Here are our new players for the 2026 season. Apologies to the official site for stealing their photo. I thought I needed something to make this post look slightly more appealing.
New signings
Svend BRODERSEN
One of two big signings in this window. Regular readers will probably know that I have my doubts about Yamaguchi so I was delighted to see us sign Brodersen from Okayama where he’d been one of their best players. Only missed one match for them last year and that was due to a red card ban. With him in goal they conceded significantly less goals than we did last year, even though they had only just been promoted. Surely will be first choice…. won’t he? Surely he will. I remember he seemed like a nice chap who had a bit of a laugh with us behind the goal when he was playing for Yokohama FC a couple of years ago. I like to think that he will be one of the missing pieces in our jigsaw. Please let this be true…
KONNO Kazuya
Signed from Avispa to link up again with his former manager Hasebe. A short midfielder, (we seem to be a bit low on our complement of them at the moment, hehe), who will presumably challenge for the right wing spot. Ito has long said he prefers to play on the left, so maybe we won’t be quite as reliant on Marcinho as in previous seasons. It’s good that it seems like we will actually have some decent options and competition in 2026.
MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
Played very briefly for us once last season away at Nagoya but now has a proper contract. Plays as a supporting striker but I think he came on on the left in that Nagoya game. Seems to widely be considered as one to watch so hopefully we’ll get that opportunity in 2026.
OSA Ryuki
Left-sided midfielder who scored 16 goals in 47 appearances for his high school in the Takamado U18 PL East last year. Don’t know much else about him but the stats at least sound promising.
TANIGUCHI Hiroto
The other big signing of the off season and one which has given me a bit of optimism about our chances. Not only was he Verdy’s best defender he was also their second top scorer. And his hattrick against us the season before last is still quite fresh in the memory. Clearly our big weakness last year was defending, and Taniguchi looks like he could play a massive part in sorting that out. Fingers crossed.
YAMAHARA Reon
Right-footed full back signed from Shimizu. Can play on either the right or left of the defence. (Another player with Yama in his name. Could we name a whole starting eleven with Yama players? Maybe). Aside from injury was pretty much an ever present for Shimizu last year. Seems to have only received four yellow cards in five seasons! Presumably he’ll be sent off as soon as he gets on the pitch for us. Clearly the Sai replacement, but I guess time will tell whether we have upgraded or have just gone for someone on a lower wage. (Pure speculation from me here).
YAMAICHI Shuto
Central midfielder joining us from Waseda University. Although he did make the bench for a couple of games at the end of last season. To be honest, I don’t know anything else about him.
Returning from loan
HAYASAKA Yuki
Returned from a season on loan at Iwaki, where he was starting pretty much every game and then disappeared from sight. Not sure what happened, but I suppose at least he got a bit of experience. Unlikely to be able to get anywhere near starting this year, barring any injury disasters, but if he’s not going to play, I’d rather it is with us than with a J2 team on loan.
MATSUNAGANE Yuto
Back with us after a couple of reasonably successful years on loan at Fukushima. Still young and whilst I don’t think he’ll be immediately challenging for a starting spot, will hopefully be useful back up if injuries or transfers occur. Knowing Frontale, presumably both will.
YUI Kota
Returning from a season on loan at Fukushima United where he didn’t play a great deal, but started to get a bit more pitch time towards the end of the season. If I remember correctly from his time in our youth team, he’s a defensive midfielder. Presumably won’t be getting much involvement this year and maybe will go out on another loan for a bit more experience.
Promoted from youth team
HAYASHI Shunsuke
Centre back promoted from our youth team. Seems to have played once for both the U17 and U19 national team. And that’s about all I know about him. 181cm tall. Presumably will spend this year training in the first team before being loaned out, perhaps in the summer.
KAN Noriharu
I feel a bit sorry for Kan, as I picked him out as one of the best players in our youth team last year, so now he has presumably been cursed. An all action left back who’s taller than some of our centre backs. According to some cursory research I’ve done, he seems to have Chinese citizenship which came as a bit of a surprise.
Transferred to Fukushima. Maybe it was the right time given that the club seemingly thought that Yamaguchi was a better option. Was a great servant to the club and will be greatly missed. I’ll try to get to a Fukushima United game this year to cheer him on.
TANABE Shuto
I think Tanabe did a pretty good job when he was called on. I guess the problem for him is that those situations weren’t particularly regular occurrences. Transferred to Tokyo Verdy where hopefully he can pick up a lot more pitch time. Good luck to him!
YAMAUCHI Hinata
Spent half of last season on loan at Vegalta Sendai after getting involved early on in the season but never quite fulfilling his potential. Perhaps dropped down the pecking order slightly and that is why he has decided to move to Kashiwa Reysol. I know he was wanted by Urawa earlier in his career. Perhaps this was when Rodriguez was in charge, and therefore his move to Kashiwa would make sense. Definitely a feeling that we might live to regret this transfer, but at the same time, you can’t really blame either club or player for wanting it to happen. Good luck to him.
Out on loan
PATRICK VERHON
After spending half of last season on loan at Imabari, he has now moved to Oita Trinita on loan. It didn’t quite happen for him with us after a bright start and then maybe he didn’t quite take off in the way I might have expected when he went out on loan. Pretty much the same story as with Yamauchi! I’m sure there’s a great player in there so he just needs to get some regular minutes and then he’ll hopefully be off and running.
TSUCHIYA Kaito
Following the usual route of our youth team promoted players by spending a season in the first team not doing much and then going out on loan. I think he’s too good for J3, but that should hopefully mean that he can play plenty of games and pick up some experience at Fukushima this year. I’m sure he’ll be back with us sooner or later. (By the way, I don’t know if I mentioned the curse of my shirt choice before. Basically whoever’s shirt I buy leaves shortly afterwards. I was fully aware this was going to always happen so last year got Tsuchiya’s shirt with the hope that his departure would be for experience on loan and this is exactly how it turned out. With these great powers I have, I will forever have to choose my next shirt carefully).
Not offered a new contract
JESIEL
Perhaps his injury record was the reason he was let go. It’s a shame, as like Ando he was a lot more involved in 2025 than in some previous years. I think he can still do it and hope he finds a new club soon. I believe he wants to stay in Japan.
VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai
Maybe the most surprising of the departures. Was playing quite a bit at right back so a bit of a shock to see him leave. Especially given that Miura and Sasaki will both potentially leave for Europe at some stage. (Them going on holiday to London together has made me think it might come sooner rather than later…). At the moment doesn’t have a club, which is a shock. Perhaps was on a higher salary than some others which might explain why he has left and why he hasn’t found a new club yet. I hope he can find somewhere soon. Good luck to him.
Retired
ANDO Shunsuke
Something of a shock retirement especially considering he had a lot more involvement last year than previously. His retirement is likely to have any significant effect on our fortunes. Now is an assistant goal keeping coach with the club. I’m pleased we’ve managed to keep him involved.
KURUMAYA Shintaro
Another slightly shocking retirement, but one which probably makes sense as he seemed to be feeling the pace a bit. Not sure why he wanted to convert to centre back as I always preferred him out wide. I hope he enjoys his retirement!
Just a quick post to update you on what’s happening with this blog. Maybe you might have noticed through the lack of end of season posts, but I’ve kind of lost enthusiasm for writing blog posts. Whilst I am still enjoying going to games and will continue to do so, there are some other things that I feel like I should be focusing on a little bit more rather than writing blog posts. I will however continue to do them for each game, but they will hopefully be significantly shorter. At times I did enjoy writing loads even about very boring matches, but I think I was repeating myself quite a bit and felt that on the whole it was a bit of a waste of time for everyone involved. I haven’t really worked out how the new style posts will go yet and I guess it will probably be a work in progress for the time being. I’ll do a players in and out post soon, which will also hopefully be briefer than in the past and then when the first game comes round, expect to hear from me again. Any feedback or suggestions will be gladly received. Thanks for reading.
What a horrible end to a mixed season. At least I think it was a mixed season. I can’t quite remember the good times right now. I suppose we scored some goals (five more than any other team), but jeez conceding so relentlessly to lose points takes the shine off it a bit. Whilst this was a horrible end to the season it was also an utterly appropriate one in the way that it came about. We’ve clearly gone well off the boil recently and I guess thats to be expected when you consider we had nothing to play for. I was still a bit shocked quite how lacklustre plenty of our players were. I wonder if we will have some people leaving being announced soon. Yamamoto looked like he was doing his best to keep out of the way of everything so maybe he has a transfer lined up. There have been rumours for other players too. I suspect next season will be one of rebuilding. Which you could say we should have been doing this year. Perhaps it will be more of a complete demolition and start again from new foundations kind of thing. Anyway, as I have no desire to prolong this year, let’s get this out of the way.
Us -
There were hardly any positives to be taken from this game. Perhaps we could say that Noda looked good when he came on. Also Myogan got his first J1 minutes and did alright. Elsewhere… hmmm. Wakizaka and Yamamoto were terrible, the former giving the ball away again and again and the latter seemingly to be actively getting out of the way of any action. And neither contributing to any kind of attacking threat. I wonder if Marcinho’s time with us is coming to an end. With our only usual attaching option Ito banned for the game a lot of responsibility fell to Marcinho. But he was pretty ineffective in the way that he can be sometimes. If the ball went to him during a rare attack you could guarantee that would be the end of the attack as he’d either dribble till he lost it or miscue his pass straight to the opposition. I don’t want to blame him too much though as given the anonymity of our midfield the only thing we did was endlessly hoof the ball forward so weren’t ever really that likely to score. There was absolutely no imagination, no inspiration and not a lot of motivation. To be honest though, the scoreline was ridiculously flattering to Urawa. Sure, there was no way we deserved to win and we never looked like scoring so the 0 on our side was absolutely correct. But fuck me, Yamaguchi was awful. It’s interesting but also unwelcome that he is coming up with new ways to concede soft goals. He repeated the tactic from the last game of just sitting down rather than attempting a save in this match. We didn’t get one of his usual flying dive to palm it perfectly to the unmarked striker at the back post performances which was something of a surprise. The second goal was horrific, when as Urawa crossed, Yamaguchi decided to throw himself across his goal parallel but crucially well behind the cross rendering him helpless to even think about making a save as they slotted the ball home. But still somehow people seem to think he’s a good keeper. Maybe it’s because he occasionally flings himself into the air to stop a regulation shot. It seems to me that the only on target shots he normally saves are ones that are hit straight at him. And at the same time, he quite often seems to be trying to get out of the way of the ball rather than in the way to save a shot. If he is our number one next year, we’re fucked. I’d say we’re fucked if he’s even making the bench next year. Of course it’s not all his fault, but you can guarantee that recently it’s usually mostly his fault. I don’t really understand expected goals, but I guess if a team concedes almost double the goals as the xg, the keeper has maybe had a mare? I have nothing against Yamaguchi personally, but the adoration he gets from a surprisingly large amount of people baffles me. And I also hate the way he blames anyone after a goal that is almost certainly his fault. You could probably point the finger a bit at Hasebe again in this match, as his triple change at half time seemed to have a thoroughly negative effect rather than the positive one he might have been hoping for. But the truth is that this game didn’t matter so he definitely could easily give some fringe players a chance. And even with fringe players involved you wouldn’t expect one of your starters to fuck up so massively, repeatedly. Guess we’ll really be able to judge our manager when we see what he does in the off-season. Hopefully we might try a change of system, formation or approach, or any combination of them. Please just try something…
Them (marginally, but actually mainly more moaning about us) -
It’s quite annoying that they beat us so easily as their fans were sulking and doing the whole ‘we won’t sing unless you give us something to sing about’ thing mentioned in their pre-game banner. To be honest, during the game it wasn’t so different from a normal Saitama Stadium experience as most of the time they just boo anyway and apparently they were still allowed to do this when we had the ball. It wast perhaps more baffling that we kept singing as the game continued as we were absolutely shit. I’d still probably rather have it that way though, rather than go down the bad boy supporters route. Their silent treatment really exposed the pointlessness of our ‘don’t sing when we don’t have the ball’ policy though. There were long periods of silence as they played the ball around at the back and we just twiddled our thumbs. After half time I was doing my best to keep supporting, even though the first half had been horrible. And then one shocking Wakizaka pass knocked the stuffing out of me and I was pretty much done for the day apart from singing some of the subs songs. I wanted to make a joke mentioning about how I’d finally worked out the real reason for them always playing East 17 before the game. As it turned out, I’ll have to reflect it back on us instead though, as although Urawa usually follow the Bryan Harvey approach of metaphorically blacking out after eating too many baked potatoes and running themself over in their own car, they’ve finished above us now and if anyone was in a massive stodge coma in this match it was clearly us. As I don’t really have anything else to have a go at them about I’ll leave it here. Well, with just the short postscript that on leaving the station I noticed a political party handing out leaflets. I didn’t recognise the name but a quick google search informed me that the party’s ideology is apparently Japanese ultranationalism, which was utterly predictable given the passing foot traffic and which I imagined was going to form a hilarious part of this blog post presumably provoking an angry response about how all the horrible elements of their fanbase are just a tiny proportion of Urawa fans etc. But as appropriate as the political party’s choice of venue to hand out leaflets may have been, I can’t even be bothered to make a joke about it. Hmmmmph.
Ref -
Koya, who was once known on Flashscore as K. Hut, a fact which I still enjoy, seemed pretty useless and utterly card shy. But even his shiteness was smothered beneath the disastrous performance from Yamaguchi, so I guess Mr. Hut should buy him a beer for taking the heat off of him. Delighted I won’t have to watch another atrocious J League ref for the next three months.
Fuck all of this. I can’t believe I wrote this much. I guess my irritation about Yamaguchi has propelled me on. Plenty for us to do in the off-season and I think plenty of shocks coming about more departures. As I said, I reckon Yamamoto might be one. There is a small chance that I might do some end of season posts, but right now I feel like I don’t want to waste my time thinking about this season anymore. If there is any demand for it, I might do my survey, but honestly I don’t know if even I can be bothered to answer the questions, let alone compile and post the answers. We’ll see. Anyway, let’s put 2025 behind us and I hope you can enjoy some kind of end of year festive fun. The safest way is do that is probably to get smashed and then hopefully a flashback of a horrible Frontale 2025 moment won’t interrupt your good times.
Team GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 46') MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for (IENAGA 46') FW 29. MYOGAN Toya (on for KAWAHARA 76') DF 30. NODA Hiroto (on for JESIEL 66') MF 34. YAMAICHI Shuto
FW 38. KANDA Soma DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 46')
On this blog I generally try to steer clear of anything too informative and instead focus on the other more... interesting maybe... (maybe not) stuff. With this match that is something of a relief as this was for the most part a pretty tedious encounter with opponents who also had nothing to play for. They did seem to be a bit more up to the job though, as perhaps demonstrated by the relative league positions of the two teams. The most exciting thing from a Frontale point of view was maybe the starting line up. Well, perhaps exciting isn’t the right word. Given that since the previous game we’ve found out that plenty of players are leaving. They are Sung-Ryong, (his choice I believe), Jesiel (no new contract offered), Ando (no new contract offered, and will retire), and Kurumaya (think a new contract was possible but he felt he wasn’t up to it and is retiring). All of these departures are sad for me and I’ll deal with them later. But with this in mind it was nice to see Jesiel and Kurumaya start at centre back. Given that we have nothing to play for, it was great to see Hasebe give them an opportunity to say goodbye to the fans. Not sure why Sung-Ryong didn’t get the same opportunity and instead had to start on the bench. If he’d been able to start we could have brought on Ando for the last few minutes and given them all one last chance to play. I would have thought Hasebe would have been up for it, so maybe it was a decision driven by a player’s wishes perhaps. It’s nice to see Hasebe is an emotional human being. There’s no way Oniki would have done that. I remember countless end of season dead-as-a-doornail rubbers where he continued with exactly the same players as always. I was pleased to see Sung-Ryong get a clean sheet for the time he was on the pitch. Unfortunately we had conceded two really soft goals before he'd made it on to the pitch. I thought Jesiel really looked like he had a point to prove and I think he proved it. Kurumaya did well too, I thought. It was especially nice to see him finish the game playing at left back where I feel he really belongs, Well maybe it’s not so nice because that situation came about due to an injury to Sasaki. Hopefully it’s not serious. But it was satisfying to see Kurumaya’s career come to an end where it started.
I felt we were kind of lucky to be drawing at half time. It’s a strange thing to say as we were leading up until the 48th minute. We hadn’t done much though and had looked in trouble on a few occasions. At the same time, I think we could have felt disappointed to be drawing at half time and indeed to lose the game, as the goals we conceded were very very soft. I still don’t have much confidence in Yamaguchi. I feel like people think he’s great because he makes some dramatic saves, (perhaps with the drama turned up to transform a regulation save into a dramatic one. There was one occasion in the match when he did a high flying dive and palmed the ball off the pitch even though it was way off target and was going off anyway. It was kind of reminiscent of the goal he seems to concede once a match where he pats the ball to the unmarked attacker at the back post, but on this occasion there was no-one there so instead he put it out for a corner). The fact is though, that it looked like he dived way too late for the first one and for the second goal just sat down rather than trying to save it. Of course it’s not all his fault, but you could tell he felt at least slightly responsible because he didn’t scream and shout too much at his defenders like he usually does. There have been rumours about a possible new keeper coming in who would presumably be the number one for next year. Given that we only have two goalies on the books now, (or maybe three if Hayasaka comes back from his loan) and one of them is Lee, with absolutely zero experience, there will definitely be something happening in that area of the pitch.
Maybe a quick mention of the ref here. The last time we had Takasaki we won 4-0 but I still said the ref had had a shocker. On this occasion it was amateur hour again I thought. Reckon we might have got a little lucky with Ito's yellow and the card probably contributed to him being subbed at half time. It was a shame as he was our only attacking threat really. Erison was trying his best but the ref seemed to give every challenge he was involved in as a foul against him. The thing that pissed me off the most was when the dozy bastard of a ref totally blocked Kawahara from getting the ball and then gave him a yellow afterwards for complaining. Reckon Sanfrecce could have had their keeper sent off for a handball outside the box in the first half. I thought it was handball and so did Erison, (who was quite a but closer), but maybe the fact that the ball didn’t go out of play for a few minutes afterwards diluted the possibility of it being reviewed. To be honest we'd had more than enough VAR in the match anyway. But it would have been fun to see Osako get sent off.
What else do I need to say here before I get on to the players leaving? Maybe the fact that it’s pretty bad that we couldn’t really trouble Sanfrecce's creaking Grandads back three. To be honest though, I still don’t think we would have scored yet if we were still playing now. Can’t really blame our players for being on the beach already though. I don’t think they were slacking particularly, but definitely there was a feeling of a bit of pointlessness about our play. Sanfrecce’s long throws were gross, as any long throws are. I guess the occasional one could be excused and is maybe something we should try as I think Sai can do them, but the endless dithering over their stupid little fucking towels was really getting on my nerves. But at least it gave me something to get involved with, as the rest of the match was quite dull. The only thing that is in any way interesting about the one remaining match away at Urawa is the possibility that they will do their silent treatment thing again that they’ve been doing in the last few matches. Hopefully they will all stay after the game and continue the silence all through the end of season ceremony too as then the train will be a lot better. Would be lovely to beat them on the last day of the season. Looking back, this year has been a mixed bag and I don't think we’ve really actually done the whole season of transition thing that people expected particularly. Maybe we’re saving that for next year, (god help us…). With one game to go, as long as we don’t get hammered and concede four goals in our next game we will have got more points, scored more goals, conceded less goals and finished higher than last year. So even though some points of this season have been deeply disappointing, not losing on the final day will mean that our hosts will be even more disappointed. Again. As they are pretty much every year. In a intensely amusing way.
With four players leaving, and the end of season ceremony, we actually spent more time in the stadium after the match than we did when the actual game was taking place. I definitely wanted to stay though as I wanted to show my appreciation for the players who were on their way out. Regular readers will know I love Sung-Ryong so obviously I’m gutted about him going. However, perhaps the time has come. I don’t think he deserved to be demoted to second fiddle this year, but at the same time, I’m not sure he would have been the answer to play in every game. Definitely a department that needs attention in the off season. I suspected that Jesiel might go, but I thought he would want to go back to Brazil, given he’s just had a baby. Apparently though he wanted to stay with us and will remain in Japan. It’s still a massive frustration for me that he had his career slightly ruined by Oniki who played him straight back from injury in a totally pointless end of season game away at Sagan Tosu and then he got seriously injured again. Definitely he has been quite injury prone in recent years, but he also has consistently been one of our best defenders. I hope he can stay injury free and show us what we’re missing. Ando seems to have been unceremoniously dumped which is a shame more from an emotional point of view rather than a practical one. There is a certain irony in him not getting a new contract after a season in which he has played a lot more in than in the last five or six years put together. He’s been an amazing servant to the club, so I hope he can be offered a position in the club somewhere. I kind of admire Kurumaya’s decision to retire. He definitely could have continued playing at a lower level, but leaves us having been a one club man. I was never sure about him wanting to move to centre back, but I guess with Nobori, and then Sasaki, and then Miura at the club, he was probably going to get more of a chance in the middle. It would have been interesting if we’d tried him in a back three. I remember him playing there at times near the start of his career. I will always consider him as a left back though. Maybe if Sasaki is inured we might see him play left back away at Urawa! All of the farewell videos were of course tear jerking. I think Jesiel’s speech affected me the most as he was clearly gutted. I mentioned above Hasebe’s compassion in playing most of the players leaving one more time being a very welcome thing. This was in stark contrast to the kind of ruthlessness when it comes to moving people on that maybe people would say is essential for our club to progress. Maybe it is essential, but it’s also quite out of character for us, so it came as a bit of a shock. I don’t know if it was a business decision made by the chairman, who once again in the end of season ceremony made himself appear quite unlikeable. As Sung-Ryong started his farewell speech which he was making in Japanese with “Sung-Ryong desu” Hasebe giggled, apparently with real affection. At the same time the chairman stood stony-faced looking like he was scanning the crowd for dissenters who he could get thrown out of the stadium.
There has been some criticism of him for his lack of understanding of football and some of his decisions and reactions. I still remember him not understanding why Chanathip wanted to play football rather than train and just sit in the stands. I wonder if that signing, and maybe also the signing of Gomis, were his idea, to extend our reach in Asia and raise our profile overseas, with the ultimate aim being to get more MONEY MONEY MONEY! And then there’s also the upheaval amongst the staff which also might have something to do with him. You can’t help feel that we’ve lost our way a bit recently and it just happens to have coincided with his tenure at the top of the club. Basically, I’m still quite suspicious of him. As I’ve probably made abundantly clear.
Well that all went on a lot longer than you might have expected for such a boring and pointless game. As I said above, hopefully we can finish the season with a bit of excitement away at Urawa. It’s not too much to ask, is it? And then we get a nice break and all the fun of the off-season. There’s definitely some work to be done before we’re back playing again in early February. My regular pre-match drinking establishment is called Progress, and whilst I think that could be said in some ways about 2025, I remain cautiously hopeful that we could see some more forward steps in 2026. Nice to finish on something positive!
Team GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai
FW 23. MARCINHO Subs GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG (on for YAMAGUCHI 81') GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MARCINHO 72') DF 22. Flip UREMOVIC (on for SASAKI 61') DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota DF 30. NODA Hiroto (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 81') MF 34. YAMAICHI Shuto
FW 38. KANDA Soma FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for ITO 46')
It’s taken me quite some time to get round to writing this post, mainly due to the poor quality of the game. Even at the end of the match it was quite hard to recall what had happened in the preceding 90 minutes. Four days later, it’s almost impossible. And when you consider that most of my notes were things along the lines of ‘this is utterly dull’ and ‘complete lack of quality’ I’m going to get this out of the way with not much discussion of the actual game events as nothing much happened, and as I also can’t be bothered anymore, with as little effort as possible too.
Us -
Still mainly plugging away with the same players. No excitement of some youngsters getting a run out even though our season is over and done with. It’s hard to imagine what kind of scenario would result in some youngsters getting a chance as in seasons where we’d already sealed the title we haven’t done it, and in seasons like this where we’ve already fucked everything up, we still seem to be approaching every game as a crucial must win contest. When you consider that we might have a few players maybe retiring or leaving us at the end of the season (the first one, Sung-Ryong was announced today in between writing this and posting it), it also might have made sense to give some of them a chance to play. But no, just the same old stuff, dawdling towards a boring end to what has been a real up and down season. It was nice to see Sasaki back at left back. It was nice to see us fairly solid in defence. Well, right up until Hasebe decided to shore things up to hang on to that crucial 1-0 home win against Okayama. Right on cue, as often seems to happen when he tinkers to make us more solid, we conceded. Hasebe has had a tough year in some respects. He seems to have got no end of bad luck. The defensive solidity that people imagined he’d bring hasn’t materialised and instead we’ve become a team scoring goals for fun. Well, sometimes. On other occasions we’ve been absolutely blunt in front of goal as we were on this occasion. If we could have spread out the goals we’ve scored this year a bit better we would really have been in with a chance in the league. Probably likewise, if we hadn’t defended so badly all year. But this is all stuff for an end of season post really, (if I can be bothered to write it). Yamaguchi was very ready to throw blame around in his post match comments. It was quite unedifying, particularly when you consider some of the goals we’ve conceded this year. But I don’t want to start slagging people off. I will say though that I am worried about next season already.
Them -
Not much to say. I thought it was amusing that Broderson’s first name in Katakana is Subendo. I’m not sure why I enjoyed it so much, but I guess I was trying my best to find entertainment where I could in what was a dull, dull game. Aside from their goal, Okayama could only shoot either directly at the keeper or miles off target, which explains why they didn’t score more. To be fair though, the same could be said about us. Actually even worse could be said about us as even our goal was massively deflected. The height of goalkeeping excitement for most of the match was a keeper bending over to pick up a shot that dribbled into their hands. I’m pleased we managed to score against Okayama, as we’d failed to do so in the away game. This means we’ll finish the season by having scored at least once against every team… Oh, apart from the mighty Tokyo Verdy. That really sums up the season I think. Anyway, this is supposed to be the Okayama section. But the truth is there isn’t much else to say.
Ref -
Thankfully the ref Shimizu didn’t send off two of our players on this occasion. He continued in his previous (before he went nuts in the Fukuoka game) form and pretty much didn’t give anything, and was very reluctant to give any cards. He was even reluctant to let the physios onto the pitch, instead favouring the maxim that time is a great healer. I was worried that if someone broke a bone we might still be sitting in the stadium as Shimizu thought that any injury could be cured by just waiting. There definitely wouldn’t have been enough space on the board to show the additional time. How many minutes are there in nine months? I did like the way the ref overruled both of his linesman early on, within a few minutes of each other. The guy in front of us definitely deserved it as he was utterly hopeless. But anyway, this game was so dull for the most part that he didn’t have much to do. And therefore I don’t have much to moan about!
Another lead thrown away! Another late goal conceded! What a thrilling match, absolutely predictable when you consider that in order to let excitement reach an absolutely peak the league decided to play the last four games of the season over the course of a few months. Fever pitch excitement! Both teams played like they hadn’t kicked a ball for a couple of weeks. So just imagine how bad we’re going to be in the next match which is in three weeks time! Clearly it would be more humane if we could euthanise our season now, (or even better, could have done a few games ago). I feel like I should write a brief end of season piece as there probably is something to be said about our year, but please excuse me for not bothering with anything else. Writing this blog seems to have become quite pointless recently so i think I’ll probably have a rethink before next year’s dull half season of only the most boring away games. Next up Hiroshima and Urawa at home and away respectively, some time before the end of the year. Not much to look forward to, apart from a break from the kind of tedium that was on display in this match. Blessed relief!
Team GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for ITO 90+3') MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 77') FW 29. MYOGAN Toya FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for MARCINHO 66') FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 66')
