Vs Yokohama F Marinos (away) 18/4/26 J League East match 11

 

Yokohama F Marinos 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale  

I should start this post with some background explanation. I was quite hungover for this match. I could make some claims for the restorative power of a win against one of your team’s most despicable rivals as the result and perhaps the way it came about definitely gave my spirits and body a boost. But at the same time, if that late winner hadn’t gone in it would have been a very different result, (for my health I mean. Obviously it would have been a different result for the game). Naturally, winning 2-1 at your rivals’ stadium doesn’t make up for us getting hammered by them at our big showpiece National Stadium event. Presumably everyone at the club knew we wouldn’t be able to win 6-0 so instead went for the more achievable late winner option, which although not reaching the trauma inflicting heights of a massive defeat, probably stings a lot more than something like a comfortable 2-0 win with all the goals coming in the first half. That is what this season has come to now. We have nothing to play for other than hopefully making rival fans miserable. Oh, and maybe giving some youngsters some pitch time. I hope I can enjoy some of both of these things over the next few weeks. Given that this match was for the most part, pretty shitty, and given that I had a hangover, please excuse the lack of any kind of insight or any real effort in the writing of this post. I’m sure you’d expect nothing less.

Us - 

‘Why change a winning team even if it was the subs that won the game?’ said I, after Hasebe made his team selection for the Kashima defeat. I could say something similar for this match, as aside from bringing Romanic in for Erison, Hasebe went with the same line up and tactics again. So maybe it would be more accurate to say something like ‘why change a… team?’ Win or lose we keep going with the same things. But this is probably not massively surprising as after hearing some things from my friend who watched a recent training session, it could well be the case that these are pretty much the only fit players we have at the moment. Which is quite worrying! The players we might most be hoping to have a swift return from injury weren’t training at all, which suggests the road back to us being full strength will be a long one. With that in mind you have to temper any massive criticisms of Hasebe I suppose. Also, it’s not him who is missing so many of our chances. At the same time, it does seem a bit weird that he is apparently so wedded to starting every match the same way, and always ignores the fact that we are playing a different system when we score most of our goals and play our most exciting football. I suppose there is more to it than I’m saying, but it seems a bit baffling to me why we keep doing the same thing. Well, baffling if you don’t consider the Wakizaka issue. In this match when we switched formation he ended up on the wing. It doesn’t suit him and we had people on the bench who could play there but it seems that it’s just not the done thing to drop Wakziaka or to even substitute him unless we’re in injury time. Even though he seemed to suggest that the reason we lost against Machida was because he wasn’t in the squad, I can’t really see what he’s adding at the moment. This was the second match in a row that his mistake directly lead to an opposition goal. Go on Hasebe, give it a go without him just for a game or two and see what happens. At times it seems like Hasebe is very risk averse. Maybe so risk averse that he’s the kind of guy who’d wear a full inflated life jacket whilst feeding the ducks at the knee-deep village pond. But hang on, we won this match so I shouldn’t be so negative. As I said above, this was far from being a good performance. Both teams seemed determined to drag the opposition to ever lower depths. We had some more shots on target than usual but a significant proportion of them were reminiscent of softly hit back passes. But we scored twice! And both of our strikers scored! And scoring in the eighth minute of the five that had been added on was extremely entertaining. Sometimes it’s not so important to win in style. It’s far more important to just win and this result gives us a decent opportunity to pick up consecutive wins for the first time this season. Our next game is at home against bottom placed JEF so surely this is our best chance? Well maybe our best chance alongside the second game of the season where we faced JEF away, after seemingly being able to score for fun against Kashiwa, and struggled to even have a shot. So let’s not get too carried away, eh? No midweek game will give us the opportunity to get some platers back from injury, but like I said, don’t expect any of them to be the bigger names, most of whom didn’t train at all last week, so clearly still have a long way to go. But at least we can go into that game with a smile on our faces after the late winner in this match. Lovely!

Them -

People will I’m sure know that I’m not a big fan of our salty neighbours YFM. When I recently decided to somewhat immaturely place all of the J1 teams into groups depending on how much I disliked them, YFM were of course a no-brainer for being in the most dislikable group. Considering they are having another dodgy season it’s a bit of a shame that there’s no relegation in this mini season. At the same time, given how up and down we are, that might actually be a good thing. You might have thought that after they walloped us in our ‘home’ fixture, they would have come into this match with some more confidence and a belief that they could beat us again. I certainly thought they probably would. But instead it seemed like they spent the whole match trying to play for penalties. I guess this makes sense as I think it’s become clear that penalties might not be our strength. There was so much play acting in this match for injuries that YFM players required the stretcher to be brought onto the field four times. Naturally, only one player actually used it, as by the time they’d rolled around on the floor kicking the pitch and grizzling for a few minutes, more often than not they’d wasted the requisite amount of time. Their goalkeeper hung on to the ball for way over the allowed amount of time, each time the ref presumably forgetting to start counting, and when he finally remembered to start, waved his arms in such a dramatic wide ranging way that clearly his seconds were lasting much longer than the seconds we are used to in the real world. They also seemed to have set up the pitch to make things as difficult for us as they possibly could, (of course this is perfectly acceptable). At times it looked like we were playing with a rugby shaped bouncy ball instead of a football given the weird-angled and massive boings we were getting. At half time there was a perfunctory watering of first few meters of one side of the pitch, so it clearly was a tactic. But still they couldn’t defeat the mighty Frontale. (Well, apart from that last time when they smashed us). YFM were pretty shitty. As were we. But thankfully they were shittier. I think they’d spent all week with training sessions practicing falling over and rolling on the floor, occasionally interspersed by a drill where they raised their arms in unison, pleading to the linesman for absolutely clearly non-existent offsides. Perhaps in keeping with their horrible form it shouldn’t be a surprise that the stadium was so empty. We helped play our part in the emptiness as there were clearly a lot fewer of our fans than in previous seasons. I guess people have got fed up with watching shitty football in a half season that is ultimately pointless for all but one of the teams. But hang on you say, this format ensures lots of thrilling local derbies. (Hmmmm, apparently not enough of a draw for this match). I’d love a nice away trip but instead all we get is games at stadiums I’ve seen us play at numerous times before. Even the two newly promoted teams in the East section don’t present new or interesting trips for us as we’ve played both of them away in fairly recent times. I guess the real excitement will come when the two leagues combine at the end of the season. The really important games will come where over a two-legged thrilling tie, we finally discover the answer to the crucial questions like who exactly are the fifteenth and sixteenth best teams in the league. I am hanging on with my fingers crossed that we’ll get a nice trip from our final league position. I suspect though that these cup finals to decide ninth spot might not be the big draw for most people that the league thinks. So maybe attendances are going to drop even further over then next few games. Our away trip to FC Tokyo isn’t selling particularly well, I’ve heard. Tamagawa Classico? More like Tamagawa Couldn’t Give a Tossico. Hmmmm, that could have worked a bit better, but it’ll do.

I’ll finish this section with a little wish that YFM improve slightly over the course of the next few games. I think it’s very important that they finish the year in mid table as I’d hate for them to have a terrible season and end up making wholesale changes in preparation for a season where they could get relegated. Far better to have a little mini recovery to make them think that all is right in their garden and then collapse massively next season. And don’t be sad Marinos fans. You may have lost four out of the last five, but at least you’re not Urawa who’ve lost six in a row now. The two teams in the shittest of forms actually play each other next. I’m sure that game’s going to be a cracker…

WOW! - 

You would have thought there would haver been plenty of options for this given the opposition, but one guy in the stadium was never going to let this award elude him. Kamimura was in charge again after we had him for our away game at Kashima. In that blog post I mentioned his bizarre concept of time, his absolute bat shit inconsistency and his bizarre interpretation of the rules of the game. All were once again evident in this match. He was just all over the place when it came to making decisions. The thing that took the biscuit though was the phantom free kick he gave when a Marinos played twisted his ankle with absolutely zero contact. It happens around 35 minutes in the first half and is worth a watch for anyone who thinks that being a ref is difficult but that they generally do a good job. It seemed that he had been informed of how bad the decision was given that from the resulting free kick, he immediately blew for a free kick to us. But if you then consider that he’s covering up one erroneous decision by making another one, it just all becomes a bit of a joke. And presumably if they’d shot from the free kick and scored, he wouldn’t have been able to rule the goal out. Perhaps I should embrace the absolute shitness of the J League refs and see it as just another aspect of the match day entertainment. It’s tough to do this though as more often than not they are absolutely infuriating. But it’s great to have such a clear cut example of quite how bad the officiating in this league is. Kamimura, throw yourself in the bin.

So, as stated above, next up, JEF at home. It would be nice if we weren’t quite so gutless in next week’s match as we were in the away game. It’s funny looking back on that match now as although it did deflate the excitement from the previous big win, it did feel like it could be just a blip. As it has turned out, that game was a perfect encapsulation of our season, in that  it was pretty low on excitement with most of our football being absolutely pointless. Fingers crossed we can improve on that game and keep the good feelings gained in this match going. After that we’ve got a couple of games in a week. How nice it is that we get to cerebrate Golden Week by heading to the absolute wasteland of the Saitama stadium…. That’s a trip to really get the juices flowing, isn’t it?

 

 

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
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 90+9') (on for ROMANIC 77')
MF 15. MYOGAN Toya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 86')
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 46')

DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke

MF 34. OSA Ryuki (on for ITO 77')

FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for WAKIZAKA 90+1')

Man of the match

Once again this wasn’t exactly a vintage performance with us only managing eight shots in a game against a team in terrible form, and also seemingly being determined to concede a goal after giving the ball away repeatedly until they could finally manufacture a shot. Both the strikers scored so they could get a look in. But I think as his performances continue to surprise, it has to go to…

TACHIBANADA Kento - seemed destined to be drifting out of contention earlier on in the season but now is consistently our best midfielder and probably the only player in that area who I could say definitely deserves to start every game. Bravo!

 

Goals

ROMANIC (Frontale) 15' 0-1
AMANO (YFM) 45+3' 1-1
ERISON (Frontale) 90+8' 1-2

Highlights

 

Vs Kashima Antlers (away) 14/3/26 J League East match 6

 

Kashima Antlers 1 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

Ah, absolutely gutted. I guess I was expecting disappointment but I hadn’t banked on it coming in this way. I’m sure plenty of people will disagree, but I think Kashima absolutely stole the three points in this game. I guess this is a bit one-eyed though as we didn’t come very close to taking any of our limited chances. But fucking hell Kashima are a bit rubbish and fluked a goal and with it the win. As I sit here on the bus in the car park after the game at the designated departure time, I am fully aware that me writing this blog post will probably take less time than it takes us to get out of the car park here. At least it's something to keep me occupied whilst we go absolutely nowhere. As the reception is so poor in the rural industrial wasteland, (perhaps a slight contradiction there, but anyone who’s been here will probably understand), that the Kashima stadium is in I can’t really check any incidents from the match, and can’t even see the stats. With that in mind, expect some inaccuracies but I’m sure you’d expect nothing else. I also suspect that the WOW! section might be longer than the rest of the post this week. But maybe that’s what some of you come here for anyway. Let the vitriol begin!


First half -

They seemed scared of us for some reason. And maybe if we’d been playing with 11 players they would have had reason to be. Have a guess who the two below par players were on our side this week? Yep that’s right Miura and Wakizaka. Although that’s extremely unfair on Wakizaka who was just a bit below par, in contrast to Miura who did absolutely nothing other than give the ball away and stand around pointing whilst the game went on around him. No, come on, that’s a little unfair. At one point he also left the field to change his shorts. There weren’t many chances for either team but Broderson had to make one good save. 0-0 was absolutely the right scoreline. Thankfully we managed to squeeze in our first shot on target just before half time. We were mostly in control but failed to trouble their keeper. Hang on, I feel like maybe we’ve heard that one before, haven’t we?


Second half - 

We really had them rattled. They looked extremely dodgy at the back and in midfield. We had some good chances which we blasted either high or wide. Miura was still shit. Well up until the final ten minutes when it seemed like he remembered it wasn’t a training session. Their goal was fluky, completely against the run of play and utterly undeserved. Although our failure to trouble their keeper probably suggests that we didn’t deserve much either. But damn it, we really had them wobbling but couldn’t score. Which makes the defeat all the more frustrating. At least we didn’t go to penalties I suppose. That could have caused issues with the buses which were ‘leaving’ at 17:30. Although it is now 17:48 and the wheels of the bus haven’t even gone round once, let alone been able to ‘go round and round’. There are a few things I’d like to look at when I can as I was quite irritated on a number of occasions by the officials. Will add a little ‘In the cold light of day’ section when I’ve done that. 

Good day - 

Good day for fans of certain players. Oshima and Maruyama were unexpectedly back in the side. Apparently Hasebe rewarded the players who’d done well in the training match we played last week. (Bit more on that in the bad day section). On the pitch, Maruyama and Tachibanada stood out for good reasons. Oshima too. He did plenty of things for people to clip up and post as short videos. (I haven’t checked but I suspect the club has probably done this, apparently unaware that we lost the game. Perhaps creating social media content and getting ‘impressions’ is more important to them than us actually winning games). I really hope he can stay fit as he’ll be very important if he can. But I’m totally aware that we’ve said this many times before. Good day for people who like to watch a real battle of a game. And for people who like to watch build ups that never reach the having-a-shot stage. Good day for people who want to scream as there was plenty to get angry about. Good day for whoever apparently bribed the ref as he did exactly what they wanted. 

Bad day - 

Bad day for fans of correct decisions. Bad day for Miura (obviously). Not a great day for Hasebe as we still seem to be stuck in the toothless attack doldrums. It’s good that he rewarded those players who’d done well in training, but it’s a massive black mark against his name for not removing Miura from the team. I know I always moan about this and I know I moan more than most people, but there definitely seemed to be some frustration from others around me in the stand with Miura. Also a bad day for Yamaguchi who once again wasn’t in the match day squad. Apparently in the training match he was the goalkeeper who absolutely gifted the university team opposition their two goals. It doesn’t look good for him. 

Any other business - 

Let’s just go straight to the WOW! Section. 

WOW! - 

The first WOW is a quite all encompassing one. All the Kashima players, staff, fans, ball boys, everyone connected with the club in any way definitely slots into this category perfectly. They’re such a scummy club from top to bottom. Things that irritated me about the team in this match included their fucking infuriating gamesmanship, clogger play, constant whinging to the referee, extreme time wasting, injury feigning, dirty fouling, and most of all spawny luck. Three points for them from this game is an absolute injustice. The ball boys were clearly under instruction from the club to not give us the ball for throw ins under anything except for the most extreme circumstances, just let that time ebb away, even when they were drawing. Don’t think that the fans are going to escape from this. It was an appallingly low attendance for what they seemed to think was an important and tricky game. If it hadn’t been for the Frontale fans I think they would have struggled to get over 15000. Presumably it’s a bit easier for their fans to get to the stadium so they can’t even blame the horrific bus journey. Actually though, the coaches from Tokyo are probably at least 50% full with ‘home’ fans. My contention that Ota-ku, Setagaya-ku and Shibuya-ku are fair game for being Frontale territory is intended mainly to wind up FC Tokyo fans. But I think it takes a bit of a leap though for someone living in Tokyo to choose Kashima over a closer team particularly given that everything about the club is so scummy. Imagine doing that bus journey for every home game. Blimey. These wonderful fans also broke off a song midway before the game in order to boo our goalkeepers coming out. And they’re not even as good at booing as Urawa are. 

Let’s not leave the stadium experience out of this slagging. Now they allow you to retain your PET bottle lid when entering the stadium. Amazing! There’s no longer any re-entry though, so I guess they’ve worked out that any revenue lost from people no longer having to replace spilt soft drink bottles is more than made up for by the fact that none of that food stalls outside the ground will be getting any custom from away fans who are scrambling for the unreserved seats once the ground is open. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have gone out anyway, as I don’t enjoy wandering around rural industrial wastelands, but their commitment to stamping out any kind of enjoyment or fan mingling from the match day experience is impressive. I guess the mantra is to just keep the experience aggy, like it is on the pitch. And maybe in an attempt to further increase the irritation, the in stadium music was horrendous. The choice of songs was awful but the fact that they even went further and chose cover versions that efficiently stripped away anything that was interesting about the originals shows a real commitment to the cause. Oniki famously had never been to a concert before one of our fan events, and this music selection really had the whiff of being chosen by someone who hates music. Maybe they don’t need to spend as much on royalties for those versions. At least Urawa fully commit to having the original versions of their pre-game gay anthems soundtrack. The Saitama stadium experience wouldn’t be the same without them! (Are you impressed that I am somehow managing to slag off both Kashima and Urawa in the same post and hopefully the fact that I am comparing them will hopefully further irritate fans of both teams).

So, awful club, awful people, awful experience. Surely we can’t go any lower? Somewhat surprisingly all of these things may have been eclipsed by the ref. We’ve now had a couple of dodgy games with him but this one really took the biscuit. He gave us absolutely nothing, showed an almost Jesus like approach when it came to forgiving the sins of multiple Kashima players who pulled and fouled constantly but for the most part avoided cards. When Tagawa attempted to break Ozeki’s ankle, he got away with a yellow. He hassled us for dilly-dallying over a goal kick in the first ten minutes of the game but let Kashima take as long as they wanted to do anything after they’d gone ahead. After a coming together where we won the ball he let play continue till the ball went out and then took it back for a Kashima free kick, apparently playing the advantage for us, but then giving the decision the other way. Maybe he's just a bit simple and it takes his brain a little while to catch up. The linesman at our end was equally bad. But basically, a fucking absolutely useless arsehole of a referee who was terrified of giving any decisions against those scary Kashima guys. I don’t know if the ref has a vineyard, brewery or dairy farm, but he definitely showed that he is an excellent bottler. So not a completely useless human being I suppose. Just completely useless when it comes to football. We didn’t lose because of him because he wasn’t the one who couldn’t hit the target more than once a half, but he definitely affected the way the game played out.


In the cold light of day - 

So this part has been written at home and not on the bus and I’ve now watched a few things back so can give you the low down about things you probably already know. I didn’t go as far as watching long sections of the game though, (life’s too short, and I don’t want to get the resentment boiling up again), so I’m going to just presume my feelings at the time were correct when it comes to thinking that the ref was generally intimated by the Kashima players. One thing I didn’t notice at the time but irritated me intensely when I saw a replay was Ito being blocked by the ref. Absolutely sums up how bad Kamimura is, body checking a player who’s trying to get to the ball. Ito’s face said a lot. I think the ref’s lack of a backbone and Kashima’s dirty tricks is really displayed when the ref gives Tagawa a yellow. It looked like a dodgy tackle at the time but was a bit too far from me to be able to really see it properly. The replay is damning though, both players sliding in, Ozeki pulls out and puts his boot down as it clearly is going to be a dangerous collision and Tagawa slides right into his ankle, boot off the ground, no intention of stopping himself. The ref gives a yellow, but I have no idea why VAR didn’t suggest he have another look at it. To be honest, we should be thankful for the yellow. As soon as the ankle-break attempt is complete Kashima players surround the ref, suggesting he’s given the foul the wrong way and that Ozeki should be sent off. Even the prick Tagawa seems to be suggesting that Ozeki has made a grievous attempt to injure him by attacking the sole of his boot with his ankle. That one small incident sums up the whole game really. The ref making a mistake in favour of Kashima who were intensely irritated that the mistake doing go even more in their favour. It wouldn’t have made a difference if he’d sent him off as it was probably too late anyway. It might have made a difference though if he hadn’t let them get away with their shittiness for the whole match.

Looking for the yellow card incident in the highlights I’ve inadvertently stumbled across one of the absolutely mind-numbingly bad decisions from the ref. It’s around 89 minutes and the defender has his arms completely round Erison and pulls him to the floor and the ref isn’t interested at all. It says a lot that our players didn’t complain more. They presumably knew by this stage that we weren’t getting anything from the ref. After all, the same thing happened throughout the game and he wasn’t interested on any of the other occasions. Maybe he also officiates in Judo matches so thinks that throwing opponents to the floor is all part of the game. I think it’s not an accident too that Oniki walks out of his technical area and almost directly in front of us taking the throw. Anyone who is still of the opinion that Oniki is a nice guy probably needs to rethink. It seems that anyone that is touched by Kashima turns to the dark side.
 

So, in the cold light of day, my thoughts that the ref was useless and that Kashima are a despicable bunch of pricks was exactly right. Bravo to me!


What a crappy end to what at some stages looked like it could be a good day. If we want to take some positives it must be that we really had them wobbling on a lot of occasions. If we want to undermine those positives, well, two shots on target in 90 minutes and we lost. It’s now 66 minutes since our buses departure and we still haven’t made it to the expressway. But to be honest, I think we’re a bit ahead of schedule compared to previous years. I’m intending to have a few drinks when we get back to civilisation so that should soften the blow a bit I think. It’s a shame the season is so totally over so early. But equally, it’s a relief that we’re farting around like this in an utterly meaningless season. I think it’s time for the club to admit we’re not going to win the league and start trying some new things. It seems that there has always been a reason why the time wasn’t right to try something new. Clearly now there’s nothing to lose. Please let us see some new faces and maybe, shock horror, some new tactics…. Lot’s of people are talking about how Miura and Ito don’t play well together but still Hasebe is still persisting with it. Personally I think that this year Miura and no-one plays well together and that is mostly because Miura is in horrific form. For god’s sake change something Hasebe! Bet he won’t. Well, aside from the normal tiny changes of the midfielders and attackers who dropped out of the team for this match coming back in for the next match. There have been a few minor changes but he basically seems to go from line up A, who don't do the job and are dropped, to line up B, who don't do the job, so are dropped for line up A, who... you get the message here I'm sure. He has experimented with line up AB at times, but to be honest, that just seems to be a way of him demonstrating he's doing something. And given that whoever plays we have the same shittiness problems, is it not clear that there it's a bigger problem than personnel? Next up Tokyo Verdy away on Wednesday. I’ve just seen that they’ve beaten Urawa today. LOLZ! They’ve had some good results and fun so far this year, so maybe they’ll be good neighbours and let us have some. We’ve now played five games, over a quarter of this mini season, and in a normal season we’d be sitting here with just five points, having failed to win since the first fluky game of the season. It’s not massively encouraging, is it? But somehow I don’t feel massively disheartened. Might be feeling that way soon though. I feel like every week I’m coming away with the impression that we just need to make a little change and we’ll be off and flying. But every time the following game comes round, the little change we need to make hasn’t been made. I’d love to sign off here with some kind of optimistic flourish. Clearly we’re not rubbish and there are plenty of teams in a worse position than us. At the start of the year on the J Talk Podcast I said that we could have a great season as all the pieces of the puzzle were there but Hasebe just needed to put them together. Sadly, it seems like he just can’t stop using the instructions Oniki left behind instead of doing what he knows best. If things carry on like this, I don’t think it will ruin us, but I can’t see it’s going to help Hasebe get another job after he leaves us, (which presumably will happen after the next full season unless there is a massive change in fortunes). There is a certain irony that in looking for something positive to finish this post on, I’ve ended up making things even more depressing. The feeling straight after the match was that we’d been unlucky, but a little reflection made me think that the best we could have hoped for was a 0-0 anyway. So given that even when I felt like we’d done quite well it was basically a backhanded way of displaying we’re not very good, perhaps keeping things depressing at the end is exactly the right way to finish. 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for OSHIMA 66')
FW 9. ERISON (on for ROMANIC 83')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for TACHIBANADA 83')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for ITO 83')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for IENAGA 60')


Man of the match

Kind of a shock that I’m doing this given the result and my inherent sulkiness, but I like to think this shows that I’m at least a little bit fair. We weren’t great, but some people deserve a mention. Lots of people have said Oshima, and whilst I’d agree with that to some extent, I think he was slightly outshone by two others whose good performances were more surprising. So I’ll give it to…

MARUYAMA Yoichi and TACHIBANADA Kento - probably neither of these players would be in most people’s preferred starting lineup, but both put in full effort and showed some of their underperforming team mates the way to go. Extra props to Tachibanada as he was not only playing in midfield but also left back in the first half whilst Miura strolled around doing nothing.

 

Goals

LEO CEARA (Kashima) 79' 1-0

 

Highlights

 

Vs Kyoto Sanga (away) 4/10/25 J League match 33

Kyoto Sanga 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Yay! A meaningless game! But one that some people say was surprisingly entertaining! But I think it was something more like unsurprisingly frustrating. Frustration shouldn’t be a massive surprise as it seems pretty much par for the course recently. There’s no doubt we have some great players. There are increasing doubts that we can consistently play particularly well. Any lingering doubts as to whether we could get anything from this season are absolutely gone and lying in tatters after a really rotten run of games in the league. Like I said before, we only have the ability to mess other people’s seasons up. Anyway, these posts are supposed to be short now, so here we go.

Us - 

It seems like recently we have an uncanny ability to score exactly the same amount of goals as the opposition, however many shots we have. In this game we had more shots than in the 4-4 against Kashima or the 2-1 against Shonan. We pretty much tripled the Kyoto’s shot tally and shots on target tally but only managed to score the same amount of goals as them. We absolutely battered them in the first half and naturally went in 1-1 at half time. Even when we went down to ten we still looked like we were the most likely team to score. Someone at the club has definitely had a black cat cross their path whilst hanging a horseshoe upside down over their arm as they walked under a ladder and knocked over and smashed a whole crate of mirrors. Poor old Hasebe seems to be the opposite of Oniki, who was and still seems to be ridiculously lucky. Of course we weren’t helped by the ref in this match, and of course it was pretty pointless game for us anyway, but we seem to play well more often than not, but seem to always snatch a draw from the jaws of victory. Once again we’ve damaged the title hopes of a team who most people probably would prefer to win the league rather than Kashima. We’ve done that to Machida, Kashiwa and now Kyoto. Sadly we don’t have any mote games left against Kashima. Although to be honest, the way things seem to be going, we’d probably lose that game, knowing our current luck. ‘At least it was an entertaining game’, say people who apparently don’t have the same emotional investment with these games as I do. Drawing a game when you’ve battered the opposition goal isn’t particularly satisfying, especially when you only managed to score once. We didn’t rotate for this game which was a bit of a surprise given that we have Kashiwa at home in the Levain Cup on Wednesday and then away on Sunday. I guess we’ll see changes on Wednesday, But then again there isn’t a great deal that is changeable at the moment really. And in this match, once again Hasebe didn’t use all of his subs. He didn’t make any changes till the 72nd minute. If we’d still been banging like we were in the first half that would have made sense but we’d been a bit shit since the start of the second half I thought, so we might expected something to be changed a bit sooner. There’s probably not much else to say about this match. It followed the recent pattern of us going ahead through Ito and then conceding a goal due to… well, I won’t point fingers but there does seem to be someone not doing particularly great this year and they didn’t do that great again in this match. Oh, one notable thing was perhaps the return of Sung-Ryong in goal. I think Yamaguchi is injured. I feel sorry for SR as he did everything he could and can’t in any way be blamed for the goal we conceded. I hope he gets a clean sheet the next time he plays. Depending on Yamaguchi’s condition maybe he’ll be playing a lot more before the end of the season than we might have expected.

Them - 

I enjoyed the beer in the stadium which was a lot better than the crap Asahi that they sell usually. They had a beer garden in the concourse of the back stand. To be honest it was more like a beer patio… hmmm, that still sounds bigger than it actually was. In any case, there were some nice beers available from Kyoto Brewing. Given that I chucked a bit of money their way on those beers, the least they could have done was give us the three points. On this showing, it’s a bit of a surprise that Kyoto are so high up in the league. When they beat us at Todoroki they were dire as far as I can remember, (naturally, we were worse, but…). In this match I thought they were very lucky to get away with a point. Hara drew my ire for asking the ref to check VAR for something that he believed should have been a penalty, even though it absolutely wasn’t a foul and it was nowhere near inside the box. Guess he must just be a bit simple. It seemed that their fans might be similarly intellectually challenged as they booed the ref off at the end of the game, even though he’d done his absolute best to get them a win. Maybe they wanted a few more red cards for us. The pre-match DJ was quite cringeworthy, but I have to admit that when they turned the lights off and he played House Of Pain, it was quite fun. Playing Oasis at the final whistle wasn’t good for my already elevated irritation levels though. Probably did sum up their stodgy football quite well though. Why not wrap up a disappointing game with some truly turgid music? And perhaps you could also draw some comparisons between the way that their players faked injury constantly and convinced the ref and the way that Oasis have somehow managed to convince the world that they have talent. A lot of deception going on everywhere it seems. Anyway, before the game I wouldn’t have minded letting them have the win if it meant it might mess up Kashima, but after the constant play-acting and whinging to the referee, well, fuck ‘em basically. Gutted we didn’t take all the points and give them the absolute battering that our first half performance suggested might have been coming. I say suggested, because of course, anyone who’s watched us this year will know that even if we do batter someone, we also batter ourselves in the process. 

Ref - 

As the popular chant goes, 'the referee is a wanker'. And what a wanker! Last time we had this guy he was pleasantly anonymous but on this occasion he ruined the last part of the match by being totally taken in by Kyoto’s faking and diving. The two yellow cards for Romanic were outrageous. At least he made contact for the first one but for me it didn’t seem like it was worthy of a yellow. For the second I don’t think there was any contact at all, although the Kyoto player faked some. Kamimura is one of those refs who doesn’t give any cards until an apparently random moment of the match, after which he starts throwing them around like they’re going out of fashion. Tachibanada’s yellow looks a bit dodgy too after watching the replay. Kyoto were totally fine with these kind of cards for phantom fouls being given out. When things went the other way though they were whinging like nobody’s business. Nagasawa elbowing Uremovic in the face isn’t a foul as far as they were concerned. The player who dived into a challenge and blocked a goal bound shot intentionally with his arm. No foul according to them. So I suppose I should at least congratulate the ref on getting those right. Congratulations, not everything you did was a total disaster. You carried out your duties adequately on occasion. Presumably this is enough to get him promoted to new J League golden boy status. I hope we never have him again.

Ah, what a shame it is recently that we can’t even really enjoy scoring an early goal as it’s always inevitable that we won’t hold on to a lead. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said ‘we really need to score again whilst we’re totally on top or we’ll regret it’, before we don’t score again and we do regret it. Anyway, never mind, these games are pointless! Unlike our next two games which are the next stage of  our only chance of getting anything from this season. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect us to storm the league and win the quadruple. It would be nice if we could win something for Hasebe though as I feel he’s done a decent job so far. Not a great job, but a decent job. With five games to go we’ve already exceeded our points total from last year and if we score more than six goals in our remaining five league games we’ll have scored more this year too. And we’d have to concede 13 goals in those last five games to have conceded more this year. I mean, that is obviously not off the table though! So yeah, Kashiwa in the Levain Cup, home and then away. The last league game was chock full of goals. so presumably a 1-0 win on aggregate for someone and utter tedium. It would be fair to say that the two teams we’ve drawn in the Levain this year have not given us the most exciting of fixtures when it comes to away trips. But fingers crossed we can make it through to the final.

 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 77') 
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 9. ERISON

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu 

DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for ITO 85')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
FW 29. MYOGAN Toya
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for MARCINHO 74')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC  (on for ERISON 75') (Yellow card 84', second yellow/red card 88')

Goals

ITO (Frontale) 8' 0-1
SUGAI (Kyoto) 38' 1-1

Highlights

 

Vs Albirex Niigata (away) 16/8/25 J League match 26

 

Albirex Niigata 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

 How utterly predictable! Of course we were never going to win an away game in Niigata. We hardly ever do. And this time, in addition to the usual we-play-awfully curse that seems to be on us at the Big Swan, we also had to deal with some (more) bad luck and some self inflicted chickens coming home to roost. Hmmm, that mixed metaphor doesn’t really work, but hopefully you’ll get what I mean later on. A 1-1 draw wasn’t something that either team wanted. As I say every week, any faint hopes of us getting anything from this season are surely now gone. (Although the teams who actually have a chance to do so keep cocking up). For Albirex, perhaps one point is better than no points, but considering the position they are in, the start they made in this match, and the condition our team was in, not getting three is a massive missed opportunity. In the section about us, there will be more talk about what happened around the game than what happened in the game. Basically because the background to the match dictated a lot of how we played. Anyway, let’s get on with this.

Us - 

So after the Fukuoka game referee-created debacle we had two players missing due to suspensions. Could have been tricky, but surely we’d have enough players in the squad to deal with this, right? And then the starting line up was announced and we had three goalies in the match day squad. I wonder if Lee had been fit it might even have been four. Kobayashi, Miyagi, Tanabe and Romanic were all nowhere to be seen. So three goalies on the bench. Oh and Kamihashi and Tsuchiya, two centre backs who have hardly played at all. There must be others on there though, right? Yeah! Noda. Hmmm, another hardly used defender. But we had Kawahara, Kanda, Ozeki and Ienaga, so all good, right? Well, Ienaga wasn’t brought on, even though we only used four subs and instead of him we played a 19 year old right back with five minutes of professional football experience in the Emperor’s Cup against a J3 team. Either this was an extremely left field selection from a manager who loves taking chances and doing wild things, or Ienaga was also unable to take part. Before the game after seeing the lineup I could only suspect that there must be an illness running through the squad and in his post match comments Hasebe said some players were unwell. Watching highlights I noticed that there were no high fives when the players arrived at the stadium with fist bumping instead. Don’t know if this is significant. So basically, I don’t think Hasebe had any choice with either the squad, or even the starting lineup. Well perhaps apart from Tachibanada or Kawahara. 

 

So many goalies on the bench that one of them 
has to warm up by the side of the pitch

With thoughts of sickness in mind, the first 20 minutes of the game further emphasised this as we were absolutely awful. For the majority of the first half the midfield was completely absent, but for the first 20 minutes, most of the defence were too. We really could have been 4-0 down in the first quarter of the game, but thanks to Albirex’s appalling shooting we escaped relatively unscathed. Time after time they swept through the midfield and defence, which basically ran out of their way to make room for them (more illness echoes here. Perhaps we were trying to social distance. Very noble of us, but not a great idea when playing football). In a similar way, our shots mostly seemed to be applying a policy of social distancing, keeping very far away from the goal. Marcinho’s basically open goal miss was horrendous. He’s not having his best period at the moment. And likewise most of his teammates, who seemed like they wouldn’t be able to hit a barn door even if they were inches away from touching it. Only Erison seemed to be able to shoot on target. Well actually not on target I guess as he hit the bar twice. But he had shots blocked too. Thankfully Ito managed to score at the end of what must have been one of our worst first halves of the year. (How many times have I said that now?!). We were much better in the second half. Well, apart from when it came to shooting sadly. And at the end of the day, if you can’t hit the fucking target, you’re not going to score are you? Strangely enough though, I felt like this was a decent performance even though we were actually pretty shit. I say decent because clearly there was more going on behind the scenes than we know about. It will be interesting to see where we stand next week away at Nagoya. Sai will be back but now Marcinho is banned for accumulated yellow cards. One in and one out. Hopefully some of the ‘sick’ players will have recovered. Hopefully the ones who aren’t sick will have practiced shooting a bit. As much as I am being positive about a semi-decent result considering the circumstances, (as I perceive them), you’ve got to ask some questions about the club’s transfer dealings. In this window we have had six players leave us and only replaced them with two. Some might say our squad was a bit bloated but the reason teams have big squads is to deal with situations like this. And when we needed those extra players, we’d already shipped them out. I don’t know if we’ll get any more players in. I don’t even know if the window has closed. It seems that our run of bad luck is continuing, but the bad luck was partially self-inflicted. Still, it’s a shame we decided to use the smashing of mirrors as a training exercise. Given how bad our shooting is, perhaps the aim of the training exercise was to hit the ball between two mirrors and instead every time we cannoned the shots off the first mirror onto the second, ensuring the absolute maximum of bad luck from every single shot. You would have thought someone might have heard of the superstition and said maybe it wasn’t a good idea. At least we’re trying new things, eh? I’d say though that the club should probably send someone down to Kawasaki Daishi pretty quickly to pick up a box of Omamori to break this horrible run.

Them -

Albirex showed in this game why they are in so much trouble. They attacked beautifully at times but couldn’t shoot for shit. And their keeper is very dodgy, (still not dodgy enough to deflect one of our miles-off-target shots into his own net sadly). Probably the most worrying thing for them though is that they spent most of the match time-wasting. One goal up, maybe do it, but when you’re a goal up after six minutes, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work for the rest of the game. When we finally got a goal back, it seemed like they were still time wasting, now playing for the draw. I suspect if we’d gone ahead they would have continued time wasting looking to hang on to the one goal defeat. This was somewhat undermined by their fans booing Yamaguchi every time he got the ball, apparently not having noticed that their players were trying to run the clock down at every opportunity. Their fans though wanted our keeper to hurry up with his kicks and for us not to play it around aimlessly at the back for some reason. I think in the past I have made comments on their fans on here so I won’t say any more but they seemed to be a bit… confused on this occasion. The general feeling in the city seems to be that they’re going down from the people we spoke to. It will be a shame as it’s a nice away trip and they have a big, (if somewhat confused), fan base. Also, the shuttle buses on this occasion were very smooth and efficient and you don’t often get me saying that. I will say though that they could do with their local breweries upping their game a bit. But that’s just my pint of view. (I’ll leave that typo there as it seems quite appropriate).

Ref and VAR -

Hmmmm. The ref was a relative unknown and I thought on the whole he did a decent job. Would have been nice if he’d given their goalie a second yellow card for time wasting but of course no one is going to do this apart from either a very strict ref who has full command of the rules of the game, (don’t think this person exists in the J League), or is a total attention seeker. (Hmmm, definitely some of those refs around). Kamimura doesn’t fit in the latter category as a relatively unknown ref, and it seems like he doesn’t fit the first category either as he let their keeper claim the ball, dither for a bit, put the ball down, and then pick it up again when we pressed him, much to the shock and disgust of our players, Hasebe and at least me in the stand. (I suspect I shouted quite a lot when this happened so anyone else complaining got drowned out). I wanted to check the replay to see what had really happened and it seems it was exactly what I thought had happened. You can see the ref put his finger on his ear, presumably to ask the linesman or VAR, but presumably VAR can’t get involved in this and the linesman at that end was absolutely useless. But basically, aside from this major clanger, I thought the ref had a decent game. The linesman can do one though. Neither of them affected the outcome of the game though, which is a very welcome thing to be able to say!

This was a game where my general feelings seemed to be a bit at odds with other people’s. Yeah, we were quite shit, but I think there were extenuating circumstances. With so many players absent it was actually a surprise that we could start with a pretty decent lineup. Yeah, they were pretty bad, particularly in the first half, but I think they weren’t all in perfect condition maybe. Apparently the pitch didn’t suit us, (it never does, we’re delicate young flowers when we don’t play at home, aren’t we?), but I was quite pleased to see that Hasebe didn’t use this as an excuse. Our current form is pretty shit, but I’m still not getting angry with Hasebe or our players. I’m not too pleased with the club though for our transfer activity or for the people who seem to think it’s necessary to post up Instagram videos of ‘great’ play when we labour to a 1-1 draw against the team who are bottom of the league or get smashed 5-2 at home. But maybe other fans don’t feel the same way as I do. I think the general quality of this game could be guessed from the highlight video of Yamaguchi making two absolutely regulation saves which was greeted with the usual adoration and adulation from our fans. Quite strange! I’m hoping my boss posts a video of me on the school’s social media doing something equally run of the mill like maybe handing out some print outs, or writing down what page of the text book we’re doing next on my spreadsheet. Exhilarating stuff! And maybe that one commenter I saw on Instagram might suggest that I should represent the national team like they thought Yamaguchi should. Next up Nagoya away, another game that recently we always do terribly in. Since we had that COVID-times beef with them cancelling and rescheduling a game for less than honest reasons I think we’ve failed to beat them in Nagoya. Actually we’ve been unable to beat them in Nagoya since the Mizuho stadium closed as the Toyota stadium is very much not in, or anywhere near Nagoya, but you get my point, I’m sure. I remember in recent years turning up to Nagoya away extremely refreshed and that game was horrific as far as I can remember. Hopefully I can arrive only slightly refreshed this time and we can buck the trend and get a result. But we’ll probably have to have some youth team players and coaches in the squad and will have at least a couple of goalies in the starting lineup. I guess at least we have a week till the game, so hopefully some players can recover. Much like with this game, I’m not very confident, but also like with this game, we have some fun things to do lined up either side of the game, so at least we’ll be able to get some enjoyment out of the weekend. After 26 games last year we were in 11th with 34 points and a +6 goal difference. This year we’re in 8th with 39 points and a +9 goal difference. So Hasebe is definitely an improvement on 2024 Oniki. But the one thing Oniki always had was good luck and it seems that he’s taken that with him to Kashima. If it’s somehow possible for Hasebe to get rid of this terrible luck we have right now, we might be able to win a match. In the last five games we’ve taken four points from a possible 15, which is pretty bad and during this run also got knocked out of the Emperor’s Cup at home against a J3 team. Clearly this is not all down to bad luck, but jeez, it would be nice if we got a break sooner or later. Maybe a penalty, perhaps? We’ve still only had one in 26 games. Some teams get one every 26 minutes. But yeah, I guess I was surprisingly positive about this game, which might make a nice change for people reading this. Lovely! But please, by some small chance, could we actually have a game next week where I don't have to write about shocking refs and lack of options? It would be lovely to be able to get back to moaning about our football rather than all these other things. 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 85')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 45+4')

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MARCINHO 63')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 77')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota

DF 30. NODA Hiroto (on for ITO 87')

FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for ERISON 87')

DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito 
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match 

Not sure anyone particularly deserves this. Maybe Ito was the player who did the most best things and the least bad things. Or maybe Erison who seemed quite unlucky. But I’m going to leave it unawarded again. 

 

Goals

SHIRAI (Albirex) 6' 1-0
ITO (Frontale) 45+1' 1-1

Highlights

Vs Shimizu S Pulse (away) 12/4/25 J League match 10

Shimizu S Pulse 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Three draws in a row and somehow, as of Saturday night, we’re still in third. The extremely enjoyable part is that the two teams above us are Fukuoka and Kyoto. This year is quite a fun J League season so far. Of course, this could all go wrong tomorrow if Machida win. Fingers crossed they’ll lose. (They did!) As I write this I’m on the train home and I’ve just checked who Machida are playing and found it’s Urawa. Hmmmm. Maybe a 0-0 is ok then. It would see us drop to 4th, but whilst it is extremely enjoyable to see YFM in the relegation zone, I guess it would be quite enjoyable to see Urawa join them there. Obviously this is impossible from tomorrow’s games, but you know, let’s just be positive and hope they both have a disastrous season. Schadenfreude, eh? Is it a wonderful thing? I’m not 100% sure, but in this season of transition where it’s sometimes difficult to work out whether our results are good or bad, let me at least have some enjoyment about teams I don’t like doing badly. But back to the matter in hand, another slightly disappointing game, but at the same time another one which wasn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things. It’s probably more of an issue that we’ve managed to only get a draw in this match with what we probably imagine is the first team playing rather than the game against YFM where we played the reserves. But I don’t have anything much to complain about really. Which probably all means that this is going to be a brief blog post. Maybe. Let’s get on with it.

Us -

Aside from injuries, probably our first choice eleven, although I guess the Yamada / Erison question is still something for people to think about. As this is something that I have spoken about in previous blog posts there’s no point rehashing that. We made plenty of chances. We didn’t get that many on target. And much like in previous games, although I don’t think I have said this before, there seems to be a feeling recently that with our form, it’s a matter of whatever the opposition do, we’ll do similarly, us playing up or down to the opposition’s level. I’m not going to go on about this too much though as the massive caveat is that we’re preparing for, or rather trying to avoid cocking up before, the ACL knockout stage. I don’t think you’ll see us cutting loose until that tournament is finished, hopefully with us being crowned champions. (Bit optimistic that, isn’t it?).  So what is there to say about this match? Not that much as I was stuck behind a big flag so missed quite a lot of it. So big and so close was the flag that if you wanted to recreate the experience at home I’d suggest that you sit quite close to your screen and ask a friend to dangle a towel in front of you, occasionally revealing the screen, occasionally stretching it out and holding it right in front of your face for about ten seconds, and occasionally lightly whipping you in the face with it, or draping it over your head. Maybe one notable thing was that Hasebe finally did the 4-4-2 Yamada Erison thing and that we scored whilst doing it. It was a bit of a shame after the elation of seeing Hasebe give that a go and put Wakizaka out on the wing, that it didn’t last long and we went back to the usual 4-2-3-1 briefly before going back to 4-4-2 again later. I guess though that Erison was tired so had to be changed. We could have brought Kobayashi on for him though and kept on with the 4-4-2. But I don’t think Kobayashi / Yamada is the same kind of partnership as Erison / (insert someone else here) is. Erison definitely offers something different from our other strikers at the moment. Hopefully we can use the things he brings efficiently in upcoming games. 

 

Anything else apart from being kind of vaguely positive and negative at the same time? Not much. I noticed that Wakizaka again tried to chip the keeper, this time he got it a bit higher but with the same outcome of the ball going straight into the hands of the keeper. Ideally here I would make a joke about how Wakizaka loves chips but the best I can come up with is that I also love chips, especially with either ketchup, brown sauce, curry sauce, mayonnaise, samurai sauce… I could go on but I think I’ve already hammered the joke so hard that it’s barely even slightly amusing anymore. At the moment it seems that we can score goals, and move the ball nicely, but don’t seem to be up for doing that for the whole game. The first half again was a bit crap, but as I’ve said before I’m sure we all don’t mind this being the case as long as we go gang-busters in the second half. We did at times, but switching the formation back and forwards apparently at odds with how well it was going might have undermined our gang-busting attempts on this occasion. As I seem to just be repeating myself now, I’ll just finish this part with one more repetition and say that as long as we have the ACL on the horizon, I’m fine with us not really going full out. Thankfully the rest of the league seems to be playing similarly and it’s very tight right now. If we’d managed to turn even one of these recent draws into a win we’d be top so clearly things aren’t going too badly. But let’s still keep our fingers crossed that we’re playing with the handbrake slightly on right now and that we’ll see what Hasebe Frontale really can do after the ACL is over and done with. Hopefully it won’t turn out to be the case that we have actually been going full out so far and are not quite up to the job. Everything will, (or maybe might), become clear in the near future I guess.

Them and ref -

Not much in this section again. Dealing with the ref first, we’d only had one game with Kamimura and that was the 7-0 win over Consadole from a few years ago. It became clear quite early on that it wasn’t going to be a 7-0. Think that the ref probably got both the penalty for their goal and the red card against them right. To be honest, I have no notes about the ref at all. In a way, it wouldn’t have been a disaster if he hadn’t given the red as we never seem to do very well against 10 men. To be fair to Shimizu though, they didn’t just shut up shop after the red though. They were still trying to win the game too. There was a bit of time wasting though, but that’s to be expected. Alright we had a bit more possession and a lot more shots, I think a draw was the right result. So what else can I say in this section…. Hmmmm. Well as usual the bus to and from the stadium was awful. Considering the game finished around 4 it’s pretty bad that we didn’t get to the station until 5:30. And we didn’t hang around long after the final whistle. I know people love Nihondaira, but the access is terrible and I’m looking forward to when they build their new stadium. Or sort out the buses. The former will probably take years, but maybe is easier and more likely than the latter.

So next up, Vissel Kobe away on Wednesday. I’m kind of pleased that they won at the weekend as hopefully that win will give them some complacency and we will be able to turn them over. After that, we’re back at home on Sunday for the visit of Verdy. And then we’re off to Saudi Arabia. Or rather the players are, as the trip doesn’t appeal to me for a multitude of reasons, most significantly financial ones. In the time we’re away the league will have four rounds of fixtures so after returning we’ll be playing catch up, which I think might suit us. But obviously means the busy schedule will continue. And the quality of these blog posts will continue to plummet. Wonderful!

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 45')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for MARCINHO 85')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for KAWAHARA 85')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for ERISON 77')
FW 18. SEGAWA Yusuke
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (Yellow card 90+8') (on for IENAGA 64')
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

My Frontale Man Of The Match

No-one again really. A kind of average game, people seemingly with their minds on the upcoming long away trip for a horrendously weighted in certain teams’ favour dog’s breakfast of a competition.

Goals

KITAGAWA (Shimizu) 62' PEN 1-0
YAMAMOTO (Frontale) 68' 1-1

Highlights