Kyoto Sanga 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale
Yay! A meaningless game! But one that some people say was surprisingly entertaining! But I think it was something more like unsurprisingly frustrating. Frustration shouldn’t be a massive surprise as it seems pretty much par for the course recently. There’s no doubt we have some great players. There are increasing doubts that we can consistently play particularly well. Any lingering doubts as to whether we could get anything from this season are absolutely gone and lying in tatters after a really rotten run of games in the league. Like I said before, we only have the ability to mess other people’s seasons up. Anyway, these posts are supposed to be short now, so here we go.
Us -
It seems like recently we have an uncanny ability to score exactly the same amount of goals as the opposition, however many shots we have. In this game we had more shots than in the 4-4 against Kashima or the 2-1 against Shonan. We pretty much tripled the Kyoto’s shot tally and shots on target tally but only managed to score the same amount of goals as them. We absolutely battered them in the first half and naturally went in 1-1 at half time. Even when we went down to ten we still looked like we were the most likely team to score. Someone at the club has definitely had a black cat cross their path whilst hanging a horseshoe upside down over their arm as they walked under a ladder and knocked over and smashed a whole crate of mirrors. Poor old Hasebe seems to be the opposite of Oniki, who was and still seems to be ridiculously lucky. Of course we weren’t helped by the ref in this match, and of course it was pretty pointless game for us anyway, but we seem to play well more often than not, but seem to always snatch a draw from the jaws of victory. Once again we’ve damaged the title hopes of a team who most people probably would prefer to win the league rather than Kashima. We’ve done that to Machida, Kashiwa and now Kyoto. Sadly we don’t have any mote games left against Kashima. Although to be honest, the way things seem to be going, we’d probably lose that game, knowing our current luck. ‘At least it was an entertaining game’, say people who apparently don’t have the same emotional investment with these games as I do. Drawing a game when you’ve battered the opposition goal isn’t particularly satisfying, especially when you only managed to score once. We didn’t rotate for this game which was a bit of a surprise given that we have Kashiwa at home in the Levain Cup on Wednesday and then away on Sunday. I guess we’ll see changes on Wednesday, But then again there isn’t a great deal that is changeable at the moment really. And in this match, once again Hasebe didn’t use all of his subs. He didn’t make any changes till the 72nd minute. If we’d still been banging like we were in the first half that would have made sense but we’d been a bit shit since the start of the second half I thought, so we might expected something to be changed a bit sooner. There’s probably not much else to say about this match. It followed the recent pattern of us going ahead through Ito and then conceding a goal due to… well, I won’t point fingers but there does seem to be someone not doing particularly great this year and they didn’t do that great again in this match. Oh, one notable thing was perhaps the return of Sung-Ryong in goal. I think Yamaguchi is injured. I feel sorry for SR as he did everything he could and can’t in any way be blamed for the gaol we conceded. I hope he gets a clean sheet the next time he plays. Depending on Yamaguchi’s condition maybe he’ll be playing a lot more before the end of the season than we might have expected.
Them -
I enjoyed the beer in the stadium which was a lot better than the crap Asahi that they sell usually. They had a beer garden in the concourse of the back stand. To be honest it was more like a beer patio… hmmm, that still sounds bigger than it actually was. In any case, there were some nice beers available from Kyoto Brewing. Given that I chucked a bit of money their way on those beers, the least they could have done was give us the three points. On this showing, it’s a bit of a surprise that Kyoto are so high up in the league. When they beat us at Todoroki they were dire as far as I can remember, (naturally, we were worse, but…). In this match I thought they were very lucky to get away with a point. Hara drew my ire for asking the ref to check VAR for something that he believed should have been a penalty, even though it absolutely wasn’t a foul and it was nowhere near inside the box. Guess he must just be a bit simple. It seemed that their fans might be similarly intellectually challenged as they booed the ref off at the end of the game, even though he’d done his absolute best to get them a win. Maybe they wanted a few more red cards for us. The pre-match DJ was quite cringeworthy, but I have to admit that when they turned the lights off and he played House Of Pain, it was quite fun. Playing Oasis at the final whistle wasn’t good for my already elevated irritation levels though. Probably did sum up their stodgy football quite well though. Why not wrap up a disappointing game with some truly turgid music? And perhaps you could also draw some comparisons between the way that their players faked injury constantly and convinced the ref and the way that Oasis have somehow managed to convince the world that they have talent. A lot of deception going on everywhere it seems. Anyway, before the game I wouldn’t have minded letting them have the win if it meant it might mess up Kashima, but after the constant play-acting and whinging to the referee, well, fuck ‘em basically. Gutted we didn’t take all the points and give them the absolute battering that our first half performance suggested might have been coming. I say suggested, because of course, anyone who’s watched us this year will know that even if we do batter someone, we also batter ourselves in the process.
Ref -
As the popular chant goes, 'the referee is a wanker'. And what a wanker! Last time we had this guy he was pleasantly anonymous but on this occasion he ruined the last part of the match by being totally taken in by Kyoto’s faking and diving. The two yellow cards for Romanic were outrageous. At least he made contact for the first one but for me it didn’t seem like it was worthy of a yellow. For the second I don’t think there was any contact at all, although the Kyoto player faked some. Kamimura is one of those refs who doesn’t give any cards until an apparently random moment of the match, after which he starts throwing them around like they’re going out of fashion. Tachibanada’s yellow looks a bit dodgy too after watching the replay. Kyoto were totally fine with these kind of cards for phantom fouls being given out. When things went the other way though they were whinging like nobody’s business. Nagasawa elbowing Uremovic in the face isn’t a foul as far as they were concerned. The player who dived into a challenge and blocked a goal bound shot intentionally with his arm. No foul according to them. So I suppose I should at least congratulate the ref on getting those right. Congratulations, not everything you did was a total disaster. You carried out your duties adequately on occasion. Presumably this is enough to get him promoted to new J League golden boy status. I hope we never have him again.
Ah, what a shame it is recently that we can’t even really enjoy scoring an early goal as it’s always inevitable that we won’t hold on to a lead. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said ‘we really need to score again whilst we’re totally on top or we’ll regret it’, before we don’t score again and we do regret it. Anyway, never mind, these games are pointless! Unlike our next two games which are the next stage of our only chance of getting anything from this season. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect us to storm the league and win the quadruple. It would be nice if we could win something for Hasebe though as I feel he’s done a decent job so far. Not a great job, but a decent job. With five games to go we’ve already exceeded our points total from last year and if we score more than six goals in our remaining five league games we’ll have scored more this year too. And we’d have to concede 13 goals in those last five games to have conceded more this year. I mean, that is obviously not off the table though! So yeah, Kashiwa in the Levain Cup, home and then away. The last league game was chock full of goals. so presumably a 1-0 win on aggregate for someone and utter tedium. It would be fair to say that the two teams we’ve drawn in the Levain this year have not given us the most exciting of fixtures when it comes to away trips. But fingers crossed we can make it through to the final.
Us -
It seems like recently we have an uncanny ability to score exactly the same amount of goals as the opposition, however many shots we have. In this game we had more shots than in the 4-4 against Kashima or the 2-1 against Shonan. We pretty much tripled the Kyoto’s shot tally and shots on target tally but only managed to score the same amount of goals as them. We absolutely battered them in the first half and naturally went in 1-1 at half time. Even when we went down to ten we still looked like we were the most likely team to score. Someone at the club has definitely had a black cat cross their path whilst hanging a horseshoe upside down over their arm as they walked under a ladder and knocked over and smashed a whole crate of mirrors. Poor old Hasebe seems to be the opposite of Oniki, who was and still seems to be ridiculously lucky. Of course we weren’t helped by the ref in this match, and of course it was pretty pointless game for us anyway, but we seem to play well more often than not, but seem to always snatch a draw from the jaws of victory. Once again we’ve damaged the title hopes of a team who most people probably would prefer to win the league rather than Kashima. We’ve done that to Machida, Kashiwa and now Kyoto. Sadly we don’t have any mote games left against Kashima. Although to be honest, the way things seem to be going, we’d probably lose that game, knowing our current luck. ‘At least it was an entertaining game’, say people who apparently don’t have the same emotional investment with these games as I do. Drawing a game when you’ve battered the opposition goal isn’t particularly satisfying, especially when you only managed to score once. We didn’t rotate for this game which was a bit of a surprise given that we have Kashiwa at home in the Levain Cup on Wednesday and then away on Sunday. I guess we’ll see changes on Wednesday, But then again there isn’t a great deal that is changeable at the moment really. And in this match, once again Hasebe didn’t use all of his subs. He didn’t make any changes till the 72nd minute. If we’d still been banging like we were in the first half that would have made sense but we’d been a bit shit since the start of the second half I thought, so we might expected something to be changed a bit sooner. There’s probably not much else to say about this match. It followed the recent pattern of us going ahead through Ito and then conceding a goal due to… well, I won’t point fingers but there does seem to be someone not doing particularly great this year and they didn’t do that great again in this match. Oh, one notable thing was perhaps the return of Sung-Ryong in goal. I think Yamaguchi is injured. I feel sorry for SR as he did everything he could and can’t in any way be blamed for the gaol we conceded. I hope he gets a clean sheet the next time he plays. Depending on Yamaguchi’s condition maybe he’ll be playing a lot more before the end of the season than we might have expected.
Them -
I enjoyed the beer in the stadium which was a lot better than the crap Asahi that they sell usually. They had a beer garden in the concourse of the back stand. To be honest it was more like a beer patio… hmmm, that still sounds bigger than it actually was. In any case, there were some nice beers available from Kyoto Brewing. Given that I chucked a bit of money their way on those beers, the least they could have done was give us the three points. On this showing, it’s a bit of a surprise that Kyoto are so high up in the league. When they beat us at Todoroki they were dire as far as I can remember, (naturally, we were worse, but…). In this match I thought they were very lucky to get away with a point. Hara drew my ire for asking the ref to check VAR for something that he believed should have been a penalty, even though it absolutely wasn’t a foul and it was nowhere near inside the box. Guess he must just be a bit simple. It seemed that their fans might be similarly intellectually challenged as they booed the ref off at the end of the game, even though he’d done his absolute best to get them a win. Maybe they wanted a few more red cards for us. The pre-match DJ was quite cringeworthy, but I have to admit that when they turned the lights off and he played House Of Pain, it was quite fun. Playing Oasis at the final whistle wasn’t good for my already elevated irritation levels though. Probably did sum up their stodgy football quite well though. Why not wrap up a disappointing game with some truly turgid music? And perhaps you could also draw some comparisons between the way that their players faked injury constantly and convinced the ref and the way that Oasis have somehow managed to convince the world that they have talent. A lot of deception going on everywhere it seems. Anyway, before the game I wouldn’t have minded letting them have the win if it meant it might mess up Kashima, but after the constant play-acting and whinging to the referee, well, fuck ‘em basically. Gutted we didn’t take all the points and give them the absolute battering that our first half performance suggested might have been coming. I say suggested, because of course, anyone who’s watched us this year will know that even if we do batter someone, we also batter ourselves in the process.
Ref -
As the popular chant goes, 'the referee is a wanker'. And what a wanker! Last time we had this guy he was pleasantly anonymous but on this occasion he ruined the last part of the match by being totally taken in by Kyoto’s faking and diving. The two yellow cards for Romanic were outrageous. At least he made contact for the first one but for me it didn’t seem like it was worthy of a yellow. For the second I don’t think there was any contact at all, although the Kyoto player faked some. Kamimura is one of those refs who doesn’t give any cards until an apparently random moment of the match, after which he starts throwing them around like they’re going out of fashion. Tachibanada’s yellow looks a bit dodgy too after watching the replay. Kyoto were totally fine with these kind of cards for phantom fouls being given out. When things went the other way though they were whinging like nobody’s business. Nagasawa elbowing Uremovic in the face isn’t a foul as far as they were concerned. The player who dived into a challenge and blocked a goal bound shot intentionally with his arm. No foul according to them. So I suppose I should at least congratulate the ref on getting those right. Congratulations, not everything you did was a total disaster. You carried out your duties adequately on occasion. Presumably this is enough to get him promoted to new J League golden boy status. I hope we never have him again.
Ah, what a shame it is recently that we can’t even really enjoy scoring an early goal as it’s always inevitable that we won’t hold on to a lead. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said ‘we really need to score again whilst we’re totally on top or we’ll regret it’, before we don’t score again and we do regret it. Anyway, never mind, these games are pointless! Unlike our next two games which are the next stage of our only chance of getting anything from this season. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect us to storm the league and win the quadruple. It would be nice if we could win something for Hasebe though as I feel he’s done a decent job so far. Not a great job, but a decent job. With five games to go we’ve already exceeded our points total from last year and if we score more than six goals in our remaining five league games we’ll have scored more this year too. And we’d have to concede 13 goals in those last five games to have conceded more this year. I mean, that is obviously not off the table though! So yeah, Kashiwa in the Levain Cup, home and then away. The last league game was chock full of goals. so presumably a 1-0 win on aggregate for someone and utter tedium. It would be fair to say that the two teams we’ve drawn in the Levain this year have not given us the most exciting of fixtures when it comes to away trips. But fingers crossed we can make it through to the final.
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 77')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 9. ERISON
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 77')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
Subs
GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for ITO 85')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
FW 29. MYOGAN Toya
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for MARCINHO 74')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 75') (Yellow card 84', second yellow/red card 88')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for ITO 85')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
FW 29. MYOGAN Toya
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for MARCINHO 74')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 75') (Yellow card 84', second yellow/red card 88')
Goals
ITO (Frontale) 8' 0-1
SUGAI (Kyoto) 38' 1-1
Highlights
