Vs Mito Hollyhock (away) 12/9/26 J League match 7

Mito Hollyhock 0 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale 

Oh my god, two wins a row! Oh my god, a clean sheet! Both of these things happened for the first time in the league this year in this game. And you have to go back to our game against Verdy in May to find our last clean sheet, even including cup games. Some might say this is the dawning of a great new era. Maybe they’re right. There were periods of this game where we looked really good I thought. We did still only manage to score once though. And although the stats say we had ten shots on target, I can’t remember many of them being particularly likely to actually go in. But this win and clean sheet are not to be sniffed at. After all Kashima went to the same stadium a few weeks ago and conceded four times. And Mito definitely don’t look anything like the mugs that many people might have thought they’d be in J1. Of course mainly due to the result, but also to a few other things I’ll go into shortly, all in all, a surprisingly pleasant day out!

Us - 

No real surprises in the line up again. Well, perhaps apart from Derik dropping out of the squad and being replaced by Kayke, who didn’t get the chance to make his full team debut but after the match looked like he’d had a fun time sitting on the bench. (I’ve just seen the lineup for the U21 game today and both Kayke and Osa, unused subs in the game yesterday are starting. Does this mean that the U21 game is affecting the changes we’re making in the senior game? That seems a bit weird….) Our play was unsurprising too, pretty much the same as ever, although we did seem to be just a little bit better than recently. Hasebe always says after games that we’re improving little by little, game by game, and whilst in the past this has been quite hard to believe or notice, maybe he was right all along. One thing that stood out was how good we were at nicking the ball back off of Mito in this match. There must be a technical term for this, I guess. It wasn’t particularly through tackles, but more by us seemingly knowing where the pass was going to go and getting in the way and intercepting it. It was very pleasing to see this. For most of the game, Marcinho was having one of his off days, not being able to pass or shoot and then he cropped up with a lovely finish. It’s weird as he constantly seems to get in these kind of positions, which I guess says a lot about him as a player. By contrast on the other wing, Ito never really seems to get the same chances. I don’t know why this is. One kind of interesting or maybe amusing, or perhaps worrying, thing about this match was our subs. In the past I’ve complained about Hasebe doing like for like subs and changing nothing else. In this match, I guess we’d have to describe the changes as unlike for like. The first two subs were as expected. (Not sure why both Taniguchi and Romano missed the last game and were changed in this game. Perhaps they’re not in perfect condition or something. Or perhaps it’s Hasebe playing 4D chess style mind games). The second batch was where things got a bit confusing. Sasaki came on for Marcinho but unlike the previous time where Hasebe went with Miura on the wing and Sasaki at left back and Miura pretty much gave up on any kind of defensive duties, this time Hasebe put Sasaki further forward. It would have been interesting to see how he did, but he didn’t get long there before he got switched to centre back after Romano went off. As Mochiyama had run himself into the ground he also made a change up front, bringing on… Ozeki?! That one was a bit weird, given that we had a striker on the bench. Maybe he was hanging on to what we had slightly, but I don’t think it really worked. The final change saw Kawahara on for Romano so Tachibanada then had a turn on the left wing. To be honest, there wasn’t that much time to see if any of these last three changes would work, but it definitely blunted us going forward and seemed to confuse things a bit. If we, (and let’s be honest, this season it would be a very likely scenario as it’s happened over and over), went on to concede after these changes, I think I wouldn’t be finding them quite so amusing and entertaining. And Mito did hit the post, so it very nearly happened. In conclusion, I thought we were a bit better than we have been so far this year, but still aren’t getting anywhere near scoring from most of the chances we make. Plenty of pea-roller ‘shots’ straight to the keeper. But definitely a step in the right direction!

Them -

Mito probably could consider themselves to be a bit unlucky they didn’t get anything from this match. Especially when they hit the post. That’s about all I have to say from a footballing point of view… This year they’re playing in a different stadium. It looked like it was going to be a pain in the arse to get to. But to be honest the train from Mito wasn’t too busy either way and the shuttle bus was free, quick and well organised. Blimey! I know nothing about Pokemon really but the stadium felt like an evolved version of the previous one. There’s still a running track but the stands are a bit bigger and the elevation is better. Also behind the goal there’s only the slightest bit of grass and the stand is mostly seated rather than the picnic friendly but football viewing and  calf muscle unfriendly grass verge at the K’s Denki stadium. The bench type seats were spacious and the vending machines were very reasonably priced! Super thumbs up! But there are woefully few toilets. I missed the start of the second half because of this. There are extra portaloos outside the stadium but they had queues too and it seemed a toss up as to which would be quicker. Or rather less slow. It was a shame as otherwise this was a pretty good stadium. (Of course there’s a running track, which is obviously shit, but so many teams’ stadiums have them, including our one, that you realistically have to reassess what good means). Few other things. Mito’s song to greet their players is Daydream Believer which is nice. They really could have done a better job of making the words fit the tune though. Definitely felt like they’d done the lyrics first before having someone else who hadn’t seen the lyrics select the tune. And during the respect speeches before the match, unless I’m going crazy, there was that kind of quiet and emotional piano music playing in the background. You know the kind of music you might expect on a program where a kid is reading out a thank you letter to their struggling single parent mum. ‘Okaasan, thank you for everything you do for me every day. We may be poor but we have each other and we’re happy. Fair play blah blah, respect the referees and opponents blah blah. Kawasaki Frontale captain Yasuto Wakizaka’. I have to say I quite enjoyed the juxtaposition.

Ref -

Astonishingly, I have very little to say in this section. I don’t think I even shouted at the ref in the match. Well actually I did, but just a little bit when I made a note to check something and I reckon my initial feeling was right. (This was the disparity between the yellow cards for Romano and the one the Mito player got shortly afterwards. They definitely didn’t feel like they should have got the same thing). Aside from this one matter I thought the ref was alright. Always easier to say this when you win though, isn’t it? And there was no VAR too. At least not noticeably. Lovely!

So a very welcome win which in retrospect might turn out to be a much better result than we might think it is right now. Next up, Kashima at home next Saturday. And then on Sunday there will be an U21 game I can go to away against FC Tokyo. So a Frontale heavy weekend. I said before this game that I’d happily lose to Mito if it meant we could hammer Kashima. As we’ve beaten Mito I’ll have to change that to ‘I’ll happily take a 1-0 against Mito if it means we can hammer Kashima’. Not too greedy, right? Given that they’ve lost three in a row, I fear we might revert to early season style and oblige with a few soft goals for the opposition and then fail to hit the target ourselves. It would be very nice if my relentless pessimism could be proved to be completely wrong next weekend. This is the end of the usual business part of the post but I’ve written a little bit about the U21s below.

 

 

U21s round up - 

I really want to go to the U21 games. Unfortunately quite a few of our home games are at our training ground and any kind of singing or shouting isn’t allowed. So might as well watch it on DAZN, right? We beat Shimizu 5-1 but the scoreline was probably a bit affected by the fact that they only brought 3 subs and we used six of ours so at the end of the match Shimizu looked knackered and that’s when we scored most of our goals. Ienaga was on the bench and came on! Kawahara had a good game as you’d expect. Kayke got his first goal after winning and converting a penalty. Kimura and Hirose from the U18 team came off the bench and both scored. I think Kimura will be a very tricky player. And he’s only a second grade high school student. Lee looked good in goal. In fact everyone looked pretty good. Hopefully I will have a bit more to say after watching the U21 game in person next weekend. I never really trust what I see on DAZN. It was quite funny when it got dark as it looked like the game was being played in the middle of nowhere, which I guess it was to some extent. (The Asao ground isn’t the most urban area of Kawasaki). The pitch was kind of illuminated, but it didn’t seem as bright as you might expect. And then anything further than a metre away from the touchline was in almost total darkness. It looked kind of fun, but I’m still not convinced I’ll go because of that no noise policy. 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO (Yellow card 87')
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya 
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for MARCINHO 83')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MOCHIYAMA 83')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for ITO 76')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for PEDRO ROMANO 90')
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC (on for TANIGUCHI 76') (Yellow card 80')
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto

FW 34. OSA Ryuki
FW 93. KAYKE QUEIROZ

Man of the match

 

I think I should pay a bit more attention at games. We played kind of well but I still can’t really pick out anyone in particular for this. I think that’s definitely due to me rather than a lack of players having a good game. Sorry! 

 

Goals

MARCINHO (Frontale) 59' 0-1

 

Highlights

  

Vs Shimizu S Pulse (kind of home) 6/9/26 J League match 6

 

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 1 Shimizu S Pulse

This game saw us back at the (mostly) cursed (for us) National Stadium. It’s never a particularly fun experience to watch Frontale there, particularly from behind the goal, about 3km from the pitch.  Add to this our results there in league games and you have a perfect misery cocktail. But somehow on this occasion we managed to actually get the job done. Although let’s be honest, there were numerous times in the match and plenty of occasions where it looked like we were going to mess it up again, exactly like we tend to do most weeks this season. There is really something a bit shitty about having games at the National Stadium. And it’s not just for the reasons I mentioned above. Unlike with clubs like Kashima, the majority of whose fans almost certainly live closer to the National Stadium than they do to Kashima, it seems a bit stupid for clubs to make the fans who go to their home games basically do an away trip. Admittedly, it’s closer to where I live than Todoroki is, (before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, Todoroki is the nearest home stadium to where I live so I do support my local team), but I still can’t really get on board with the whole “exciting experience” thing that it seems to be sold as. But all of this is basically a preamble to me saying that I understand that National Stadium games are probably a prerequisite for us at the moment. With the redevelopment of Todoroki happening next season we need somewhere to play, and I believe that using the stadium a few times is part of us showing good will and therefore being able to use it when we can’t use Todoroki. Perhaps people looking at the attendance for this match will think it was a disaster as we only got a bit over 37000 in. I should say though that the weather was horrible, and I presume that this knocked out a significant number of the free ticket crowd whose presence usually pads out the Kokuristu attendance figures. Anyway, last time we played a league game here we got absolutely hammered by YFM. Thankfully we managed to avoid a similar fate on this occasion and blimey, we actually won at the Kokuritsu in J1! As I don’t really know what to say about this match, I won’t use the semi-regular headings and will just lump everything together in a stream of consciousness splurge, perfect to make it as unreadable as possible, right?

Hasebe rotated for this match! I don’t know why he did this. And I don’t know why he changed the defence and strikers so much but left the midfield entirely intact. Of course, up front we don’t really have many options as I mentioned in the last post. On this occasion we went with Mochiyama which I think makes sense as Derik seems to get knackered quite quickly after he enters the pitch, so it probably makes more sense to use him as a sub rather than as a starter. Honma has been knocking in goals for fun for his university team, but unfortunately for us, this means he has been unavailable for us. Hopefully he’ll be able to provide us with another option soon. But you can’t really argue with Mochiyama starting, particularly as he scored after 23 seconds. It was a lovely goal and for the majority of the game it looked like it might be our only successful attack. I was a bit surprised when Hasebe took him off at half time, but I suppose when you’ve only got two (semi) fit strikers it might make sense to not overstretch either of them. At the back he went with a centre back pairing of Maruyama and Uremovic, which was a bit of a surprise. I think they did pretty well though. Well, apart from the one occasion where they both went for the same header and took each other out. I’ve never noticed Uremovic doing this before and maybe it was a tactic for this match, but I quite liked the fact that for every Shimizu long goal kick he would come charging out of defence towards the ball and more often than not bonk it forward with a high speed header. Konno more than justified his spot on the right I think. He was fouled for the red card, and also for the other red card that probably should have been given. (More on that later). He also got changed at half time but I wonder if it was more to do with the fact that he’d been absolutely smashed to pieces by Shimizu clogging. So that’s the non-regular-§starter business, I guess. So on to our play… I dunno, the same as usual really. Lots of possession, not many actual attacks, or at least attacks that were in any way likely to lead to an actual goal. But it did feel like we were very much on top… and would probably throw away another lead and regret not scoring more.

And we did. At least the first part. And at least for a while. You can’t argue with the penalty. And shockingly, I don’t think I even did argue about the penalty in the stadium, and I make it a matter of principle to argue with pretty much every decision these awful referees give. It was a shame as, you know, it would be nice to get a clean sheet sooner or later, right? We can only dream. Aside from the penalty, we dealt pretty well with everything Shimizu threw at us. Brodersen made some good saves. We hit the post, again. Before we managed to take the lead for the second time there was a really worrying panic that looked to be spreading through the team. You could see a lot of people getting frustrated and moaning at each other. Clearly and understandably confidence amongst the players is around the same level as it is amongst the fans. (I’m presuming everyone feels the same way as I do, which is a massive reach given how happy clappy a lot of our fans are, but definitely some people seem to feel the same way as I do). But thankfully, in spite of the efforts of the referee, we managed to score a second and then miraculously a third, making it a somewhat comfortable win in the end. We shouldn’t forget though that we played for about an hour against 10 men and even then managed to concede before we could extend our lead. One final point in this section before I go on to absolutely bitch about another predictably atrocious referee. Our second goal was absolutely amazing and everyone should watch a replay of it as it had everything. I could try to explain it but I think it’s just easier to watch the replay, but make sure you see the bit where Uremovic gets kicked in the face by a tumbling Shimizu player, fallsl to the floor clutching his face and as he does, kicks the ball (intentionally or not, who knows…) perfectly to Derik. It’s been referred to online as an ‘Ita ita through pass’ which I think is just perfect. Shimizu complained about the goal. I’ve got no idea what they were complaining about as it was clearly not offside. But even so we had a lengthy VAR delay, and then the goal was given. Then back for some more VAR to check for a possible red card. For whom, well it seems that no-one knew. And even the commentary when I watched it back didn’t know either. The kick in the face? The annoyed reaction from someone who got kicked in the face? Brodersen appearing and absolutely losing his shit? All in all, completely confusing and a perfect encapsulation of a useless officiating performance. 

Ah Jumpei Iida. As I never tire of shouting from the stands when he’s in charge of one of our games ‘FUCK OFF JUMPEI!”.  I wasn’t sure whether I should be pleased to see him in charge as at least we could be sure that we’d be having a J League refereeing performance, instead of the random factor of a guest ref that we had for our previous two league games. And thankfully it wasn’t the awful Sutani or Mikuriya (I could name plenty more, but those two are in my recent memory). But don’t get excited it was the eternally hopeless Jumpei whose position as one of the more senior refs in the league can only be related to his age, and absolutely not to his abilities. I think part of the reason this season is so wild for us is that you never know what kind of ref you’re going to get from week to week. Well apart from it being a crap one. You just can’t be sure about the way in which they will be crap. But one things for sure, with Jumpei you always know you’re going to get all round incompetence. And we got it in spades. Add to this a guy on VAR who we’ve never had for a match, (so clearly a less ‘experienced’ ref), and you know you’re in for a shocker. I reckon Shimizu could have had three players sent off, so I suppose we should be grateful that they got at least one of the red cards. The first challenge on Konno that only warranted a yellow according to Iida looked bad to me. The red card was so blatant so it was a surprise that we needed a VAR review. But it seemed to be that VAR in this match was used like a new toy or a paid service that they were determined to make sure they got their money’s worth to cover the monthly subscription. One time I was very happy we had VAR, (and that’s something I VERY rarely say), was when Iida gave a horrendously clear and obvious corner / goal kick decision the wrong way, much to the disbelief of the players and the crowd. He was overruled by VAR, and fair to him put his hands up to apologise, but then that appeared to send him spiraling, giving each subsequent decision to make up for the previous one. “Oh, I made a stupid mistake here, I’ll even things up with this one. Oh that was a bit stupid, I’ll even things up with the next one…” etc. The first half ended with another insane decision when Ryo Germaine, Frontale tormenter when he was at Iwata, went down, apparently being taken out by a sniper in the third tier and ever un reliable Iida gave a free kick against Maruyama. Seriously, there were so many bad decisions in this game that I think people close to Iida might be considering staging an intervention. “Put down the whistle and slowly step away from it. It’s ok, you’re safe here. Don’t worry about that last clearly incorrect decision you made. No one’s going to shout “FUCK OFF JUMPEI!” at you. Well apart from Neil maybe, but he’s clearly an idiot”. In the second half he wasn’t bothered about a clear backpass, waving it away. But he was bothered about booking Marcinho either for a dive in the box, which he immediately got up after so clearly wasn’t claiming anything, (I believe the commentator said it couldn’t be simulation if there is any contact, but maybe I misunderstood  him or misunderstand the rule) or for a fair tackle immediately afterwards. He also gave a nonsense free kick against Derik who took the ball cleanly and clearly later on. I’m sure it’s not intentional, but plenty of J League refs do seem to give more decisions against foreign players. Is it just me who thinks this? Anyway, all of this is to say that Iida was hopeless in the way that Iida is always hopeless. I was delighted to get some back up for once from other people in the crowd who also were pretty disgusted by both his announcement before the game and his general uselessness. 

I’ve realised I’ve got to the end here and haven’t even mentioned Shimizu really. It was always going to be tough for them after going down to ten. They brought a decent amount of fans on a horrible rainy day to a not very good stadium for football. Regular readers will know that I don’t have anything against Shimizu really, so I have no interest in saying nasty things about them. So this paragraph is kind of pointless.

Next up Mito away next weekend. No midweek game makes it a bit confusing why Hasebe rotated so much, but given that we won, I don’t think anyone can say it was a mistake. After that we’ve got Kashima at home the following weekend. So an Ibaraki double header, one home and one away, and thankfully the Kashima game is at home. I’m not going to Kashima away this year because I’ve decided to stop doing things that are basically masochism. If you offered me three points from these next two games I’d bite your hand off for a loss at Mito and a win at home against Kashima, but I guess things don’t really work out that the way they would if there was any kind of justice in the world. As evidenced by us losing to scummy Machida. Although I suppose if you look at the form table for the last two games, Mito is by far the tougher game. 😉 Fingers crossed for six points, but I’d definitely take none and then three!

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya 
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for SASAKI 82')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for TACHIBANADA 73')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So 
MF 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 72') (on for KONNO 46')
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto (on for ITO 90+3')
FW 97. DERIK LACERDA (on for MOCHIYAMA 46')

Man of the match

Not sure who to give this to. Konno did well in the first half but got taken off. Plenty of people were alright, but I’m not the kind of person who wants to give this out to the least bad player. If no-one stands out as better than the rest, no-one feels fairer. But we did win, and one player played an important part in making this happen, so I’ll give it to…

MARCINHO - only played a half, but got more goals than anyone else in the stadium and if you don’t put even the simple chances in, you don’t win games. As we are well aware of this season. Also I like his Val La dance.

Goals

MOCHIYAMA (Frontale) 1' 1-0
OH (Shimizu) 68' PEN 1-1
MARCINHO (Frontale) 77' 2-1
MARCINHO (Frontale) 90' 3-1

 

Highlights

 

Vs Machida Zelvia (away) 2/9/26 J League match 5

 

Machida Zelvia 2 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

And finally we’ve lost our unbeaten record. Although to be honest, the fact that there were so many draws in that record did significantly take the shine off of it. The dream of going the whole season as invincibles climbing the table to a very much precedented 8th place finish due to us drawing most games, is over. And of course it had to happen against one of the league’s truly scummiest teams. For most of the game, I thought we were doing pretty well, more than holding our own. Right up until the inevitable collapse which even more irritatingly came shortly after Wakizaka had come very close to doubling our lead when he hit the post. To be honest though, when I looked back at the stats and considered the fact that the view is so bad from behind the goal at Machida’s shitty stadium, I suspect the truth is that we weren’t as good… erm… as ok, as it felt during the game. Just the one shot on target in each half. The possession stats were pretty even, but when you consider that most of our possession was passes between the keeper and centre backs it doesn’t feel particularly encouraging. People who dislike me will be delighted to hear that I was really pissed off at the end of this game and utterly disappointed. I want to get this finished as soon as possible. The blog post I mean, although it could also apply to this season.

Us -

Were we good? I don’t think so. Were we better than them? possibly. Could I see anything? Not really. I don’t know where this game leaves us. I think it’s impossible to work out what kind of team we are. We’ve struggled against some teams who will definitely be in the relegation battle. We perhaps flattered by more than matching Sanfrecce who many people tip for a high finish. We finally won a game, admittedly against a team who now have zero points in five games. And then this match. We weren’t awful, we maybe were alright at times. But still we can’t or don’t want to shoot. Certainly the injuries which are already piling up aren’t helping us. Derik, who in the first three games was nowhere to be seen, is now our first choice striker, even though he doesn’t seem to be able to complete more than about 50 minutes. Shortly before he was taken off in this match he was clearly knackered and was so far back as our other players tried to quickly attack. Hopefully he can get match fit soon, or maybe this is his thing and might explain why he’s moved around a few clubs. After him we have Mochiyama, who aside from Mito away last year, (which don’t forget, according to the J League doesn’t count), hasn’t quite got going yet. And then we have Honma, who on recent selections seems to actually be ahead of Mochiyama in the pecking order but wasn’t even in the squad last night. I guess this was because he’s still at university. Maybe he had a class or had to attend a job fair or something. I’m not sure who to blame. Well, I’m always ready to blame the chairman Yoshida as he’s by all evidence, absolutely clueless and quite useless. Hasebe seems to be unwilling to do anything different, but I can’t see what he really could do when it comes to selections given the players he has available. Obviously he could change the formation and tactics, but it worked in the last game, (finally), so you can’t really blame him for keeping things the same for this game. After all, he hasn’t changed anything since he joined the club, so it would be a shock if he did after our first win of the season. I kind of feel that at this stage he is just hanging on till the end of his contact. He knows that Kengo is waiting in the wings, actually on the bench next to Hasebe, and in a way, it’s very good of him to get Kengo up to speed. We had six point for four games. It wasn’t great, but it was alright. We now have six point from five games. It’s not good. And if we lose at the weekend we’ll effectively be back to drawing every match form from the point of view of points gained. We now seem to have a problem at left back. Miura started this match after Sasaki had a bit of a mare against JEF. He did alright and his assist for the goal was great. And then he got moved forward to the Marcinho spot and seemed to pretty much give up on anything other than trying to attack. Sometimes attack. Even Marcinho gets back to help defend. I definitely don’t think he can continue to be played in that position if he’s going to do that. Marcinho after having a good game against JEF was back to classic recent Marcinho unfortunately. There were numerous occasions where he seemed to just kick the ball from short distance directly into the legs of the opposition defender. To be fair to him, it did seem that most of our midfield was doing the same thing though. Perhaps this is something that should be a compliment about Machida’s defending but I’ll keep it as a criticism of our players as I don’t think anyone wants to compliment Machida, right? But still we were very much in the game, and if Wakziaka’s shot that hit the pst had gone in, we… could have thrown away a two goal lead and got a draw. The fact is, we can’t compete with Machida’s money. We have a chairman who seems to want to do everything on as tight a budget as possible with the main goal being to make money. I don’t think it has occurred to him that people don’t want to watch terrible games and those who don’t have season tickets might stop coming. We hardly did any business in the transfer market this time and now we basically will have to keep two squads going as we’re taking part in the U21 league too. It feels like some players aren’t being considered for the top team as they are players for the U21 team. At the same time, maybe they aren’t good enough. But look at the dross we’re playing most of the time and can you seriously tell me that the players we’re playing in the top team are good enough right now? But anyway, I don’t know what’s going on with us. We’re a mystery team, vacillating from good to shit on a minute by minute basis. Only consistent in our bewildering inconsistency, not even from game to game, but from passage of play to passage of play. We can’t stop conceding. We have no plan B. The plan A is barely there. Players’ form is all over the place. The opposition are wankers. The refs are terrible. I am a tedious person. Ugh.

Them -

I fucking hate Machida. I’m sure I’ve said why on numerous occasions. I’m sure you agree, even if you are a Machida fan who has decided to hate read this. They seemed as useless as us in the first half, but the big difference is that they have MONEY MONEY MONEY and can bring on big signings for fun later on whilst we have only one and a half fit strikers at the club. The whole match day experience seemed to be the result of an AI prompt. The topless bondage-gear muscle man big flag wavers were there. I only have to watch their extremely repetitive and tedious performance once a year. I can’t imagine having to watch strong men wave big things and pretend to be impressed by it every other game. Maybe it’s physically impressive to wave those big flags but there is a distinct lack of entertainment to it. I suggest instead that they just get a big guy flipping over increasingly big things week on week. This week a massive tractor tyre! Machida’s Strongest Man pulling a truck around the running track using only his genitals. The stadium music resembled a provincial night club. I quite enjoyed their goal keeper warm up music which seemed to contain the absolutely accurate repeated line ‘WE SCUM!’ One of the announcers referred to the team as Machida Zelvy at one stage. The whole thing is surprisingly tinpot considering that they have so much money. I always talk about the wide range of idiotic hooligan wannabe flags they have but this time I want to focus on the surprising number of English flags, (not the dark blue Union Jacks which I guess also fall into the idiotic category but the red and white St George’s cross flags), that were there. Weird given that, as far as I know, there is no connection between the club or any of its players and England. The other flag I ‘enjoyed’ was the classic flag demonstrating their desire to follow their team in continental competition. It seems that the Machida fans are heading to Asia but instead of going direct from Haneda are using Mackinac Island airport, (airport code MCD), an airport in Michigan on an island with a population of 583 which is only served by Fresh Air Aviation and Island Airways for charter flights to Beaver Island. Not sure that the Japan - Mackinac Island - Beaver Island - Asia route is the most convenient one, but I guess when you’ve got cash to splash, why not make things exciting? And I guess the fact that you can walk 1.6 miles by paved road from Mackinac Airport to Market Street and the downtown area shops was a big draw. I’ve been to Machida quite a few times now. Once when they were in J3, once or twice when they were in J2 and now I go there every year for our regular beating. Their supporter base has clearly grown a lot. Perhaps it’s because of the fact that they keep signing once famous J League names who have gone to Europe, had a mediocre time and then returned to the J League with a new found hunger for money. I guess a lot of the newer supporters are attracted by these kind of players mercenary spirit. Personally, plenty of them repulse me. It’s undeniable that Machida are one of the teams, if not the number one team, when it comes to having shithead players. If I had booed all of the arseholes in their starting line up I would have been out of puff for the whole game. Of course Soma is top of that list. But there are plenty of others who fit that brief. One new thing I can make fun of this time around is that I saw lots of people with shirts that had DAVID R. on the back. I presumed this was another new big money signing, but couldn’t work out who it was from their squad list. As I’m sure some of you will be aware, it’s actually Kikuchi. The David is there because it’s his, (presumably self-applied), nickname because of his love of David Luiz. Which is absolutely hilarious. Please start calling me Pizza N. See if you can guess who the people are that I have made these new nicknames for. Answers at the bottom of the post.



1. Power harassment G.
2. Pies and aggro Y.
3. Awful shooting and being tall T
4. Being an arsehole and failing in Europe multiple times T.
5. Crying K
6. White t-shirt and trainers G

As an aside, when I was at university, there was a guy with a strange nickname, which I’ll not mention for the sake of anonymity. When his friends from home came to visit and we referred to him by his nickname, (perhaps we didn’t even know his real name, so ingrained was the nickname), they had no idea who we were talking about. Anyway, blah blah blah, long throws and those fucking stupid towels, blah blah blah, MONEY MONEY MONEY, blah blah blah, arsehole manager and players, blah blah blah, bad boy fans who are very quiet, blah blah blah, shit shuttle buses, blah blah blah, FUCK OFF MACHIDA. 

Ref -

Once again we had a guest ref, this time from China. I am guessing that they aren’t doing the whole thing about counting down for goal kicks and throws and the like, as for most of the match, he seemed to keep forgetting to do it. There was definitely something said at half time as he applied himself a bit better to the task in the second half, but still seemed to think that the whole reason for counting was to give the long throw or the goal kick an excitement lift. Something like when a rocket takes off, which when you consider Machida’s main tactic is to absolutely launch everything is quite appropriate. For most of the game the ref would allow four or five seconds of preparation for whatever crime against football the Machida player was readying themself for, then remember he was supposed to count. He’d count nice and slowly and on reaching the allowed time, give them a wave to get on with it. Only once did one of their interminable throw ins get  switched to us due to them taking too much time. Maybe. Or maybe he just overruled the original decision. And much like the way a goalie getting a yellow for time wasting basically means that they can then waste as much time as they want knowing that they are unlikely to get a second yellow for the same thing, the one throw in being switched to us basically seemed to be Machida briefly having to take their medicine, and then be able to go back to what they were doing previously. Aside from his inability to apply a law of the game which is targeted at one of the many ways Machida plays, dragging the game into the stone age, the ref didn’t do much else. Well part from letting Machida clog away like they always clog away. There was no VAR as far as I could see. But I wonder if the communication wasn’t that great, as the ref didn’t really seem to be able to get his point across to the players particularly well. He spent most of the match looking like he was trying to swat an imaginary fly that was bothering him, waving an arm or on occasion both arms all over the place, much to the bemusement of everyone there. So aside from all this there wasn’t a great deal for me to get irritated about. Well, up until very near the end when he missed an absolutely clear foul on Konno before giving Machida a free kick for something that might not have been a foul. Oh, and I think he left his cards at home in China. Shit ref. Influenced by the scumbag staff of the home team. So no different from the guys we get pretty much every week. Bravo referee!

Next up Shimizu at ‘home’ on Sunday at the National Stadium. Remember what happened last time we played there? We don’t seem to do particularly well in that stadium and that perfectly suits the match day experience which also isn’t very good. After that we have a free midweek before going to play Mito away in the stadium where they have just beaten Kashima 4-2. And then Kashima at home. Will we have more than six points after those next three games? I really hope so, but can definitely see a scenario where we don’t. It’s all a bit grim isn’t it? But at least I’ve finished writing this blog post so can forget about football till Sunday. Glory! Pizza N. signing out.

 

Man of the match

Back to no again on this.

Goals

WAKZIAKA (Frontale) 59' 0-1
OGAWA (Machida) 75' 1-1
OGAWA (Machida) 81' 2-1

 

Highlights

 

Quiz answers

 

1. Kuroda 2. Soma 3. Yenge 4. Nishimura 5. Tani 6. Kuroda again because he’s an absolute bastard.  

 

Vs JEF United (home) 29/8/26 J League match 4

 

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 2 JEF United

Still undefeated! And by god we’ve only gone and won a match! This was a fun game to watch. Well the first half was anyway. The second was a bit of a snooze fest. It’s great to finally get a win and hopefully this will give everyone a bit more confidence. We’ve got another game fast approaching so I’ll keep this relatively brief.

It’s interesting to see that once again we have Yahiro Hasebe in charge of the team. Much like when Hasebe joined, in this match we seemed to be playing with the goal of scoring as many as possible and not worrying too much about conceding as long as we kept scoring. Of course this all changed in the second half but I guess that was to be expected. The early injury to Romanic was a bit of a weird one. I didn’t know what had happened at the time and checking the coverage hasn’t helped me get any closer to knowing. Also there doesn’t seem to have been anything mentioned in any post match comments. But then again, I haven’t read everything. So on came Derik. I wondered if I had ruined his Frontale career before it had started by buying his towel on Wednesday. I can’t really explain why I chose him, I do these kind of things on vibes mainly. On Wednesday he assisted, (admittedly after missing a sitter), and when he was called on unexpectedly early, I wondered if he’d be able to do the business again, this time in a league game. One goal and two assists suggests that he can. He did have to be subbed later on which suggests that maybe he’s not completely up to speed yet. But he did a good job so well done to him. Sasaki had a bit of a mare, particularly with their first goal. He’s maybe not totally fit either but you can’t really use that to explain the first goal which was just totally unbelievable for such a usually reliable player. It was interesting to see Hasebe switch Yamahara and Sasaki around after their second goal. I thought it worked pretty well. After the switch Yamahara looked like he’d just removed a pair of really tight shoes that he’d been wearing since his transfer. Absolute relief and a new found freedom! Hasebe said that both of them can play on either side, but I wonder if we might see Yamahara spending more time on the left in the future. After all, that is where he’s played for most of his career. That does cause a problem as we have Miura in that spot. But then again when Miura came on in this game he was played on the left wing, which might work I guess, particularly as Miyagi is injured for six months (I think it was six months…). Some things for Hasebe to think about, I guess.

I don’t have much to say about JEF. They brought lots of fans so credit to them for that. Erison was back at Todoroki and surprisingly didn’t score. Normally ex-players always seem to do that. (Issaka Zain last time, I think. He wasn’t in the matchday squad this time round). I hope they can sort themselves out a bit as I’d like to see them survive. The fact that we scored four times against them suggests that they have quite a bit to fix at the moment. The ref was from Germany and I don’t have much to say about him either. I was pleased he dished out a yellow card for a dive though. Definitely would like to see more J League refs do that. Maybe they aren’t aware of the law. So this seems to be a blog post very low on whinges. Which really makes a change.

So we won! But let’s not get carried away. Three of our four games have been against teams who have looked like they might be relegation contenders. And we’ve only managed to beat one of them. I wonder if the reason we’ve drawn so many games is because we were denied the… thrill… of draws in the half season so wanted to get that feeling back again. I definitely prefer winning though. Whether that will continue on Wednesday is another matter. I feel like we definitely owe Machida a beating. But to be honest this feeling is based mainly on the fact that I really don’t like them. It will be interesting to see if the Machida wannabe bad boy fans will be allowed to attend on a school night. Also I wonder if those shirtless medieval style centre circle flag wavers will be there. The whole Machida away experience has been quite weird in recent years. I suspect the crowd will be quite small which will be a very welcome thing as it might make the shuttle bus situation better. I don’t particularly want to be stuck up the mini mountain till midnight, waiting for all the people who’ve paid money to jump queue for the shuttle bus. Fingers crossed we’ll have something to enjoy and celebrate whilst we wait. 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 13') 
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for MARCINHO 57')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for ITO 59')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAHARA 83')
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for PEDRO ROMANO 83')
FW 36. HONMA Rin (Yellow card 87')  (on for DERIK LACERDA 57')
FW 97. DERIK LACERDA (on for ROMANIC 6')

Man of the match

I don’t particularly like to go with the same person as they do in the stadium but on this occasion I also think it has to go to…



DERIK LACERDA - One goal and two assists. Nothing else to say really.

Goals

DERIK LACERDA (Frontale) 10' 1-0
TANAKA (JEF) 26' 1-1
ITO (Frontale) 37' 2-1
TANAKA (JEF) 38' 2-2
MARCINHO (Frontale) 42' 3-2
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 45+3' 4-2

 

Highlights

 

Vs Tochigi SC (home) 26/8/26 Emperor's Cup second round

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 1 Tochigi SC

I always enjoy the Emperor’s Cup games. Well, maybe that’s not the case during or after some past games. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I always enjoy anticipating Emperor’s Cup games. There’s always a little bit of excitement about who will be in the team. It’s a chance to see some new faces. I say a chance because quite often we’ve gone with only a few changes and the whole process has been quite dull. I guess going into these games a manager has two choices. You can play the normal players and sometimes lose in humiliation, or rotate the line up and sometimes lose in slightly less humiliation. I’m glad on this occasion we went for the latter and even managed to avoid the losing part. Given that we’ve drawn every game in the league so far, there’s a definite feeling that we adjust to the level of whoever we’re playing. For a while it looked like that might happen again. Well maybe that was the optimistic way of looking at it when we went behind to a J3 team. To be honest though we dealt with this match fairly comfortably on the whole. But don’t forget, we usually win our first match against J3 or University team in this completion and then go out in the next round to a J2 team. This year we’ll be playing Tegevajaro Miyazaki in the third round. Apparently it’s away. I quite want o go, but recognise that this is a kind of stupid idea. We’ll see…

Fair play to Tochigi SC for bringing a decent amount of fans. Kyoto Sanga didn’t bring that many more. And good on them for taking the lead. You can probably guess who I’ll blame for the goal, but before it got to the stage where Yamaguchi started his dive after the ball had already entered the net, we had had a series or increasingly ridiculously unlucky ricochets as we struggled to clear the ball. It was a nice finish from Tochigi’s Otabor though, a player who I saw play for Grulla Morioka plenty of times. One other bit of Yamaguchi bashing I need to include was the absolutely insane time wasting he did when he dithered over a goal kick which got turned into a corner by the ref. It was clearly going to happen if he didn’t get a move on so quite why he decided to delay further even as the ref clearly counted and I shouted to him to hurry up, I don’t know. This cock up meant that Kan who was waiting to come on for his debut didn’t actually manage to touch the ball as the substitution was delayed as we had a corner to defend. 

Maruyama was back in the team but only lasted till half time. I don’t know if this was tactical or due to an injury. Uremovic started and grew into the game I thought. Maybe his Frontale future is looking a bit brighter. Yamaichi came on for his debut late in the game which was nice. He missed most of last season due to ‘illness’. Was never really sure what that was. Nagane played right back and looked pretty good as we might expect after his involvement last year. Mochiyama played the Wakizaka role and did a decent job. Would have liked him to play a bit further forward alongside Derik, who was another debutant, but we got some player rotation so we probably can’t moan about the completely unsurprising tactical inflexibility. Derik had a good game I thought. He likes to put himself about a bit. His first real involvement was a bit of a shocker of a miss, but he improved and assisted for one of the goals and was a general nuisance. It was nice to see Konno score as he’d had a bit of a quiet first half, the ball just never seeming to go anywhere near him for some reason. Ozeki got two goals which is great and did some good stuff, but also made a few cock ups, one of which lead to their goal, and seemed to want to over complicate things sometimes. Hopefully he’ll focus more on the good stuff he did and start making a real challenge for a starting spot. I realise I’ve mentioned a lot of players here but for the first time this year there was someone who actually deserved the man of the match award so check that out below. It might be surprising. 

What else is there to say? An unknown ref who didn’t seem to make any horrendous errors, but obviously booked the big Brazilian as always tends to happen. No VAR, an absolute delight! I suppose I need to mention the usual weird Emperor’s Cup pre-game music. I think this year they might have asked AI to make them some music with the prompt of there being lyrics about being ‘Ready!’ and telling us to ‘Go!’ They cycled through a few genres but the same limited lyrical theme kept coming up. Quite weird, quite amusing and definitely more interesting than the usual never ending funky rock loop they have gone for in the past. One final highlight, the local school brass band and cheer group at half time were great. As they were last time. I dunno why I like it so much but I think it’s always fun to see people dancing whilst playing brass and wind instruments. 

So, next up JEF at home on Saturday. Whether we can take anything from this match into that one, I don’t know. Whether anyone who came into the team for this game will feature in that one, I don’t know. I doubt it, but who knows? I’m pleased that Hasebe did the right thing as far as I’m concerned when it came to the players he picked for this match, so hopefully he’ll continue to do that going forward. We’ll see. After that, it’s a quick turn around before Machida away on Wednesday. I really hate Machida. Presumably they’ll beat us, but of course I hope they don’t. 

Team 

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 97. DERIK LACERDA (Yellow card 16')

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO (on for MARUYAMA 46')
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC (on for DERIK LACERDA 59')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 69')
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto (on for MOCHIYAMA 69')
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 31. KAN Noriharu (on for KONNO 90+3')



Man of the match

The first time this season I’ve felt even slightly inclined to give this and I never would have expected I’d be giving it to…

MARCINHO - recently has seemed to have increasingly less ‘final product’ but in this match he did the usual running fast thing but actually managed some decent passes on top of it. Hopefully this is him getting back into his best form!

 

Goals

OTABOR (Tochigi) 29' 0-1
OZEKI (Frontale) 45' 1-1
KONNO (Frontale) 50' 2-1
OZEKI (Frontale) 56' 3-1

Highlights

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 22/8/26 J League match 3

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Our 33.3% record is still intact! Sure, when it comes to consistency, you might be also be able to point at Machida, Kashiwa and  Kashima, (played three won three), but when we come to play them, you’ve got to be confident that we’ll bend things our way and keep our perfect drawing record going. At the same time, you could point to the perfect records of Urawa and JEF, (played three lost three). The weird thing is that our next league game is against JEF and I just imagine that our perfect draw record will more likely be smashed by a defeat to them, than by a defeat to Machida in the following game. We’re so weird this year. I can’t work out if we’re alright or terrible. I think a bit of both to be honest. Certainly our shooting remains awful. It was quite fun to come back from a goal down against Sanfrecce who previous to this match had been scoring for fun, and ruin the day of the majority of fans inside the Piss Swing stadium. With another game coming up soon, (Emperor’s Cup at home on Wednesday), let’s get this post done as quickly as possible.

Pretty much the same players again, pretty much the same approach again, pretty much the same outcome again. We’ve certainly play kind of well in periods of matches, but our inability to take the relatively rare good chances that we make is a real problem. When Marcinho was through on goal there was an inevitability that he was going to blast the ball over the bar and that’s exactly what he did. Ito too. As has been the case for the last few years, for some reason the actual shooting chances we make rarely fall to the guy who’s on the pitch whose main job it is to score. I can’t explain tactically why this happens and I really can’t understand why successive managers over successive seasons have either not noticed it or have been unable to do anything about it. I still stand by what I said about the apparently unnegotiable presence of Wakizaka on the pitch for every single minute of every game not helping us when it comes to tactual flexibility. In this match it was even more stupid than it has been in previous games. It seems inevitable that after a period where we can’t get much going, Hasebe will do his semi regular recent change of bringing in Ozeki and moving Wakizaka to the right. He can’t really play there, (I reckon even the Wakizaka lovers would agree with this), but he is just seems to be eternally unsubbable. Even in this match where he could barely walk towards the end of the game. Maybe Hasebe makes a plan and nothing will allow him to deviate from it. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for why an obviously injured and knackered Wakizaka, playing out of position to the extent of being more of a hinderance than a help, was overlooked and Tachibanada was taken off as our last change. Wakizaka was even on the side of the pitch where Hasebe was sitting so presumably it’s not a problem with his eyesight. He didn’t have a particularly good game, (again), but I can’t imagine he’ll ever get dropped. Unlike Miura who was on the bench for this match. It was definitely a good idea as much like in the half season, Miura hasn’t started at all well this year and last year it took him being benched to get him back to his normal ways. When he came on in the second half he started pretty brightly and I was delighted. But there was one horribly vivid memory I have of him strolling back after an attack which resulted in nothing, and as Sanfrecce attached, it was left to Osa and a midfielder to do their best to cover for Miura. So maybe he needs a little bit longer on the bench, eh? But anyway, as I said, I can’t really explain what’s going on. Apart from the obvious bit where if you can’t shoot for shit, you’re unlikely to be able to score. I felt like we were the team more likely to win it towards the end, even if we did have one injured player on the pitch. This match saw the debut from the bench of Rin Honma, a player who’s still at university but is with us on one of these special contracts. I’m a bit confused why Hasebe, after choosing Mochiyama for the first game of the season, now seems determined to not play him even from the bench. But in any case, Honma did look quite lively. Once again, it’s just a shame that all of these players, (plus plenty of others too), are all competing for the one striker spot. Us playing with one striker also seems to be something that’s unnegotiable.

A few words about Sanfrecce and the ref. Once again, when we play them in this stadium they came as a package. I don’t know why the J League persists in getting a local lad in for every game we play in this stadium and I also don’t know, (but I can guess), why the local ref seems to always bottle it when it comes to giving a red card to a Sanfrecce player. Local lad Takasaki completely ignored the high shin-level raised boot tackle on Ito in the play off game, not even giving a free kick as far as I remember, and in this game we had Sutani, not actually from Hiroshima this time, but from neighbouring Shimane prefecture instead, who didn’t spot a foul on Marcinho and gave a throw in instead. Then we had the joy of an over five minute VAR delay. Of course he finally came to the conclusion that he’d accidentally missed the foul but decided that in spite of Marcinho being about to shoot as he entered the box and with the covering defender having no chance of getting there on time, it wasn’t a DOGSO. Probably this was because it was early in the game, was one of Sanfrecce’s legendary grandad trio of centre backs and, because J League refs are FUCKING USELESS! I can’t understand how it could be a yellow card and a free kick. Surely if there was contact and it was a foul it should have been a red. But I guess Sutani didn’t want to upset his neighbours. And I suppose you could say that Marcinho being though on goal doesn’t actually really count as a goal scoring opportunity… By the way, is it just me or does Shiotani look a bit like a baby who’s been left alone with the felt tips and has drawn on a moustache and beard to his own face? Maybe that influenced the ref too. The look on Shiotani’s face after he got the yellow suggests that he knew he’d got away with one, I think. I thought the ref was horrendous, but expected nothing else. so it didn’t come as a great surprise. What did come as a great surprise was the fact that the Sanfrecce fans also thought he was terrible. I’d never realised they were the kind of fans who just want to see correct decisions being given, even if they go against their own team. It was very honorable of them to boo the ref for consistently ruling in their favour. Bravo Sanfrecce fans! That is what they were moaning about, right? The Sanfrecce keeper whose name I insist on mispronouncing as OUCH!-i seemed pretty angry too. After we scored he spent the rest of the match moaning to the ref apparently claiming that there was a handball for our goal. A quick look at the replay for that shows quite how baffling this opinion is. Even after the final whistle he was still going at it. Presumably he was hoping that the ref would take another look at the goal and replay the final 35 minutes of the match. Oh, and Romanic’s yellow card was a joke. As you’d expect from a local ref trying to help out his mates. (I’m constantly told that of course the refs aren’t corrupt, and I’m not saying they are. But they definitely aren’t accurate as far as I’m concerned. And when you give local refs games in their local stadium with presumably their local team, I think you’re not making it any easier for them as when they are utterly useless, (as Sutani is in every match to be fair), it’s way too easy for idiots on the internet (Hello! That’s me!) to moan that they local guy is doing local things).

Yeah, well, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on with us. As I’ve long been saying, at least we can enjoy these baffling performances with horrible shooting in some different cities this time round. Who knows, maybe we’ll win a game soon? I suspect we will probably lose before we win though. We can say that we’re still unbeaten but this result saw us drop down the table one spot. Three points from three games isn’t great and whilst even if we draw every match, we’ll probably get a lower mid-table finish and should probably see us safe, it would be an extremely irritating season if we failed to win even a single game. A winless JEF at home in the league next weekend would seem like the perfect opportunity to pick up our first three point haul, but as they’re in terrible form and the game will see Erison back at Todoroki, clearly they are going to beat us and he’s going to score. Before then, we have Tochigi SC at home in the Emperor’s Cup on Wednesday. I’m not sure what kind of team will play this game. Given that the U21 league has now started, (I watched it on a tiny screen whilst in the pub so am not going to make any comments on it), maybe some of the players we might in our wildest drams have expected to take part might be rested for the next U21 game instead. But I do like these kind of games, so am looking forward to it. Hopefully it won’t be a draw…

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC (Yellow card 72') 

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for SASAKI 59')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for ITO 59')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 81')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 34. OSA Ryuki (on for MARCINHO 59')
FW 36. HONMA Rin (on for ROMANIC 73')

Man of the match

No, I’m still not going to give this. 

Goals

KATO (Sanfrecce) 29' 1-0
YAMAMOTO (Frontale) 58' 1-1
 

Vs Kyoto Sanga (home) 15/8/26 J League match 2

 

Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 2 Kyoto Sanga

I’m delighted to be able to say that we are STILL UNBEATEN! There you go! However, that might be all the positivity over and done with. Looking from the other direction you could also say that we’re still winless. It is absolutely astonishing that we are in 13th and no lower after the start to the season we’ve made. Of course we’ve only played two games. And I suspect that these two games were against teams that most people would expect to pick up points against this year. And who do we have coming up next? Just a team that are second in the league at the moment with a 100% record, an average goals scored per game of 4.5, and with only one goal conceded so far. We conceded more goals in four minutes of the second half against Kyoto. But with Sanfrecce’s 100% record and our, ahem, 33.3% record at stake, something’s got to give. Will we be able to drag them down to our tedious level? Actually, that would be quite funny. But quite unlikely, I think. Maybe we’ll suddenly get a bit better at taking chances. Whatever happens, at least we’ll have a nice city to go out in after what will presumably be a return to getting humiliatingly defeated.

This game felt a little better than last week. Certainly the first half was pretty positive. There were definitely echoes of the Verdy game though with us possessing and attacking but not really threatening that much. Ito was back on the right and looked somewhat back to his great early Frontale form. I know in the past he’s said that he’d prefer to play on the left but maybe when he thinks about it, it might be a lot better for his morale and his career if he stuck to the right. We even scored in the first half! Looking back it does appear that Miura was shooting and not crossing though. But if part of him once again having a terrible start to a season is that his shots are so off target that they end up being extremely hard hit and unintentionally pin point crosses, maybe that’s one positive thing we can say about his poor form. What on earth does he do in the break between seasons? There was definitely a feeling that if we didn’t take our chances whilst we had the upper hand we would probably get the usual consequences. But for once we scored! Obviously things weren’t positive enough for us to actually get more than one goal though. Luck didn’t seem to be on our side with us hitting the post and bar and shooting narrowly wide. But a lead was a very welcome thing, even if it just suggested that we’d be spending the rest of the game grimly trying to hang on to that slender advantage.

If only! Hasebe weaved his half time magic and by the 58th minute we’d conceded twice and were behind. To be honest though, I’m being a bit harsh. Their first goal was a pretty good one. Apparently we were starting to prepare Sasaki to come on for Miura and didn’t manage to complete the sub till we’d conceded two and were behind, which just seems to be say so much about us right now. If Hasebe had singled that area out as a problem, as presumably anyone who’d noticed Miura in the first half had, not sure why he decided to wait till the 59th minute to make the change instead of doing it at half time. Once again, up against it whilst paying a team that will probably not do much to threaten most opposition teams this year. We were back level not long after the sub, from what initially looked like an amazing header from Marcinho but on watching the replay it became clear that it was either a massive deflection or 100% an own goal. I suspect from Marcinho’s slightly confused lack of celebration he might not have touched the ball at all. At this stage it seemed clear what was gong to happen. Like-for-like subs right up until the 85th minute when Hasebe decides to cut loose and go fully crazy by playing more than one player up front. But astonishingly that’s really not what happened… 

 

I guess I have to apologise to Hasebe from presuming he’d follow his usual pattern. Instead he implemented some tactics that he must have been working on at the training ground. Oh, sorry, typing error there. That should have said some tactics he’d been working on in a cheese dream. Uremovic came on and… played at right back. He seemed as surprised as the rest of us. Taking off Ito meant that Wakizaka was moved out to the right, the position where he’s even more ineffective than he has been in the middle so far this year. (Hasebe, you do know that he doesn’t have to play every minute, right?) So our right side was Wakizaka in front of Uremovic. If Kyoto knew what they were doing, they really should have immediately shifted all of their focus to attacking the part of the pitch where no-one really knew what they were doing. Thankfully they didn’t seem to want to do that. The Uremovic experiment didn’t last long, but was entertainingly amusing whilst it did. Realising that it had perhaps been a bit of an ask to use someone who hadn’t played a minute of football for ages and get them to bomb up and down the wing playing in a position where they had no experience, Hasebe decided to switch Uremovic and Romano and ask Romano to do that instead. This was also wonderfully entertaining and seemed quite a bit more effective than anyone might have thought. The highlight of the game for me was Romano’s first throw in. His throw in style really looked like he was about to one-hand-overarm-fling the ball forward. It was a true laugh out loud moment and was amazing. We didn’t go on to get a winner. We had plenty of good chances. Maybe we’re unlucky. Maybe we’re not good enough. Probably both. I don’t know which of the players who aren’t making the match day squad are injured. I can’t really explain why Hasebe would go with the same group two games in a row and pretty much the same starting line ups. Who knows what he’ll do for the next game? There definitely seems to be plenty of players who don’t really seem to be justifying their place in the starting line up. At the same time there is a still lingering feeling that it doesn’t really matter who you pick with these turgid tactics as most of the time we’re terrible and only occasionally, with absolutely no apparent reason, we play a bit better. I guess I should mention that Miyagi now seems to be seriously injured after stretching for a ball late on. He looked in a lot of pain, so I can only imagine it’s a serious one. Also Hasebe said that the reason Yamahara came off was because maybe something wasn’t quite right. There was some optimism that a new fitness coach might help us avoid getting quite so many injuries so it would be disappointing if we ended up with two in the second game. Guess it’s preferable to players getting injured in training which seemed to happen endlessly last year.

A few words about the opposition and the ref. Firstly on this occasion with the announcement about thanking the opposition fans, they could easily have mentioned them all by name. Their support was tiny. Maybe they’re all saving themselves for the ACL or something. If you watched online you probably know better than me, but I’ve heard that on DAZN there was a Kyoto fan who was shown picking her nose and eating it. I have no idea how old they were, but it would certainly be amusing if the answer was that she was in her early twenties. There was something kind of impressive in the action that Kyoto’s Alex Souza managed to cram in to the short time that he was on the pitch. He got injured in an attack, left the field for treatment looking like his game was up. Managed to make it back on to the pitch and immediately committed a foul, got a yellow and injured himself again. An impressively intensive contribution! Popovic is kind of annoying, but there’s no point getting annoyed by him as he’ll presumably have left in a few months as normally he just joins a club, stays for a little while and then pees off. The ref was Nakamura, who’s been on a rollercoaster as far as I’m concerned in recent years. I don’t have too much to complain about on this occasion, although I did make a note to check something around 42 minutes and it did seem like he made a bit of a stupid decision against us. But hell, we’ve all made some stupid decisions relating to Frontale recently right? I went to both of our opening matches. An absurd amount of people seem to have bought Wakizaka shirts. Hasebe, well he’s made plenty too! So yeah, guess I can’t moan too much about the ref. And I even have some sympathy for them now. The absurd amount of things that they are supposed to be counting seconds for now is very confusing. And I think it’s different lengths of time for different things too. I will say though that different refs have considerably variable interpretations of how long a second lasts. Nakamura’s ‘second’ must have been somewhere between 1.5 and 2 seconds I think. Maybe he uses the ‘one Mississippi, two Mississippi method but struggles with the pronunciation a little. I suppose if you count the seconds more slowly it means there’s less chance of you actually having to take some kind of action when too much time is taken, so that might be the thinking behind doing it. 



Ugh… Hopefully recalling this game to write this post won’t send me to my sick bed for four days like it did when I wrote the last blog post. Considering I have been sick for the majority of the week, you might expect that the game, even though it was a draw, would be the best thing that happened this week. I’m not sure I can go that far as even thought it was fairly entertaining, the absolute squandering of the talents we have available undercuts any kind of good feelings. Perhaps the new player announcement videos were the highlight. There’s a very good bit where they show the number first, then flash up a few pictures of past players who’ve worn that number before showing the player who’s now wearing it. Aside from Romano’s throw in, this video was definitely the best part of the week and luckily we’ll get to see that at every home game! What a surprise, nostalgic old git likes nostalgia. I guess we should all appreciate nostalgia considering we don’t have much to get excited about at the moment. Next up Sanfrecce Hiroshima away on Saturday. Of course the game itself will be awful. so I’m looking forward to having a nice trip and not worrying about football. Wonderful! Then the following Wednesday, a home Emperor’s Cup game! That should actually be fun! Well, not judging by past experience I guess, but I’m trying my best to be hopeful. 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for MIURA 59')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto  (Yellow card 80') (on for ITO 76')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 76')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC (on for YAMAHARA 80')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 80')
FW 34. OSA Ryuki


Man of the match

No one no one no one no one no one not one single one.

 

Goals

ROMANIC (Frontale) 43' 1-0
FUKUDA (Kyoto) 54' 1-1
RAFAEL ELIAS (Kyoto) 58' 1-2
MARCINHO (Frontale) 64' 2-2

Highlights