Vs Kashima Antlers (home) 1/11/24 J League match 35

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 3 Kashima Antlers

This truly has been a season of superlatives for us. However, unlike previous seasons where we’ve struggled to find the right words to express how exciting our football was or how well we were doing, this year it’s a case of finding an endless amount of synonyms for ‘shit’. There are plenty of options to choose from when it comes to deciding what the worst game of the season is, but this one has definitely got to be right up there. After having lost 3-1 at home to a team we’ve spent the last five of six years beating pretty easily, when you hear me say that the 3-1 score line didn’t reflect the game you might think that it’s going to be a tale of refereeing howlers and us getting absolutely robbed. On this occasion 3-1 didn’t reflect the game accurately because we didn’t really deserve the one, and we should have conceded more than three. To sum things up concisely, this was another game where we didn’t bother turning up for the first half, conceded for fun and then tried really hard for the second half. So hard that I think their keeper only had to make one save in the whole game. In hindsight, the fact that the half time entertainment consisted of not only a comedian taking on the mystery runner but also the former Guinness World Record holder for running on all fours, it looks like some world class satire from the behind the scenes people who organise these things. Yes, in 2024 we are a joke of a team. And one whose manager’s involvement is basically the equivalent of running the 100m on all fours; it makes the task a lot more difficult and a lot less effective. I’m not going to spend too much time writing this as every minute I spend thinking about this game is a minute that could be better spent… erm… punching myself in the face, maybe. Anything right now is preferable to having to watch the crap we’re playing. Bring on the end of the season. It can’t come soon enough.

Oniki went back to 4-3-3 again, still apparently not having noticed that when he doesn’t play 4-3-3 we do a bit better and sometimes even win. But no, back to 4-3-3. But give him some credit, this time he managed to play two of the back four in their preferred positions, so some progress on that front. ‘Tachibanada at right back’ really does seem to be a phrase that is quite the often associated with ‘terrible performance and result’. But I don’t want to blame him as he is of course being played out of position. In the second half Oniki moved him and instead played Segawa out of position there. Godlike insight. I could start moaning about other selections but the fact is that whoever plays at the moment, we’re awful. As I continue to say throughout this extended period of misery, if one player has a bad game you can blame the player. If almost every player has a bad game pretty much every week, you’ve got to blame the manager. There was some bullshit in Oniki’s post match comments about how at half time he maybe felt that the players didn’t believe we could win whereas he was encouragingly confident that we could. Perhaps it was more a case of them being irritated that the tactics of the idiot in charge mean that every week we’re terrible in the first half and give ourselves a mountain to climb in the second. I mean, sometimes in the past when I’ve played Tetris on a long plane journey, I occasionally randomly fill 2/3 of the screen with blocks to give myself the challenge of trying to clear it up nicely. This is alright when you’re playing Tetris on a plane with absolutely nothing at stake, but if Oniki is intentionally trying to get results from difficult positions just for kicks, he should be booted immediately. At the same time, if that same idiotic approach to the first half of most games is how he thinks we’ll win matches, he should also be given the boot. I know he’s leaving at the end of the season but I’m starting to think that we should fire him before then. We should have done it at half time. We wouldn’t have much contract to pay off and it would significantly improve our chances of not being out of the ACL by Christmas. This time, he didn’t even take the blame in his post match comments as he has done recently. As for his job prospects, it seems that this was perhaps the worst possible result for him. It was widely reported that he’d maybe be going to Kashima next year. But jeez, he’s fucked that up, hasn’t he? If we’d beaten them or even put up a decent fight they might have still been interested. But consider the fact that their stand-in manager totally out-thought the guy who some seem to feel is the greatest manager in the world ever. I know Kashima are one of the bonkers teams in the league when it comes to insane decisions behind the scenes, but how could even they look at that game and think that Oniki would be a better option than the guy who’s keeping the seat warm right now?

As I said above, everyone was pretty bad in this game. The best encapsulation of this was when Yamada managed to miss two open goals within a minute. I haven’t watched the highlights because… well, why would I? I know I’m an idiot, but that’s taking things too far. Another perfect demonstration of this game and 2024 Oniki Frontale is us having 63% possession and only two shots on target. One save from their keeper in 90 minutes! Utterly pointless. The amount of people who left pretty quickly on the final whistle was definitely more than usual which suggests that there are plenty of people who are getting a bit cheesed off with this shite. Equally though, the fact that some of our supporters sang the players into the tunnel at half time after what must have been our worst 45 minutes of football all year, and the fact that they also continued singing after the final whistle still continues to bemuse me. I didn’t really hear any booing either. They got the silent treatment from me. I know I keep saying it’s not the players’ fault but at the same time, I don’t think that means they should be congratulated for what they served up. The highlights of the few notes I made in this game basically amounted to the following:

- Trailing before we’ve had a shot

- And two down before we’ve had a shot

- 20 mins we had a massively deflected shot!!!

- Three goals down before we’ve had three shots

- First shot on target on 50 mins from Kobayashi who Oniki’s playing in midfield.

This photo sums up how dangerous our
attack was for most of the game

This felt like what Oniki considers to be our best eleven which is a bit confusing too. Whether or not you agree with that, we have nothing to play for in the league. I don’t think anyone cares whether we finish in 9th or 14th. We theoretically have something to play for in the ACL, the next game of which is coming up on Tuesday. Why did he play his first choice team?! He won’t have that luxury on Tuesday though as Wakizaka is probably injured. Notably, we conceded the third goal whilst down to ten men, when a clearly unfit to continue Wakizaka was getting treatment right in front of Oniki after hobbling off the pitch, but Oniki didn’t bother to start warming someone up to make a change beforehand. Perhaps he didn’t have time to get the magnets sorted. We spent most of the second half racking up the passes rather than trying to score. And don’t forget, the second half was much better than the first! God it was a fecal match.

A little bit of the ref, officials and the opposition. Tanimoto is a ref I’ve described in the past as useless. Didn’t particularly get that feeling in this game, but I would say that he’s someone who is determined to give a free kick for everything but equally determined not to give a yellow card for almost anything. We didn’t lose because of the ref though. The lino on our side was pretty crap I thought, endlessly doing the delayed flagging but at the same time missing some clear offsides, one of which lead to the corner they scored their first goal from. But we didn’t lose because of the lino though. Kashima, well, they’re just a bunch of wankers aren’t they? Perhaps the ‘Spirit of Zico’ thing means waste time endlessly even when you’re 3-0 up against a team who are utterly hopeless. If I was a Kashima fan I would have been furious they didn’t score double figures. Their keeper spent so long adjusting the turf in front of his goal in the second half that I started to think he’d planted some potatoes there. And let’s be honest, he would have had plenty of time to do so given that we only hit the target once before the 92nd minute. Misao is a prime arsehole for his celebration in front of our fans. But then again, I knew he was a prime arsehole before he did that so I guess no change there.

Preparing for our second shot on target
(in the 92nd minute)

Next up, potentially another turd of a match, at home against Kevin Muscats’ new team in the ACL. They’re only marginally ahead of us in the table, but we’ve scored one goal in three ACL games, so don’t expect too much, eh? Almost certainly 4-3-3 with as many players out of position as possible. Now I understand why they sold tickets for the home ACL games in a batch of four with a special present. If people hadn’t bought them already, I’m pretty sure they’d think twice before attending. Perhaps even those who’ve bought the tickets still will think twice. After that, we’re away to Kyoto next weekend. At least we’ve got something nice planned for before and after that game.

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 70')
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for KAWAHARA 70')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for WAKIZAKA 29')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 82')
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 90+5') (on for TACHIBANADA 70')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
(on for YAMADA 68')

Goals

CHINEN (Kashima) 10' 0-1
HIGUCHI (Kashima) 18' 0-2
MISAO (Kashima) 28' 0-3
YAMAMOTO (Frontale) 90+2' 1-3

Highlights

Vs Shanghai Shenhua (away) 23/10/24 ACL 2024/25 game 3

Shanghai Shenhua 2 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale 

Another awful result. Can’t really comment too much on the performance for a few reasons. Firstly I didn’t see most of the game as I was working. And secondly, I guess the performance is never going to be particularly good if you have to play with ten men for 85 mins of the game. In previous years Oniki has been shown up in this competition and this year when we get shown up by pretty much anyone on a weekly basis, it’s no surprise we’re not doing well in the ACL. I think I said previously that the big problem with us not sacking Oniki or even coming to a ‘mutual consent’ agreement for him to leave earlier meant that he had the opportunity to not only destroy our league, Emperor’s Cup and Levain Cup prospects, but also do irrevocable damage to our ACL campaign for 24/25 before we’ve even got to 2025. In a competition where eight out of the twelve teams progress to the next round, it really takes a high level of incompetence to get your team knocked out, but it looks like Oniki has got the skills for the job. with only two teams sitting below us, we look like we’re in a pretty bad position. One of those two teams is Ulsan, who we just about sneaked past, against the run of play, in our opening game in what was a great triumph for Oniki. The fact that their two consequent opponents haven’t had much trouble scoring against them and beating them says a lot. We have one goal from over 270 minutes of football in this competition. Truly glorious stuff.

I can’t say for sure, but it seems that Oniki might have reverted to his favoured 4-3-3 for this game. Remember that formation that prevents us from winning almost every game recently? You know, the one that when he changes it results in significantly better performances? And then is brought back right in time for a defeat to follow up any half decent result? Lovely stuff! It’s hard to say if this game really was 4-3-3 as we were almost immediately a man down. But the pre-match line ups seem to suggest that is what happened. And after all, it’s Oniki we’re talking about, so it probably was. Marcinho has been sent off again, for pretty much the same thing he is always sent off for. You have to go back to 2017 for his previous red card before the ones this year. Which all suggests that perhaps he’s being asked to do something he clearly can’t do. But still the clown in charge is asking him to do it. I guess maybe Oniki doesn’t mind so much, as now it gives him something to divert the blame for the defeat from it being the result of his own massive inadequacies. In recent years Marcinho only seems to pick up a couple of yellows a season at the most. But this year he’s on fire in that respect too. Although a ratio of five yellow to one red suggests that more often than not, when he fouls, he really fouls. Given that he clearly can’t tackle, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Oniki try him at full back sooner or later. Because whilst it’s easy to say Oniki doesn’t ever really change anything much, the one thing he is constantly innovating with is playing new attackers out of position at full back. There really is no beginning to his managerial talents. But still, we can look forward to the after game comments where he once again says that the team wanted to win the match for all the fans who’d gathered in the stadium and those who were watching at home. Quite why he persists in saying something so blatantly obvious after every cock up makes me suspicious. Such is the lack of managerial talent from him that if he ever tried to throw a match I suspect we’d probably end up winning it. For years we said Oniki was an unbelievably lucky manager. I’m not sure he ever really had the golden touch. I think it was more a case of us having a platinum situation that he managed to not cock up too much. But whichever way you look at it, any golden touch is long gone, and any gold we might see now is clearly going to be from the kilolitres of golden liquid resulting from masses of absolutely piss poor performances, mostly thanks to piss poor management.

It’s very dangerous for us to get a win in 2024. After a win against the mighty Sony Sendai, we crashed out in the following round of the Emperor’s Cup to a J2 team. After just about defeating another J2 team in Kofu in the Levain Cup, we royally fucked up the next tie and were out. After a win in our opening game in the league, we then lost to Jubilo at home conceding five. It might be an exaggeration to say that put paid to our title hopes, but I think it clearly pointed at what was to come. And then in the ACL, a squeaky win against Ulsan and then two defeats. I mean, I know 2024 could have gone worse, but honestly it couldn’t have been much worse, could it? Next up Kashima at home on Friday next week. I intend to get smashed before the game and perhaps then I can sleep through most of it in the stands, the most effective way of enjoying Oniki’s football to the max.

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO (Red card 5')

 

Subs

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 69')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 79')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MIURA 79')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 64')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 69')
MF 34. YUI Kota
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

Goals

WANG (Shanghai) 24' 1-0
ANDRE LUIS (Shanghai) 90+3' PEN 2-0

Highlights

Vs Gamba Osaka (home) 18/10/24 J League match 34

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 Gamba Osaka

Let’s start at the end with this post. As the Gamba players approached their fans after the final whistle a chorus of boos rang out, their fans clearly being upset that they’d failed to beat a team as shit as us. To be honest I had some sympathy for them, as for the majority of this game we were once again absolutely awful, completely clueless and terribly turgid. We did have a good last fifteen minutes though… How far we’ve fallen since the times when we were good. Perhaps these bad times might be about to come to an end though as clearly the big news I’m burying with that intro is that Oniki is leaving at the end of the season. It was apparently not by mutual consent, but I guess it doesn’t need to be if his contract will be expiring. There was some surprise expressed that it wasn’t stated more like it was something that both parties felt was for the best though. I’m sure even Oniki has now realised that his magical touch has long gone.

So with Oniki’s impending departure in mind, this was a kind of emotional day for many people. Before the game the usual Oniki Frontale chant was massively extended. Heart strings were yanked. People reminisced about the good old days and reflected on the fact that Oniki has brought the club the success that in the past was always elusive. He put the final piece in the jigsaw that saw ‘not quite’ turn into ‘almost certainly’, repeatedly. It’s fair to say that recent seasons might have soiled previous memories a little, but the fact is he did what previous managers had failed to do, and to be honest, what no other manager in the league had managed to do. His run of success is unrivalled. So in a way it’s a bit of a shame that his departure came at least a couple of years too late. There were definitely lots of opportunities for him to leave on a high but for whatever reason, we kept offering him new contracts and he kept deciding to accept them. Getting booted out of the Levain Cup last weekend was perhaps the final straw, with us now having an utterly pointless run to the end of the year. (Well actually relegation is still mathematically possible, so maybe there is some point to these last few games, but the fact remains that the most positive emotion we can hope for is relief about having avoided a bad fate rather than delight at achieving something). So yeah, people were emotional in the run up to this game and I have to admit that my usual harsh feelings towards 2024 Oniki softened a little, and melted into a kind of end of term, ‘we’re all moving on but it’s been fun’ kind of thing. Oh, and then I saw the starting line up and realised that his departure is way too late and that the last few games are going to be filled with the same frustrating shit, rather than be a kind of handbrake off, expression of fun and excitement. It’s not going to be pitch time for unheralded squad members. It’s going to be the same players, squished into the same shitty formation with the same shitty tactics.

Yeah, we’ve got injuries, but did we really need to field a back four where only one player was playing in their preferred position? And even that player was a veteran who’s had a bit of a challenging year with us. And naturally, it was only a matter of time before Tachibanada got moved to play at full back! We’ve got lots of players who could play on the wing so we didn’t need to play our central midfielder there.  But as usual with Oniki it’s pick the players first and then try to squeeze them in where you can. And the results were utterly predictable. It was a strange decision to play the not very big attacker Segawa at right back and put him up against the muscly Brazilian Gamba we’re playing there. Blog Gamba pointed out to me that Welton had had a storming start to the season before teams worked out exactly how to nullify his threat. Naturally Oniki didn’t bother with this and instead basically gave him an easier route to break through us. Almost every set piece Gamba took saw the ball end up at the far post where they had at least one player in acres of space, completely unmarked. For it to happen once was unfortunate. For it to happen repeatedly, well, it just seems kind of stupid. We had quite a few shots in the first half but I wouldn’t say we ever really threatened. it was the same old thing, some quantity, but zero quality. Half time came and we weren’t playing well. So zero changes to personnel or approach! The second half started the same way. We didn’t have a shot at all for the first 25-30 minutes of the half. And don’t forget, we were trailing at the time. The last bit of the game was alright though. But you can’t really say that we deserved to win when you consider we didn’t really play for 80% of the game. Equally Gamba didn’t deserve to win so you could say a 1-1 draw was the perfect result. I’d disagree. I think a 0-0 would have better portrayed the pointlessness on show from both teams. 

Let’s briefly digress into some bitching. Blimey, Gamba were big on the time wasting. I guess that’s to be expected when you give them an early goal, but jeez, they could have scored loads against us in the first half if they hadn’t taken every opportunity to delay, roll around on the pitch or in the case of the keeper, take countless drinks of water in between picking up the ball and placing it down for a goal kick. Then another few drinks before retreating for the run up. Then a couple more before actually taking the goal kick. I thought my tweet about Ichimori was one of the most amazing things ever written, but predictably was pretty much ignored. So they seemed determined to get a 1-0. And for some reason it seemed that for most of the match we were equally determined to lose 1-0, given that when we had the ball, we just did the usual tidy passing until we get out of our half and then lost it. But let’s get back to Gamba moaning. Their winger Yamashita was an unbelievable diver, and this was most clearly demonstrated when, in an attempt to get another one of our players booked, he not only flopped down, but seemed to do that roll and flip back into the air like a leaping salmon as he rotated his way towards the edge of the pitch, crucially stopping before he left the field. The ref hadn’t even given the free kick initially I thought, but clearly impressed by his midair version of the famous break dancing move the worm, decided she’s clearly missed something and had a guess what that might have been. I’ve had a look at the replay and it seems like there was no contact at all. A good thing for Yamashita when it came to getting decisions given his way was the fact that his mum was reffing the game. I say his mum, but I’m only guessing. The ref Yamashita isn’t that old, but definitely old enough to have birthed Yamashita the player, who judging by his size and his little-shitheadness, has probably just entered his teens. The poor lad was having a right strop! A bit more on Yamashita the ref. Any criticism of a female ref is clearly going to look like the rantings of a gammon, so I have to tread carefully here. Given that her name was roundly booed by the Gamba fans when announced before the game, I guess she has some history with them. So this match gave her the perfect opportunity to try to win back their favour by giving them pretty much everything. I’m sure Gamba fans won’t agree with me about this, but to me it seemed like every time we got with a metre of a Gamba player they’d drop and she’d give them a free kick. In contrast there’s the widely shared clip on Twitter of a horrible challenge from a Gamba player on the ankle of Tachibanada, (I think), which could easily have been and probably should have been a red, but didn’t even warrant a yellow according to Yamashita. To be fair though, this is clearly something that VAR should have mentioned to her. Instead we just took a quick free kick short, as we always do in every situation. So on the ref, some might say she’s not up to the job, but on the evidence of this game, I’d say she fits in perfectly in the J League as she is without a doubt as shit as most of the male refs are. Bravo!

So, yeah, another shit game, overshadowed slightly by the Oniki love in, but which perfectly encapsulated why he should be leaving. Knowing that he’s on his way definitely makes it easier to balance my emotions about him recently. I know he’s trying his best and doing what he thinks will be best. I also have heard that he’s a nice guy and that everyone loves him. I have no desire to constantly moan about him, but he hasn’t exactly given me any other option in recent times. With the news that he’s leaving having sunk in, I feel that I can now watch the games, get a grump on about our shitness but not feel any personal animosity towards him. It’s definitely a very sad moment for some of our fans. It probably speaks volumes that with all of the tweets and posts of people rightly saying how much he has achieved for us and how sad it is that it’s the end of an era, I don’t think I’ve seen even his biggest fans saying that we shouldn’t be parting ways. When even your biggest fans think it’s time to move on, you know you’ve probably left it a bit too late. Anyway, I presume I’ll be repeating this kind of thing in every blog post from now till he goes, so I should stop going on about it now.

Next up Shanghai Shenhua away in the ACL on Wednesday. The good news for Frontale fans is that once again I will be working that night so won’t see the game, perhaps ensuring that we play a bit better than we did against Gwangju. So far in the ACL it seems that plenty of teams have won one game and lost one so whilst it looks promising that Johor hammered them in the last game, it doesn’t look so good that they won their first game handsomely against Pohang. We have the same amount of points as them but have only scored the one goal, boring our way through two games. So basically, I dunno what will happen. After that we’ve got Kashima at home at the start of November in more FRIDAY NIGHT J LEAGUE!!! The Kashima board can have a good look at their new manger for 2025. Presumably Oniki will want to do well as if he’s crap, whilst it might please Kashima in the short term, it might affect his future employment opportunities. As we run out of games and trundle towards the end of the season it’s quite difficult to get too excited or be optimistic. But fingers crossed we’ll at least have something to cheer about sooner or later. 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 48')
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 53')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for ERISON 68')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for SEGAWA 68')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for MARCINHO 68')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for YAMADA 68')
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

Goals

WELTON (Gamba) 7' 0-1
KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 81' 1-1

Highlights

Vs Albirex Niigata (home) 13/10/24 Levain Cup Semi Final 2nd Leg

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. 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 52')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (Yellow card 40')
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 9. ERISON

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.


Highlights