Vs FC Tokyo (away) 2/5/26 J League East match 14

FC Tokyo 2 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale 

Well that was shit, wasn’t it? Maybe not quite as bad as against Urawa but pretty close. And at least in the Urawa game we had two shots on target. In this one we managed just one. Three shots on target in 180 minutes of football. Truly woeful stuff. And still Hasebe seems to think we’re making progress. His post match comments are top level gaslighting at this stage. He says our defence is slowly improving, apparently unaware that we’re still conceding goals for fun. He says we need to improve our attacking. No shit! Don’t forget his intention when he arrived was to tighten up our defence a touch and keep the exciting attacking. He’s done the opposite with both of those things. And apparently hasn’t really noticed. I know this season is a pointless waste of time but it would be nice if we weren’t playing like we had that at the forefront of our minds. An attack every now and then would be nice. And it’s not as if Hasebe is using the opportunity of having a pointless season to try some things out. Even the slightest tweak is immediately erased and we return to the same old crap. The booing at the end of the game spoke volumes. I don’t particularly like to boo, but on this occasion I did. You could argue that it’s the fault of the manager rather than the players, but there definitely are some of them that are stealing a living at the moment. As I’m currently on a train and won’t be home till shortly before the next match, this post will be quite threadbare till I have time to add the usual bits. But let’s be honest, I don’t think anyone wants to read much about another shitty game, so I think it doesn’t really matter. 

A few words about this travesty. Hasebe did exactly what I hoped he would after the Urawa debacle. He switched to 4-4-2 and dropped Wakizaka. Sadly in a Trump rivalling U-turn, he brought Wakizaka on at half time. And also Marcinho, who let’s be honest, has really struggled recently. So two of our most ineffective players against Urawa were supposed to come on and turn the game around. Marcinho isn’t having a good year. At the moment he only seems to be able to run fast and occasionally successfully dribble, but his passing and crossing are awful right now. I wish I could be so positive about Wakizaka, whose main contribution seems to be giving the ball away stupidly to start dangerous  opposition attacks. Hasebe did the right thing to leave them out, but you know, HACO, Hasebe Always Chickens Out. His response to us not setting the world on fire after trying something slightly different for 45 minutes is to go back to the old way which has failed for most of this year and last year. Such is his skill-sapping influence that I think if he took charge of the most successful top league moneybags team in any country, he could probably have them in non-league within just a few years. Shortly after their fourth successive relegation was confirmed he’d probably comment that their defence is steadily improving. I think our squad is pretty good, so it takes a really special manager to get so little out of them and make the football they are playing so unappealing.  

Erison and Kanda up front seemed like a strange choice. It looked like they hadn’t even met before, let alone played together. Miyagi was on the wing again and underwhelmed again. He had a great game when he played up front but clearly that was a bit too daring for H(ACO) so he has never been played there since. Last year, Ito, fresh from a disappointing European stint was keen to impress and was on fire. But don’t worry H(ACO) has now squashed all of that out of him. Both of these players got 45 minutes and then were replaced by Wakizaka and Marcinho. Wakizaka on the wing never works but still it’s H(ACO)‘s answer if the formation we’re playing doesn’t suit Wakizaka. And no worries anyway, Wakizaka will wander across the field anyway, meaning that one of our strikers ends up on the wing. All good, as long as Wakizaka gets what he wants and can move into more central areas to wave his arms, tell people what to do whilst doing nothing himself other than giving the ball away to start dangerous opposition attacks. We’re fucking shit! We spent about a whole minute camped in their box in control of the ball and failed to even have a single shot instead just moving the ball from side to side presumably waiting for the defenders to get bored and get out of the way to avoid prolonging the tedium. I just don’t understand what the game plan is. I suspect there maybe isn’t one. 

There’s no point me writing any smart arse comments about the opposition. I can’t even be bothered to write about the shit ref. It’s all down to Hasebe and he’s almost certainly not the man to sort the situation out. The board seem to be equally or perhaps even more useless, so don’t expect anything to change on the managerial front. As long as the club keeps making money the club president Yoshida is happy. He is a businessman with absolutely no understanding of football. I wish he’d fuck off back to Fujitsu where his talents might be more appreciated. Our president doesn’t understand football, our manager doesn’t seem to be able to manage and our players have lost the ability to play. And this all is kind of understandable, because as a supporter, I’m losing any enthusiasm for supporting. I don’t have any problem with losing to better teams. I have a big problem with us losing every match before a ball has even been kicked because the game plan is so stupid and the manager seems to be incapable of motivating anyone. If he hasn’t lost the changing room, he really should have done by now. Someone needs to say something. Or are the players being gaslit too?  

Even when we’ve won this year it has more often than not been luckily. Great players are becoming shit players and there still seems to be the feeling that we should just say ‘oh well, let’s move on and support even more in the next match’. Considering the shit we’ve been put through by a string of awful games we should really be reacting in a way that isn’t just shrugging our shoulders and looking forward. If I succeed in getting a ticket for the Mito game I will have seen every fucking minute of this awful season and I feel that rather than unconditionally giving my support for every subsequent game I should be getting a handwritten apology from the club and some payment for the massive amount of wasted time and effort. Think of all the more exciting things we could have done instead of watching these matches. We could have counted how many grains of rice there are in a 5kg bag. We could have unfurled and then rerolled a Costco bumper size pack of toilet paper. We could have reread every one of these awful blog posts and counted how many times I’ve used the word ‘shit’. All of these things currently sound more appealing prospects than watching another turgid 90 minutes of so called football. But as I’m an idiot, I’ll go to the next game.  

Next up Tokyo Verdy at home on Wednesday. The away leg was a shockingly boring game and since then we’ve absolutely regressed so expect an absolute rotter. If there was any justice, Hasebe would start the match with a completely different team from the ones who’ve started the last two matches. I want to see Hayashi, Kan, Noda, Mochiyama. And some of the players who have been in and out and have been doing their best. But the problem is that we can’t drop the manager so we’d still be shit. It’s going to be 4-2-3-1 again with the usual players, isn’t it? Two shots on target against Urawa, one in this match, so presumably on Wednesday we’ll fail to hit the target even once. But we’ll still get the post match comments saying how we’re improving defensively, in spite of conceding five. Maybe I’ll take a book to read and some noise cancelling headphones. That way it won’t have been a complete waste of time. 

Team 

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 66')
FW 38. KANDA Soma

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for TACHIBANADA 79')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for ITO 46')

DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 23. MARCINHO (on for MIYAGI 46')
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke

MF 34. OSA Ryuki (on for ERISON 87')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for KANDA 57')

Man of the match

There wasn’t one.

 

Goals

SATO (FC Tokyo) 41' 1-0
NOZAWA (FC Tokyo) 56' 2-0

Highlights

Vs FC Tokyo (home) 21/2/26 J League East match 3

 

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 2 FC Tokyo

 

I normally try to write a nice introduction paragraph to these blog posts but this game was so awful I’ll just go with mostly repeating the same word over and over again. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shitty shit shit shit shit shit shit. Shitty shit shit shit shit shit shitty shit shit shit shit shit shit, shitty shit shit shit shit shite shit shitty shit. Shit shit shit shit shit? Shitty, shit shit shit shite shit. Shit! And you can quote me on that. Shit.

1st half - 

Appalling first half with the usual suspects doing the usual things. Or rather not doing them. Miura started better but both goals came from moves down his side. Wakizaka mostly absent again. Presumably Hasebe will change back to the previous starting line up with his first subs (he didn’t. But there was a similar lack of inspiration in the changes he did make). The Ito-not-defending criticism seems to have meant that he’s now playing behind Miura and in defensive midfield. One shot! One fucking shot! (Actually it was two as I forgot the free kick, but I think the point still stands).


2nd half - 

A slight improvement, maybe, but that’s basically saying we were totally shit as opposed to unbelievably, staggeringly shit. Like in the first half, massively out shot. No changes at half time was a surprise (and almost certainly a mistake). When the changes did come, they were the deeply uninspiring swapping of the whole of the front three with not even a hint of trying something different and instead retaining the tactics that had failed for the whole of the first half and pretty much all of the JEF game. Astonishing that Miura and Wakizaka played the whole game. I feel like I am being gaslit. Whilst I’m not going as far as some and saying Hasebe out, he has to take full responsibility for this absolute turd of a performance. Reading an auto translation of Hasebe’s post match comments, it seems that he didn’t think the game was as bad as I did. One of us is clearly out of our mind.


Good day -

I mean come on. Good day for Tokyo I guess. I think they played well. I think so, but to be honest it’s tricky to say as we were so accommodating. Can’t really say anything positive in any way about us. Maybe good day for people who like seeing misplaced passes from the club captain and for people who like to see tackles, as every time we had the ball in some space, we immediately stopped, checked back and headed for the nearest opposition player to let them have a go at getting the ball off of us. And I suppose it was a good day for Yamahara as he got his first goal for us and it was a nice one. But it still infuriates me that the club have been hyping it up on social media apparently oblivious to the fact that we got absolutely destroyed in the this game.


Bad day -

Bad day for anyone who has any connection to Frontale. Bad day for me especially as I was quite hungover for this match. Can you imagine how bad that must have been? It would have been terrible even if I was feeling well, but the unbelievable dragging time, combined with the bright sun in my eyes and the constant dull headache wasn’t the combination I was hoping for. And as you can maybe tell from the irritated tone of this blog post, I’ve only gone and put myself in the same situation today after hitting the commiseration beers a bit too heavily considering the state I was in. At least I’ve avoided the sunburn today as I’ve stayed home and stewed in my own misery instead of going out. 


Any other business -

- I think one of the most significant aspects of this game, and the two previous games, was the unbelievable amount of shots we were letting the opposition have. It was 27 to 13 in the first game, 22 to 17 in the second game and 22 to fucking 7 in this match. I can’t even begin to imagine how many goals we would have conceded if we’d had last season’s patched together back line in place. And it’s no surprise the opposition are getting so many shots as we seem to be approaching every match like a defending practice training session where after we thwart an attack we pass the ball forward and back to the apposition to give them another go. To be fair to some of the players, we probably could have got another clean sheet in this match in spite of the numerous opportunities they had if FC Tokyo hadn’t been so cheeky as to make sure their attacks went down the side where there was someone who couldn’t be bothered to do anything apart from half-hearted, actually that’s too generous, one-tenth-hearted attempts to stroll back into position, usually long after the ball was in the back of the net. Of course we don’t want to be facing so many chances, but if you want to be slightly positive you could say it’s a miracle we haven’t got battered every game. We have a goal keeper who’s trying his best, two centre backs, a right back and a couple of defensive midfielders who are trying to stem the tide, but ahead of them it basically seems to be a bunch of mannequins who the ball is just bouncing off of. On the rare occasions we did manage to get into their half without passing the ball directly the them, it was either a case of Erison (or later on Romanic) competing for the ball and then having no-one to help them out in any way, or a case of us making a quick break and with the goal beckoning deciding to slow things down and play the ball backwards. Even with a minute left in the game we were still patiently passing the ball around at the back. Absolutely fucking useless. And absolutely no sign of any other options or ideas. Just plugging away with the same formation that we’ve been playing for years, now being done to dramatically diminishing returns.

- In the last post I brought up Hasebe’s tactical adjustment screwdriver. Against Kashiwa he’d tuned things a bit too far towards the attacking and forget about defending end of the scale. Against JEF he adjusted too far the other way and removed any hope of attacking. In this match, he couldn’t quite decide what to do and in his twiddling back and forth accidentally broke both the screw and the screwdriver. All out attack is one kind of approach. As is backs-against-the-wall full hearted defending. Both perhaps have their merits. In this match we abandoned both of them and went for shocking defending and almost no attacking. Hasebe definitely tweaked things a bit from the Chiba game where online geniuses were commenting that Ito wasn’t defending enough, perhaps ignoring the fact that he really is supposed to focus more on the whole attacking thing given that he’s playing up front. It was clear that Hasebe had told the wingers to sit back and join in with the defence a bit more. When Miura actually could be bothered to move his lazy arse he was more often than not ahead of Ito who seemed to have been cowed into sitting in front of the centre backs at times. This probably didn’t really help us keep the ball when we got out of our own half. When Marcinho came on he was doing the same thing, and let’s be honest, we don’t really want Marcinho defending with his straight-red-cards-for-shocking-tackles record. It’s possibly significant that both of these players were playing in front of Miura so maybe they felt like they had to try to cover for some of his absolutely-don’t-give-a-shit moments.

- Hasebe has some work to do now. Our next match is Mito at home, on paper one of our easier fixtures. He needs to make some changes. Will have have the guts to drop Miura. I don’t think so. Wakizaka will almost certainly not get dropped. I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes back to the starting line up he used for the first two games. I think the scariest thing is that he’s used pretty much the same players for every match. Ozeki was strongly linked with a move overseas before the start of the season but he has hardly got a look in. Kanda is… nobody knows. But I guess we’ve been playing with the same formation where whoever plays up front just looks completely isolated so we have to presume that if he plays there the same thing will happen to him too. I know we had quite a lot of people who weren’t training recently due to a variety of reasons. I really hope that those reasons sort themselves out soon. Hasebe says he’s picking the team based on the form players are showing so if that’s true, presumably he’ll be dropping Miura and Wakizaka, right? And I don’t think Yamamoto, who Hasebe dropped due to him playing terribly this year but then turned to as his great hope from the bench, should be playing either at the moment. I know this won’t happen, but even if we only have the same group of players available for the next match and we stick to the same formation, (which it seems we most likely will do, after all, if it ain’t broke… oh actually it is totally fucking broken…), we can definitely put out a starting line up that is much more likely to get the job done. Uremovic should be playing, I reckon. Move Matsunagane to right back (or put Noda there), play Yamahara at left back, Kawahara and Tachibanada in front of them and Ozeki ahead of them. And it probably doesn’t matter which three play up front, but maybe tell them to try to score a goal instead of get a world record for consecutive passes in a non-threatening area. I know Ito wants to play on the left, but it’s definitely the case that him playing on the right last year was a lot more effective than he’s been so far this year. And don’t forget all the exciting young players we have. Hasebe apparently has forgotten them. He’s got to do something after we finally got exactly what we deserved for two or maybe even three games where we have got totally battered. 


WOW!

Skipping this again as the main contenders I can think of are employed by our club and that wasn’t really the aim for this section. Ref was cack again, but that’s just par for the course.


Next up Mito. Come on Hasebe, do something please. Maybe we can keep the opposition shot count under 20 this time? Is that too much to ask?  

 

Team

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto (Yellow card 90')
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 59')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for KAWAHARA 73')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for TACHIBANADA 88')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for IENAGA 56')
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for ITO 56')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 30. NODA Hiroto 
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 56')


Man of the match

 

Goals

MARCELO RYAN (FC Tokyo) 18' 0-1
YAMAHARA (Frontale) 31' 1-1
MUROYA (FC Tokyo) 37' 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 FC Tokyo (away) 29/3/25 J League match 7

 

FC Tokyo 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale

Another Tamagawa Classico and it was another fun game for Frontale fans. As I’ve left it a bit since the game to start writing this, and as I spent the night of the game over-imbibing in the company of home and away fans, the details are all a bit hazy now. But hopefully I have just enough memory of the day left to be able to at least give you some kind of insight that you wouldn’t have got from watching the match online. Probably most of it will be poking fun at Nakagawa though. Let the poking begin!

Us -

We perhaps seem to have gone back to the early season thing of having a very average first half and then taking the brakes off in the second. Have to say, I don’t mind if that kind of thing continues. The first half of this match was quite unremarkable for us. Those with a better view than us right down the other end of the pitch might point to Takai’s ruled out goal as being something at least slightly remarkable. But from where we were, we weren’t even aware that the ball had gone in as there didn’t seem to be much in the way of celebration, complaint or VAR. Recent line ups have probably made Hasebe’s first choice preferences a little clearer. And… they are pretty similar to Oniki’s. On this occasion we got to see Oshima start again. Maybe Hasebe is using him in a little bit of a different way to Oniki. In the past, we’d wait ages for Oshima to recover from his latest injury, he’d be back in the team for a few games and then out again. Maybe Hasebe is using him more sparingly. We saw him against Shanghai Shenhua, he was absent for the trip to Okayama, and then back in for this game. If managing his minutes helps him stay more injury free, that will be great. He had a pretty good game again, so I guess the real challenge facing Hasebe is to work out how to make the midfield work when Oshima is not playing, as it was a total mess away against Okayama. (But so were the attack, and the defence too…). I think this back four represents what Hasebe considers our best back four and you can’t really argue with that at the moment. Jesiel back on the bench was a nice surprise, but Maruyama and Takai seem to be working well together. Kawahara didn’t start this game which I guess means he’ll start against Shonan. Ienaga was on the right, did well again and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down like he did at times last year. I’m very happy with the rotation that Hasebe is doing from match to match right now. I think this would be what he'd say he thinks is our best eleven. The only position where I think he might have a dilemma is choosing between Yamada and Erison, as both have been doing…ok. They haven't been bad, but neither has been doing amazingly well so it's quite hard to choose between them right now. But rotation works for me and I hope it works for them. I never liked the whole thing of sticking with the same players forever until they break down, one by one. I don’t have much else to say about us in this game. It was nice to us crank it up a bit in the second half. I enjoyed the goals a lot. The first was quite hilarious in the way that it just dribbled over the line. In the ensuing celebratory melee, someone high-fived me in the eye. It was a small price to pay and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intentional. If it was, I got the upper hand as with the subsequent two goals I managed to not get high-fived in the face by the same person. High-five me in the face once, shame on you. High-five me in the face twice, shame on me. Ito seemed very pleased to have scored and is fast becoming a fan favourite for his passion. He also was apparently irritated by what was perhaps the worst foul throw I have ever seen. Like the tired old git that I am, I often find myself bleating in a whingy voice ’foul throw referee! I can’t believe they didn’t notice it…’. On this occasion the throw was so appallingly bad there was no way anyone could miss it, and the natural reaction was to burst out laughing. Apparently Yamada complained to the ref about the decision which is some prize winning brass balls behaviour. It was around 12 minutes into the second half if you missed it and want to check. It was also quite amusing when about ten minutes later, two of our players tried to take the throw in simultaneously from different positions with different balls. I like the fact that as we were clearly on the up at that stage we wanted to keep things moving. Let’s hope for more throw in giggles caused by our team being relentlessly up for attacking in the future. Oh, and one last word to say that Yamaguchi’s save with his face was pretty brutal. Can’t believe he got up immediately and was ready for the following shot. Well done to him!

Them -

At one stage last year, when the Oniki to Kashima rumours seemed to be being denied, I wondered if maybe we’d be seeing Oniki in charge of FC Tokyo this year. Although that didn’t happen, there was a hint of Oniki in the fact that Tokyo dominated possession but for the most part didn’t seem to threaten that much. Don’t get me wrong, I thought they were well in it in the first half, but a lot of the time they were on the ball was accompanied by Oniki style sideways passing. They had a decent amount of chances, but aside from the face save one, I can’t remember any that came that close. Perhaps this was in part due to them playing my perennial hate figure Nakagawa up front. There was something extremely amusing about seeing Nakagawa standing next to Takai. Takai is 192cm, so I suppose that is almost double the height of FC Tokyo’s Donald Trump-alike. It looked a bit like a heartwarming father and son scene, the ‘father’, who in this case was much younger, towering over the ‘son’, and occasionally letting him have the ball briefly before teaching him a life ain’t easy kind of lesson and taking it off of him. The image was further enhanced by the fact that Nakagawa seemed to be waddling looking like he was a toddler that had recently filled his nappy. Ironically, [Please add your own joke about Nakagawa being 70 years old here. I’m writing this in a bit of a hurry]. I know it’s not very becoming to just be mean about someone on the internet so I should probably stop doing it. But he did do that sliding on the knees goal celebration in front of our fans, when scoring against the club he played for as a youth player. And those kind of things are quite hard to forget. So with that in mind, I’ll make a joke about his hair, which just keeps on getting more ridiculous year by year. When he first came on to warm up it looked like someone had a glued a freshly washed and pressed white handkerchief onto the middle of a totally bald head. I don’t know if he actually is balding, but when you see that whiff of hair that looks like the top curl of a soft serve ice cream you’ve got to think that something funny is going on. As this is all a bit like a personal bullying campaign, let’s spread the net further and make some wisecracks about the stadium music instead. I was trying to put my finger on the ‘vibe’ that was being created by the techno version of ‘The Final Countdown’ and was still pondering it when we moved into the house version of ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’. It wasn’t until Abba’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ came on, that I realised, when my wife said that it felt like a hen night DJ’s playlist. Good to see that Tony from the local Eikaiwa has another string to his bow so now doesn’t have to solely rely on the income from his ‘Laydeez and Jennelmen’ announcing duties. This wouldn’t be a Tamagawa Classico post if I didn’t mention ‘You’ll Never…’. The lack of gusto in their fans' rendition always amuses, but the absolutely suicidal decision to fade out the karaoke backing track halfway though the first verse, presumably imagining that the crowd would be belting it out by that stage, resulted in a complete silence, which initially bewildered, then became very amusing. I presume that was why the music stopped, but it ended up appearing more like a technical error. Also somewhat surprising was that after the game Tony introduced the day's highlights video. Fair play to them for showing our goals, but given that they didn't score, this basically meant that our fans delightedly cheered every highlight, given that they were all either our goals, or FC Toyko missing chances. With the fact that this is supposed to be a football blog in mind, maybe I should write something about their football? They didn’t deserve to lose 3-0. That’ll do.

Ref -

So here you are, the section where the real bitching comes out! Fukushima was the ref in this game. When we had him for the Kashiwa away game I was quite irritated by his refusal to book anyone and his general awfulness. In this game he again didn’t book anyone and… I thought he had a really good game. I’ve got no complaints really. Of course I moaned at the time about plenty of things, but that’s the point of going to the game, isn’t it? I was really impressed with the way he dealt with a bit of handbags from Ienaga and a Tokyo player. Wasn’t sure about the decision that he didn’t give previous to the incident, but that’s because it didn’t go our way. He seemed to easily diffuse what could have become a bit of a boiling point. And after that decision Ienaga was very charged up and that worked out well for us. So yeah, kind of unusual to praise the ref for doing the same thing that I criticised him for doing in a recent post, but it just felt like I didn’t have much to moan about, and that is a very rare thing. I guess we did win though, so maybe if we didn’t I might be moaning a bit more. You will know that I have reached the stage of true enlightenment when I can accept that a ref had a decent game even after we’ve lost.

Next up, Shonan at home on Wednesday and then Machida away on Sunday. It’s a busy schedule so hopefully we’ll see some rotation but hopefully the same kind of result that we got in this game. We have four games in between Shonan at home on the 2nd and Verdy at home on the 20th. So a game every three days, roughly. I’m already peed off about having to write so many blog posts. But they’re a bit easier to write after wins, so please let’s keep that up as long as possible! 

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

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 4. JESIEL

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for OSHIMA 78')
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 78')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 71')
FW 18. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for IENAGA 86')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 86')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Hmmm, I’ve realised I’ve given this no thought whatsoever till this moment and no-one is jumping out to me, so I guess it was an all round decent performance. Would do the usual cop-out thing and give it to the whole team, but instead, let’s go a little left-field and give it to…

HASEBE Shigetoshi - Brought on Ito and three minutes later he scored. Brought on Erison and five minutes later he scored. We’ve all heard of super-subs, but maybe Hasebe could be a super-subber.

Goals

YAMADA (Frontale) 55' 0-1
ITO (Frontale) 73' 0-2
ERISON (Frontale) 83' 0-3

Highlights

Vs FC Tokyo (away) 11/8/24 J League match 26

FC Tokyo 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale

This is the start of a new streamlined Frontale Rabbit blog. It will be like this for the time being as the more important parts of my life are getting a little out of control and I probably shouldn’t be spending so much time writing sarcastic blog posts. So let’s give this new style a go, hopefully with all of the snark still in place.

- This was another welcome win, albeit another one with some caveats. Against Kashiwa we were pretty lucky. Against Kobe, they shot themselves in the foot with some stupid red cards. And in this game, well Tokyo weren’t very good. The stats aside from possession, (which recently seems to more often than not have an opposite correlation with our success in a game), were pretty even, but I can’t really remember ever being that worried in this match. However that may be due at least in part to that fact that….

- I had consumed a few drinks before this game. So perhaps my memory isn’t as clear as it could have been. It was also a brutally hot day. With this in mind, well done to FC Tokyo for turning off the vending machines inside our end and making people queue for ages for ¥300 bottles of soft drinks. I guess the vending machine vends at a lower price so that avenue had to be stopped in order to leverage as much income as possible to pay for their next expensive mid-contract manager dismissal package. During an injury break in the first half I thought I’d pop to the loo and at the same time get some water as I thought it would be horrible at half time. Even at the 30 minute stage there were about 40 people in the single line for the drink stall and given that I’d attended in order to watch a football game rather than the subs warming up at half time I returned to my seat sadly empty handed but thankfully empty bladdered.

- I always like to poke fun at the ‘laydeeeez and jennnelmun’ stylings of the announcer. Today, I think I’ll call him Tony from the local Eikaiwa. On this occasion he seemed to be aping the general mood of some FC Tokyo fans. I don’t know what he’d taken before the game but perhaps in keeping with the oppressive weather, his announcements seemed quite sedated. Apparently so sedated that he made a massive error. Perhaps expecting the atmosphere to be at fever pitch due it being ’THE BIGGEST DERBY BETWEEN TAMAGAWA TEAMS IN THE WORLD!’ he made the big error of dropping out the usually extremely loud backing track for ユールネバ (as I think it’s referred to among Tokyo fans) halfway through the first verse revealing the utter silence in the ground. Perhaps the lyrics to the verse are a bit tricky to remember or perhaps no-one ever really sings it, but I’d say that Tony definitely overestimated the white heat of the Tokyo support on this occasion and instead triggered a giggling fit in me. I’m sorry Tony, but you made a big mistake.

- As did Nakagawa when it came to his hair. He is pushing on in his apparent desire to resemble a British granny in a bar in Benidorm, tanned to the point of crispiness from five days straight on the beach with seemingly thinning grey hair that has just about been disguised as blond but is clearly not. Either that or he’s looking for a role as a mini me for Donald Trump, with his orange skin tone and unruly yet fake looking shaft of weirdly coloured hair spiking out at a jaunty angle. At one point in the game when he made a tackle something dropped to the floor and he had to run and pick it up. I suppose it was a shin pad, but given that it seems that his goal is to either look as old as possible or perhaps conceal the fact that he is very old, it could as easily have been his dentures. Nakagawa, it doesn’t matter how many years pass, I will still detest you for your shithead goal celebration right in front of our fans.

- This game has reinforced my confusion when it comes to FC Tokyo and pyrotechnics. I liked to laugh at them for their national stadium ‘atmosphere’ building flame throwers but had to take that back to some extent when other teams used the same things in the same venue. It seems the flame throwers came as a job lot with the stadium hire, showing quite how hip the people who run the national stadium games are. In this game though Tokyo went big with the fireworks before the game. Everyone loves fireworks, don’t they, so that was kind of fun. The problem with having a mini display before a football game though is that the smoke just hung around for ages. Our first goal probably came in part due to the fact that no Tokyo defender could see through the gloom as the cross came over. Although the smoke had begun to clear by the time the second went in in similar fashion. And definitely had by the time the third went in… in similar fashion. Three headed goals in a game! And three goals for the third game in a row. Football is fun right now so let’s enjoy it and not worry about the possible reasons behind those wins. 

- Erm, the ref was Nishimura. But once again, he was… alright wasn’t he? I don’t remember anything even of note. This is all a bit uncomfortable for me. Sure we’ll get a stinker of an officiating performance soon though. 

- Finally, that FC Tokyo substitution sponsored slogan seems a bit harsh. It can’t feel very good if you’re leaving the pitch and they flash up ‘Change For The Better’ as they announce your removal. I won’t truly know how it feels till I hear one of my students say ‘thank god that wanker is leaving’ as I finish a class, but at least in that situation I would have the pride of knowing that my students have the ability to insult in perfect English, so could probably take some satisfaction from that.

Next up YFM at home next weekend. Would be lovely to continue this winning run and lovely to continue scoring three goals every game. Not sure if I’d like the Kobe self destruction route or the Tokyo not-at-all-with-it route to a win though. To be honest, if we get a win, I’ll be delighted however it comes about. Oniki said recently that if we win every remaining game we can still get 70 points, which is absolutely an amazingly ballsy thing to say considering how terrible we’ve been for most of the year, but perhaps shows that Oniki is a positive thinking kind of guy. If we’re thinking about trends continuing, and Yamada continues to score twice every game for the rest of the year he’d end up on 35 goals which would be pretty impressive but unfortunately wouldn’t be a record so I guess he’ll need to get a couple of hat tricks on the way. And if I continue to enjoy alcohol the way I have after the Kobe game and this match, I too might be reaching some kind of surprisingly high level, but perhaps not in a positive way. Long may the former things continue but maybe I should have a little rest from the latter.

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 2. TAKAI Kota

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

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

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

Subs

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 84')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for OSHIMA 73')

MF 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 57')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for YAMADA 84')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke  (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 73')

 
Goals

YAMADA (Frontale) 15' 0-1
YAMADA (Frontale) 20' 0-2
TAKAI (Frontale) 72' 0-3


My Frontale Man Of The Match

Although the details of the game are a bit vague in my mind, I think that given how I’ve long been saying our starting striker never scores and that I don’t think him starting there works and then he’s gone on to score two in all of the last three games, it has to go to…

YAMADA Shin - scoring goals is what he’s in the team for and he’s doing it. And you’ve got to love him for his Vai De La performance too, haven’t you? Surprisingly it doesn’t get old.

Highlights

Vs FC Tokyo (home) 30/3/24 J League match 5

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 0 FC Tokyo

Ah…. It’s lovely when we win, isn’t it? It’s even better when it’s against a local rival in a somewhat artificially constructed derby. And by a few clear goals! Ambassador, you are really spoiling us. I’ve come away from this game with scandalously few notes which means this is all going to be a bit slapdash but I’m sure you’d expect nothing else. As the next game is fast approaching and it’s already Monday evening when I’m writing this, let’s get into it.

First of all a few words about the latest starting line up. Sung-Ryong was back in goal. I think I said before that I think there’s not a great deal of difference who we have in goal this year and with that in mind, I think it’s very much a case of you hang on to the spot unless you make a massive cock up.  In the cold light of day rather than during the game, I’m not sure Kami flapping at that cross that hit the bar against Kashima was a total clanger, but it seems that might have been the reason for another change in goal. This game, with FC Tokyo having just the ONE shot on target, (I think in second half injury time!), is unlikely to give us any new insight into who should be in goal. I will say though that the save was a pretty good one, and instinctively I feel more comfortable when Sung-Ryong is in goal. That opinion is a bit harsher on Kami than it was last year though. In central defence I thought we’d already tried all the possible combinations but I was wrong! Jesiel and Takai was a new one! I don’t know if them playing together is the magic formula though. I think pretty much every centre back has made at least one horrible blunder this year. People might comment that Takai has been in the team for our two 2024 clean sheets. I’d probably counter that by saying that he was in the team when we conceded five times against a newly promoted team too though. Yamamoto didn’t play, I think for the first time we’ve had Oniki’s first choice 11 out. I don’t think you can really make a connection between his absence and us winning though as I think he’s consistently been our best midfielder this year. But it seems that he and Wakizaka are probably best in the same position and I can't see Oniki dropping Wakizaka. Hmmm. It was nice to see Tachibanada back where he plays best though. Of course though this meant that the only natural option at right back was Segawa (hehe), who is presumably ahead of Sasaki, Sai, Ominami and Tanabe there. I think that’s all of the people in the squad who play right back who weren’t selected. Up front Erison returned from injury, much to my delight. Sadly we didn’t get the (at least) one goal his appearance normally guarantees. But he really is our best option there as he’s just a brute. And a brute with a great eye for goal. (Well apart from the fresh air shot/half scuff in the second half when it seemed that we were focusing on experimenting with different ways to waste great scoring opportunities. Replacing the banned Marcinho was Tono, who finally got a chance to play in something like his best position. I think having him there gave our attack a bit of variation. Not saying that Marcinho shouldn’t play, but just that we shouldn’t rely on him so heavily, and so predictably. So that’s the changes in the team. I think Segawa had a pretty good game to be honest. Likewise Miura. The midfield looked really solid and the amount of time that we just robbed the ball from FC Tokyo shortly after they entered our half was lovely! We scored three times! Amazing! We carried on attacking right up till the end instead of taking the ball to the corner flag constantly after the 85th minute. It was fun! I am fully aware though that this is very much coloured by the fact that we won. So with that in mind, let’s get negative!

The first goal was an absolute gift from FC Tokyo. In fact maybe that actually made the first goal going in all the more enjoyable. The other two goals came after Tokyo were down to 10 men after a very welcome red card for their keeper which probably decided the game, even though the margin at that stage was only one goal. I think that vocally I celebrated the red card a bit too much, particularly as there was lengthy VAR check after my celebration before it was finally given. The second goal went in off Nagatomo’s backside which also was very amusing. OG = お尻ゴール. Hang on this is supposed to be the negative part and instead I’m posting enjoyable stuff… (Before I switch back to that, let me just say that Yamauchi’s assist and his subsequent celebration was a real joy). However, let’s not forget that quite a lot of the first half of this match was basically both teams focusing all of their efforts on intensely pressing the opposition’s short goal kicks to absolutely no effect. It was nice of FC Tokyo to join in with our usual Frontale performance art piece of futile yet beautiful repetition. Any excitement about us winning has to be tempered by the fact that they seemed to be able to do almost nothing when they approached our goal. I don’t know if that’s their preferred front three this year, but if it is, they must have really been having an off day, as aside from their late fast break and only shot on target, they never looked like they were getting anywhere near close to scoring. Matsuki, who obviously is a contender for number one hate figure, looked pretty useless I thought. Delighted! Araki whose parent club makes him a perfect fit for the same award was also anonymous. Lovely! But with this in mind, you’ve got to say that any delight about our comfortable win has to be qualified by the overall poor quality of the game. With this in mind though, I think the performance wasn’t actually that important. I don’t particularly think we’ve been unlucky so far this year and have largely got what we deserved. But a first home win should hopefully create a bit of good feeling around the team. It certainly did in the pub afterwards! (Although obviously the team weren’t in the pub with us). So to sum up, I’d probably say the right thing to do is to delight in the big win, whilst understanding that the performance was by no means as impressive as the result suggests, and while the goals put a nice gloss on things, the real significant things are the three points and the boost it will hopefully give us.

FC Tokyo fans either claiming some regal heritage or
really should go and get that checked out by a doctor

Oh, almost forgot to mention the ref. I thought he was a ref that let a hell of a lot of things go, but officiated the game in a pretty even handed way. So I suppose that is almost…. praise. So let’s undermine that by saying that there was one absolutely horrendous bit of reffing from him when Ienaga was being relentlessly fouled, but managed to keep the ball, and the ref decided to wait until Ienaga had shrugged off the fouler and played a nice pass into the middle towards the goal until he blew up for the free kick, which from my scant knowledge of the rules of the game seems to be the complete opposite to how you’re supposed to play the advantage in these kind of situations. See, I couldn’t resist a bit of a moan, could I? But Ueda did… alright. Which in 2024 J1 amounts to high praise to be honest. A quick look back at posts on previous games he’s been in charge of suggests that he’s either pretty good, or absolutely terrible, with the one constant being that he doesn’t give much. Thankfully he went for a pretty good on this occasion! And before you start thinking that my past opinons were based more on our results than the ref’s performance, the last two games we’ve had with him were a big win where I thought he was terrible and a dodgy draw where I thought he was pretty good.

Ref Ueda about to commit an absolutely crunching
foul to break up a Frontale attack

Next up, YFM away on Wednesday in what is a bit of a local derby packed couple of weeks, because after that we have Machida at home. I don’t know if the fixture computer does this on purpose. You might think it would make sense to put the closer to home goes in around Golden Week as loads of people are traveling at that time. Instead, the fixture computer, which is almost certainly a modified fax machine, has given us Sanfrecce Hiroshima away and Avispa Fukuoka away around that time, nicely slotting in Urawa at home in the middle lest anyone get the idea of combing the two away trips. And then after Avispa we’re back home against Consadole before retuning to Kyushu for the second time in two weeks. My league game 100% attendance is going to be killed off very early on this season. YFM away will show us quite how positive we should be after this game. They aren’t doing particularly well this year either but it’s never an easy game and they are almost certainly my most disliked team in the league. Although Kashima and Urawa obviously are right up there too. Sorry this post has been light on anything amusing and hasn’t even contained that much moaning and opposition baiting. I guess it’s just a relief that we’re back going in the right direction. Whether that is a lucky accident or not, I guess we’ll find out soon.

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 34')
DF 2. TAKAI Kota

DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON
FW 17. TONO Daiya

Subs
Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for SEGAWA 64')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 90+5')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 82')
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for TONO 82')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for WAKIZAKA 90+5')

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 34' 1-0

YAMADA (Frontale) 83' 2-0
TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 90+2' 3-0

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

This is a bit of a tricky one for a change. It could easily be someone from the midfield as the ball just didn’t seem to be able to get through it when Tokyo attacked. And it could have been a few other players too, but I dunno, for me one player stood out slightly and that was…

MIURA Sota - Has had a reasonably positive start to his career with us but like everyone has had a few dodgy games. But in this match he just seemed to be at the heart of a lot of our positive play and looked to have really found his feet.

 

Highlights