Vs Urawa Reds (home) 5/4/26 J League East match 9

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 2 Urawa Reds 

Wonderful, wonderful! Football is great! I’ve been saying that all season, right? I know it’s slightly unorthodox of Hasebe to try to lower our expectations as much as possible in order to make the joy of this last minute victory over a despicable rival all the sweeter, but damn it has made me feel very good after what was basically going to be an extremely insignificant match in an extremely insignificant, (as we’re so far off the pace), half season. This match was the second of a run of game against the teams that I consider to make up the most scummy of tiers of J League clubs (in my opinion, naturally). The first against Machida didn’t exactly go as we might have hoped but at the same time didn’t go as badly as we might have expected. This game wasn’t great, but the outcome definitely was, and the manner in which we got to that outcome was quite lovely. Would be fantastic if we could continue with the wins as we go on to face Kashima and YFM. I don’t have a massive amount of confidence that we will, but hopefully this win will have given the squad a bit of a boost. Don’t for a moment imagine that it being a 3-2 win meant that it was a quality game between two good teams. Certainly we were quite evenly matched, but that was because both teams seemed intent on trying to play football at a skill level that was absolutely above their abilities. It was a bit like two pub teams who, whilst getting smashed watched some top quality football on TV in the local on Saturday night and decided to have a go at recreating it hungover on Sunday morning. If someone asked me how we score goals or how we intend to try and score goals I would not be able to tell them because all we usually do is move the ball slowly and patiently up the field and then give it away before getting the chance to have a shot. By contrast, Urawa’s modus operandi seemed to be to grimly hang on in defence before launching the ball forward and sprinting after it. To their credit, this approach at least resulted in them having some chances. The only reason we were even at half time was due to a hilarious own goal that so embarrassed the scorer that he had to get injured and subbed in order to get out of sight and presumably have a little cry. Anyway, I’ve changed the usual headings a little this week for no particular reason. So here we go.

Good day / bad day -

- Good day for people who like seeing scummy sides defeated. Coming into the game both the teams were in a bit of a state. Delighted that Urawa are now in more of a state. There was maybe even a feeling that this match was something of a sack race, with the defeated team getting one step closer to a managerial change. Whether that will happen at Urawa, we’ll see. But it’s now four defeats in a row for them. So a good day for people who like seeing Urawa suffer, mainly due to problems they create for themselves.
 

- A good day for Romanic and Kawahara, who both scored. Hopefully that goal will set Romanic on a little scoring run as I felt he just needed his first goal to get going properly. And good to see Kawahara score as he could justifiably feel quite aggrieved for getting dropped after the Machida game I think. More about that in a minute. 

- Bad day for the club behind the scenes. As we’ve toiled a bit this year I’ve got increasingly onboard those who see our travails as having quite a lot to do with the top brass, (obviously as well as the players and manager who clearly also have some responsibility). If you compare the home and away games between us and Urawa it’s always evident that they give us a tiny away allocation and we are happy to give them as many tickets as they want. Of course the club wants to sell tickets to get money, but I think it’s probably more important to try to win games, and intentionally dulling our home advantage by inviting a massive away support is not going to be helpful in that respect. It’s true that the attendance would have been pretty bad with a smaller away allocation, (not Machida vs FC Tokyo bad obviously, but pretty bad), but the reason there were so many tickets available for resale is almost certainly to do with how awful our games have been this year. But maybe the top brass aren't able to make this connection. I will always go to the games, but at times this year the match has definitely been the thing I have to suffer through in order to enjoy the post game activities. I would be quite happy to see changes at the top. I think it’s unlikely, but if we had someone in charge who had any interest in or understanding of football, I think it would help.

- From a player point of view, it wasn’t a great day for Yamamoto and Wakizaka again. As I say every week. Yamamoto’s cross for the winner was great though. I can’t remember us scoring a goal like that for a very long time. So maybe there is a tactical reason why two of our best players aren't doing very well this year. Wakizaka is confusing me. The things he said after the massive defeat against YFM were great. The fact that he said we shouldn't over celebrate penalty wins was good too. But he did recently seem to suggest that the reason we hadn’t won against Machida was at least in part because he wasn’t playing. This seems quite delusional as he’s been playing in the rest of the games this year and the second half against Machida was better than a lot of our other matches. Of course the fact that he was back in the side and we won makes it look like I’m an idiot and he was right, and almost certainly the former is true. But he still isn’t playing very well, and it seems like he isn’t going to be dropped. If he’s playing we don’t seem to be able to break away from the rotten formation we are apparently tied to. Hopefully this win is a fresh start for us and we can forget about everything that's gone on so far this season.

- Hasebe… hmmmm. Good and bad day, I think. Good day for him personally in that he’s probably moved one step back from getting sacked. I don’t think it would have happened, but it definitely should have at least been being considered. Probably not such a good day when you consider that once again his starting line up and tactics proved utterly ineffective and once again it wasn’t until the plan was thrown out the window that we started making things happen. And for us to concede so early in both halves (thankfully the one in the second half was ruled out), doesn’t say a lot about the way he motivates the players at the start of the game and at half time. I was pleased when he changed the formation for the Machida game, but equally disappointed that in this game we went back to the same old thing. Perhaps it was enough for him to be seen to be doing something, and changing back to the same old stuff for the next game was fine. Miyagi, who had one of his best games for us can’t have been too happy to be dropped for the following match. I just wish Hasebe would do something a bit more often instead of just tweaking our old style which clearly doesn’t work any more. But anyway, let’s hope that this game can be a reset for everyone and we can get ourselves together for the rest of the half season.

- Oh, one more good thing, NO PENALTIES!

WOW! - 

I mean, the Urawa fans can always at least get a share of this. That could have been said for sure even before the match as it just seems to be inherent in their support. However, two guys wanted to make sure their names were up for this, so put in truly horrific WOW! performances. Or perhaps if they were aiming at taking this title, you might have to say that put in a great performance as without a doubt the ref and the VAR ref absolutely deserved this. First of all, on the pitch Fukushima was just shit. Maybe it’s because we merely whinge after the event rather than angrily getting up in the ref’s face, but it seems that more often than not, in our recent games the ref has been more than wiling to take advice and get guidance from the opposition players. I know I always think J League refs are awful, but when we got to the pub after the match, the first thing the normally rational regulars did was to comment on how bad the ref had been. For the most part the yellow cards went only one way.  Wakizaka's yellow was an absolutely clear cut one so he got that right, but similar actions from Urawa players in similar positions and constant hacks and kicks from them apparently weren’t worthy of punishment. Erison’s card was an absolute joke. But what do you expect from the reliably terrible J League ref community? I have long said that Araki hates us, so I was filled with some trepidation when I saw his name down for VAR. Maybe Araki not only hates us, but also hates football as he seemed to want to take every opportunity to slowly make his judgements, ensuring that any enjoyment the crowd might be getting from the game was slowly and relentlessly undermined. As it's something I always say and always seem to have the need to say, I’m going to separate this next bit so it’s easy for me to cut and paste in future blog posts

.

VAR is supposed to deal with clear and obvious mistakes, so it doesn’t make sense that it takes five minutes to judge whether a clear or obvious mistake has been made. 

VAR overturning the offside decision in the first half took so long that even though the game kicked off at 16:00, I started worrying that I wouldn’t make it in time for last orders. And looking at the replay on DAZN, even when the decision was made after endless procrastination, I  still don’t think they have enough evidence to overturn the original decision. VAR’s intervention helping to rule out the goal in the second half was equally ridiculous, but this time for the fact that it was so clear that the goal shouldn’t stand immediately, but still Araki and Fukushima decided they should drag it out so they could make themselves the centre of attention for even longer. Apparently they weren’t sure if a player lying on the floor and tripping over the goal keeper counts as interfering with play. As there is clearly no point me even bothering to write these things, I’ll just finish with a couple more statements for easy cutting and pasting in the future. 



Of course it’s a difficult job to be a referee, but it must take some real effort to be as clueless as the J League referees are.

In my opinion, VAR is a blight on football, but I’m sure not everyone agrees. What I would imagine everyone does agree with though is that it’s not good that J League VAR takes an interminably long time, and even after these massive disruptions, due to the apparent idiocy of the officials, you can’t even be sure that they will make the right decision. Even though whilst taking all that time to make the decision they probably would have enough time to read the whole fucking rule book cover to cover.

Aaaaahhhhhh. What a lovely finish to the game that was. And we have something nice to think about for a whole week. Schadenfreude is never particularly nice, but when you’re enjoying the misery of the Urawa Lads, Garçons, Boys, Striplings, Fledglings, Tots, Kiddies, Nippers, Chicos, Ragazzi, Rapazes, Chaps, Males and Tykes, (perhaps they haven’t used some of those for a flag or supporter group yet, but it’s surely only a matter of time), I think it is perfectly acceptable. So let's enjoy it, right up until next week when we come up against Kashima. I can’t remember what their fans call themselves but judging by a recent photo, I would say that ‘shirtless, slightly overweight, middle-aged, should-know-better knuckle-draggers’ might work. This is probably our last chance to do something which might have some effect on the outcome of the league, so hopefully we’ll be charged up to put a dent in someone else’s half season and make the East at least slightly more interesting. Clearly my mood might not be as buoyant next week, but until then, I’m going to enjoy this week to the max.  

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 43') 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 45+4')

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
MF 15. MYOGAN Toya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 89')
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 69')
MF 26. YUI Kota

DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke

FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for ITO 76')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 69')

Man of the match

Dunno really. No-one particularly stood out. But Miura did well again and as I’ve slagged him off quite a lot recently, I should at least mention him. But in the absence of an obvious stand out winner, let’s give it a miss this week.

 

Goals

NEMOTO (Urawa) 2' 0-1
OWN GOAL (Urawa) 9' 1-1
KANEKO (Urawa) 62' 1-2
ROMANIC (Frontale) 77' 2-2
KAWAHARA (Frontale) 90+4' 3-2

Highlights

 

Vs Machida Zelvia (home) 31/8/25 J League match 28

Kawasaki Frontale 5 - 3 Machida Zelvia 

We’re gonna win the league! We’re unstoppable. Even ‘illness’ and injury can’t stop us. We can put two goalies on the bench for fun as we only need three or four subs per game. 4-3 then 5-3, so presumably next we’ll win 6-3. Everything is marvelous. Regular readers of this blog will probably realise that I’m not being entirely serious here. But all the same this was a joyfully exciting win against a real shitbag team. To introduce an element of reality to this, it would be wrong to not mention the fact in the last two games the opposition goalies have made one save in total. Whether you want to interpret that as our shooting being so amazing that all but one of our shots were unsavable, or that we’ve come up against two very dodgy keepers, well that's up to you. To add a further dose of reality, you’ve got to think that even if we won the remainder of our league games, the gap to the top is already too large for us to get anywhere near the teams up there without some very weird results. But let’s not be too negative. This is fun football again, slightly reminiscent of the old Kazama glory days. (Hmmm, those glory days when we never won anything, but you know what I mean, right?). It’s difficult for me to type this blog post as, much like happens to a certain orange president with his handshaking, the sheer amount of high fives I’ve done in the last two games is enough to make even someone in perfect health, (like the orange bastard and I both clearly are) end up with significant bruising. (Presumably on a part of the hand that is not involved in the handshake or high fives). Immediately after the game, whilst enjoying the highs of handsomely beating a bunch of terrible wankers, I perhaps complained a little about the standard of our goalkeeping, (their third goal was irritating me quite a bit). But in the cold light of day, I don’t think we need any negativity here, do we? Yeah, we look like we’ll concede a goal with every opposition attack, but as long as we keep scoring on most of our attacks and keep making chances, let’s be positive!

Us -

It was delightful to see just two goalkeepers in the match day squad. But I don’t think we’re really out of the woods on the illness front yet. Ienaga is now nowhere to be seen. Which confirms my suspicions that he wasn’t fit anyway. Still no sign of Romanic either. But it was nice to see Uremovic back after his… cameo. Marcinho was back from his ban but started on the bench which I thought was probably fair enough as Tachibanada had done a good job there against Nagoya. It did make a difference when Marcinho came on though so it’s good to see him back and hopefully banging. Slightly amusing that he celebrated his comeback goal after accumulated yellow cards by getting another one for taking off his shirt. Wakizaka was back and I guess we don’t know if he was ill or injured. He didn’t have a great game, (looked a bit off the pace which I guess doesn’t get us closer to knowing why he was out), and I would have thought Ozeki would have continued in that spot but now he has gone missing. Your guess is as good as mine. But I guess he’s either injured or ill. And Jesiel and Miyagi were back too! So it’s great yeah, all our worries are over? But Ozeki… and Maruyama is injured as we knew from the Nagoya game and out for 6 months apparently. But anyway, we attacked, we shot and we scored. Perhaps Machida might say they'd had a tougher schedule as they played midweek, (save your moans Machida. Did you see our early season schedule?) and I think Kuroda was saying that they had players missing, (yeah, and we didn’t?!). But the fact is they’ve spent a lot of money assembling a team of rotters, had come off a long unbeaten record and we smacked them. Well kind of. We gave them a couple of goals due to our own shortcomings so perhaps we could say that they got lucky when it came to the scoreline. It certainly wasn’t a great display of defending or goalkeeping from either team. But anyway, I’m trying to be reasonably positive here. But yeah, let’s not get carried away as the last two goalies we’ve faced have been very generous and the fact that even on a sweltering day we only made four subs instead of five suggests that even if we’re not down to the bare bones anymore, we're still not exactly blessed with options. Fingers crossed for no more disasters. But a really enjoyable win, mainly because Machida are so grotty.

Them - 

Grotty. Do I need to say any more? Kuroda was rocking his summer look. Basically the same horrible tshirt and suit combo with those brighter than the sun white trainers, but without the jacket. His beard annoys me too. Not sure it’s a very sensible choice for a man of his age. Or actually for anyone of any age. But at least on a younger person you could at least blame it on exuberance and naivety. Soma remains an absolute arsehole, the epitome of the type of player who rolls around mortally injured and on every revolution makes sure he checks if the ref has got his cards out yet to check if he needs to continue rotating. The transformation of Soma from a kind of semi-likeable, bit cheeky little player at Nagoya to the shithead beast of a cheat he is now is truly breathtaking. There are plenty more objectionable players on their team but it was a little disappointing to not see Tani in goal because he totally would have shit the bed again and I would have really enjoyed barracking him. Oh well. 

blokes! 😂

It’s not just the players who are arseholes though. It seems that some of their fans are trying to get in on the act. There was a truly horrific selection of flags on display with more than a nod to Urawa style wannabe hooliganism with the massive Stone Island flag and one that somewhat amusingly said ‘blokes’ (Urawa had already taken ‘lads’, ‘boys’ and ‘garcons’). They also have gone down the loads-of-nationalist flags route that Gamba, Sanfrecce and Kashima do (and actually thinking about it Urawa too). I wonder if there’s any aspect of their support that they haven’t stolen from another club. Certainly some of their songs sounded quite familiar. As I always feel I need to say though, it’s obviously only an element of their fan base. At the same time they do seem to be getting a bit of a reputation for having a part of their fan base who seem to be absolute pricks. Anyway, grotty manager, grotty players, grotty clogger tactics and some grotty fans. Oh and don’t forget the grotty long throws too. Poor Shimoda for having to play there for so long. 

Ref - 

Unusually, as I said last time we had Fukushima, surprisingly little to complain about here. Of course I moaned a lot during the game, but can’t say he got anything particularly wrong. He’s notoriously card shy so obviously I would have preferred a few more to be dished out to an unsurprisingly dirty Machida team. But at least he seemed fairly consistent. I quite enjoyed the female linesperson in front of us when she managed to slightly disguise a throw in signal she’d incorrectly given which was overruled by the ref by signalling to the left with her flag in her left arm and then circling it round to end up signaling to the right with her arm across her face. It’s an action that is surprisingly enjoyable to recreate. I did it a few times in the pub after the game and have done it again now as I’m typing this. 

Lovely wins against horrible teams. Who’s next? Oh! Urawa! So the horrible teams run continues and hopefully the winning run can continue too. I still wonder what might happen when we come up against better opposition, but at the same time, maybe we’re… playing reasonably well. Who knows really? Wednesday were away in Saitama and then back home on Sunday in a two-legged Levain Cup quarter final. I guess there’s no point speculating who might play. We don’t have enough players to rotate really, so we should just hope that we only have the one goalie on the bench, I suppose. I never enjoy going to the Saitama stadium. Some might think this is because of the white hot intimidating atmosphere, but it’s more the absolutely dull walk from the station and the packed trains afterwards. And of course the fact that there is nothing to do in the absolute wilderness area that the stadium is in. Hopefully we'll get the full booing treatment that they give out when their team soils themselves after a couple of minutes of the game. Nobody cares about the Levain Cup until they’ve got nothing else to care about and as we’re in that situation now, I suspect this is a priority for us. Well, along with the league which obviously we’re going to win, eh?

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
FW 9. ERISON


Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 4. JESIEL (on for UREMOVIC 75')
FW 23. MARCINHO  (Yellow card 90+11') (on for TACHIBANADA 46')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for ITO 61')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota

FW 29. MYOGAN Toya
DF 30. NODA Hiroto 

FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for ERISON 80')

DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito 

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match 

Predictable as it is to give it to him, I think it has to go to...

ERISON - two goals, one assist, a very funny bit of side to side shuffling to try to trick a Machida defender who he then just barged over instead and some tears in the hero interview afterwards. Please let him stay fit. Please!!!!

 

Goals

ITO (Frontale) 20' 1-0
NA (Machida) 28' 1-1
SHIMODA (Machida) 36' 1-2
ERISON (Frontale) 45+4' 2-2
MIYAGI (Frontale) 65' 3-2
FUJIO (Machida) 71' 3-3
ERISON (Frontale) 78' 4-3
MARCINHO (Frontale) 90+10' 5-3

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 Kashiwa Reysol (away) 22/2/25 J League match 2

Kashiwa Reysol 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Hmmmm. Well that’s complicated things a little bit hasn’t it? Although there were some seeds of doubt sewn after the last slightly lacklustre match against Central Coast Mariners, we could say that the reason we were a bit rubbish was to do with us playing the reserves. We can’t say the same about this match though. We were back to almost full strength but our play was absolutely nowhere near any kind of concept of strength. Of course it’s still early days, so much too early to jump to any conclusions, but this match was quite reminiscent of mid to late period Oniki Frontale when it came to pointless passing at the back. The only twist being that instead of the passing being safe pointless passing, in this match every pointless pass came with a high level of danger. But I’m going to be slightly positive and say that this was in part due to Kashiwa being a fair bit better than in recent years. Thankfully they weren’t better enough to take all of their chances though. As there’s a not a great deal to say, (particularly when it comes to things other than “we were a bit crap”), let’s rattle through this.

What have we learnt from this game then? I’d say we can be sure that Yamaguchi is now definitely Hasebe’s first choice. Whether that is a good thing or not, well, I guess we’ll see when we face a more clinical team. Kashiwa had three shots on target in this game, so we finally had a chance to see what Yamaguchi can do. The two saves from the move in the first half that represented the first two of these were pretty good. There probably wasn’t much he could have done about their goal too as if they hadn’t scored after being given so much free space it would have been a crime against football. So, yeah, perhaps the jury is still out on him. I’m a bit confused about Ito and Ienaga, as I suspected both had been injured because they weren’t being included but then both were available today. Perhaps both were just minor injuries. With both involved today I’d say it’s clear that Ito is ahead of Ienaga for that starting spot. However, Patrick Verhon, whose position in the pecking order is also still a mystery was missing today so who knows what we can read into that. Still too early to work out if it’s just the fact that Hasebe rotates more, (and to be honest, everyone rotates more than recent Oniki). The problem today was just that we were so dull and lifeless. Of course at the start of this season we’ve come to expect a boring first half  and then a stepping up of our level, but on this occasion us being boring coincided with the opposition trying to batter the door down, so a goalless and dull on our side first half looked like a real bonus. We struggled to even get out of our own half for most of it. Sadly the second half gear change didn’t really happen again. Well I guess we changed a little, maybe from neutral to first gear for a little while but then on occasions accidentally slipped into reverse. The second half was an improvement but that sounds a bit grand when you consider that the only possible way was up from the terrible (but fortunate) first half. I haven’t seen replays of what from my pretty bad angle looked like a certain penalty we were denied in the first half and our offside goal on the second half, but when I try to think of anything else of note in the game, all I can think of is the frustrating sight of our players trying to walk the ball directly though defenders and into the net. Yamada did not have a good game. Recently he never passes if he’s anywhere in the final third. We gave the ball away a lot and when we had it, more often than not did nothing with it. So not the most positive of performances. I was a bit confused by the subs. Kasahara wasn’t having a great game but Tachibanada had a dodgy one on Tuesday. And Ienaga on for Ito seemed like it would be a step backwards when it came to positive attacking (to be fair to him though, he did alright when he came on).

The problem was that nothing really worked at all, so maybe I should give some credit to Kashiwa, who I would say frustrated and nullified us, but to be honest I think a decent amount of nullification was self-inflicted. But it’s a great shame for us that they seem to have got their act together and no longer want to gift us goals. So a little praise for them here before I go on to make fun of the ridiculous music they played for their team announcement, an unusual and close to unlistenable mix of spaghetti western trumpets and Teutonic techno, all the time threatening to break into some classic J League style shit-rock, a style that is characterised by pounding electronic drum beats, weak trebly riffing and truly horrible fret-wanking. Aside from this ‘hilarious’ banter about their choice of music, all I have to say is that they defended stoutly, pissed around with the ball for an apparently random amount of time to lull us into a false sense of security and then attacked quickly and in numbers. We were lucky not to concede more. They were much better than us in the first half and I’m not sure I could say that we were sufficiently better than them in the second to deserve a draw. So with that in mind, let’s be kind of slightly positive. I don’t think they’ll finish near the bottom of the league this year, so maybe this will turn out to have been a pretty good result after all.

A few words on the ref. Without having seen replays of what I considered to be the two major dubious decisions in the match I’ll have to go with my gut on the large amount of other terrible decisions he made and say he was shit. I know there has been a rule change so that yellow cards don’t get handed out so often. However, on checking previous blog posts I’ve seen that Fukushima was always a ref that didn’t like to book players, so I guess it’s no surprise that he was even more reluctant this year. I can understand that maybe players getting bans from excessive yellows all the time is a drag, but I’m not sure the solution is to basically abandon the rules of the game. Yamada though on goal and hauled down by a defender, not even a yellow. Was delighted when the ref thwarted a promising Kashiwa attack by bringing play back for a Kashiwa free kick though. Great work Fukushima! In a way I guess I should just stop writing the ref section as we know they will be crap, and they are pretty much always crap, but you know, they are all crap in slightly different ways though. And they deserve having their feet held to the fire a little otherwise they might get even worse. Bring back Judge Replay on DAZN! Although I suppose that part of the reason it ended was because they were having to expose the incompetence of the refs on a weekly basis, so perhaps it wasn’t fulfilling the brief of educating the viewing public as to why decisions were made. After all, there are only so many ways you can say ‘the ref messed up’ before it all gets a bit repetitive. As I was in the front row of what is a pretty small stand, naturally my view wasn’t the best. But I’m pretty sure some of these moans are right. Hopefully… [A quick update, I’ve now checked the two ‘dubious’ decisions that went against us. The offside goal looks marginal and it seems that they only had one angle, (at least only one angle was shown on the replay),  and looks a bit too close to have been checked so quickly but I do always say that VAR should be used for clear and obvious errors and this wasn’t really clear. Wouldn’t have minded a bit of a deeper check though, as with my Frontale cap on, I don’t think Marcinho is offside, particularly when you consider the linesman wasn’t level with the play and the replay isn’t properly side on either. But never mind, these things happen. The other major incident in the first half which I thought should be a penalty is a bit more confusing. Sure, the defender doesn’t know that Ito is about to appear in front of him when he swings his leg back to hoof the ball, but the fact that he does get between the defender and the ball and gets booted in the back of the leg but the ref gives a free kick to Kashiwa, seems a bit dubious. Actually, it seems baffling to me. Sure there was no intention but if a player accidentally handled in the box, I’m pretty sure it would be a penalty, so I don’t get what the difference is here. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the ref being pretty bad, but the VAR guy having an even lower profile. Basically the decision seems to have been that Ito fouled their defender either by hurting the defender’s foot by placing his leg in the way, or by unfairly surprising the poor delicate soul. The fact that Kashiwa fans behind the goal seem to be disgusted by Ito’s ‘foul’ is more than a little surprising. So, I reckon we were definitely robbed in at least one way, but you know, as we weren’t great, I’m not going to get too upset about it.]

I don’t know why I’m devoting a paragraph of its own to this, but what’s with the new goal kick thing that lots of teams are doing, where the centre back takes it and passes it to the keeper to start the usual interminable extremely slow build? I don’t think there’s been a rule change that has made this a desirable thing to do. I can’t work out why it is a desirable thing to do to be honest, as more often than not in this match it resulted in either a centre back or the keeper slice-hoofing the ball clear to an opposition midfielder. Maybe all J League managers saw a big foreign team doing it and thought that it had to immediately be implemented in the J League. I was initially kind of irritated that we’d come up with a new way to waste set pieces but then noticed that we were not alone and everyone was doing it. Anyway, I haven’t described it very clearly, but if you know what’s going on, please let me know as I’m a bit baffled.

Next up Avispa away on Wednesday for the Hasebe derby, (can we call it that? Perhaps…). They haven’t had a good start to the season and whilst we’d had a pretty good one, (at least until today), these kind of games where a team faces their recently departed manager do tend to go the way of revenge sometimes, so I’m not massively optimistic about it. But at the same time when you consider how much didn’t work in this game, you’ve got to think it’s good to get back in the saddle quickly and sort things out. There you go! It took me until right at the end, but I’ve found just a touch of that recently discovered Frontale Rabbit optimism again.
 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KAWAHARA 62')
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 82')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for MIURA 82')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 82')
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for ITO 72')
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Hmmm not a massive amount of options here, but I’ll give it out in the interest of saying something positive. If his goal had been allowed, Ito might have got this for sentimental reasons, but as aside from that well taken finish he didn’t do that much, I’ll give it to…

MARUYAMA Yuichi and MIURA Sota - the former seems to have really come on recently and is a crucial part in Takai doing reasonably well I think. He also seemed to be giving advice and encouragement to lots of players so I think his influence is a lot greater than we might think. Miura’s crossing is great and he can really take a set piece well. Great assist for the goal. I suspect he is going to have a stand out season this year. Hopefully that doesn’t mean we’ll lose him to the Belgium second division too soon.

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 50' 0-1
KOIZUMI (Kashiwa) 57' 1-1

Highlights

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (home) 17/8/24 J League match 27

Kawsaki Frontale 1 - 3 Yokohama F Marinos

In a totally shite season, this was probably the one game many of our fans wanted to win more than any other. Which makes it all the more disappointing that we put in an absolute turd of a performance. Let’s not kid ourselves though, our previous three wins came with massive caveats and before that we had a long line of lacklustre draws. So basically we could just hope that this game went one of three ways. Apparently the only ways we can win are the massive dose of luck route (Kashiwa), the opposition self destruct route (Kobe) or the they play alright for 10 minutes and then don’t bother to do anything for the rest of the match route (FC Tokyo). Sadly, and utterly justifiably, it wasn’t to be and instead we got exactly what we deserved. So shit were we that I didn’t even get any stick from YFM fans online, the depths of our performance perhaps being so low that even our biggest rivals felt sorry for us. If you’re looking for insight into the match, please understand that it won’t get any deeper than the ‘we were shite’ that I’ve already said. But in case you’re still reading this, here are this week’s bullet points.

- In a week that we almost certainly lost two players to overseas transfers, (curse of my shirt continues, although not confirmed just yet), it was nice to see that we at least attempted to bury that bad news with the release of a new ACL shirt. Think that’s shirt number six this year, isn’t it? What a blessing that we can instead focus on the (de)merits of a new shirt rather than think about how crap we are. Talking about transfers it probably once again bears mentioning that the players who move overseas to ‘better’ clubs never seem to be the ones that Oniki favours. Don’t forget he has pedigree in this area, thinking that both Miyoshi and Itakura should go out on loan as they weren’t good enough for us, before other teams, (Manchester City in Itakura’s case), thought that they were good enough for them. Of course I guess that other teams imagine it’s easier to prise one of our players away if they’re not starting regularly, so maybe that’s why we haven’t lost Wakizaka or Tachibanada. At the same time you could probably easily make a case for the fact that Oniki is so shit that even though he sees them every day, he doesn’t know who our best players are. Remember also that he’s the guy who watched Arsenal train once and decided there was nothing for him to learn from the experience. I wish I had his confidence.

- Let’s have a bit more of a dig at Oniki, eh? I think it’s almost accepted that he’ll be leaving at the end of the season, (which I think is at least two years too late, but what did we expect, eh?), but perhaps this will give him one last chance to fuck us up in a competition, as half of our next, and judging on current standards last ever, ACL campaign will be under the command of someone who has persevered with exactly the same tactics and approach for the last seven years. For the majority of this year I’ve been moaning about his absolute dearth of ideas and his apparent resolute optimism that doing the same thing will eventually result in us doing well against all logic. In the last three games I’ve had to bite my tongue a little as it’s never a good look to whinge when you’re winning but I think this game showed the Oniki master tactics showing their true colors. The fact that we could have so many shots in one game but at the same time it feel like we were utterly outplayed and would probably never score is a real bit of Oniki magic. The one goal we got was at the stage where Oniki basically just gave up and threw on all the attacking players to at least pretend that he was giving it a go. But the fact that we’d stunk the place up and he hadn’t seen fit to make any subs before the 71st minute, a full 11 minutes after we’d gone two goals behind speaks volumes about the incisive wisdom of our great leader. Even though we’d been awful for most of the game he probably only started unpacking the magnet board after their first goal and didn’t unwrap all the magnets till about ten minutes later. Even those first subs looked pretty hopeless, particularly when you consider that they included Oniki’s usual ‘I haven’t got a clue what to do’ move of putting Tachibanada at right back. To give him some credit the whole of the left side had been crap for most of the game, (Miura’s corners were even worse than Wakizaka’s and that’s saying something), and he changed it. To take some of the credit away, it took 26 minutes of the second half and two goals conceded to actually fucking do anything. 

- Whilst we’re on players who didn’t have a good day, (actually maybe it would be easier to list players who didn’t have a terrible game), it probably deserves mentioning again that Takai had a bit of a dodgy game. Much like he has in the past, it seems that just as he gets settled and in a comfortable spot he has a blunder-filled game. I guess he won’t be leaving us this summer after Japan crashed out of the Olympic tournament early, denying him the chance to catch some clubs’ eyes, and perhaps with that in mind he’s settled in to a guaranteed starting berth for the rest of the year and celebrated it by giving away two goals. I don’t want to single him out though, as the crap was spread quite evenly across the pitch. But I think that when people are praising him for his good games they shouldn’t forget that he does tend to throw in an absolute stinker every now and then. Hopefully he’s done with the stinkers for the rest of the year. We do have potential competition for him at the back, but of course our new Colombian defender will presumably languish in the stands right up until the most pressing of emergencies when Oniki will throw him in due to a lack of alternatives. Add to this our new singing confirmed this morning, which is… a defensive midfielder! Perfect! Because with Seko leaving we really needed more numbers in this area to ensure that the level of dissatisfaction amongst players who aren’t playing continues. With almost zero rotation and plenty of players getting nowhere near the team even though we’re crap, it seems like a pretty stupid thing to do, but I guess we’ve got used to these kind of signings. After all, it seems we need to always have at least two disappointed Brazilians in the squad. I don’t know why we need to, but it definitely seems like part of the master plan. One recent disappointed Brazilian Erison was back in this game. Back for a whole twelve minutes! He scored, but don’t expect that to have been noticed by the master tactician. Yamada will almost certainly start up front by himself the next game. And play all of the 90 minutes which seems to be a privilege reserved only for him. Normally the striker, especially if they get a big wage and are foreign gets dragged off as soon as possible. As for the suggestion that I’ve seen a few people mentioning on Twitter that we should play Erison and Yamada up front together, well, let’s just see if that or hell freezing over happens first. It doesn’t matter that it seems like a good idea. The fact that it’s not Oniki’s idea, (emphasis on the singular here), means that it’s not going to happen. 

- The ref was a bit floppy I thought. Quite happy to put up with torrents of abuse from YFM players and do nothing about it. Bring back Kasahara! He does something about dissent! 😉 The penalty seemed pretty soft, but can't really complain. The VAR seemed non-existent in this game, which I don’t mind at all. This made it a bit of a surprise that we had nine minutes added on in the second half. But then again YFM were doing some top level time wasting. And who can blame them? Although they probably should have tried to score some more goals to make our humiliation all the more profound. They almost certainly would have succeeded. At the same time, it also seemed like we were time wasting at the end, perhaps happy with our 3-1 defeat, playing the ball along the defence line and not being that bothered about trying to attempt to get it forward. Bit disappointed that the ref didn’t stop Anderson Lopes from doing that fucking ridiculous run up for his penalty, where he clearly stops twice. If running on the spot apparently counts as moving forward the next time we get a penalty in a game that we are leading we should get the taker to just skip all over the pitch for the remainder of the game as part of his ‘run-up’ and run the clock down. I don’t know which out of Diego Oliveira’s ballet dance run up or Anderson Lopes’ running man dance is more effective, but I can confirm that both are equally irritating and almost certainly the work of complete tossers. But we didn’t lose because of the penalty run up or the ref, we lost because of Oniki being shit at his job. A quick dig at the Marinos fans whilst we’re here as this post would not be complete without one. I thought it was a bit shitty for them to start singing as loud as they could as our youth team graduate was presented to the fans after singing his first pro contract. A bit shitty, but very much in character as proved by a cyclist after the game. As we left the stadium pretty sharpish after the final whistle we heard someone moaning quite aggressively about how disgusting it was that she couldn’t ride her bicycle down the road that about 50% of the fans leaving the stadium use. If it had been a football hating local, well, I guess it could have been excused. But the fact that it was a Marinos fan who seemed to have left that ground as quickly as utterly pissed off Frontale fans and then seemed upset that other people had done the same thing as her, well that was a bit annoying. Particularly considering that there are numerous other routes she could have taken which would have been clearer. I hope she got a puncture. But I’m sure she’ll be the first one to back me up when I get irritated trying to drive my combine harvester across that bridge outside the Nissan Stadium and am foiled by the people who are leaving the same event as me at the same time.

- Oh, I’ve got to the end and didn’t mention Hayasaka making his debut. It was a hell of a shock and we can only presume that Sung-Ryong is injured. Hope it’s not serious. Hayasaka did a decent job, almost got to the cheater penalty and can’t be blamed for the other goals, but it can’t have been much fun for him to concede three times on his debut to our local rivals. Hopefully he doesn’t take it to heart. Equally it can’t have been much fun for Ando on his birthday to see that in spite of Kamifukumoto leaving and Sung-Ryong being presumably injured, he still doesn’t even warrant a place on the bench. Yamaguchi came straight into the squad after transferring from Machida. In previous years a move from Machida to Frontale might have seemed like a big step up for a player. Right now with our current clown in charge, it looks like the career of anyone who does so is probably going in the opposite direction. At least he won’t have to train with that twat Tani anymore though!

This was longer than I intended. Next week I’ll do my best to get it back to being a bit less of a hassle to write and read. But that will be a post about an away game at Urawa which pretty much always is filled with some kind of bitching so we’ll see. Urawa have been rubbish this year, so perhaps we can be slightly hopeful. At the same time, they haven’t been as rubbish as us, so maybe not. After that we’re away to Sapporo. I don’t know what it says about me that I’m more hopeful for the Urawa game. We briefly climbed the table a bit after our recent run of wins but the truth is we’re still only six point off the drop zone. And still the clown remains in charge, doing exactly the same thing, mostly getting exactly the same results. I wonder if the transfer of Kawahara from Tosu is partly to try to weaken one of our relegation rivals. Any chance we can tempt away some other rivals’ players to allow them to train in a different training ground and watch games from the stands instead of actually play them? It’s not the most exciting way to assure our J1 survival, but to be honest, any way is good right now.

Team

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki

DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 63')

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 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for MIURA 71')
FW 9. ERISON (on for IENAGA 78')

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

MF 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 71')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 71')

Goals

SOME WANKER (Yokohama) PEN 58' 0-1
SOME WANKER (Yokohama) 60' 0-2
SOME WANKER (Yokohama) 79' 0-3
ERISON (Frontale) 89' 1-3



My Frontale Man Of The Match

Seems a bit strange to give this to a defender when we lost and conceded three goals but I think it has to go to…

SASAKI Asahi - some great defensive work in difficult situations and did equally well when he had to shift to left back after Oniki’s master level substitutions. And crucially unlike most of his teammates wasn’t absolutely shit.

Highlights