Vs United City FC 6/7/21 ACL Group stage game 4

United City FC 0 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

This is a difficult blog post to write. And that’s not because we have recently got used to massive victories in this competition and this failed to live up to those standards. It’s more that I used up all my ‘witty’ observations about United City in the last post. And also because this was a pretty bad game that was quite difficult to concentrate on. Thankfully it was an 11pm kick off rather than a 1am one as that would have really put the cherry on the cake, frustration wise. To be honest I’m going to rush through this post as there’s not much to say. It was a case of job done (in the least exciting fashion possible, which is a bizarre observation considering we had 25 shots, but it just felt like a bit of a borefest), and hopefully was a case of us doing what was necessary and not exerting ourselves to do much more. I’m pleased we managed to get the second goal as until then the game was so one-sided but still at 1-0 that the only possible outcome seemed to be a last minute own goal equaliser disaster.

Both teams changed their starting line ups quite a lot. Again this was a case of us playing the reserves and you could say it showed a bit. I don’t know where their starting 11 ranked on the first team/reserves axis but they did a lot better than the previous line up did. Well, from a results point of view anyway. They still didn’t really offer anything going forward aside from one goalmouth scramble, but they considerably reduced the amount of goals they conceded. The weird thing is that we had more shots in this game than in the 8-0 victory. We also had almost the same amount of shots on target. However, the important stat is that in the 8-0 game 8 out of 15 went in and in this game 2 out of 12 went in. I saw someone on Twitter wondering whether the United City keeper could do a job in the J League. I can only presume they weren’t watching the game. Not dissing him, but definitely the reduced number of shots going in had a lot more to do with our dull finishing than any goal keeping heroics. Heroics is a good word though, as their keeper Pinthus does seem to like an overly dramatic flying save. Well done to him though. He did better than Langerak did in the two games we’ve played against Nagoya so far this year. (Now I’ve said that I bet we’ll get them in the next round and lose…). Much like in the first game between these two teams, United City did a good job of defending and holding out sternly for the first part of the game. Significantly, in this game the collapse never came. Credit to them! Slightly bizarrely, the other group game seemed to go a similar way. Perhaps this is the natural pattern in that both of the ‘weaker’ teams in the group got spanked by the two ‘stronger’ teams in their first encounter and then managed to stem the flow somewhat in the following fixture. When the final group game comes round we’ll see if that applies to the other fixtures that were previously whallopings. In the mean time we have the crucial fixture of the group stage when we face Daegu in the next match. Hopefully we won’t be as generous at the back as we were in the first fixture. And hopefully we won’t be so wasteful up front as we were in this game. I presume the ‘first team’ will be back for that game, although some of them were called on to try to make this game safe about halfway through the second half.

Some final little comments. The foul count in this match ended up pretty even, which is weird considering how one sided it was in the previous two games. I can’t quite make a clear connection between playing well and giving away fouls so that will remain something of a mystery. I’ve noticed that our Forza Frontale flag changes end in the matches depending on whether we are ‘home’ or ‘away’. A nice touch perhaps, or maybe just a slightly obsessively weird request from the Kazoku. A quick mention of the goals. Chinen’s was a nice tidy finish, Hasegawa’s was perhaps one of the sloppiest and least exciting goals ever, being a close range scuff. Even that makes it sound more exciting than it was. Nobori was back but we have potentially another injury now as Tsukagawa had to leave the pitch on a stretcher, perhaps due to a previous head injury. I’m not sure if he went down because he was wobbly a few minutes after the clash of heads or whether the stretcher and substitution were precautions due to the fact that he’d had the clash of heads and his injury was unrelated. Either way, I obviously wish him all the best. It’s the second time he’s had to be substituted due to a head injury in his brief Frontale career which shows he really does like to get stuck in. Oh and finally, credit where credit’s due, and a slap in the face to Einstein, as Taniguchi came on for Tsukagawa in midfield and he actually seemed to do a pretty good job there! The evidence still points to it not being a good idea, but I can’t complain about it on this occasion aside from complaining that it makes my previous comments that he’s terrible there look stupid… unless you look at any of the previous occasions he’s played there. But on this occasion, well done Shogo!

Next up is Daegu at 1am on Friday night. We get to go to the other Tashkent stadium for once. Not the nicest of kick off times for perhaps the most important game of the group stage. And not sure why the more exciting games need to be played at more inconvenient times, but never mind. If we avoid defeat in that game we only need a draw against Beijing Guoan’s kids in the final game to win the group. Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG

DF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo (on for TSUKAGAWA 58')

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for OSHIMA 46')

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

DF 13. YAMANE Miki (on for KOZUKA 72')

DF 15. ISSAKA Zain

FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

DF 26. KAMIYA Kaito

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for TONO 72')

 

 

Goals   

CHINEN (Frontale) 18' 0-1

HASEGAWA (Frontale) 78' 0-2

 

 

Highlights

 

Vs United City FC 2/7/21 ACL Group stage game 3

Kawasaki Frontale 8 - 0 United City FC 

Another ACL game ticked off and it was another big win. We’d been building up to an ACL push this year but the reality of these group games so far has been a bit of an anticlimax. Not saying they haven’t been fun to watch as they’ve had plenty of goals in them. Just that it seems that 4 out of our 6 group games will just be us going through the motions. I’ve posted previously about the weird state of the ACL this year so I won’t go over that again. But aside from the other game against Daegu, the most challenging aspect of the next week or so might be the club trying to find original content for Instagram and me trying to find ways to describe very one-sided goalfests. I’m sure both the club and I will do our best though. So here we go.

Initially when I discovered our ACL opposition, I was reminded of that particular kind of football fan who has on their Twitter profile that they are a fan of Arsenal and Tottenham or something like that. It’s definitely something that seems a bit alien to most people who follow football. Presumably the person who changed the name of Ceres Negros to United City FC likes both Manchester United and Manchester City and just couldn’t choose one over the other. Who needs the name of the place when you can just go with two team name endings instead? Although I guess we do have Albion Rovers in the UK so I should probably shut up. I like to think of it being something positive though. A city united through football. Feels much better to look at it like that rather than being snippy about it, doesn’t it? I didn’t know much about them before the game (apart from the fact that FC Tokyo just about managed to squeak past them with a 2-0 win in a game that was mostly subaquatic in last year’s ACL), so I was somewhat surprised how steadily they started the game considering their previous two ACL results. For a lot of the game they were pretty solid at the back. This may have been due to the fact that they were playing a back three with another back four in front of them (according to a website line up I saw). They did a decent job of preventing us breaking through and scoring and played the ball out from the back quite well I thought. Well, up till they reached the middle of the pitch where they hoofed it forward or lost it. I guess when you play with so many players at the back you end up with no-one up the front to get the ball when you’re not defending. One other thing that surprised me was that according to the commentators Shrek was playing for United City. I couldn’t spot him and his green skin probably would have stood out nicely against their golden kit. I’m not going to be too snippy about this either as although Katakana doesn’t exactly help with making foreign pronunciations accurate, in English we tend to just do things our own way and be done with it, particularly with place names. Guess that’s an ex-imperialist thing. The similarities between creature and player don’t go very far. According to a very brief internet search ‘Though surly, dangerous, cynical, misanthropic, and venomously cranky, Shrek is peaceful and does not care to hurt anyone, but just wants to live in solitude and be left alone.’ By contrast a Schröck loves to get involved with every challenge on the pitch and have a moan about it being either definitely not a foul (if he committed it) or definitely a foul (if he lost the ball). So I guess he does share some of the crankiness. Anyway, I’m just trying to make some jokes to make this blog post slightly entertaining and I have no feelings of ill will against him or his team.

Talking of fouls, once again we seemed to give away loads more than we received. 26 to 13 in this game, 25 to 5 in the Beijing game. I don’t think we’re a dirty team so I can only imagine that this imbalance is probably due to us having a lot more of the ball and being able to keep it away from opposition tackles. The ref in this match gave absolutely everything though. No sign of any advantages being given and any 50/50 tackle seemed to be given as a foul. Slightly bizarrely they picked up three time as many yellows as we did though, which I guess shows that if they were going to foul, they really went for it. I thought Joao Schmidt’s yellow was ridiculous in this game, but let’s not moan when we’ve won 8-0. I’m trying to be less annoying recently in this respect. Please let me know if I’m succeeding. However, I can’t help but have a little moan again about the TV director. We had a few replays of a couple of yellow cards being given which was shown at the same time as one of United City’s three shots. I wouldn’t have been too happy if I was a United City fan having missed one third of the positive moments of my team. I should also mention the, (I think), once per game occasion of there being an ACL FACT flashed up on the screen. In this game it was perhaps slightly relevant given that it was about the fact that there have been 13 champions from the East zone in the last 18 years (or something like that…). In the previous game against Beijing Guoan the fact was about Korean teams which kind of seemed to be missing the point slightly. I wonder if they couldn’t come up with that many facts and are therefore having to ration them to one per game and shoehorn them in even when they aren’t particularly pertinent. The coverage does all feel a little bit like it’s been handed to the guys who normally do the darts who’ve been told to have a quick watch of another channels coverage of a different tournament and try to do broadly the same thing on their first attempt with only a couple of days to prepare.

A few brief points about us. It seems like Oniki is basically going with alternate teams for alternate matches. This game we were back with what could probably be described as the first team. Sung-Ryong, Yamane and Hatate are playing every game though. No Nobori or Kobayashi in the squad which suggests that they are both still injured. To what extent, who knows? Hatate added another string to his bow in this game as he spent some time at right back. This was a glorious time when we were playing an attacker at right back, a midfielder in defence (Yamamura) and a defender in midfield (Taniguchi). I don’t particularly want to moan about Taniguchi playing in midfield again, but I feel that I have to do it as it’s pretty stupid I think. As I always say, we have now tried him in the anchor role a crazy amount of times, all with the same outcome. Not sure how accurate the widely spouted 'quote' is, but I believe Einstein said something about the definition of insanity being trying the same thing over and over and expecting the outcome to be different. If we were going to give Taniguchi a go there, this was probably the right game in which to do it. But I’m not sure why we are bothering as he’s always pretty bad there and now he’s playing great at the back, why mess with it? One little final dig about this. We had a 90% pass completion rate. I’d say that at least half of the 10% of incomplete passes came from Taniguchi during his time in midfield. This was perfectly summed up by the pass he attempted just before he was taken off, which was a lofted through pass for an attacker to run onto which only just was able to bounce before it left the pitch about 5 metres ahead of the run of the player. It also felt that other players were trying not to pass to him in order not to ruin his confidence. Oniki, leave him at the back please! He’s good there! Oh and a quick mention of the fact that we scored loads of goals and Tachibanada got a hatttrick! Blimey! He’s 4 goals behind Olunga in the scoring charts having played three less games. Come on Kento and make a push for the golden boot! Aside from his three we had a couple from Mitoma, a beautiful one from Oshima, one from Damiao and one from Wakizaka. Nice work guys!

Next up we have United City again. It’s another 11pm kick off and it’s on Monday night. I would imagine we’ll get the other starting line up for that game. Or maybe Oniki will go with a composite based around Taniguchi in midfield and Hatate in goal. The game after is against Daegu so if we win the next two Oniki would be free to do anything he wanted in the final group game knowing we had won the group. Could be exciting. But might be just the same thing again. I guess if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But at the same time, it might be worth trying to keep some players injury free as we’ll have a couple of games within a week of us returning from Uzbekistan before we take a one month break. Go Frontale!

 

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (Yellow card 26')

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for TANIGUCHI 63')

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 46')

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for OSHIMA 46')

DF 15. ISSAKA Zain

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for HATATE 73')

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for YAMANE 61')

 

Goals   

MITOMA (Frontale) 33' 1-0

OSHIMA (Frontale) 42' 2-0

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 50' 3-0

TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 56' 4-0

TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 65' 5-0

TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 70' 6-0

MITOMA (Frontale) 82' 7-0

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 90+2' 8-0

 

 

Highlights

 

 

Vs Beijing Guoan 30/6/21 ACL Group stage game 2

Beijing Guoan 0 - 7 Kawasaki Frontale

If you thought that last blog post was a bit pointless in its flakiness  then this one is really going to up the ante. But to be honest, I’m not wholly to blame for this. This year’s ACL, (AN EASY RIDE! TYPICAL THAT YOU GET IT SO EASY! YOU’RE CRAP IF YOU DON’T WIN EVERY GAME 20-0! cry the rival fans… again…), is a weird beast. I quite like seeing plenty of teams from ‘smaller’ footballing nations so thanks to the Australian teams for sorting that out. The significant difference as evidenced by this game is the fact that the Chinese teams have sent the kids. The oldest player who started the game for Beijing Guoan was 23 and he was the goalkeeper. He also had the lowest squad number which is not unusual when you consider he is the keeper but when that number is 25 there’s definitely something going on. Incidentally, the highest number on display was 88. And it showed on the pitch as they looked pretty awful. So awful that any real discussion of this match is pretty pointless I’d say. I can’t imagine we have ever had so much space in a competitive game before. After an initial flurry of goals at the start of the game they did manage to stem the flow slightly. But I’d say that this was more due to us not just taking our foot off the gas, but more pulling over into the motorway service station, turning the car off and spending the majority of the rest of the first half browsing the magazines in WH Smith and getting and eating a Cornish Pasty. We scored goals and any dissection of the goals is kind of pointless, I’ll just mention that it was good for Hasegawa and Yamamura to get one, Chinen to get a couple and for Wakizaka, Tono and Tachibanada to keep their goal counter ticking over. Nice.

A few words on our starting lineup. It seems that Noborizato is injured after he left the pitch in the last game. It also seems that Kobayashi could be joining him on the sidelines after picking up a knee injury and having to be subbed after 34 minutes. Hopefully it won’t be too serious as if we continue at this rate of one important injury every game we could end up with lots of players missing by the time we get back to playing J League fixtures. Of course, I’d like to blame the pitch like I did last time, but to be honest it looked a bit better. Or rather I didn’t notice it being totally horrible. Perhaps this was due to the game being considerably less challenging than our last fixture against Daegu. Also, I was attempting to watch the England Germany game at the same time so there is a real possibility that instead of taking in two games at once, I ended up not really paying any attention to two games at once. It was made all the more confusing by the fact that the two games were going quite different ways when it came to tension and the level of the tactical battle going on. Oniki made a few changes when it came to the starting line up. There were various interpretations of the formation after the line up was announced. Not sure that any of them were right to be honest. Basically we had a centre back pairing of Kurumaya and Yamamura, with Hatate at left back and Taniuguchi in the defensive midfield spot. Because, you know, it’s been a little while since we tried that and yeah, it didn’t work, but why not give it another go, eh? I always moan about it because it never works and once again it didn’t, so I will register a moan about it again. Moan. Perhaps it’s telling than Taniguchi was withdrawn at half time. As we are pretty light on centre backs I would have thought he could have been rested for this game anyway. Perhaps that was Oniki’s thinking when he took him off at half time. I hope though that his thinking was ‘Weird… I tried this same thing again and for some reason once again it didn’t work’. He clearly knows a let more than me about football but please let me know if I’m off the mark with my desire to not see Taniguchi play in midfield. It was nice to see Issaka and Kamiya get some time on the pitch again. This time it was more than a minute for Kamiya and I thought he looked pretty good at left back. But like I said I wasn’t fully focussed so probably only noticed when he was involved in some kind of action. I wonder if he might start the next game if Nobori is still injured. I’ll draw this post to a conclusion with a couple of stupid observations. I liked Chinen’s new sideburns. Surprisingly long. Or at least that’s how they looked. And an observation that the low budget feel to these games and their coverage continued with the fake digital subs boards with day-glo stick on numbers being used. I wonder if they had enough of the larger digits given that they probably don’t usually need to do a substitution where player number 88 is replaced by 68. (These numbers are for demonstration purposes only. Truth and accuracy, as you’d expect from this blog, is abandoned in order to make a stupid joke. The TV director and cameramen still seem obsessed with long lingering shots of managers or players uninvolved with the action whilst the game continues unobserved off screen. I find it adds to the excitement though, as particularly given that there is no crowd reaction noise, literally anything could be happening and you only have the facial expressions of the person being focussed on to use as evidence for a guess as to what’s going on.

Next up we have United City of the Philippines on Friday at 11pm so it won’t be such a late night. They lost 7-0 to Daegu in their second game so I guess we probably won’t be putting out the full strength team and hopefully will see some more squad players getting a chance. Can’t help but feel though that if we started Damiao in this game and the other two games against United City and Beijing Guoan he might end up breaking the all time ACL scoring record that Dejan Damjanovic has just broken. He’s probably about 32 goals behind still, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Certainly we’d be seeing a few more overhead kicks! There is a lingering feeling that this whole tournament group stage is a bit pointless but I have to say, I’m quite enjoying it! Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki  (on for TANIGUCHI 46')

DF 4. JESIEL

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for WAKIZAKA 76')

DF 15. ISSAKA Zain (Yellow card 85') (on for YAMANE 54')

FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 34')

DF 26. KAMIYA Kaito (on for HATATE 54')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

 

 

Goals   

HASEGAWA (Frontale) 7' 0-1

TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 8' 0-2

TONO (Frontale) 41' 0-3

CHINEN (Frontale) 47' PEN 0-4

YAMAMURA (Frontale) 51' 0-5

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 56' 0-6

CHINEN (Frontale) 59' 0-7

 

 

Highlights

 

Vs Daegu FC 27/6/21 ACL Group stage game 1

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 2 Daegu FC

Another ACL campaign kicked off with some hope that we’ll do a bit better this time. Our last attempt was pretty awful in spite of us actually going for it. We were unlucky on a few occasions in that attempt and at times it looked like we were going to also fluff our lines in this game. But we managed to come through relatively unscathed in the end. Already people are bitching about how easy we have it this year in the ACL. We are in a no win situation as far as opposition fans go. If we win, we’ll be told that this year was a freakishly easy competition due to Australian teams pulling out and Chinese teams sending mostly their youth teams. If we fail we will be told that we’re useless for the same reasons. Given that we’ll get criticised both ways, hopefully we can go for the former option and make a decent stab of it. So, onto this game.

We got off to the worst possible start, looking like we were all over the place defensively, conceding within eight minutes and then going on to give away a penalty, (which thankfully Sung-Ryong saved, again!). To be honest, we generously gave them both of these chances as their goal came from a Joao Schmidt ‘assist’ and Jesiel was all over the place in giving away the penalty. Their second goal was equally sloppy from our point of view as the scorer was free in acres of space and then Jesiel helped them by blocking Sung-Ryong’s view. To be honest our usually reliable Jesiel had a bit of a nightmare in this game. Thankfully we and he were doing slightly better at the other end as it was Jesiel who provided the ball for Damiao to do his usual ‘set myself up for an overhead and score another lovely goal’. In the same way that we assisted Daegu with their first, they helped lay the ball off for Damiao for his second after a nice Mitoma run and cross. It was nice to see Joao get the third as it was his first goal for us and particularly good for him after you could have said he inadvertently helped them with their first. Daegu looked pretty comfortable with their tactics of sitting back and hitting us on the break. We really should be used to teams doing this by now! They weren’t helped by a few injuries, but I suspect for some of the ‘injuries’ whilst they were ahead, there was an element of time wasting involved. The camera tracking left to right showed a Daegu player kneeling down tying his laces. When the camera tracked back the same player (I think) was rolling around on the floor. The first time I have seen someone get injured tying their laces. Perhaps it was lace burn or maybe he tied them dangerously tightly. Equally, a Daegu defender seemed to injure himself hoofing a clearance. I think he really was injured though as he seemed to get subbed shortly afterwards.

On to some gripes. The pitch was atrocious. In the Emperor’s cup game I compared the ‘special’ ball to one of those super bouncy balls kids love. This ball seemed to be the same, except this time we were playing with a super bouncy ball on a cobbled town square. Simple passes gamboled along boinging up and down and occasionally shooting off at tangents. We have five out of our six games on the same pitch apparently… And if it’s bad now… Yikes. Also there was some interest on Twitter about what I would say about the ref. I thought he seemed like a nice guy, quite smily and seemed to congratulate Damiao on his spectacular goal. He did also seem to be on a super focussed mission to book players in blue. I don’t have any problem with the penalty he gave. I think that maybe we didn’t get the rub of the green when it came to getting free kicks though. And we got more yellow cards in this match than we did in the previous seven games combined. Guess this is something we are going to have to get used to when we’re in ACL games though. Bit weird that they didn’t get any though. Oh, and is it just me or are ACL refs always from Oman? Presumably this point will be proved completely wrong in our next match. Final moan is that the DAZN feed seems to have been purchased from a local Uzbek Del Boy character who has got his mates in to film and direct the match. A few times the camera didn’t keep up with the ball and there were times when we have a long close up of a player jogging and watching an attack build at a distance from him before a harsh cut to a ball flying wide with no idea who kicked it. Interesting from the point of view of observing the emotions of the players but not exactly great for watching and understanding the game. The commentators seemed to have the same pictures as they seemed genuinely surprised by a harsh cut to Daegu almost scoring as we were watching a replay of a defensive header or something. The commentators also were having quite a lot of trouble identifying our players. But I guess it was late and the camera angle seemed slightly weird. And I suppose there is a few players of similar stature with similar haircuts. That is why they put the numbers on the shirts though, so I would have hoped for a bit more accuracy.

I probably should also mention the news that everyone probably already knows. Ao has left us and transferred to Fortuna Dusseldorf. Fortuna(tely), Oshima is finally back from injury so hopefully this will soften the blow a little. Good luck to Ao. Of course it’s a shame to see him go, but hopefully he’ll do well.

So a good opening win. Daegu are probably our biggest rivals in the this group and of course we have the toughest game of the group to come when we play them away from home (lolz, I had to put this hilarious observation in somewhere. Does seem a bit weird that we have to do home and away in the same stadium only a week apart without even any opportunity to get some money from fans attending, but never mind…). Next up is Beijing Guoan’s youth team (apparently). They got a draw against United City of the Philippines but from the stats it seems that they were comfortably out possessed and out shot in that game. I guess we’ll know a lot more about the teams relative strengths after the next round of matches. And I guess we’ll see quite a bit of rotation in the next match. Or maybe Oniki will save that for a time when we have a few more points in the bank. It’s another 1am kick off so expect another slightly flaky blog post like this one. Go Frontale!

 

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 28')

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (Yellow card 52')

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 47. HATATE Reo (Yellow card 45+1')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for NOBORIZATO 66')

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for WAKIZAKA 63')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

FW 19. TONO Daiya

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for MITOMA 87')

 

Goals   

HWANG (Daegu) 8' 0-1

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 40' 1-1

CESINHA (Daegu) 47' 0-1

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 51' 1-1

JOAO SCHMIDT (Frontale) 55' 1-1

 

 

Highlights

 

Vs AC Nagano Parceiro (home) 9/6/21 - Emperor's Cup 2nd round

 

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 AC Nagano Parceiro (AET) (4-3 on penalties)

Phew! We scraped through. Coming into this game unbeaten and with us playing a J3 side who were struggling there seemed only one logical outcome in this game. Yes, that’s right, a real wobble from us, just about managing to avoid losing. At certain stages of the night it looked like being a great evening for either us, YFM or FC Chofu fans as within the trio of rivals there was always one team who seemed to be doing their best to embarrass themselves. I guess the one positive from your team losing to weaker opposition would be if your rival also did, particularly if it were to even weaker opposition. However, Frontale, perhaps the team who have the strongest rivalry with the other two (not downplaying the FC Tokyo and YFM rivalry, especially after events in recent years, but both of them almost certainly hate us more than they hate each other), managed to come up smelling of roses again with a slightly nervy win on penalties, with the added bonus of their two neighbours going out to a university team and an amateur team. I don’t want to hear about Honda FC’s strength and how they are actually better than some J1 teams. It’s much more fun to concentrate on the fact that they are in the JFL. Why let facts get in the way of fun? The win sees us take on JEF United in the next round, although that will probably have to be rescheduled as we’ll be away on ACL duty. Which will also be the competition our next game, (against Daegu on the 26th June), is part of. So a bit of a break now. Lovely! Get the international players back and have a bit of a rest and then get ready and firing for the ACL hopefully. Here are the usual bullet points before we all have a couple of weeks off.

Us -

In usual Frontale cup style we started with our probably strongest line up and toiled. Of course this is with the caveat that we had those five international players still missing. Probably the big surprise in the line up was Kozuka starting in midfield. Oniki has done this before, and much like the previous time he was replaced at half time. I thought this was a bit unfair both times as I couldn’t see he was any worse than anyone else, but maybe he wanted to put some players together who have played more alongside each other as we were trailing. Clearly Oniki sees something in him to have given him a couple of starts but I’m wondering how much longer that will go on. Personally, I wonder if he’d have more joy playing further forward. He’s apparently a more attacking midfielder so perhaps playing up front would suit him better. Another starter who was withdrawn relatively early was Issaka, who I thought did OK again. But his replacement at right back Tachibanada did really well, so you can’t argue about that change. Tachibanada has been growing in stature recently. (Metaphorically speaking. Literally, well if that were true he would have had to have started from a very low place if he’s grown to where he is now!). In both this and the YFC game I think he’s really seized his opportunity and looks like a great prospect. Another interesting prospect who got a surprise runout was Miyagi Ten. He came on for Hasegawa and it seems that he’s been learning quite a lot from him and Mitoma as his game seemed to be all about dribbling, beating the man and shooting. He could have scored a beauty. Which is a nice link to talking about almost all of the front players. They all could and probably should have scored but were denied by wayward targeting and last ditch defending. We hit the bar a couple of times and there were numerous goal line clearances and scrambled blocks. Full credit to Nagano for this, but you’ve got to wonder if we’ll get so many opportunities in our upcoming ACL games.

 

We did our best in this game when we moved the ball forward a bit more quickly. Nagano were understandably defending in numbers, particularly when they were ahead. We spent much too long building slowly. I say building, but it was building in the way that you can build a really long wall that stretches for miles but if you don’t add a few layers and a roof and join it up with some other walls you’re never going to get an actual building but instead will just have a long line of bricks. When we moved forward quickly and ran at them we made chances. And then missed chances, but that’s slightly beside the point. When we pondered we didn’t even make chances for us to miss. The big standout thing for me in this game was our passing and control. It was pretty bad! I would be surprised if we completed more than 60% of them. They were weirdly hit and off target. Attempted traps pinged off the boot or the body. Of course, I’d love to blame the ball, which seemed to be behaving like one of those little hard rubber super bouncy balls, which when I was young we referred to as ‘bouncy balls’ (perhaps not the technical name, but pretty descriptive, I’m sure you’ll agree). I wish we’d been able to adjust a bit more quickly to it as if the ACL decides to use a beach ball for this season's competition we need to be prepared to adapt a bit quicker. All in all, we looked a bit tired and a bit off the pace, but we really did have a lot of possession and a lot of shots and aside from some stout Nagano defending we would have won this easily. But you can guarantee that other teams will defend like that against us, so I’d hope we get a bit better at taking our chances soon.

Them -

There’s not much to say about Nagano that I haven’t already referred to. They were very unlucky. They defended well and scored a wonder goal. They had a player called Kammera Shuto which delighted me. You’ve got to feel sorry for them losing this game, but at least they did it on penalties to a team who are unbeaten and leading the division two above them. Full credit to them. I’m a bit worried how poorly we dealt with their long throws. I hope this won’t be picked up on by other teams. I never imagine these games will be easy, but they made it a lot harder than everyone expected it would be. Nice work Nagano!

Ref and VAR -

This was the best game for VAR so far this season... because it’s not used in this tournament. The ref was a new name for me, Sendachi. I thought he looked a bit out of his depth, perhaps being unwilling to make any bad decisions and as a consequence not really making any decisions. He wasn’t bothered about time wasting or shirt pulling and even if we played for days I don’t think Damiao would have got a decision given his way. He also tackled Kozuka, which I don’t think he’s really supposed to do, causing us to lose the ball and he didn’t stop the game for a drop ball as I’ve seen other refs do. I’m not going to complain too much though as given that this is the first time I’ve seen his name I guess he’s not that experienced. (Turns out from some research that he's not refereed a top flight game before and before this match has only taken charge of 8 games. He's only 31 too!). If it had been Nishimura or Iemoto doing the same I’d be far more inclined to have a rant.

Other stuff -

We had an earthquake before the game. It was the first time I’ve felt one whilst in the stadium I think. The JFA is still flexing their muscles and showing they’re in control of the Emperor's Cup by controlling the build up music before the game and it’s the same horrible crap they played last year. Endlessly looping guitar-solo-funky-rock-workout and then slightly traditional sounding intro song which gear changes into a soft techno beat mess. Rotten stuff! But quite funny I suppose and it does mark this out as a different competition. Oh and one point that could have gone in the ‘us’ section. Jesiel attempted an overhead kick in this game. At FC Chofu Leandro seems to be spreading grumpiness to his countrymen. At Frontale Leandro Damiao is instead convincing his compatriots to try an overhead at every opportunity. Lovely stuff!

This could have been a very different blog post if we hadn’t managed that equaliser. Full credit to Tachibanada for putting the ball in the net! We were really motivated toward the end of the game but couldn’t do actually score, so without his goal we would have been screwed. Maybe we should try the same insane formation we had at the end of the match for the ACL games, with everyone playing everywhere and loads of attacking players on the pitch. (Kurumaya was definitely left and centre back with Nobori and Jesiel up front). Probably best not to, but it was clear that Oniki was throwing every attacking option he had at the game in order to avoid an embarrassing defeat. And he did. Next up, the ACL. No one has the TV rights at the moment but hopefully that will change nearer the time. Otherwise the upcoming blog posts are going to be very brief. Probably a blessing. Let’s have a rest then get ready and then hopefully make a decent stab of it this year. Go Frontale!

Team

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 15. ISSAKA Zain

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 81')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for ISSAKA 65')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 81')

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KOZUKA 46')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for HASEGAWA 85')

MF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for HASEGAWA 112')

 

Goals   

FUJIYAMA (Nagano) 42' 0-1

TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 90+1' 1-1

Penalties
FUJIYAMA (Nagano) 0-1
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 1-1
MIZUTANI (Nagano) 1-1 (saved)

YAMAMURA (Frontale) 2-1
AZUMA (Nagano) 2-1 (saved)
KURUMAYA (Frontale) 3-1
YAMAMOTO (Nagano) 3-2

TONO (Frontale) 3-2 (saved)

YOSHIMURA (Nagano) 3-3

IENAGA (Frontale) 4-3

 

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

This was a weird game where things just didn’t seem to be going our way. For most of the game it would have been difficult to pick someone for this but I’ve ended up going with two people for different reasons. Let’s give it to....

Sung-Ryong JUNG and TACHIBANADA Kento - Sung-Ryong basically won us the game by saving two out of the five Nagano penalties. If you save one penalty in a shoot out that’s great so two is definitely deserving of this prestigious accolade. Tachibanada gave us a lot more drive when he came on and he scored the goal that got us back in the game so he clearly deserves this too. Bravo to both of them!

 

Highlights