do something else. At the back, Yamaguchi had another stinker, reverting to his fairly regular thing of diving long after the ball has passed him. Of course he can’t be held fully responsible for us conceding as the ball seemed to easily pass through the massive gaps in our defence, but I have almost no confidence in Yamaguchi. As a back up, maybe, but as a first choice keeper, well, I think he seems to have been promoted way beyond his abilities. Don’t get me wrong, he has had some good games, but more often than not he gives the opposition at least one goal. One Vissel cross sailed way over his head with him doing some kind of spiderman pose jump nowhere near either the ball or any players. Thankfully the defence dealt with it, because if it had gone to a Kobe player it would have been an open goal with Yamaguchi on the floor near the penalty spot. You may think all of this is my pro-Sung-Ryong bias and maybe some of it is, but I don’t think he’s the solution either. To be fair to him though, every time he’s played it has been with the (very much) second choice defence in front of him. It would be interesting to see how he does with some more assured players. The thought of Yamaguchi with the second choice defence is not something I want to dwell on for too long. Ienaga doesn’t have ‘Yama’ in his name but can be lumped in with the Yamas in this match. How he is starting ahead of Ito is a mystery. When Hasebe made some changes late on we finally started looking like we might do something. But before then Ienaga had had another pretty bad game I think. So it’s probably no surprise we lost when you consider that I have singled out five of the starting eleven as being bad in this match. 

 

I think however it’s not completely down to them. I don’t really like doing this, but… hmmmm, I guess this is my first Hasebe moan. Those players aren’t playing well but keep starting. That’s down to Hasebe. Even if you say that we don’t have replacements, well, maybe he should change the system and stop playing Yamada in a position that he isn’t suited for. After the subs, which I have to say came very late given how obvious the problems were from very early on, we looked like a different team. You could praise Hasebe for this, but maybe it makes more sense to question why those players didn’t start? We have been mostly pretty dodgy since the ACL but perhaps the fact that we’ve picked up a few lucky wins has convinced him he’s doing the right thing. I think we should probably pay more attention to the draws and defeats though. Sure we’ve been a bit unlucky with injuries, particularly to Erison just as he was starting to get into some form. I wonder if we’ll get any reinforcements in the transfer window. I hope so, as right now the squad looks pretty threadbare. Segawa and Verhon have gone, (Verhon on loan), we can’t score for toffee and still we’re going with the same players, formation and tactics every game. Kanda seems to score every time he plays for the national team, but seems to be way out of contention. The players who are playing almost every match are looking increasingly tired, but there seems to be no desire to either give them a rest, (apart from the occasional game where almost everyone is rested), or any signs of any reinforcements. It’s a miracle that the stats said we had 60% possession in this match as every time we hoofed the ball forward it boinged straight back to us. BOING! It’s a stat I’d like to see added to the usual ones that are compiled. I reckon we must have had at least 30 long ball boings in this match. How on earth could that result in 60% possession? Ah, of course, it’s our old friend backwards passing, playing it around beautifully at the back, just waiting for the right time to lump it forward for the next boing! This game made me quite angry. There was no way we were going to do anything after the first five minutes. What an absolute waste. So poor were we at shooting that if Vissel hadn’t played a keeper for the second half we would only have come away with a draw. Two early shots on target, one of which was a goal and then just the one in the remaining 85 minutes. Absolute dogshit. And all the more annoying given that Kashima lost. Although who am I kidding, there’s no way we’re in the title race. If we had won this match though we would have ended the day in third, only six points behind Kashima with a game in hand. But we fucked it up. I can’t really understand how we’ve scored so many goals and have conceded relatively few when we’ve been playing quite badly recently. Our next two games are against 18th placed Niigata and 15th placed Verdy. These are clearly must win games. After that we have Kashima at home. After Vissel Kobe have done the double over us, it would be a huge disappointment to have another despicable club do the same a couple of weeks later. Hasebe, you’ve got some work to do.

Them -

Nothing much to say. I don’t like their players much, particularly those arseholes Thuler and Erik. Obviously it wasn’t nice to see Miyashiro score twice against us, but I did appreciate that he didn’t celebrate. He clearly did the right thing by leaving us to get away from our shit formation and tactics. I’m not sure if they’re particularly good. They certainly didn’t seem to be that dangerous, yet they totally dominated for most of the match. I’m in a bit of a quandary as obviously I don’t want Kashima to win the league, but at the same time I don’t want Vissel to win it. The standard of the league seems to have really dropped this year. Perhaps it’s because we’ve had to play over half the season in just 4 months. Anyway, this isn’t really Vissel talk so let’s knock this on the head here.

Ref - 

Once again we were subjected to the referee exchange program and had a ref and two linesman from Poland. The fourth official who had trouble working the subs electronic board thing was Japanese though. And so was the VAR guy. Naturally, I moaned about the ref during the game, but can’t really say he did anything wrong. We were just shit.

Next up, well, I mentioned it above. A must win (maybe?) against Niigata at home, a team that Yamaguchi conceded four against when we played them in the Levain Cup last year. I suspect that Hasebe might rotate a bit on Wednesday so maybe we won’t see him and it will be Sung-Ryong conceding four instead. I just pray though that we have something to get at least a little bit excited about. Hopefully Ito will start as with Marcinho getting increasingly knackered he seems to be our only attacking threat at the moment. Please please please let us have a bit of fun as this match was so crushingly dull and we were so utterly impotent. What a lovely positive way to end this. 

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 75')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi 
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 4. JESIEL
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for YAMAMOTO 66')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 86')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto 
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 80')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for IENAGA 66') 
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 80')
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

My Frontale Man Of The Match

YOU MUST BE JOKING, WE WERE ABSOLUTELY SHIT 

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 6' 1-0
MIYASHIRO (Kobe) 10' 1-1
MIYASHIRO (Kobe) 52' 1-2

Highlights  

Vs Yokohama FC (away) 14/6/25 J League match 20

 

Yokohama FC 0 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Oops. I’ve left it a bit late to write this and given that I went to another game between this one and writing this, everything has got a bit blurry. This is all excellent news when it comes to how long this will be and how long it will take you to read it. It’s fair to say that even if I had scrupulously taken copious notes it would probably be kind of tricky to write much about this match as it wasn’t really a very exciting match and not a great deal happened. Perhaps due to the generally dubious level of the game, even the winning goal felt like a bit of a soft one at the time. Having watched the replay it was clearly a lot better than it seemed at the time. So maybe everything I thought about this match was equally inaccurate. Please feel free to correct me if this is indeed the case. I’ll do the usual headings but the paragraphs are gong to be a lot shorter than usual. Here we go.

Us -

One of my few notes says that we were on top for most of the first half but only had our first shot around the 30 minute mark. In the past maybe this would have meant that we were going to have a storming second half, but to be honest that half went similarly to the first. In fact one of my other notes says that we were even worse in the second but somehow we managed to score. Praise the lord for Yamamoto Yuki! The fact that it was raining for most of the match meant that I couldn’t take my phone out as much as I usually do to write down stuff. The fact is though, that even if I had been able to, there wasn’t really anything to write about. It was a ‘real nothing game’ according to my penultimate note, possibly written on the train on the way home. Oshima started, which was nice. But it didn’t really mean that we played well. But the most important thing is that we won and we’ve done the double over YFC, which I can’t remember us doing recently. At this stage of the season with us playing catch up, getting the three points is the most important thing, so I’m not going to get too upset about boring games if we win them. 

Them - 

Perhaps things would have turned out differently if YFC had managed to get any of their shots on target. The had 50% more shots than us, which sounds like they had a massively attacking game, but in this case 50% more was 9 to our 6. There probably isn’t really anything else to say in this section. Maybe YFC could feel hard done by, but I guess if you don’t hit the target even once, you can’t expect to win. Maybe the lack of excitement in our play was down to YFC having a good game defensively, but I suspect it was more due to two teams who are a bit tired both being off the boil and we were perhaps lucky to edge it because we hit the target. Definitely not a game either set of fans will be watching back much, I suspect.

This flag didn't seem annoying at the time, 
but it takes up most of every photo I took

Ref - 

So poor was this game that I came away from it with no strong feelings about the ref. I have only one note regarding him and that was he was soft on Suzuki who I thought probably should have got a second yellow card. Aside from watching the entire game back, I don’t really know how I can verify this comment and I don’t intend to do so, so once again, feel free to correct me. My feelings about this ref were probably softened by witnessing a truly atrocious homer of a ref in the game I watched on Sunday when Criacao Shinjuku got absolutely everything from the ref. Delightfully, Grulla won the game though. This point is only added to say that perhaps it’s true that the refs in J1 are the cream of the crop if the others in the JFL are as bad as the one on Sunday was. Cream of the crop! Even if that cream is slightly sour. Guess that would work better in a dinner than in a coffee, so perhaps there is somewhere where J1 refs could really look good. But anyway, this all feels like a slightly unfair diversion as Ueda didn’t do much wrong, I reckon.


Next up Vissel Kobe at home on Saturday. I reckon we owe them a beating after the away game. Although to be honest, as far as I could tell from what I heard, we were awful in that game, so perhaps we don’t particularly deserve to get ‘revenge’. Would be nice though, wouldn’t it? And as I’ve heard that wanker Thuler might be leaving them soon, it would be nice if get could get sent off again before he leaves. Fingers crossed for that and three points for us, even if it is dull again. 

 

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. YAMADA Shin

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for YAMAMOTO 75')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 67')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto 
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for OSHIMA 58') 
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for ITO 67')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

I know I’m copping out of doing these a lot recently, but this game was generally shite, so it’s difficult to work out who I might give this to. If MVP stood for mediocre very player, there would be plenty of candidates. But you know, they did the job, so either give it to everyone or no-one, depending on your preference. 

Goals

YAMAMOTO (Frontale) 58' 0-1


Highlights 

Vs Fukushima United (home) 11/6/25 Emperor's Cup 2nd round

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 3 Fukushima United

After a few home games which ended in draws and which better people than me said were quite exciting, it feels good to be able to finally agree with them. Presumably I can agree with them because we won rather than drew or lost and that always helps me be a bit more positive / realistic. I mean, even the presence of recent disaster ref Yamashita didn’t really impact on me much during this game. Undeniably, it was a bit of a weird game, with plenty of changes from us, (and them too, I think), the absolutely inevitable early goal conceded, (which seems to be something of an Emperor’s Cup habit for us), the storming come back and then finally the late collapse which was thankfully not serious enough to take us to extra time. There was lots to enjoy in this game. Perhaps not much to analyse but then again that has never been the strong point of this blog, has it? As there’s probably not a great deal to say about a game against a J3 team with a massively rotated team, I’ll try to get through this quite quickly. 

Us -

With Segawa having left, (good luck to him), Takai away with the national team, Ozeki, Kanda and Tsuchiya away with the U20s and the usual massive amount of injuries the starting line up seemed like it would be quite predictable. But hang on, we suddenly seem to have players coming back from injury! Miura started, Oshima and Miyagi were on the bench. Blimey! And Noda made it into the squad for the first time and even got a few minutes on the pitch. A centre back pairing of Kurumaya and Haydar is obviously not going to be many people’s first choice but they did alright. Well, up until the last five minutes anyway, but let’s ignore that. Actually maybe we shouldn’t, as we’ve conceded a hell of a lot of late goals this year. I don’t really have any general points to make so instead I’ll just make a few comments on some players from the back to the front. I feel a bit sorry for Sung-Ryong as he’s conceded three times again when given a chance. Certainly he wasn’t helped by his defenders and he did make some very good saves near the end of the first half when we were under the cosh. Tanabe had a good game I think, (well, apart from for their first goal perhaps). Just want to say here, Tanabe SHOOT-o. I mean, I know this is a pretty underwhelming… ‘joke’, but he came quite close to scoring on a few occasions which was quite a shock. Haydar seems to have developed a new thing of hooking long laser-guided-missile passes forwards and these were quite exhilarating at times. Tachibanada did really well for our first goal and boy did we need to score at that stage. I thought Yamauchi did pretty well in the Wakizaka role in the first half but it seems that Hasebe disagreed as he replaced him with Wakizaka at half time. Perhaps though this was with a dual purpose in mind of trying to avoid extra time and perhaps giving Wakizaka a chance to play himself back into a bit of form. He seems to have been a bit lost since the ACL. Hopefully the goal will do him good. And then up front, YAMADA SCORED! AND THEN DID IT AGAIN! It’s been a while and you could see the relief when his first one went in. Fair play to plenty of our players who seemed determined to tee up attacking players for easy finishes which hopefully gives them all some confidence. Obviously it was nice to see Kobayashi score as well. So, plenty of goals! But plenty conceded too… But never mind. These kind of games are always a potential banana skin and I feel that in the past we probably wouldn’t have come back so strongly from a goal down. Perhaps though, we might not have almost thrown it away at the end. But the word ‘almost’ is quite important in that sentence as we didn’t completely throw it away. A win is a win, and if it’s an entertaining one, all the better!

Them - 

Fukushima gave a pretty good account of themselves, I reckon. All praise for our team probably needs to be tempered by recognising the fact that the opposition were from two leagues below us. Equally, any praise for Fukushima should be amplified for the same reason. Of course plenty of Frontale fans will have a soft spot for Fukushima these days as Terada is their manager and we now have a partnership with them for loaning players. (When Ozeki appeared at the end of the game to greet the Fukushima fans he got an amazing reception. I like these kind of good feeling things). So we can be pleased that we won and they can be pleased that they scored first, scored three and only lost by one goal. They really had us under some pressure at the end of the first half. And it was nice to give them a cheer and clap at the end of the match as seems to happen in Emperor’s Cup games. Not sure if this happens in all teams’ games but I like it. Couple more things, they have an amazingly big-haired striker. I liked that. And I enjoyed their kick off routine, where pretty much everyone is in the centre circle, they play the ball back to the keeper and he thumps it forward. Certainly seemed a bit more effective than some kick offs we’ve done recently.

Ref - 

No VAR in this game, which I think is a good thing, but if we had had it, their last goal probably would have been ruled out for handball. When you consider the ref was Yamashita, just the one memorable dodgy decision seems like a bit of a success. I’m being a bit unfair as aside from the things that I always moan about, (any decision going against us in any game), I can’t remember really making any significant comments about her. Wow.

Music - 

Of course as this was an Emperor’s Cup game it would be remiss of me to not mention the music, a small part of which was amazing (and nothing to to with the JFL), and the rest of which was predictably shite. The JFL seem to have changed their music policy this year and have decided to go for more of a mid to late twenties women’s clothes shop on Oxford Street kind of feel with the music. Or something like an All Bar One kind of feel. Perhaps both of these references are a bit oblique so just compare it to something shite that you are familiar with. So that was the dodgy part but the good part was a local high school orchestra who played the music for the players’ entry and then went on to do a high energy dancing orchestra (?!) performance at half time including a version of Smoke On The Water. It was great! As it perhaps always is when people are running around with trombones and tubas.

Next up YFC away on Saturday evening. The last time we played them away it was an absolutely shit game and we didn’t exactly cruise past them in the home game so I’m not massively confident. But, hopefully some of our players might have got a bit of their mojo back after this game. And players returning from injury could be very important. Poor old Marcinho hasn’t had a rest for a very long time. After that our next game is at home against the always grotty Kobe the following weekend. Feels a bit strange to have a whole week off after a start to the season where we seemed to have to play every other day but hopefully should do us some good. Keep up the good work Frontale!

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 71')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for YAMAUCHI 46')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 63')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for IENAGA 71')

DF 30. NODA Hiroto (on for MIURA 86')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi

My Frontale Man Of The Match

No-one is really leaping out to me, so please excuse me, but I'm going to skip it on this occasion.

Goals

MORI (Fukushima) 9' 0-1
YAMADA (Frontale) 29' 1-1
YAMADA (Frontale) 51' 2-1
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 64' 3-1
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 84' 4-1
YAJIMA (Fukushima) 89' 4-2
KANO (Fukushima) 90+1' 4-3

Highlights

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 31/5/25 J League match 19

 

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

After a few games where I’ve said halfway through ‘I hope we don’t regret not taking more of these many chances’ and where we’ve gone on to regret taking more of those many chances, it looked once again like history was going to repeat itself in this match. To be honest, maybe I should just stop saying it as it seems to keep coming true. I mean, I know I’m a football genius but I don’t think even my excellent level of insight is enough to actually change the game. But, wonderfully on this occasion we did initially regret it but then went on to make Sanfrecce regret the same thing. This was a bit of a weird game, absolutely not helped by an overseas ref who seemed to have thought he was here on holiday rather than to actually work. With no Wednesday game and no game next weekend, this is perhaps an unfortunate time to get a momentum shift and turn the corner, (add several more cliches here), but I think we really needed the win. And it was really, really fun in the stadium. After we kept squandering leads and missing chances it was becoming a bit difficult to recall why we spend so much time going to matches, but a win like this in an away game in a city that’s fun to visit makes up for all the shittier games we’ve had to watch this year. The highs are apparently very much worth waiting for. Maybe if we could have another four months of similar results that would be lovely. 

Us -

I’ve been a bit disheartened recently by our repeated capitulations. To be honest though, perhaps I should have been a bit more upbeat given that we had a lot of players well out of form and we weren’t losing every game. I’m pleased to say that I think we’re getting ourselves in order a bit with this match. The win is obviously the most important thing, but I think large parts of this game also should hopefully have given our players a bit of confidence. Hopefully a late win away at Sanfrecce who were on a five game winning run will give us a more significant morale boost than a boring one-nil win at home against one of the league’s weaker teams. And boy did some of those players need the morale boost. I feel a bit sorry for Yamada who has been pretty bad for most of this season. In this match I thought he did much better. Clearly he still doesn’t seem to be able to play up front by himself this year, but he was passing in this match and quite often doing it well. So fingers crossed that’s going to be a significant step in the right direction for him. I even said that I thought he’d been a bit hard done by to get subbed when he did. Yamaguchi too has been flailing a bit recently, but this game should hopefully get his confidence up again. I don’t want to point the finger solely at him for recent results, but I guess if you remove the howlers from the last two matches we would have won both of them 2-1. So perhaps we normally should win every game 2-1 but occasionally turn the win into a draw by someone having a brain freeze and gift-wrapping a goal for the opposition. Wakizaka, another recent subject of my grumbles, didn’t quite get back to his old form in this match to the same extent that Yamada and Yamaguchi did, but I still feel that he did a bit better than in the last few weeks. His passing was noticeably off again in this match, but hopefully the win will cheer him up a bit. I guess I should bring the mood down slightly by referencing the fact that even though we battered them in the first half we still only had five shots. But who cares, eh? Well, who cares as long as we win? They definitely battered us a bit in the second half but when you consider how thin our squad is getting due to a constantly growing injury list, (latest one out injured seems to be Ito, presumably after the terrible tackle from Gamba’s horrible Yamashita that clown/ref Sendachi thought was only a yellow card. Add to this that Sai went off injured in this match. The injury gods clearly hate us), you’ve got to expect that we won’t have the upper hand when we’re bringing on players in important positions who have hardly played at all this year. There were long period of this game where we’d struggle to thwart one of their attacks, would hack the ball forward and it would come straight back to us. It was seat of the pants stuff at times. Which makes it all the more fun that we won! Wonderful! With all of these injuries in mind, a nice little break is very welcome. Even more so when you consider that the next game will be an Emperor’s Cup game so presumably there will be a lot of rotation for it, (I can say this with a bit more confidence than I would have under the previous guy). I’m not sure we deserved to win, but Sanfrecce didn’t either. And given that we’ve been a bit unlucky turning three points into one on a semi regular basis this year, well, I’ll enjoy the win and Sanfrecce can suck up the loss. 

Love having our celebrations with their annoying 
post-match huddle in the background

Them -

Much like I probably said last year, the stadium is quite nice. I think the away area is shockingly small though, but that might be part of the design I guess. I suppose they couldn’t get many people interested in schlepping out into the mountains to their old stadium, (we only did it once and that was enough for us), so perhaps have underdone the capacity a bit for the new stadium. The stadium WiFi was excellent though. And you can’t argue with the access. Thought it was lovely of their fans to start booing the first time one of our drummers hit his drum to warm up before the match. Pretty petty stuff which made the win all the more satisfying! They definitely have some irritating players, but of course I’m going to say that. Liked the fact that ‘Japan’s (sometime) number one’ was probably at least partially at fault for both goals, absolutely flapping at the ball. I think for the second he actually flicked the ball on to Sasaki with a bowl cut connection. Of course, one of the main points of these blog posts is to write snarky things about the opposition players who probably aren’t actually bad people. It’s a bit annoying though when they appear to be. When we gave Araki a clap before the game for his 200th appearance, he repaid our kindness by spending most of the game whinging to the ref about non-existent elbows. But I guess that behaviour did seem to run through the team who perhaps for some reason thought the ref should have been on their side. I think he absolutely was, but more on that in the next bit. One final comment about the stadium, and it’s that the music was next level cringy. Unlike other clubs who just play naff music, (we are not immune to this ourselves, when we play the original versions of the players’ songs), Sanfrecce seemed to have employed either a local dogshit rocker or a dogshit AI to record Sanfrecce specific versions of classic songs for ultimate cringability. Even these efforts paled into insignificance though when compared to the ‘gates are open, come on in’ Sanfrecce Hiroshima music where at least three over emoting singers apparently had all been told theirs was the lead vocal and to really finesse it up a bit. It was shocking, and sadly, as it took a while to get into the stadium, we were treated to what seemed like an infinite loop of the musical crime, perhaps intended to hype everyone up, but which instead had me looking for the source of the racket and seeing if I had anything sufficiently heavy and unwanted in my bag that I could chuck at the speakers to arrest the mental breakdown that was approaching. If the bosses at Guantanamo Bay are looking for someone to really level up their mental torture department, I highly recommend they employ the people who commissioned, wrote and performed that song. 

Ref -

Once again we were ‘treated to’ an overseas ref. For most of the game I thought he’d forgotten not only his cards but also his whistle as he seemed determined to give nothing at all. All my moaning about Sendachi giving everything one level too low seemed kind of petty in the face of this ref, who just didn’t give anything at all. All he did was wave his arms about in one of three ways. The first was the most common and was a side to side wave signifying that he was not going to give anything. He probably should have constantly done this gesture and things would have been a bit clearer. At the same time it became obvious quite quickly that he was going to do nothing, so maybe he didn’t even need to bother with the arm waving. The second was an up to down wave signifying that the players should calm down, otherwise he’d have to blow his whistle and give a free kick. I’m not sure quite why he was so averse to doing so, but I guess that’s just the way he does things. Or rather doesn’t do things. The third was the out to in wave telling someone to hurry up. There was some top level time wasting from us after we scored our first so perhaps this hand gesture was the most necessary. I haven’t seen it back yet, but I was absolutely furious and absolutely baffled when the ref with his whistle in his mouth pointed to the spot after Kobayashi was hacked down, but then just let the game continue. I think it was an extremely bad decision from where I was standing, but will add an update when I’ve seen it back. (I’ve watched it back and am still confused what he was doing. And unhelpfully, DAZN showed no replays of either this or the next decision I am about to moan about). I was also pretty annoyed with him booking Ienaga for handball after he got hacked down and handled the ball. Seems like the ref had a point to prove and that point was I AM IN CHARGE AND I’M DOING THINGS MY WAY! Will check this on the highlights too. (Yep, no replay here either. Had DAZN been told to not even question anything the ref did? Nice to add another conspiracy to all my others). I guess I can understand the thinking behind the referee exchange scheme. But there do seem to be some drawbacks. (Hmmm. That suggests that there are some benefits from the exchange. The only one I can think is that it means that we don’t have one of the useless refs we already know in charge of one of our games and considering what we get instead, I’m not sure it’s really a benefit). The first major drawback is probably exemplified in what many people say about foreign refs letting the game flow and letting players get away with more physicality than regular J League refs do. I can’t really see the point of having a ref come in and referee the game in a way that doesn’t match what every other ref in the league is doing. You don’t really see this in other kinds of situations. It wouldn’t make sense for a speed metal and a twee indie pop band to swap drummers as part of a percussionist exchange scheme. 

Ref getting ready to put in attack breaking tackle, 
for which he will book our player

Also, I can’t imagine the language barrier particularly helps matters. We didn’t have any VAR in this match. I suspect there’s a high chance that this was because the ref and the VAR probably couldn’t really communicate particularly clearly, so to avoid any embarrassment, you know, just don’t worry about it, eh? So a ref refereeing in a totally different style to that of the league and possibly not being able to communicate any of his extremely unusual to the J League decisions. Seems kind of pointless, doesn’t it? Guess it takes the focus off the useless bastards who normally are in charge of the matches though, right? I’m sure if there were any communication difficulties the Hiroshima manager would be happy to help via his translator. As there has been plenty of speculation already in this section, let me add to it by saying that I reckon Skibbe almost certainly had a good chat with the ref before the match and told him how grateful he was that a good German ref would be in charge because all these Japanese refs are useless, nicely buttering him up pre-game. As stupid as I think the whole scheme is, with a total of ten games to choose from, you couldn’t really do something more stupid than put a German ref in charge of the game of a team with a German manager, could you? Guess the logic behind this decision matches most of the decisions the J League usually makes, so we probably should’t have been that surprised. Looked a bit suss to me though.

A long ranty post on what was a delightful result. The celebration for the winner will live long in the memory. I almost fell into the row in front on me but was steadied by the guy standing next to me. Thank you sir! Maybe all this time we’ve been worried about trying to play well and sometimes all you need for complete satisfaction is to score a late winner rather than concede late on. As I said above, no games for about ten days, so hopefully the players can keep on enjoying this victory. There was definitely no shortage of big smiles from them at the end of the game. Our next league opponents are YFC. Hopefully we’ll do a bit better there than we did last time. That game was a shocker. Keep the good times rolling! 

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 75')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. YAMADA Shin

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for YAMAMOTO 79')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 64')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for VAN WERMERSKERKEN 66')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 79') 
FW 18. SEGAWA Yusuke  (Yellow card 85') (on for MARCINHO 79')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 38. KANDA Soma
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Somewhat unusually there are plenty of deserving players for this. Somewhat predictably, considering how much of a sentimentalist I am, I’m going to give it to…

THE WHOLE TEAM - yeah, I know not everybody was as good as the best players were, but the result was so important for the team, and it really did feel like they were acting like a real team, waiting a long time after the game for Sasaki to rejoin them before the end of game celebrations. Lovely stuff!

Goals

MARCINHO (Frontale) 50' 0-1
ARAKI (Sanfrecce) 86' 1-1
SASAKI (Frontale) 90+1' 1-2


Highlights