Vs Kashiwa Reysol (home) 28/9/25 J League match 32

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 4 Kashiwa Reysol

With any dreams of a late run in the league being finally eliminated by an absolute shocker of a game against FC Tokyo, when it comes to the league now, all it seems we have left is the ability to mess up other people’s seasons. We started this by beating Shonan, inadvertently helping our hated rivals YFM. We continued this by denying Kashiwa the three points in this game, inadvertently helping our hated…. erm I’m not sure they are particular rivals… hmmm, let me start that sentence again. We continued this by denying Kashiwa the three points in this game, inadvertently helping absolute scumbag team Kashima Antlers. To be honest, as our league campaign is cooked I wouldn’t particularly have minded losing both of those games. Next weekend we have Kyoto away, another possible title rival for Kashima. It’s a weird feeling really. Obviously I like it when we win, but my feelings of disgust for certain other teams seem to be quite strong too. I guess all we can hope for now is that Kashima, YFM and Kobe too, mess things up for themselves. It’s been a weird season with us playing some truly dreadful stuff, occasionally winning and occasionally getting exactly what dreadful play deserves. Then at other times we’ve gone on a goal rampage. Some weeks we shoot all day hardly hitting the target and then follow that up with a match where everything we hit goes in. We’ve long known this is a season of transition so I guess we can at least be pleased that there have been quite a few highs. And even with perhaps less resources available to him, Hasebe has done a lot better this year than Oniki did last year. All of which is a long winded way of introducing this game which had something from most of the various phases of our season all combined in one match. It was pretty entertaining though!

Us -

Yeah, this match had every aspect of 2025 Frontale all rolled into one. Wakizaka’s goal and Romanic’s second were amazing moves. Balance that with some horrible misses too. And then of course that regular 2025 feature of us conceding for fun. Conceding four goals naturally isn’t great so either Kashiwa’s shooting was absolutely perfect and they are an unstoppable attacking force or hmmm, well I don’t particularly want to think too much about what the alternative is. I’m pleased that by scoring four we’ve now gone clear in the only title race that matters, which is obviously being the top goal scorers in the league. I was pleased to see Romanic get a start, get an early goal and then get one that wasn’t from a penalty. It’s quite annoying that we threw away the lead three times in this game. It’s no surprise we did the first time though as it looked a bit like we couldn’t be bothered after we scored the first goal and it took them scoring twice for us to get going again. And in the whole game we only had five shots on target, four of which we scored from. So we were a bit lucky in that respect. The ref did his best to balance out any of that fortune though. More on that later. At the end of the match Yamaguchi was absent from the thank you bow to the fans. I can only imagine two possible explanations for this. One is that he was doing the hero interview which would be surprising in a game where we conceded four or that he’s injured. We’ll see on Saturday I guess. Yamamoto will be banned for that match for the slightly dubious yellow that he got in this match. I don’t know if Ozeki will be back from international duty. If he won’t, we’ll be a bit light in the midfield area. Which are words I couldn’t have imagined ever saying about Frontale. 

Them -

Goddam Kashiwa with their competent shooting! It’s not fair! Thankfully they balanced it out with some cavalier stuff at the back. Them and us too. I think for a few of their goals we cocked up to give them the ball, and this was something they were also doing for us, so fair’s fair. Hopefully the club will apologise to Kashiwa for the fact that it seemed that someone had put electric shock pads on the bench. Numerous times they clicked the button and the whole bench of staff and subs would leap forward out of their seats and look… butt hurt, I believe the phrase is. I don’t have anything else to say about them really. Not so much snarkiness here. Both teams did well to make the game entertaining from both an exciting attacking and terrifying defending point of view. Seeing as we’re going to be playing them two more times in the next couple of weeks, hopefully I’ll find some more things to poke fun about. After the goal fest that this game was, I’d say it’s almost guaranteed that the two Levain games will be 0-0 and a one goal win. I’m not saying which way. Hopefully they will still have league title aspirations so will play the reserves a bit. We don’t have any distractions so hopefully will go full on for everyone’s favourite cracker sponsored cup!

Ref - 

We’d only previously encountered Nagamine once, in the home game against Sagan Tosu last year that basically confirmed their relegation. On that occasion I said he’d been fairly anonymous. In this match he decided to flip the script. Aside from the penalty, I think he gave pretty much everything else to the away team. (Well actually, maybe we were slightly lucky with Wakizaka only getting a yellow for a semi-flying assault of a tackle, but as that doesn’t quite fit the narrative, I’ll only mention it in passing). The slightest indiscretion from our players, (sometimes also non-existent indiscretions) was clamped down on, often with a yellow card, but for example a Kashiwa player kicking out after getting fouled was greeted by a slap on the back for the man in yellow. So unwilling to give a card to Kashiwa was the ref that I thought he was maybe getting confused by their yellow shirts, thinking that if he booked one of them it would be a second yellow, so decided to avoid doing so. One good thing though was our players got really charged up by the one-eyed uselessness of the man in the middle and it definitely helped gee us on to score some goals. I can see how righteous anger could be a good thing for cut and thrust attacking. Perhaps this also explains why we were giving away goals for fun as maybe burning with resentment is not the best recipe for calm defending. The incident that lead to the yellow card for Yamamoto perfectly encapsulates, (although sorry, I really want to say encrapsulates), the ref. Two possible handballs by the Kashiwa player and a load of shirt pulling ignored by the ref who then clearly punishes us for the fact that the Kashiwa player tripped over some particularly dense air and immediately signaled to the ref for a yellow card. The ref naturally obliged, but probably much to the chagrin of the poor wounded handball player, he gave it to a different player. To be fair, that bit was right though as Yamamoto clearly delayed the restart, but that wouldn’t have happened if the ref hadn’t ignored the three previous offences. The yellow for Yamaguchi seemed pretty dodgy too. It seems like it was for objecting to the ref’s decisions but that seems harsh considering how objectionable most things the ref was doing. Anyway, I’m not saying he’s corrupt (although perhaps during the match I might have done a few times), just that he’s another shitty ref. 

But anyway, this was a fun match. It helped that we didn’t have anything much riding on it and although the rollercoaster of emotions didn’t end on a high which is a shame, there was definitely plenty of entertainment. And a draw was definitely a fair result in the end. Next up, as mentioned above, Kyoto away on Saturday. I’m pleased that Kyoto Brewing will have a stall outside the stadium this time round. That’s where I’ll be before the game. After that, two more games against Kashiwa. I’ve been thinking a bit about the future of this blog. I think I always moan about it being a pain in the arse to write (and probably to read too!), and also at times when I read back what I’ve written I don’t feel particularly great. I find reading the ‘expert’ opinions of people who are clearly clueless irritates me quite a lot and I definitely fall into that category. So with that in mind, I’m probably going spend less time writing things about what we’re doing wrong and how bad someone has played and instead try to just write more about my experiences of the games. I’m not sure if this will be better or worse. Certainly doesn’t sound much fun! So maybe in future expect the same moaning about the refs, a bit of poking fun at the opposition and some shorter blog posts. The internet is full of utterly uninformed content already and as this irritates me it seems stupid for me to contribute to the ignorance landfill. If after giving it a try it turns out to be just as bad, well maybe I’ll just post videos of me interpreting the games through modern dance instead. 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis (Yellow card 49') 
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 57') 
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 34') 
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KAWAHARA 68')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for ROMANIC 80')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 74')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 30. NODA Hiroto
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for ITO 74')

Goals

ROMANIC (Frontale) 7' PEN 1-0
KAKITA (Kashiwa) 15' 1-1
DIEGO (Kashiwa) 39' 1-2
ITO (Frontale) 45+5' 2-2
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 52' 3-2
NAKAGAWA (Kashiwa) 66' 3-3
ROMANIC (Frontale) 79' 4-3
MITSUMARU (Kashiwa) 90' 4-4

Highlights

Vs Shonan Bellmare (away) 23/9/25 J League match 31

 

Shonan Bellmare 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale 

Yay! Back to winning ways after a terrible game against Tokyo. But this was another pretty dodgy performance. Perhaps the saving grace might be that the opposition weren’t as good. Although to be fair to Shonan, at the end of the game, we were the team who looked like the one that was in terrible relegation trouble rather than them. Obviously it’s nice to get a win, and while we played alright for some parts of the game, the shooting was once again quite bad. I know these kind of things go in streaks, but it’s really weird that we couldn’t stop scoring for a few games and now it looks like we need plenty of shots before getting the job done. Normally this is because we’re smashing it over the bar and out of the stadium. On this occasion it seemed more like we were just dollying the ball back to their keeper for most of our ‘shots’. It wasn’t terrible and we got the three points. But it definitely wasn’t good. Thankfully there was a beer festival outside the stadium to smooth things over a bit. Sadly you probably won’t have that luxury whilst reading this horrible blog post.

Us - 

I shouldn’t moan too much. We just about got the job done. Much like against FC Tokyo, the opposition didn’t exactly set the world on fire when it came to attacking. Unlike against FC Tokyo however, we weren’t worse in that respect. In these two games we’ve faced a total of five shots on target so it’s not great that we’ve conceded from two of them and have lost one of the games. Perhaps my whinging has gone up a level because for a while it looked like we might be getting somewhere in this season of transition. But in these two games we’re right back in the mediocre mud again when it comes to putting the ball in the net. We couldn’t even score from a penalty! (Bit unlucky though, hitting the post and then the keeper and still not going in. But it wasn’t as if we particularly deserved to breeze through this match). Being slightly chaotic at the back is kind of fun when we’re marauding forward and scoring with ease. It’s not so much fun when we’re toiling to even hit the target. And once again we conceded almost immediately after scoring which seems to be something of a tradition this year. I think there are some questions about Hasebe again after this match. I don’t want to get on his back, but in this and the Tokyo game there were some baffling choices that makes me worry a bit. I know we have to pretend that we are still in the title race until it’s mathematically gone, but keeping the ball near the corner flag from a corner kick with nine minutes to go has to go down as something that is pretty horrible to see. We definitely looked like we were the ones desperately clinging on to points for survival. I suppose it makes a financial difference to us if we manage to get into the continental competition places, but time wasting in this way against the team second bottom of the league is pretty despicable I think. Obviously this isn’t a decision from Hasebe that I can say is bad, as it helped preserve the points for us. Just felt very cheap. 

 

The starting line-up Hasebe picked for this game, (three days after the last game and four days before the next game), was almost identical to the Tokyo one. Thankfully he didn’t again attempt the experiment with Romanic in the Wakizaka role which it felt like he might have come up with as he got off the team bus, such was the apparent unpreparedness we showed when using it. I think the sensible choice would have been to give Erison a rest and Romanic a start. But he didn’t do that. Instead we went with the usual line up, Erison got a yellow and now will miss the next game which looks like being a much tougher challenge against Kashiwa. I know we are short of numbers in important areas, but it does feel like we’re running the same players into the ground a bit at the moment. Probably Hasebe still has the memory of when he rotated significantly against Kyoto at home, (back when Kyoto were expected to have their usual kind of relegation troubling season), and we played awfully and lost. This seems to have traumatised him and spelled the end of any kind of rotation that isn’t just changing Kawahara for Tachibanada. Surely there must be some kind of middle ground between changing almost the whole team and changing almost no-one? And surely this game would have been the time to do that? But no, on we trot with the same guys. And maybe we can get a hint as to why he didn’t change much. In this match, which as I’ve said numerous times was far from being a confortable masterclass win, we got to the 91st minute of the match having only made two subs. I guess we can only conclude that Hasebe has no confidence in the back-up players. These late changes were made to switch us to playing five at the back to hold on to those… precious(?)… points. Once again, if we were the relegation threatened team maybe that would have made sense, but shutting up shop against one of the teams who are adrift at the bottom of the table and running out of time… hmmmm. All of this is to say that the win, whilst welcome, was by no means comfortable and left a bit of a maybe not bad but certainly weird taste in the mouth. If we play like this against Kashiwa, a team who want to attack, we might get smashed. 

Them - 

Not much to say about Shonan really. At times it looked like they were Barcelona and we were a team made up of elderly tourists assembled outside the Sagrada Familia. But they couldn’t shoot, thankfully. It looks like their fate might have been sealed to be honest. It’s a shame as it’s a decent away trip. The view from behind the goal is awful though. I can blame that for the poor quality of this blog post. Everthing up the other end of the pitch was an absolute mystery to me. I quite like the orange splash across the belly of their kits which under the floodlights made it look a bit like all of their players had done a Yuma Suzuki with their shirts rather than their shorts and rolled them up and under for no apparent reason other than to show off their midriffs. It will be shame if they go down, but they have flirted with relegation and got away with it for quite a few years now so I guess they suspected that sooner or later it might come back to get them. They’ve got a few games left against teams low down in the table though, so I don’t think all is lost, but it will be tough for them. Fingers crossed either them or YFC can get above YFM and stay there till the end of the season.

Ref and VAR - 

Koya was back. We last encountered him away at Tokyo Verdy and I thought he did ok on that occasion.  I mentioned that he was giving no cards until he broke the seal and then suddenly started flinging them everywhere and it was the same in this match. I think the yellow for Ersion which will ban him for the next match was pretty awful. I don’t know where he is supposed to go to get out of the way of the keeper, who is absolutely miles out of his box. The VAR delay for our penalty was ridiculously long. Presumably they checked the hand ball. Then they checked the offside. Then they checked their lottery ticket. Then they checked on the pizza they had cooking in the oven. Then they checked the weather for the weekend. Then they checked how to spell Czech as they weren’t sure if the European born player on the pitch came from a country near Czechia. It all took ages and gave us another reminder of how fucking annoying VAR is. And then of course we missed the flipping penalty. 

Next up, as I said before, Kashiwa at home. This is another weird game. Against Shonan I wouldn’t have been distraught if we’d lost, as our league campaign is over and a win for them would have given YFM something to worry about. Now we have Kashiwa and if we beat them, we’re basically doing a favour to Kashima and Kobe. It’s horrible, isn’t it? Such a shame that with some truly terrible games played we’ve ruled ourselves out of contention and only have the ability to mess up other teams rather than further our own cause. After title chasing Kashiwa at home we have (maybe) title chasing Kyoto away. So we’re definitely going to have some kind of say in where the title is going. Sadly though, it definitely will be going somewhere, rather than coming back to Todoroki. 

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai (Yellow card 71') 

DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 70') 


Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for YAMAMOTO 90+1')

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

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for ITO 90+1')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 62')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 90+1')
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match 

Not going to bother with this again.

 

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 28' 0-1
ITO (Frontale) 80' 0-2
TACHI (Shonan) 82' 1-2

Highlights

Vs FC Tokyo (home) 20/9/25 J League match 30

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 1 FC Tokyo

Firstly, I have a confession. Although I’ve been saying for weeks that we were well out of contention for getting anything from the league this year, our recent run of good results had me feeling otherwise. Football was fun again and in spite of us being down to bare bones in many areas of the pitch, I was really quite optimistic about how high we could finish. It will come as no surprise to find out all that optimism has now gone. What an idiot I was! This match was a complete turn around from recent games an absolute reality check for us. Perhaps it was because we weren’t plying a scummy team like we had been doing every week recently. Perhaps we just ran out of steam. Perhaps we are actually a bit shit and had got very lucky in the last few games. Who knows? Who knows this game was awful? Presumably everyone who watched it from a Frontale point of view. As I don’t really have many positive things to say, don’t have anything particularly snarky to say about the opposition and as we have a game coming up in two days, let’s absolutely phone this in and get it out of the way.

Terrible photo (where's the ball even?) 
perfectly encapsulating our terrible play

Us -

The starting line up looked interesting with Wakizaka on the bench, (he wasn’t 100% fit), and Romanic in his place. That’s what the graphic said anyway but there was more of a feeling that we were playing with two up front instead. For the first ten minutes or so it seemed like it might be a great idea as we were all over them. All over them whilst naturally still giving away the occasional nerve-shredding chance to them. Thankfully their shooting was awful. Sadly, so was ours. After those ten minutes we started to fall apart. Miura had an absolute stinker in this match and everything dangerous for them seemed to be coming from the area he was supposed to be defending. Ahead of him, Marcinho wasn’t doing much better. so basically the whole of our left side was shite. Romanic up front was working very hard but not getting much luck. The one downside of Romanic being involved in everything good we were doing was the fact that it meant Erison did nothing and wasn’t involved at all. It seemed like we hadn’t really prepared to play the way we were playing. Which probably should go down as a mistake. Mistake number one. Mistake number two probably is the fact that Hasebe took off Romanic for Wakizaka at half time. It had hints of classic Oniki psychopathy which is a bit worrying. Fair enough, he wanted to end the experiment, and presumably wanted to go back to the usual formation but I think it would have made a lot more sense to take Marcinho off instead and either switch Ito to the left or put Romanic there. Ito was having a quiet game so perhaps the switch might have worked for him too. I get that it’s a problem if your star striker is rendered almost irrelevant by your formation change, but to then take off the only player who was showing any attacking intent didn’t make sense. If he was so determined to play Wakizaka for a half, why not start with him and see how long he lasted. I like the fact that Hasebe tried something different, but I don’t think he dealt at all well with it not working. The start of the second half was the same as the first. Some initial positive notes but after that, nothing much. In my notes I wrote ‘bright but shite’ and I think that sums it up nicely. Nothing at all really. Yet Hasebe waited till the 79th minute to make any more changes. Guess that was mistake number three? Of course, the players have to take some responsibility as they were the ones who couldn’t shoot for shit and who apparently wanted to place every cross directly into the hands of the opposition keeper. Apparently we had three shots on target. I can’t remember any of them. Of course the defence was a mess, but we’ve got slightly used to that recently. The problem is when you combine that porous defence with an attack that can’t attack. Perhaps our luck ran out, but that’s being a bit unfair to the opposition. Definitely need to bounce back on Tuesday against Shonan. And don’t forget thats a ground where we’ve had some shockers in recent seasons. I think Miura should be rested. I suspect he won’t be. A few other players could do with a break too. I suppose we’re going to see if Hasebe has got the guts to make some big calls. Two games in three days isn’t great so I don’t think we should be using the same players. And as any hopes in the league are now done, why not change things up a bit? I haven’t really criticised Hasebe much, but this defeat was 100% down to him. If we’d managed to grab a point with the disallowed goal it would have perhaps have obscured quite how bad we’d been, so maybe it was better that we lost. As long as there is some reaction to us being very, very bad in the next game.

Them - 

Hats off to Chofu. They’re having another pretty disappointing season, (not my assessment but the feelings of one of their fans), but they definitely deserved to win this game. We were lucky to go in just 1-0 down at half time. Although their goal wasn’t the most difficult of goals for us to prevent, we did fail to do exactly that. Their usually silent fans were loud as well. Their end of the stadium was significantly louder than the whole of Ajista normally is. (By contrast we did our usual thing of staying silent when we don’t have the ball, which irritates me more and more as the seasons pass). If it wasn’t for their finishing being only marginally less dodgy than ours they could have easily scored more. I was a bit confused by the level of their booing for Hasebe when he was announced. As the game progressed they probably would have liked to have taken that back and instead given him a bit of a cheer for the way he was managing our team. But yeah, nothing much else to say here. Well done FC Tokyo, worthy winners.

Ref and VAR -

We had a ref and linesmen from a Saudi Arabia for this game. I’ve long said it would be very unusual to have me not moan about a ref in a game we lost, but I have nothing much to complain about in this match, so maybe this does prove that I’m not completely blinkered when it comes to moaning about officials. The linesman in front of us missed both ‘offsides’ for the two VAR disallowed goals so maybe he didn’t have a great night, especially given that one of them was very clear and was right in front of him. Tanimura was the guy on VAR and I suppose I can’t moan about him either really, as the one real borderline decision for our disallowed goal was checked by the ref on the pitch side monitor. Maybe I could say that it looked extremely marginal, but the fact is we didn’t deserve anything from this game, so it would have been an injustice if we’d got a point so never mind, eh?

Another shot just about to be launched into orbit

Next up Shonan away on Tuesday. Delightfully there is a beer festival outside the stadium which should help blur what is almost certainly going to be an awful game. We need to bounce back. Not for our league campaign, but more for the mental health of our fans. Although I suppose one possible benefit of us putting in another turd of a performance could be that we could at least get to the shuttle bus quickly as I was out of the stadium on the final whistle after this game. Personally, unlike quite a few of our fans, I can’t see much point in hanging around to say ‘well done for maybe trying your hardest but absolutely unequivocally failing’. After that we’re back at home next Sunday evening against Kashiwa. Obviously I’d like to win every game, but at the same time a win for us would presumably help out Kashima. Maybe given that we’ve fucked the league we should just play the kids in that match for a bit of fun.  

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 75') 
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC
FW 9. ERISON


Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KAWAHARA 79')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for ERISON 84')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for ROMANIC 46')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 79')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for MIYAGI 79')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match 

No no no no no no no no no. No no no no no no no no no no no no no. No no no no….

NO-one - No no no no no no no no-one.

 

Goals

ENDO (FC Tokyo) 23' 0-1

Highlights

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (away) 13/9/25 J League match 29

Yokohama F Marinos 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale  

Surely this run can’t go on much longer. Recently, we’ve faced a scummy team every week and dispatched them with relative ease. Perhaps this was the easiest of all the dispatchings though. And maybe until this game any thoughts that YFM were actually going to end up getting relegated were just wishful thinking. But on this evidence, they are in real trouble! It’s quite annoying that none of the teams below them really managed to take full advantage of another delightful YFM defeat. I think the only thing that could save them now is the deficiencies of those teams below them. I guess it’s just going to be a matter of who is least bad over the rest of the season. YFM have games remaining against four of the top six. For Shonan it’s two, YFC three and Albirex two. Seven of YFM’s remaining nine games are against top half teams. They have no six pointers left. Oooooh, not looking good is it? Apparently some YFM fans online are already worrying that going to J2 would mean that a lot of their fans would transfer their ‘loyalties’ to Frontale. This is quite a bizarre point of view but I guess they must have some reason for saying it. All very intriguing going into the last stretch of the season, isn’t it? Anyway, please excuse me for apparently enjoying the potential demise of YFM more than us winning. It’s not really that way. Of course I want us to win more than anything, but having that win topped with a potentially dangerous defeat for your irritating neighbours is lovely! I was trying to think of a food related comparison but as my taste is quite pedestrian the best I could think of was the fact that chips are great, and cheese is great, but cheesy chips are really great. Doesn’t quite work, but hopefully you can see what I’m going for here. 

Us -

Unsurprising starting line up again apart from the usual shuffling in the midfield. And why would you fix something that isn’t broke? Our schedule isn’t so busy at the moment so we even have a bit of recovery time in between matches. Erison and Ito both have seven goals in six games. Amazing! In this match we even managed to get a clean sheet. This was probably mostly due to the opposition though. (One shot on target, hehehehehe). Hasebe has reinvented Tanabe as a marauding substitute winger. It’s insane! He had two good opportunities to score in this match and was unlucky with both. It would be wrong of me to not mention that we are kind of hanging in there at the back with not many options when it comes to defenders. Hopefully the current guys can stay fit as if one of them gets injured it will either be Kamihashi, Tsuchiya, Tanabe or Noda coming in, most of whom have hardly any experience. Yamaguchi had almost nothing to do in this game but I was very happy to see him have a right moan at the ref after he let a bad tackle on one of our defenders go. I have nothing much else to say. Nothing to moan about. Just hope we can keep this run going.

Them -

Aaahhhhh. Lovely! ‘Be a Stunner’ is YFM’s slogan for this season. It’s a strange choice, as I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to mean. The only use of stunner when referring to people I know of is the kind of thing a tabloid newspaper would use to describe a very attractive person. Might have made more sense in the passive voice. ‘Be Stunned’. And that’s probably true but not in the way that they might have hoped. I was stunned how bad YFM were in this game. Normally even in terrible seasons for them they somehow raise their game when they play us, presumably because they hate us. On this occasion they definitely had the amount of fouls and cards you might expect from a team playing a grudge match, but when it came to football, they were horrendous. I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t take more advantage of the upper hand we had in this match and give both their goal difference and morale a massive pasting. But it’s always tricky when we have to play against 10 men. Talking of the red card, it’s baffling that their players thought that it shouldn’t have been a penalty. Their fans probably were delighted when they got the potential lifeline of a VAR check, imagining that they were about to get away with no penalty. In the stadium the screen said they were checking whether it was a penalty or not. When the ref came back and canceled the yellow and brought out the red it was delightful! Why they thought that Yamamoto with the goal gaping and the ball right in front of him would dive rather than score is hard to believe. But then again the stadium did seem to be full, (or should I say half full), of their fans wearing the same giveaway replica shirt, so perhaps there were more than a few people there who don’t usually go to games and maybe were only introduced to the sport of football earlier in the day. With the rules changing every few months or so I had to google to check the details. The penalty and a red card thing is now ok. It would have been a yellow if the defender had at least tried to get the ball, but as he just hauled Yamamoto to the ground it’s a red. Cheerio! 41000 is a decent attendance, but probably at least a third were Frontale fans and maybe another third were people there on freebies. There certainly didn’t seem to be much atmosphere coming from the other end of the stadium. They recently had some kind of ban though didn’t they? There were no big flags, (lucky them, not having to spend most of the game ducking and weaving to try and see what’s going on). Not sure if their drums were banned too. It sounded like it. But you can’t really be surprised the atmosphere was a bit flat. They’re having a shocker of a season (about as bad as Postecoglou’s first season, but hopefully they’ll go one… better… this time), their team are awful bunch of cloggers and the stadium announcer tried to build up the vibes by playing a Coldplay ballad. Blimey. I did quite enjoy singing along to the Black Eyed Peas… classic, ‘I gotta feeling’ with my own lyrics, ‘I gotta feeling, that you’re going to J2, going to J2, going to J J 2’. Yes, I’m immature, but I would expect them to do exactly the same if the situation was reversed. They were very, very poor. We won. Lovely.

Ref and VAR -

As mentioned above, I enjoyed that VAR intervention a lot. I also enjoyed the fact that the ref was very tall. Ohashi isn’t a famous ref, and the one previous time we had him I said ‘I don’t have anything to say about him’ which I’d echo for this match and which is the absolute highest of high praise. 


Next up, FC Tokyo at home which, contrary to some people’s opinions, for me means the end of the run of us playing against scummy teams. Hopefully it won’t be the end of us winning games though. The ACL clubs will now be having midweek games which should hopefully cause them some problems. Bravo to Oniki for giving us a rest from that competition this time around. I still don’t think we’re going to win the league, but I am very much enjoying this run and hope that soon we can be the league’s top scorers on our own, rather than having to share that title with Kyoto. Which all seems destined to set up a 0-0 or defeat where we fail to score. Hopefully not. Fingers crossed!

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC

DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for ITO 90+4')

MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 81')

MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 81')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 72')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 72')

 

Goals

ITO (Frontale) 4' 0-1
ERISON (Frontale) 62' PEN 0-2
MIYAGI (Frontale) 90+8' 0-3

Highlights

Vs Urawa Reds (home) 7/9/25 Levain Cup Quarter Final 2nd Leg

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 2 Urawa Reds AET (4 - 3 on agg.)

Farewell Urawa, your season lies in tatters much to the delight of most other teams’ fans. First, in a game where they had a great opportunity to get back some ground in the title race, 2-0 up away from home at Kashiwa with only 35 minutes of the game left they went on to implode and lose 4-2. Follow that up by getting dumped out of the Emperor’s Cup by FC Tokyo. And then a week after that throw away a lead in the first leg of the Levain Cup game against us, where we were so bad for most of the game that most fans probably would have settled for the 1-0 loss to avoid any potential embarrassment. That late Ito goal was probably what won the tie for us. Such a shift in the momentum of the game. Even though they managed to come back from behind twice in this game, they were always playing catch up and it was only our very familiar 2025 thing of scoring and then immediately giving away a soft goal that kept them alive. Not saying we were loads better than them, but Urawa just always seemed like they were going to Urawa this game. I’ve said it before that they are one of a select group of teams who whatever they do, however much money they spend, whoever they hire, things always seem to end up going wrong. Presumably their manager won’t be with them for much longer. I think when he left them before it was his choice after a characteristically average season. I don’t know how they convinced him to come back, but I imagine they will be parting ways again soon. They do have a habit of never being satisfied with whatever their manager does. Anyway, this isn’t an Urawa blog so maybe I should write something about the match, right? Don’t worry, I’ll get some more bitching in when it comes to their section.

Us - 

After Wednesday’s pretty dodgy first 70 minutes we were back to something approaching full strength for this match. Of course there is the caveat that we probably can’t really be properly full strength given that however many centre backs we might have in the squad, the majority of them will always be injured or banned. On this occasion we went with Sasaki and Uremovic, which ain’t too bad, right? I think Uremovic is looking better game by game, but suspect he still will improve more in the future. Let’s hope so anyway. I suspect I might have directly caused their first goal as just before they scored, I wrote the word ‘Uremovic’ in my notes, but stopped short of adding ‘has had a really solid game’. Presumably though, just the thought was enough to jinx it. Sorry everyone. Jesiel seemed to be injured on Wednesday and was not in the squad in this game, so I guess we’ve just got to pray that Sasaki and Uremovic can stay fit. Well, either that or pray that we keep on scoring for fun. Again it wasn’t the greatest defensive performance, but once again I’ll say that if we have to sacrifice some defensive solidity for attacking fun, I’m all in favour of that. Yamaguchi had a decent game I thought and made some good saves. I’m not sure there was much he could do for either goal. And perhaps, thinking about it, I might be being a bit harsh when I say we wren’t great at the back as both of their goals were probably quite difficult to prevent. Strangely positive for me, isn’t it? Further forward I don’t have much to moan about either. Wakizaka still looks a bit off it, but at least his corners were a bit better. Erison was toying with their defence for fun. Long may that kind of thing continue. He’s really in good form right now. I was a bit dismissive of Miyagi with regards to Wednesday’s game so I should probably give him some credit in this match. Whilst I don’t think I’d go as far to say that he was great, it certainly took some nerve to step up and score that penalty. And Hasebe has talked about him making some real progress with his game. It’s probably about time to be honest as he’s shown bright moments and failed to follow them up so many times over the last… however many years. Ito, there’s not much I need to say. He’s absolutely on fire right now. It’s really nice that he shoots as we’ve often be very guilty of wanting to walk the ball into the net in recent years. What else is there to say? Tanabe playing left wing at the end of the game. Amazing! The line up was a bit of a mess at the end of 120 minutes but you’d expect that I guess. Full credit to Hasebe for the changes he made and his match plan. It was a bit seat-of-the-pants at times, but we won and that’s all the matters. Oh, and finally in this section, it would be remiss of me to not mention two things that were quite unusual in this match. Firstly, we made seven subs! More on that in the ref section. Also, two players we brought on were later subbed off, and not for injuries, all in a game that we won. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that hasn’t happened before. I’m out on a limb because I can’t be bothered and wouldn’t know how to check it.

Them - 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Bye bye Urawa. Hopefully these words won’t come back to haunt me at the end of the season. The only way that could be the case though would be if either they secured the title in our final league game of the season away against them. Or if they denied us the title in that game. I think both things are pretty unlikely, so maybe I don’t have to worry about jinxing in this case. Somewhat unusually I don’t have many moans about their players. Although Kaneko seemed to be a fouling shit who got away with everything he wanted to. I guess it’s just the laughable fans that I’ll have to focus on. Firstly, they had one of the most bizarre flags I’ve ever seen. Here is a picture of it. 

Truly baffling how that adjective could be combined with Urawa, which is the place where I work and is a very normal suburban residential area. (Well apart from the absolute wasteland near their stadium). It would be remiss of me to not mention the massive amount of rising sun flags on display. (Very much not only the ones near the flag mentioned above). Actually it’s kind of amusing when you combine their absolute patriotism for Japanese things and their belief that Urawa is exotic, (one common definition of which is ‘originating in or characteristic of a distant foreign country.’). Does this mean that in their apparent desire to remember the old imperial days and celebrate and preserve their racial purity (see the notorious “Japanese Only” banner), that they should actively hate themselves? Would be quite fun to see some of the knuckle-dragger elements of their fan base punching themselves in the face, disgusted by their own exoticism. I mean, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and say that by exotic they mean ‘attractive or striking because colourful or out of the ordinary’ you still have to perhaps pick some holes in their argument. So, yeah, that flag was funny. Also funny was the fact that for both penalties all their big flag wavers walked across behind the goal and waved their little hearts out, before having to trudge back after the ball hit the back of the net on both occasions. Maybe their ‘fearsome’ support isn’t quite as intimidating as they suspect it is. The thing is, there are plenty of reasons to hate Urawa fans for the numerous acts of fan misconduct. But you could also dislike them for their ridiculous posturing. For extra time the majority of the downstairs section squashed over to one side of the stand to have a little shout together whilst I suspect holding hands and then moved back to their spots afterwards feeling very proud of themselves and extremely tough. One of the best things about the J League is the welcoming atmosphere in the stadiums and the fact that opposing fans can mix without having to worry about any trouble. Many people love this. And then you have many Urawa fans, who seem to think that such actions are presumably too woke for them and instead the thing to do is try to ape the worst aspects of football hooliganism and show how hard they are. As this game went to extra time, (after 21:00), due to the fact that the stadium is in a residential area, we weren’t allowed to use drums for extra time. Of course that didn’t stop the Urawa fans, because they are just very naughty tough guys. Oooooooooooooohhhh!

Ref and 4th official - 

Slight renaming of this section. There wasn’t really anything significant to mention about VAR and given that it was being done by Iida, that is a very surprising thing to be able to say. On the pitch we had Araki… When we last had him it was against Kashima at home and I referred to him as an ‘absolute bottler’. In this match I wrote the note that he was bottling so much that with that kind of skill set he should consider starting his own brewery. I guess we should praise him for being consistent over the past two games we’ve had with him. In both he’s given nothing and let the clogger opposition kick us to bits. I guess we can’t expect consistency when it comes to him giving the same decisions the same way to both teams, but at least he is predictably consistent when it comes to letting the opposition get away with whatever they want without giving any cards. Anyway, he’s always shit, so there’s no point being surprised he was shit again, I guess, The fourth official seemed to have a bit of a moment when we made (I think) our last sub. The poor guy didn’t seem to want to let it happen, presumably being confused by the amount of subs we’d made. The same issue seemed to confuse some Urawa fans online. You could probably confuse those fans with that trick where it looks like you’re removing and replacing the top of your thumb though. Presumably they didn’t know that if you use a concussion sub, the opposition gets an extra sub too. It’s fair enough for them not to know it, it’s pretty unforgivable for the fourth official not to know it though. Especially as it was announced on the screen at the game. To give him a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, maybe this wasn’t what was going on, but Hasebe was getting pretty annoyed with the guy who wouldn’t let us make the change, so I’ll just presume it was that. After all, it would fit in perfectly with my general feelings about the knowledge and skill level of J League refs. They are clearly not very good.

What a lovely win this was. Once again we weren’t exactly doing things the easiest of ways at times and it wasn’t plain sailing at all, but none of that really matters. We now have Kashiwa in the next round so preumably the tickets for that match will be even more difficult to get than they usually are. Next up in the league… YFM as the run of horrible teams we’re playing continues. I would truly love our run of wins to continue too but am fully aware it’s going to come to a halt sooner or later. But please not next weekend, eh? There’s been even less football talk in this post than usual, so I hope you’ve enjoyed my complete lack of insight! I think I quite enjoyed writing it for a change.  

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC (Yellow card 90+1') 

DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KAWAHARA 85')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for OZEKI 119')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for ITO 106')

MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 75')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 58')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota (on for MIYAGI 107')
DF 30. NODA Hiroto 
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 75')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match 

This was a good team performance, but I think I can’t not give it to two guys who can’t stop scoring right now (and next weekend too hopefully…), so it’s going to go to…

ERISON and ITO Tatsuya - I don’t need to explain why, do I?

 

Goals

ERISON (Frontale) 18' PEN 1-0
KIESE (Urawa) 74' 1-1
ITO (Frontale) 88' 2-1
NAKAJIMA (Urawa) 90' 2-2
MIYAGI (Frontale) 96' PEN 3-2

Highlights