Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 2 Albirex Niigata (1-6 on agg.)
With us needing to do a bit of work after a terrible first leg, one thing was certain before this game. It was going to be a GOAL RUSH! Plenty of attacking football. GOAL RUSH! Lots of shots and lots of goals. GOAL RUSH! Of course all of our attacking might mean that we gave away a few chances at the back, but we’d more than compensate for that by the amount of great goals we’d score. GOAL RUSH! Oh, unfortunately in a game where scoring three times to take it to extra time was the bare minimum required, we failed to score. And not only did we fail to score, we also conceded twice. So in the end we were just the six goals short of making the final. It says a lot that in all of the photos I took of the game, all of our players just seem to be hanging around doing nothing. I've only included one, as much like the game, the photos were even worse than they usually are. I’m totally fed up with wasting time writing these posts as there’s nothing left to say. It’s always the same old shit from Oniki. The opposition always know what to do. Even if Oniki nominally changes the formation, still the approach is the same. In the first leg we needed over 500 passes for one shot on target. In this game the stats were marginally better, but still the important one was the same. Zero goals. In a game we needed to win and they just needed to not concede four times, we ended up having significantly less shots than the opposition. Right from the start, aside from the immediate time wasting from Albirex, (not a criticism, a legitimate tactic which the ref seemed to notice and moan at them about but of course did nothing to prevent it happening again), you would really have thought that we were the team with the big first leg lead. The usual ridiculous amount of passing amongst the defence and then… nothing. As soon as we got the ball out of our half we gave it away. Even players who’ve stood out a bit recently for not being shit had a bad day. The only possible justification for our slowly slowly patient build up could be if the intention was to bore Niigata sufficiently that they fell asleep and then we’d be able to perhaps score a couple of goals past their prone snoozing bodies. Judging by our finishing though, I wouldn’t even say that would have been a given anyway.
I don’t think there’s much else for me to say. I don’t have anything amusing to write as there is nothing amusing about our games at the moment. It’s all shit. The end of the game was greeted with what was perhaps the most booing I think I have ever heard at Todoroki. As I always say, I’m not a booer myself, but I think it was totally justified. Although it might be a bit unfair as the target of the booing should clearly be the manager rather than the players. And he has very rarely come out after a game and, surprise surprise, that was a game we won. Usually he weasels away and lets everyone else take the criticism. Maybe the chairman could do with getting a bit of stick too. After all it’s him who clearly thought Oniki was the answer at the end of last season, (well actually, quite a bit before the end of last season but that new contract was particularly galling), and who still presumably thinks things are going well. It reminds me of his astonishment when Chanathip left, being surprised that he didn’t want to sit in the stands and wait for his chance (which clearly would only really come if all of Oniki’s favourites were either injured or got sold). Perhaps the chairman like Oniki, believes that we should all wait patiently for Oniki’s tactics to start working again. At the same time, try to dilute the home advantage as much as possible by allowing Niigata fans to take over almost half of the stadium. MONEY! MONEY! MONEY! However, this does explain how this game managed to almost be a sell out even though we are not only shit, but utterly dull right now. Why would anyone apart from the most masochistic of Frontale fans think that this would be a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The pre-game motivational video showing previous times we’ve come back from deficits and scored goals, (they had to dig quite a way back into the past to find some of that footage as recently we’ve been more often than not, throwing away points at the end of matches rather than gaining them), did a good job of getting the fans going and there seemed to be some kind of (clearly delusional) belief that we might be able to get the job done. This was all smashed to pieces as soon as the match started though. The video stated that statistically we had close to zero chance of winning the tie. I don’t know if it’s possible to have a minus % chance of something happening, but clearly that was going to be the only way our chance of winning would be going right from the kick off. Maybe some of the fans believed, but it didn’t seem like the players did. And who can blame them? They probably don’t know how to react when they hear an Oniki team talk now. ‘Really? That’s what you think we should do? Have you watched any of our games this year? Is your magnet board broken?’ And still the clown is in charge. Of course I don’t expect him to be fired, but at least give us the slight morale boost of announcing that he’ll leave at the end of the year. Please, I’m begging you. Please… won’t somebody think of the poor children!
Next up, who gives a shit? Well actually it’s Gamba Osaka for another Friday Night J League. As the game is kind of meaningless, maybe we’ll get something from it. Nothing to play for means that we now have the oppotunity to give some other players a chance. But of course we probably won’t because of the clown who is picking the team. Maybe it’s important for him to try to not get his worst ever league finish when he’s thinking of future employment. But to be honest, I think most of us don’t really care if we finish 11th or 16th. We’ve been so bad in 2024 that we deserved to get nothing. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get.
Subs GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for MIURA 46') FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 57') DF 15. TANABE Shuto FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 67') FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for YAMAMOTO 67') FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke(Yellow card 90+1') (on for ERISON 57') DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR
Goals
KOMI (Niigata)31' 0-1 OTA (Niigata)89' 0-2
My Frontale Man Of The Match
A somewhat surprising return of this section, particularly because this game was so bad. But it has to go to...
JUNG Sung-Ryong -
If we hadn't had him in goal we would have been humiliated in both the home and away legs of this tie.
With a two legged-tie, the first leg can sometimes be a tough sell. We never do particularly well away at Niigata and this fairly hastily arranged game on a Wednesday evening, with us having a shit year definitely fitted that bill. So instead I went to work, feeling confident that we might do the business as recently my absence from our games has meant that we play well and my attendance meant that we just pass the ball endlessly. And as this is basically only the first half nothing would really be decided and all the excitement would come in the second leg on Sunday, right? Well, unless we got so utterly battered to the point of almost making the second leg irrelevant. It’s a bit of a shame that happened, particularly after we smashed Machida last weekend. But somehow utterly predictable. You might imagine I would have run out of original ways to get irritated by Oniki but perhaps I’ve found another relatively new one after this match. We’ve done well in a few games recently where Oniki has finally given in to the calls to play 442 with an approach that puts a bit more emphasis on trying to score than trying to rack up passes. Yamamoto and Erison were back in the team together, (admittedly due to Oniki running out of options so definitely more by luck than judgement), and were playing well. Quite why Oniki decided to break up that partnership for every game that followed a good performance, I don’t know. All the years he’s been sticking with the same formation and the same line up in spite of us playing awfully. Finally he perhaps accidentally came up with something that did work and suddenly he wants to rotate and change the formation between every match. It’s almost as if he got a win to take the pressure off and then decided to immediately revert to working on his plan of getting his favoured formation and players back and blasting regardless of the fact that it is a terrible idea and there’s any evidence it will ever happen. Even when he’s won some games doing something different he still thinks that his original way is the best. It’s infuriating, but utterly predictable.
As I have only seen the highlights of his match, I’m not going to write anything about it apart from the moan above. Actually highlights isn’t really the right name for them. From our point of view It was more like a blooper reel. I think I can only remember two shots of ours being in there and the rest was Yamaguchi looking frustrated whilst picking the ball out of the back of the net. 568 passes for just the one shot on target. Really awful stuff, real Oniki stuff. Barring an insane comeback, Oniki’s fucked another competition at almost the first time of asking. I am really looking forward to the end of the season. Well, as long as it brings the end of his time with us. If it doesn’t, I might look into the possibility of somehow hibernating for the whole of 2025. I think we’ve reached the stage now where all of the success that he brought us has been undermined by his utter uselessness for the last three or four years. If we somehow managed to win this tournament it would be kind of undeserved as we were parachuted in to the quarter finals against a J2 team and barely scraped through. And to be honest, as petty as it sounds, I don’t really want Oniki to finish his time with us with any kind of success. He should have gone a long time ago. We shouldn’t have offered him at least the last two contract extensions, but equally he shouldn’t have accepted them. I think he’s going to be really shown up in his next job, particularly if it’s at a big money basket case team.
To make a very clumsy cooking comparison, when he took over from Kazama, he basically had to only make the change of putting the deliciously cooked meal on a plate and serving it, rather than employing the risky but admittedly more exciting route of flinging it across the room, forkful by forkful directly into the diner’s mouth. As the years have passed Oniki has used up all the pasta, run down the spice rack, gone through everything in the freezer and is now wondering why no one has done the shopping. At the same time, the kitchen is now about to properly catch on fire. Although he accidentally avoided a massive inferno on a few previous occasions by accidentally turning the gas off whilst trying to switch the lights on, he’s made sure to go back and set things on fire again immediately afterwards as he was worried that going straight from building catching fire to safety was a bit too much of an adventurous step. He’s still trying to make that original meal without realising he’s put all his new ingredients into the wrong containers. And let’s be honest, after we’ve been made to eat the same meal for eight years, even if the cooking had improved it would still be quite boring. As it is, it’s now an almost inedible mess and the best we can hope for is that we don’t get food poisoning from it. On a couple of occasions he had a go at using the rice and curry sauce he found to make a curry and it was nice! But a bit too spicy for his taste, so afterwards immediately went back to attempting to use the rice and curry sauce to make an omelet instead and was shocked when it didn’t seem to work. I know this lengthy analogy doesn’t really work, but writing it was marginally more fun than watching us play football right now.
Next up, our almost certain elimination from another competition due to our manager completely fucking things up. As I didn’t see this game, some of you might think it’s a bit unfair to criticise Oniki so much. But don’t worry, I’ve seen plenty of his uselessness already, so even from a distance feel I can spot an Oniki dog’s dinner when I see one. After that, we have Gamba at home next Friday for yet another Friday Night J League. Let the joy overflow! Team
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai DF 5. SASAKI Asahi DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR DF 13. MIURA Sota MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento MF 19. KAWAHARA So (Yellow card 81') MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto MF 23. MARCINHO FW 17. TONO Daiya FW 9. ERISON
Subs
GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
DF 15. TANABE Shuto FW 20. YAMADA Shin(on for ERISON 46') FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MARCINHO 54') DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for CESAR HAYDAR 54') FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro(on for TONO 46') MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for TACHIBANADA 69')
As is probably obvious from the result of this game, I didn’t go. This time it was due to me being sick though. So sick that I slept through the first half and even when I watched the second, I did so horizontally and with not a great deal of conviction. All I’ll say is that Oniki went back to 442 and almost the same starting line up as against Niigata and once again we scored lots of goals. Whether he’ll stick with it in the next Levain Cup game or revert to his beloved and ineffective 433, we’ll see. I’m prepared to listen to financial offers from either Frontale fans, opposition fans or Frontale haters as to whether I should attend next weekend. If I have the power to curse us, I might as well get something out of it, right? Send me a message with your pledge.
Next up the first leg against Niigata, away on Wednesday. I’m not going so we can maybe be positive about that game.
It was perhaps appropriate that after I missed one game, on my return to watching Frontale, we picked up exactly where we’d left off against Nagoya. Whilst that game was widely said to be perhaps the worst match of the year so far, the first half of this match was maybe at an even lower level. So one thing seems to be clear. I am the jinx. If we lose to Machida that feeling will be reinforced. Either I’m the jinx or our manager is the problem but somehow manages to fluke a win. I guess it’s up to you to decide which is correct. One of the options will be easier to test in the next week or so as I won’t be going to Niigata away. Even nice away trips are losing their lustre a bit recently. But I suppose rushing to Niigata for a Wednesday evening game and then having to rush back the following morning probably doesn’t quite count as a top tier nice away trip. If our football wasn’t so awful this year it would have been fun though. And the fact that we’ve got a load of Friday Night J League’s for all but one of our remaining league home games doesn’t seem that appealing either. And it can’t be good for the club’s finances either. Don’t you get the feeling that Friday Night J League as a concept is a bit of a weird one? Somehow they’ve managed to give it a name and a logo that suggests it is something special, but the experience is more akin to waving around a ‘Liquidless Medicine Party’ sign whilst giving an aging relative their daily dose of pills but with the special and exciting twist that they have to take them without water. I guess one thing that is marginally easier to swallow is the fact that after a shocker of a Friday night performance we at least can forget about football for the whole weekend and concentrate instead on having a nice time. That is unless you have to write a sodding blog post about the game. Anyway, this is a long introduction, so let’s get on to this match with the old bullet points, but as a nice twist, in reverse order.
Ref and officials -
The VAR in this game was astonishingly quick. Normally that’s a good thing, but on this occasion it made me think that maybe the VAR guys system had gone down and they were too embarrassed to admit it, so instead just added a few random pauses where they briefly flashed up the VAR graphic before hastily removing it and turning back to trying to untangle the mess of cables and attempting to work out what had come unplugged. The ref, as often seems to be the case in ACL games, seemed pretty shit. So no real change from the league then. As we had no idea what was being checked and then refused with the numerous VAR interventions, it’s hard to say if they got anything wrong. Looking at replays for our disallowed goal, it looks pretty generous to rule it out for looked a pretty soft coming together, but the ref did that I think, rather than the VAR guys. Their penalty was probably fair enough as far as I could see. At the time it looked a lot clearer, but on the replay there’s more than a hint of a dive, but you know, it was always probably going to be given. So no real complaints there. I was kind of annoyed by the ref for his numerous ‘final warning’ hand gestures which on the next dodgy challenge by the same player were upgraded to a ‘final final warning’ and thereafter a ‘final final final warning’ and never a card. But who am I kidding, our loss had nothing to do with the officials, so there’s no point moaning too much about them. But, I will have at least the one moan that the ref was clearly wrong when he totally missed the Gwangju defender’s handball in the 84th minute. I say clearly but it’s hardly noticeable on the DAZN feed and there were no replays as far as I could see. But looked nailed on from my seat. Presumably the VAR guys had given up trying to untangle the cables by this stage and were already packing up their stuff. So, quite a few small decisions that didn’t go our way, but we were hardly robbed.
Them -
It’s kind of annoying that after squeaking a win against our ultimate ACL nemesis team Ulsan we then followed it up by losing to a team who only just qualified for the competition and who aren’t doing as well this year. I mean, the same could be said about us. In fact the saying the same about us would be a massive understatement as we almost stole our way into this competition and we’re utterly shite this year. But Gwangju just looked like they were at a totally different level to us. In the first half we couldn’t get anywhere near them. They had a plan (unlike us) and stuck to it. I don’t know if the reason we kept giving them the ball was because we are utterly awful or whether they were pressuring us into mistakes but maybe in this section I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. The first 30 minutes of the game were so one-sided in their favour that it was to the point of being ridiculous. I suppose at least we didn’t lose 7-3. In the second half when we came back into the game a bit they defended well and whist they rode their luck at times, they didn’t concede so in that respect they clearly deserved the victory. The less said about our ability to get anywhere near scoring in spite of us dominating, the better. I quite liked their kit too. Not much else to say really as I’d much rather spend time writing shitty things about us.
Us -
One good thing about us losing this match is that it makes it a little less likely that our clown of a chairman will see two ACL wins and immediately offer Oniki a new contract. If we get an announcement that Oniki will be in charge next year I think it could quite easily ruin the rest of this year and the whole of next year for me. At least from a footballing point of view. I’m doing quite well forgetting about the football quite soon after the games recently. After perhaps flukily coming up with a plan that somehow worked against Niigata, Oniki wholesale abandoned it for this game and changed most of the players too. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to the reason for that. Is he focussing on the league? Is he focusing on the ACL? Is he focussing on irritating me? Well, at least if it is the latter he’s actually getting the job done. People were talking about how good the combination of Yamamoto and Erison was at the start of the season and how when they were back together again against Niigata we were back scoring again. So in this match Oniki dropped one of them and asked the other to spend most of his time playing in between our two centre backs. Our flirtation with 442 was abandoned and we were back to the 433 that has served us so badly for the majority of this year. Ienaga was back and was awful in the first half. He did get significantly better in the second though. Tachibanada was back. From where, nobody knows. As I said, it’s impossible to know who is being rested or who is injured and who he thinks is really doing the job. You would have to imagine that Yamamoto would be nowhere near the team still if Oshima hadn’t got injured. But it seems that he made a real difference against Niigata. Any changes that are made that result in something positive usually come about through Oniki having no other option and having things forced on him it seems. And as soon as he notices them having an effect he backtracks to some old stuff that didn’t work previously and probably won’t in the future. It might seem harsh to blame him too much for this game as we were unbelievably bad on the ball in the first half and in the second half were unbelievably bad at shooting. But the fact remains that he made wholesale changes to a team who’d had our best result for ages and reverted to his old plan which resulted in the kind of stuff we got when we used it before. So yeah, don’t blame Oniki for the horrendous errors, but do blame him for the fact that we keep making them. I’m really sick of his post-game comments. Start with some platitudes about how they really wanted to win because of all the fans who’d come to watch and were cheering them on. Then waffle on about something tactical in ridiculous detail which would suggest a genius level understanding of the game, whilst at the same time ignore the fact that your genius level understanding of the game has resulted in defeats for us in most games this season. I’m always the first to admit that I don’t really understand tactics and maybe I always make myself look like a fool in these posts. But in my defence, I do know what it’s like to watch our players do the same thing over and over with zero success and from that presume that the 0% success rate thus far might suggest that in the future we can probably expect the same thing to happen.
To have a quick break here in between the moaning, I’d say that Miura had a decent game I thought. Recently I’ve criticised him quite a lot but this was definitely one of his better games. Where else can I go for a bit more positivity….? Erm… oh. Ok, back to the moaning, It was another horrendous Takai cock up for their goal. But he was by no means alone when it came to making horrendous cock ups in this game, No-one really seemed able to pass. I would say that Gwangju did a great job of winning the ball back from us, but to be honest, it was more a case of us just passing the ball to them. I don’t understand the point of us passing the ball thirty times amongst the defenders, tempting the attackers closer and closer, if the end result is us just giving the ball to them in a more dangerous area than it would have been if we’d tried to get out of our own box. I know Oniki wants to ‘draw out the opponents’ but even when we successfully manage to do that as soon as the ball crosses the centre line we slow things down. I feel like I write this in every post. I probably do. Likewise, our obsession with taking every free kick short and quick is infuriating, given that we do it when their players are right next to us and ready to take the ball back with ease. Or if we manage not to lose the ball, our quick and short free kicks more often than not result in us putting out foot on the ball and slowing things down. It’s just insanely irritating. And our obsession with building slowly from the back reminds me of a young boy who is determined to beat the world record for highest tower of cards, keeps knocking it down after he puts the tenth card in place, but somehow remains convinced that it’s only a matter of time before he breaks the record by triumphantly putting the 143001st card on the top. Come on Oniki, wise up. No one is falling for this shit anymore. Opposition teams I mean, but equally that could be directed at our fans too if they weren’t so relentlessly positive. The regularity with which we cock up makes me think that it’s almost as if the bit where we lose the ball is all part of the plan. It took us 40 minutes to have a shot on target in this game. It was around the same time that we took a corner that managed to get past the first defender. This also seems to be part of the game plan. It’s all just so crap. It really says something that a second half where we consistently fucked up chances and missed open goals made me feel that it was a massive improvement on the first half. That’s how bad the first was and apparently that’s how low my expectations now are.
So a game where the opposition were fast, strong and skillful and Oniki Frontale were slow, soft and shite. Glorious! Saying that, if we manage to win on Saturday away at the much detested Machida, I think plenty of people will ease up on the criticism. Let’s hope that Oniki comes up with a ‘master plan’ that is in the classic Oniki style, ie. completely inappropriate for how he thinks the game will be, but which on that occasion will be somehow exactly the right thing to do. At least at that game we’ll only have to put up with gamesmanship and shithousery of the highest order rather than the weird spectacle of the video with a guy from the ACL telling us about the competition. I couldn’t quite decide if he was a real person or an AI creation so absolutely corporate were his pronouncements and so perfectly English public school was his accent. Once again, a football organisation, (presumably run by loads of people in their late fifties, utterly out of touch with the experience of attending an actual game), in an attempt to make something look fresh, exciting and contemporary managed to make it look like an absolute combination of the worst parts of numerous decades (when those bigwigs were in their pomp), combined with the most expensive but least interesting video production technology, all with the soul and emotion of a corporate training video. This might feel a bit unfair but don’t forget the ACL has made an absolute dog’s breakfast of the format of this competition so they probably deserve to be mocked a bit. This will do, won’t it? I think I’ve run out of steam a bit. This relentless moaning is taking it out of me. And I presume I’ll need to save some ire for the next post.
Team GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR (Yellow card 21') DF 13. MIURA Sota
This result was quite a surprise, particularly as it came after one of our worst performances of the season. A shocking game in a normal season would be a big kick up the backside and maybe could be expected to be followed by a bounce back. But we’ve had so many shocking games this year that if we’d had the resulting kicks up the backside I think we would have a terminally damaged arse by now. I couldn’t go to this game due to work, so I guess I have to face facts. All the bad stuff this year is all my fault, it seems. My relentless negativity in the stadium has been bringing the team down. If we get pasted on Tuesday in the ACL that will be the confirmation. As I don’t write much about games I watched online this should be short. As I was working for most of the match and aside from the first 20 minutes I have only seen DAZN’s extended highlights this should be even shorter.
5-1 seems like it might have flattered us. Lots of our shots went in. Most of theirs didn’t. The penalty that set us on our way looked extremely soft and even after we were awarded it we did our best to not score, with the ball only squirming under the keeper. The highlights made it look like Erison had a cracker of a game. If only he’d been played a bit more this season, eh? Our website said that we played 442 but the bit of the game I saw didn’t look massively different from our usual 433. And whilst Wakizaka was nominally on the right wing, it seemed that he and Yamada were swapping spots quite often. It’s great to score some goals though and we’re now eight points clear of the relegation zone, which is considerably more reassuring. BUT, let’s not get carried away. We’ve had brief renaissances before this year and sooner rather than later it turns back into shit. And these new tactics probably surprised the opposition. They certainly surprised me given Oniki’s usual reluctance to change anything. Whether the next opposition are equally surprised will be another thing. Don’t forget that as recently as the ACL game against Ulsan we thought that we had a slightly new approach and that got totally dismantled by Nagoya. I reckon after we’ve given Albirex this pasting they will 100% knock us out of the Levain Cup now.
Next up, Gwangju at home in the ACL on Tuesday, which will make a nice change from our usual way of following up a game against Ulsan with a game against Guangzhou. (Guess that works better when spoken rather than written down, and also I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing the teams’ names properly….). They spanked YFM so hopefully we can avoid the same outcome. To be honest though, most people spank YFM right now. Thanks to them for keeping our spirits up during these difficult times. After the ACL game we are away at Machida next weekend. Would love a win in that game, once again more to upset other people than please myself. It seems that I am quite a petty person. Anyway, we’ll soon see if this was another false dawn. I hope not, but with almost zero evidence to go on as I only watched a tiny bit of this game, I already feel like I’m taking the piss a bit even writing this much so probably should hold back on exclaiming or predicting too much.
Team GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota(Yellow card 54') DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR DF 13. MIURA Sota
