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 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
Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
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')
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
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