Vs Yokohama F Marinos (away) 1/11/26 J League match 13

Yokohama F Marinos 4 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

The winning run is over in predictably horrific style. I can’t help but feel that we might have done better in this game if we came in to it on a five game losing run instead. There was no way that our scummiest neighbours would let us extend a nice run in a game against them. And so it proved to be. One thing to grasp onto is perhaps the fact that this awful defeat was not as bad as the ‘home’ game defeat against them last year. Well at least in terms of the result anyway. I have no interest in prolonging my irritation about this all any longer so please forgive me if I just whinge a lot, (mainly about us), and get out of here. I’ve got plenty of targets for my annoyance this time and that’s probably no surprise as this was a truly shitty game that makes it difficult to even think about anticipating the next match, let alone actually attending it with any expectation of enjoying it. That next match is against a team who love to score and are in good form. This match wasn’t, and still we shat the bed on a monumental scale. As I want to get this done as soon as possible I’m going to not worry about trying to present this post in an organised and thoughtful way, (unbelievably, I normally do try to make these at least slightly readable), and instead will pile it all up in a series of probably ill-informed bullet points. Here goes.

- That same shitty first choice midfield three were back again and once again were awful. Somehow two of them managed to stay on the pitch for the whole ninety minutes. I’m not saying they are awful players, but I am definitely saying that when they’re together we do badly. How Hasebe hasn’t noticed this is a mystery. In our last seven games we’ve won five and lost two. The two losses form the bread in the win sandwich and both featured those three starting. Nagoya at home and this game were truly shit matches. In the middle five wins, three featured Hasebe’s second choice midfield and it seems like those games were pretty good. The other two were the wins away at Cerezo where we were more than aided by a very early red card for them but still in spite of scoring four times could still consider ourselves a bit lucky to win, and the Okayama home game where we were utterly shit and we’re lucky to get the win. Stuck right in the middle is the Vissel Kobe match. On paper I guess they are the strongest team of the lot and we absolutely battered them with our ‘second choice’ midfield. I’ve seen people talking about how they want Ozeki and Yamamichi to start. I agree. But I wonder if they realise that if this is to happen some sacred cows will have to be sacrificed. Surely even the most happy clappy of fan or staff member can see that the big names are regularly soiling themselves. And they still are automatic choices to start the next game if it’s considered an important game. Hasebe rotating for Vissel is still baffling. Does he intend to change it every game? Maybe we’ll see soon as we have two cup games against Kashiwa coming up, preceded by a league game against the same team. Our play is obviously dull but it seems that the football gods who presumably decide the cup draws want us to suffer even more dullness by having to playing the same team three times in a row. Pretty sure the same thing happened with the same opposition a year or two ago. I’m delighted to say that I have to work for one of those game so can’t attend, and perhaps might struggle to get a ticket for one of the others. So maybe I will be spared some misery. 

- When it comes to who was bad in this game it would be much easier to name who wasn’t bad as the list is significantly shorter. Pedro Romano wasn’t bad. And unlike a lot of his teammates, he really seemed to care about us getting repeatedly dismantled. Ito also seemed to care and I was a bit surprised to see him taken off as one of our first changes. Not sure if Derik was good or bad as he never really received the ball so it was difficult to judge. Don't try to give the ball to your one striker? Great tactics! Uremovic scored so that’s in his favour. But we did look a total mess at the back so that probably counts against him. But at least he managed to get a shot on target which is more than can be said for many of his gutless teammates. I think we have a problem in goal. I’m absolutely not saying Yamaguchi would have done any better. I suspect he would have done worse. But fuck me, Brodersen is not good on the ball. Which makes it all the more baffling that we continue to persevere with the absolutely pointless short goal kick thing. I perhaps can see some benefits to it if we could actually in any way do the basics, but recently it’s basically our opponents best form of attack against us. In this game YFM even stopped trying to pressure us in these stupid short goal kick situations, presumably knowing that they didn’t have to, as it seemed part of our game plan to give the ball away, particularly when under absolutely no pressure. Just absolutely woeful stuff. Presumably it will remain a crucial part of our genius tactical master plan for every forthcoming game.

- Wakizaka is a problem, I think. Many people disagree. He’s undroppable. He’s playing shit. He’s moaning at his teammates for making mistakes and taking no responsibility when he makes his own numerous mistakes. He’s the captain so you’d hope he be able to support and motivate his teammates but recently he seems more interested in farting around picking fluff out of his belly button, giving the ball away, missing even the easiest passes and chances and mouthing off at his teammates. He’s by no means the only problem in the midfield, but his unquestioned presence is blocking younger players who look more interested and are surely not in as bad form as he is. Maybe there are some similarities with Marcinho in that both of them seem to not be playing very well but then score goals, erasing any memories of any other very dodgy moments. But at least Marcinho looks like he’s trying and is interested. I doubt Hasebe will have the guts or the insight to drop him. But clearly the midfield three he prefers are absolutely not doing the business right now. 

- Whilst we’re in the subject of picking holes in Hasebe’s abilities, you’ve got to ask some questions about his tactics and subs in this match. We were not in the game right from the start, could easily have conceded two or three more than we did in the first half and he did nothing. We had two shots in the first half apparently. This was surprise for me as I can’t remember the one that wasn’t the goal. We were awful. And he changed nothing at half time. When he finally made a change it seemed a bit late and he took off Ito who had been one of the few players to show any kind of interest. Losing 4-1 with time running out, Hasebe finally changed our shape in the 78th minute. Presumably he thought we had enough time to come back and win. And then with little more than five minutes left he made his final two subs, two defensive changes. So maybe he was intent on keeping things tight and preserving our 4-1 defeat. I know we don’t have a great deal of options due to inuries and stuff, so maybe I should cut him some slack. But as far as I can see, when we win, it’s usually because we got lucky and when we lose, it’s because we got what we deserved. If he continues to carry on with picking the same players and doing the same things, you’ve got to hope that his time with us won’t extend past this season. I know he’s not at fault for the numerous individual errors we made in this match which lead to every single one of their goals, but he is responsible for the idiotic short goal kick tactics which was involved in most of those mistakes and he is responsible for constantly picking players who seem like they can’t be bothered, aside from the part where they get to slag off their teammates. 

- Not going to bother talking much about YFM. We know they are a scummy club and they showed it with their persistent fouling, diving and time wasting. I think we actually could say we won this game 6-0 as every goal scored in the match was created by us. They hammered us AGAIN. I don’t get how their players always seem to be well up for this fixture but ours seem to not care. I don’t think YFM are very good, but you can’t deny that they deserved this win, as even if they weren't very good, we were absolutely fucking shit.

- And a quick word on the ref. He was dogshit. As I’ve said in previous posts on his games, he likes to not give much. And on this occasion he thought he’d extend that policy to not give us anything. We had three possible penalties turned down by him. Just give us one, you bastard! Miyaichi's yellow looked like it could have been a red to me, but let-it-go Shiino was in town. I mean, we didn’t lose because of him but it’s good for some of our players that he was so shit that he took some of the focus away from their numerous cock ups. But I suppose on reflection, given that it was a game between two middling to hopeless teams, it made perfect sense that the ref would also be shite.


This has all been quite pessimistic. I blame that of course on the shite on the pitch but also on the fact that the seats in the stadium were too small, (or the person next to me was maybe hogging my space), so I spent most of the match quiet uncomfortable. Add to this the stupid fucking big flags which seem impossible to avoid at certain games, the almost constant waving of which meant that most of the match for me was viewed as a series of brief glimpses of still photos with plenty of stuff missed in between them. Sadly the absolute cock ups for the goals were all too clear though. Basically this was a top tier shit afternoon. The only saving grace I can find is that it wasn’t an early Saturday kick off as that would have ruined a whole extra day of the weekend. Absolutely gutless stuff and apparently the players were still applauded at the end of the match. CONGRATULATIONS ON GETTING HAMMERED BY A SMALLER SCORELINE THAN LAST YEAR! NICE WORK LADS! KEEP UP THE… OBJECTIVELY AWFUL WORK. I didn’t see this for myself as I was out of there as soon as the ref blew the final whistle. Right now I have absolutely no desire to go to the next match, away at Kashiwa next weekend. Of course, I’ll go, but if Hasebe goes with the same old shit, which he almost certainly will, it will almost certainly result in another shocker. I’m currently watching the U21 team on DAZN and I’d love some of these guys to get a look in with the top team. At least then there would be something to look forward to. Or maybe Kobayashi could play a bit more. There’s no way we’ll ever put together enough consistency to get anything out of this season so why not just give us some kind of interest or enjoyment. Please, please, please. Make the utter boredom and frustration stop. Or if that’s not possible at least let us have the same dull shit but with some different faces.

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO 
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC (Yellow card 76') 
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya 

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 97. DERIK LACERDA

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for MARCINHO 78')  
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for YAMAMOTO 64')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 84')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto (on for ITO 64')
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for UREMOVIC 84')
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon (on for MIURA 78')


Man of the match

What do you think? Should I just ditch this section permanently? 

Goals

TONO (YFM) 12' 1-0
KONDO (YFM) 28' 2-0 
UREMOVIC (Frontale) 33' 2-1
TANIMURA (YFM) 41' 3-1 
QUINONES (YFM) 56' 4-1 
OZEKI (Frontale) 90+2' 4-2

Highlights 

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 Yokohama F Marinos (home-ish) 22/3/26 J League East match 8

 

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 5 Yokohama F Marinos

 

Please excuse me for keeping this brief. I’m slightly surprised I’m even bothering writing anything when a couple of puking emojis would probably tell the story pretty clearly. So shit was this match, I have hardly any notes and I have no photos of the actual football. I also have no desire to write this, so I’m going to dispose of most of the usual subtitles.


1st half -

Pretty shit first half which started going wrong as soon as the VAR decision was being considered. Ref giving them absolutely everything. Marcinho must be the best dribbler in the league and maybe the worst passer. As usual, plenty of pointless possession and maybe zero good chances. Unbelievable amount of offsides. 


2nd half -

Fuck that.


Good day -

No, it wasn’t. 

Bad day -

Too many to mention really. And worryingly three players who’ve done pretty well so far this season totally fell to pieces in this match. Matsunagane was the senior centre back in the pairing, which is a bit of a crazy thing to say. He thought he’d scored, it was ruled out, and things went steadily downhill from there. Broderson flapped on quite a few occasions. I don’t know if this is because the defence let him down. From miles away in the stands it looked like he was more at fault though which is absolutely the opposite of every game so far this season. Equally though, he did prevent them from reaching double figures which at one stage looked like it could easily happen. Maruyama came on and was very quickly at fault for two goals. Not great for him and not great for the tactical genius who made that change. The weird thing is, aside from these three, no one else really stood out as being particularly bad. Well apart from the manager maybe as the main takeaway from our play was that it was an absolute waste of time and was absolutely pointless. We never looked like we’d score. Even when we had a decent chance we just rolled the ball to their keeper. Individual errors were the reason we conceded so many. The reason we created absolutely nothing and had no response to constantly conceding is something more like collective apathy and that has got to go down to Hasebe. I’ve tried to give him the benefit of the doubt but it’s difficult to come away from this game not thinking that he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. We’re unbelievably inconsistent when it comes to results, but perhaps quite consistent in that we’re always pretty dull, (but sometimes get lucky). I’m not sure ‘looking forward to’ is the right phrase, but I am certain interested to hear his post match comments. They’re not up on the website yet. In previous shitty performances I’ve been surprised how he’s apparently seen quite a lot of positives in our stodgy and ineffective play. I don’t think even he can say that after this match. (I’ve read them now, and astonishingly, he pretty much did). And although, once again, we’re stacking up the injuries, there surely was a safer option at centre back than giving someone his debut who joined from the youth team last year and partnering him with someone who hasn’t really played many more games for us than Hayashi has.  And playing that ‘senior’ player on the side of defence that means he is predominantly on his weaker foot. Add to this the fact that the attacking instructions seemed to be something along the lines of the best form of attack being to play the ball backwards towards our defence as often as possible. Hmmmm. Somewhat amusingly, at the end of the game I think the only centre back who wasn’t at fault for at least one goal was Hayashi. But presumably he’ll also be suffering the mental destruction that seems to be par for the course when we inexplicably play young centre backs in games we fuck up against YFM.

Any other business - 

- Miura did a bit better in this match which suggests that Hasebe did the right thing by finally dropping him for a game. Sadly that was about the only right thing he did. 

- Late on in the game there was the joyful announcement on the big screen of the 50000+ attendance being the biggest ever home attendance in the club’s history. At the same time it felt like we could also be heading for the worst result in our history too. It’s a bit of a shame because the club had put a lot of effort into making the day a success and now anyone is going to remember is that we got absolutely thumped and created nothing on our big day at the national stadium. Probably pIenty of trauma there for some players. I can’t imagine any neutrals would have got turned on to Frontale after attending this unless they were ultra masochistic. I suppose though that there weren’t the usual massive amount of free tickets given away so maybe there weren’t many neutrals attending anyway. 

- If you want to see the absolute encapsulation of our performance in this match, check Wakizaka’s corner at 68:38. Guess we’ll blame the pitch, right? Maybe we should blame the pitch for the tactics and substitutions too.

WOW! -

Sounds a lot like sour grapes but the ref Ikeuchi, who is resolutely one of the worst in the league was an absolute shithead in this match giving almost every decision in the first a half to them. Even with a decent ref Hasebe would probably have contrived to have got us walloped but at least it wouldn’t have been as irritating an experience as seeing Ikeuchi consistently cock everything up. He absolutely deserves this title. Although we were so bad in the second half, conceding from pretty much every attack, that even Ikeuchi’s uselessness doesn’t linger in the memory. 


Utterly humiliating. The one game many fans desperately wanted to win in this pointless mini season and instead we allowed our most hated rivals to score only two fewer goals than they had scored in the seven previous games they’d played this season. They were averaging a goal a game until they come up against us. Every time they play us they seem to raise their game, no matter how badly their season is going. Every time we play them we seem to not really care. Thankfully we don’t have a game midweek, which might give some people a chance to recover. Seems like Taniguchi is maybe seriously injured. Sasaki is injured. Uremovic hasn’t had a look in at all this year and given that he wasn’t even in the squad for this match it might mean that he’s got injured too. And don’t forget that Maruyama was apparently not 100% fit (perhaps explaining his errors). Even when we have loads of centre backs it seems that we can manufacture a central defensive injury crisis, doesn’t it? But obviously people make mistakes. It’s a shame so many people made so many in one game though. But at the same time even though we conceded five, I feel like the bigger worry is that we created fuck all again and never looked like scoring. Marcinho dribbling through numerous defenders across the YFM box and then passing gently to their keeper was about as dangerous as we got. I speculated that after the shitty Kashima game there might have been a clear the air bust up. God knows what needs to happen now. Maybe burn the entire club to the ground and start again in the local leagues. Fuck me this was awful. And the next ‘fun’ we have is Machida away. Fucking hell, things are grim. I have to work on the morning of that game, quite a long way from Machida, so maybe if I decide to walk to the stadium straight from work I might be able to arrive late enough to see only the teams lining up after the final whistle, thereby saving myself the stress and frustration of watching another utterly shit game like this. If Hasebe isn’t skating on thin ice after this, he really should be. His apparent lack of ideas and fear of taking any kind of action has irritated in previous fixtures but it really pushed me over the edge in this match. When the only positive things you can say about the match relate to the fun things that went on before kick off and at half time you know we’re in trouble. And the fact that there was a lot of booing at the end of the match, (any booing is an extremely rare thing at Frontale), shows that it’s not only pessimistic me who’s thinking that this all seems pretty gutless and utterly awful right now. 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 33. LEE Keun-Hyeong
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for TACHIBANADA 76')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 61')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 60')
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for HAYASHI 61')
DF 30. NODA Hiroto
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for KONNO 61')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 76')

Man of the match

...

 

Goals

TANIMURA (YFM) 30' 0-1
AMANO (YFM) 53' 0-2
AMANO (YFM) 62' 0-3
YURI ARAUJO (YFM) 72' 0-4
QUINONES (YFM) 78' 0-5

Highlights

 

 

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (away) 13/9/25 J League match 29

Yokohama F Marinos 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale  

Surely this run can’t go on much longer. Recently, we’ve faced a scummy team every week and dispatched them with relative ease. Perhaps this was the easiest of all the dispatchings though. And maybe until this game any thoughts that YFM were actually going to end up getting relegated were just wishful thinking. But on this evidence, they are in real trouble! It’s quite annoying that none of the teams below them really managed to take full advantage of another delightful YFM defeat. I think the only thing that could save them now is the deficiencies of those teams below them. I guess it’s just going to be a matter of who is least bad over the rest of the season. YFM have games remaining against four of the top six. For Shonan it’s two, YFC three and Albirex two. Seven of YFM’s remaining nine games are against top half teams. They have no six pointers left. Oooooh, not looking good is it? Apparently some YFM fans online are already worrying that going to J2 would mean that a lot of their fans would transfer their ‘loyalties’ to Frontale. This is quite a bizarre point of view but I guess they must have some reason for saying it. All very intriguing going into the last stretch of the season, isn’t it? Anyway, please excuse me for apparently enjoying the potential demise of YFM more than us winning. It’s not really that way. Of course I want us to win more than anything, but having that win topped with a potentially dangerous defeat for your irritating neighbours is lovely! I was trying to think of a food related comparison but as my taste is quite pedestrian the best I could think of was the fact that chips are great, and cheese is great, but cheesy chips are really great. Doesn’t quite work, but hopefully you can see what I’m going for here. 

Us -

Unsurprising starting line up again apart from the usual shuffling in the midfield. And why would you fix something that isn’t broke? Our schedule isn’t so busy at the moment so we even have a bit of recovery time in between matches. Erison and Ito both have seven goals in six games. Amazing! In this match we even managed to get a clean sheet. This was probably mostly due to the opposition though. (One shot on target, hehehehehe). Hasebe has reinvented Tanabe as a marauding substitute winger. It’s insane! He had two good opportunities to score in this match and was unlucky with both. It would be wrong of me to not mention that we are kind of hanging in there at the back with not many options when it comes to defenders. Hopefully the current guys can stay fit as if one of them gets injured it will either be Kamihashi, Tsuchiya, Tanabe or Noda coming in, most of whom have hardly any experience. Yamaguchi had almost nothing to do in this game but I was very happy to see him have a right moan at the ref after he let a bad tackle on one of our defenders go. I have nothing much else to say. Nothing to moan about. Just hope we can keep this run going.

Them -

Aaahhhhh. Lovely! ‘Be a Stunner’ is YFM’s slogan for this season. It’s a strange choice, as I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to mean. The only use of stunner when referring to people I know of is the kind of thing a tabloid newspaper would use to describe a very attractive person. Might have made more sense in the passive voice. ‘Be Stunned’. And that’s probably true but not in the way that they might have hoped. I was stunned how bad YFM were in this game. Normally even in terrible seasons for them they somehow raise their game when they play us, presumably because they hate us. On this occasion they definitely had the amount of fouls and cards you might expect from a team playing a grudge match, but when it came to football, they were horrendous. I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t take more advantage of the upper hand we had in this match and give both their goal difference and morale a massive pasting. But it’s always tricky when we have to play against 10 men. Talking of the red card, it’s baffling that their players thought that it shouldn’t have been a penalty. Their fans probably were delighted when they got the potential lifeline of a VAR check, imagining that they were about to get away with no penalty. In the stadium the screen said they were checking whether it was a penalty or not. When the ref came back and canceled the yellow and brought out the red it was delightful! Why they thought that Yamamoto with the goal gaping and the ball right in front of him would dive rather than score is hard to believe. But then again the stadium did seem to be full, (or should I say half full), of their fans wearing the same giveaway replica shirt, so perhaps there were more than a few people there who don’t usually go to games and maybe were only introduced to the sport of football earlier in the day. With the rules changing every few months or so I had to google to check the details. The penalty and a red card thing is now ok. It would have been a yellow if the defender had at least tried to get the ball, but as he just hauled Yamamoto to the ground it’s a red. Cheerio! 41000 is a decent attendance, but probably at least a third were Frontale fans and maybe another third were people there on freebies. There certainly didn’t seem to be much atmosphere coming from the other end of the stadium. They recently had some kind of ban though didn’t they? There were no big flags, (lucky them, not having to spend most of the game ducking and weaving to try and see what’s going on). Not sure if their drums were banned too. It sounded like it. But you can’t really be surprised the atmosphere was a bit flat. They’re having a shocker of a season (about as bad as Postecoglou’s first season, but hopefully they’ll go one… better… this time), their team are awful bunch of cloggers and the stadium announcer tried to build up the vibes by playing a Coldplay ballad. Blimey. I did quite enjoy singing along to the Black Eyed Peas… classic, ‘I gotta feeling’ with my own lyrics, ‘I gotta feeling, that you’re going to J2, going to J2, going to J J 2’. Yes, I’m immature, but I would expect them to do exactly the same if the situation was reversed. They were very, very poor. We won. Lovely.

Ref and VAR -

As mentioned above, I enjoyed that VAR intervention a lot. I also enjoyed the fact that the ref was very tall. Ohashi isn’t a famous ref, and the one previous time we had him I said ‘I don’t have anything to say about him’ which I’d echo for this match and which is the absolute highest of high praise. 


Next up, FC Tokyo at home which, contrary to some people’s opinions, for me means the end of the run of us playing against scummy teams. Hopefully it won’t be the end of us winning games though. The ACL clubs will now be having midweek games which should hopefully cause them some problems. Bravo to Oniki for giving us a rest from that competition this time around. I still don’t think we’re going to win the league, but I am very much enjoying this run and hope that soon we can be the league’s top scorers on our own, rather than having to share that title with Kyoto. Which all seems destined to set up a 0-0 or defeat where we fail to score. Hopefully not. Fingers crossed!

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC

DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for ITO 90+4')

MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 81')

MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 81')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 72')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 72')

 

Goals

ITO (Frontale) 4' 0-1
ERISON (Frontale) 62' PEN 0-2
MIYAGI (Frontale) 90+8' 0-3

Highlights

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (home) 9/4/25 J League match 5

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 3 Yokohama F Marinos

Aaahhhhh. Definitely some mixed emotions after this game. The fact that a two goal win for us would have put us top and put them bottom seemed too good to be true and so it proved to be. This was a game that swung back and forth so many times that it was a bit difficult to keep up with it at times. It was far from our best performance but almost ended being a good result. Then threatened to become a disaster, before turning out… maybe well. Put it this way, it definitely felt better to have scored a last gasp equaliser rather than have conceded one. I guess the elation of that partly came from the relief that a few minutes before it had looked like we’d turned three points into no points. It’s never nice to not beat YFM, but on this occasion, I think there are a few things we can be pleased about and a few mitigating factors. Which I’ll go into in the usual sections. Here we go.

Us -

How good would it have been to have won this game with the starting line up Hasebe picked? I think even getting a draw is a decent enough snubbing of our nose to YFM considering we played only a couple of regular starters, mostly players who are usually subs, and some who rarely even get a look in to even the bench. There were only two players who started both this game and the previous game against Machida and one of them, Marcinho, only started because Miyagi got injured in the warm up. Five of the starters in this match didn’t even make the bench against Machida. And still right up until the 89th minute it looked like we were going to win. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a great performance by any means. But that’s to be expected when you consider many of these players have never started a match together and there were new partnerships all over the pitch. And still it was almost enough to win… But yeah, we didn’t play particularly well for most of the game. I’m fully in favour of Hasebe rotating though. After the Machida game the treatment room has filled up once again, partly due to Machida’s skillful booting of our players all over the pitch. There was an injury update today from the club and it was announced that in addition to Tachibanada and Jesiel being injured, which we pretty much knew, Oshima is also injured again. It’s perhaps a bit of a worry that our only loss of the season so far was the game against Kyoto where we also rotated a lot. So we definitely need to do a bit more work to get the guys who Hasebe doesn’t favour the most up to speed with the regular starters. But at the same time, I think that the upcoming ACL game, (fingers crossed, games), in Saudi Arabia is something that is on everyone’s mind at the moment and not knackering any of our players before then is quite important. It’s a bit of shame that our preparation for that trip is filled with a relentless schedule of Wednesday and weekend games. But the fact is that even with a new manager, with new ideas (maybe), we’re still doing alright in the league at the moment. So I don’t think there are any reasons to complain right now. But blimey, it would have been nice to win this game, wouldn’t it? 

So anything notable from this match? It was nice to see Ozeki get his first start and then his first goal.  It was kind of unbelievable to see Haydar score, and what a lovely goal that was. Kobayashi is back from injury, and Kanda had his first decent involvement in the league. It’s a bit of a shame that neither Kobayashi or Kanda really had much impact though. I don’t think Segawa in the Wakizaka position was a great success, and I thought he did better when moved to the wing in the second half. And I was very happy to see Tsuchiya get his first minutes. It’s unfortunate that his introduction coincided with us conceding twice, but I don’t think he was to blame, even if the look on his face at the end pf the match suggested that he thought he was. Don’t worry Tsuchiya, we were pretty unlucky with those goals. Probably for their first goal we weren’t so unlucky, unless it is bad luck to let in an absolute pea-roller of a shot. Perhaps Sung-Ryong was unsighted by the ball coming through a few players and there was a hint of a deflection too. A very soft goal to concede. We didn’t do much aside from score our first goal in the first half. The second half was a bit better. Well, up until the 89th minute anyway. But it’s no big deal. I think YFM will be much more upset about the way the game finished than we did, and them getting one point instead of the zero I’d hoped for won’t help their relegation fight that much. So in conclusion, fair enough to rotate heavily with big games coming up especially when playing a team so low down in the table 😉. We weren’t that good, but we didn’t lose. But we could do with a couple of wins in the next few games to get us back on track again, I reckon.

Them -

YFM were rubbish for most of this match and hopefully they will continue with that form for the rest of the season and go to J2. They had plenty of possession but for the most part did nothing with it. It was delightful. Tono seems to have settled in at YFM quickly as he appears to have turned into a cheating, diving, moaning wanker. Normally I feel a kind of residual warmth towards ex-players but Tono seems to have undergone a severe character change. I guess it’s because he’s now spending a lot of time in Yokohama. As a quick aside, it’s easy to tell that someone lives in Yokohama, because they incessantly bore on about how great Yokohama is. In a way, it was crushingly inevitable that they’d end up fluking a couple of late goals. These matches do tend to more often than not leave everyone slightly disappointed. At the time, I was obviously gutted that we’d conceded so late. Looking back at the replays, I feel like we were pretty unlucky. For their second goal they somehow managed to turn a totally off-target over head kick attempt into a goal via two point blank deflections off our defenders. For their third, the ref seemed to be not bothered by a handball by them in the build up and then they managed to set up the tap in by having the ball boing off their player’s shoulder. It’s clear that luck wasn’t on our side. But perhaps it generally is, given that our neighbours look so utterly crap this year. Whilst it would obviously be hilarious if they soon fired the new manager that they thought would be so good, it might actually be funnier if they held on to him for a bit longer so they can put themselves in genuine relegation danger. Hopefully Holland can go one better than Postecoglou did when he almost got them relegated. Wonder how Postecolgou is doing now? I guess that given how many players he signs and how great a manager he thinks he is, he’s probably won everything there is to win in England by now. I don’t know where this new thing of me doing a conclusion for every paragraph has come from but, in conclusion, they are shite, so it’s bad of us that we didn’t beat them, but at the same time, it’s delightful that we could deny them the win they thought they’d got so late on in the game, and it will be even better if come the end of the season they get relegated because they conceded that late Takai goal.

Ref and VAR -

Mikuriya is still a name that fills me with dread, but I didn’t have that much to moan about in this game. Aside from the usual petty little biased whinges that come as easily to me as breathing, I could probably only complain about one of our attacks that he decided to stop for a foul after he seemed initially to have played the advantage for but then changed his mind once the advantage started becoming advantageous. I guess I should probably moan about him potentially missing a handball in the lead up to their third, but I might be clutching at straws a little with that. Can’t really complain about the VAR either I guess, although I still hate it for the same old reasons. I did start thinking during this game though that I don’t think we’ve had VAR overturn anything in our favour this year. On the occasions it has gone our way it has been to back up what the ref had given on the pitch. We’ve definitely had some goals ruled out by it though. In spite of there being plenty of overly lengthy checks in this match, again, we didn’t seem to get the luck of VAR. So this year I can hate it for both its very existence and the way the decisions are going for us. People will say these things even themselves out over the course of a year. If that’s true, I’m looking forward to the times when we start getting some decisions going our way. I’m a bit sick of that red screen right now and those long delays are losing me valuable post-game drinking time.


Next up Shimizu away on Saturday. I reckon we need a win to get back on track after a couple of disappointing draws where we’ve thrown away leads. There were definitely mitigating circumstances in both of those matches though. After that it’s Vissel Kobe away on Wednesday as the relentless churn of fixtures continues. I won’t be able to either go to or watch that match, so the blog post will be a breeze for me to write and for you to read. Hopefully that game on Wednesday against a cellar-dweller will go better than this one did against a different cellar-dweller. And hopefully both of them will be in the relegation zone as the final whistle blows on the final match of the season. Go Frontale! And Go (YFM and Vissel) to J2! 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (Yellow card 76')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 18. SEGAWA Yusuke
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for TANABE 82')
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for KAWAHARA 46')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for MARCINHO 46')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin

FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 28. PATRICK VERHON
FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for KOBAYASHI 62')
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito (on for CESAR HAYDAR 88')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Honestly speaking, we weren’t that great and as much as I’d like to give it out to someone for some spurious reason, it probably might make me look more deluded than I already am, so let’s skip it on this occasion.

Goals

OZEKI (Frontale) 7' 1-0
YAN MATEUS (Yokohama) 41' 1-1
CESAR HAYDAR (Frontale) 66' 2-1
AMANO (Yokohama) 89' 2-2
YAN MATEUS (Yokohama) 90+2' 2-3
TAKAI (Frontale) 90+9' 3-3


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