Vs Kashima Antlers (home) 12/4/26 J League East match 10

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 2 Kashima Antlers 

Of course, as was always destined to happen in this rotten 2026 half season, we followed up a morale boosting win with a defeat. The only consistent thing about us in 2026 is that we are consistently inconsistent. We haven’t strung together two of the same results in the first ten games of the year. The closest we’ve come is a win and then a win on penalties at the start of the season and one occasion where we followed up a completely humiliating defeat with a defeat on penalties. In those ten games we’ve only won properly three times and there was an element of luck to at least two of them. Sure we’ve been wracked by injuries, again. Which to be honest shouldn’t be a surprise as it always seems to be the case. People are now talking about the Asao training ground being the cause of some of these injuries but to be honest, I think they’re just clutching at straws. Certainly I think we’d be doing a bit better if we had some of the injured players available. But it’s definitely not our biggest issue. I’d also like to blame the consistently awful refereeing of our games, but even I’m not enough of a tinfoil-hatted loony to say that we’re being unusually affected by that. It is annoying though. So where does that leave us? Somewhat worryingly, I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult not to blame Hasebe. But I’ll go into that more later. It’s just a very irritating time to be a Frontale fan. Kashima are at the top of the table but have looked shit both times we’ve played them. Significantly though, we lost both games and failed to score in either game. I’m sure in the next few weeks we’ll be doing the (lose twice) double against some other teams too. YFM who we play next are having another awful season. And they beat us 5-0. So our next match is very important. Not for anything related to league position, but more to stop me completely losing my marbles. Hasebe really has to pull his finger out if he wants to secure our usual recent overall eighth place finish. Right now it looks more likely that we’ll finish up eighth in the East section. 


Few bits about the match but more about two individuals -

Actually, on leaving the stadium, whilst disappointed, I wasn’t particularly upset as I felt we had lost slightly unluckily to the team at the top of the league. Sadly the slightest bit of reflection made it clear to me that this was actually another step closer to us being absolutely shite instead of merely moderately shite. Reading Hasebe’s post match comments made me a bit irritated. He really does seem to think that our failures aren’t anything much to do with him. Whilst it’s true that it’s not him personally failing to hit the target more than twice in a match, throwing the players under the bus whilst studiously ignoring the absolute dog shit tactics that he seems stuck to is a bit annoying. He also said we couldn’t win because the Kashima players are better than our players. This doesn’t seem like the kind of stirring motivational stuff I’d like to hear if I were one of them. More like just another way to pass the blame and wash his hands of any kind of responsibility. The only time things have gone well for us is when Hasebe throws out the game plan in frustration and it all becomes a bit of a free for all. We finished the game against Urawa pretty well. And Hasebe took that as a sign that he should start this game with the same players who’d started against Urawa and been not very good. And still we have this godforsaken formation and godforsaken tactics that he insists on starting every match with. I don’t know if there is any kind of pressure from above on Hasebe to play a certain kind of way. If there is, I don’t understand why we hired him for this job and why he accepted the job. When he joined the rumbles of doubt about us suddenly becoming ultra defensive were quashed by numerous people at the club saying we would still be playing football the Frontale way. Right now, I don’t really know what that means. My only guess is the Frontale way means 'in a way that is intensely irritating and completely ineffective’. Even during the worst times of Oniki’s tenure we at least could hang on to us having lots of possession, any doubts about us never making any chances apparently made up for by the beautiful passing. Now we usually don’t even have possession and some players don’t seem to be able to pass at all. Hasebe’s one attempt at shaking things up, away at Machida when he started with a 4-4-2, showed some promise but was immediately abandoned for the next match and now only gets rolled out when we’re chasing the game after our usual shitty formation has caused us to go behind. I think the reason Hasebe is reluctant to try it more is because it doesn’t suit Wakizaka and it seems that he can’t be dropped. Even in this match when we went 4-4-2 late on, Wakizaka, in spite of him having had another awful game, was kept on the pitch and played on the wing. Are we really that short of players that he was the best option there? Maybe in Hasebe’s eyes. After all, he didn’t even use all of the available subs. When Miura was dropped, (a long overdue benching), he came back with what seemed like a massively changed attitude and has been playing well since then. By contrast when Wakizaka was dropped, (maybe dropped, more likely was slightly injured as he wasn’t on the bench), he came out with some comments saying that the reason we’d lost was because he hadn’t been playing. Totally delusional! I keep giving Hasebe one more chance as we occasionally sneak a win from somewhere, but he’s really got to do something for the next match. Drop Wakizaka and see if that gives him a kick up the backside. Leave him on the bench as an unused sub. Or maybe take him along to the stadium as the reserve player who’ll step in on the bench if there’s an injury in the warm up. On recent evidence, Hasebe seems pretty shit at his job. And exactly the same can be said about Wakizaka. 

Ashima Kantlers - 

Of course they are scum. Of course they cheat. Of course they surround the ref. Of course they win. They are deifinitely one of the most hateable teams in the league. Their disgustingness had for about a decade been slightly tempered by the fact that they kept messing things up. That era was delightful. Sadly now even when they are shit, they more often than not win. Which makes them even more hateable. There’s not much point writing these things though as they are all common knowledge. It’s absolutely rotten that hardly anyone can stand up to them this year. They’re really not that good. So because their rottenness is so evident, let’s instead focus on their stupidity. I always enjoy their ‘Spirit of Zico’ flag. I probably don’t need to explain why it is ridiculous. But on this occasion I saw two variations. For one they’d decided that the ‘of’ was superfluous and that made it look even more like they thought he had died and were celebrating his ghostly form. The more amusing one was the massive flag with a very different message that they unfurled before the game. ‘Zico spirits is not dead’. I guess we always knew that his involvement at Kashima probably didn’t take up that much of his time, but it came as a surprise to find out that he’d branched out into making his own brand vodka, gin and rum, each bottle presumably with some of his own phlegm that he gobbed up onto the ball as the opposition were about to take a penalty, and with hints of sour grapes, vinegar and all round tartness. Not only was the existence of his booze company a shock, it was also a surprise to discover that there apparently had been talk of the company ceasing trading, but that was now being refuted by their big new flag. I think thats the only interpretation that makes sense when you consider the wording on the flag so it must be true. Well that or maybe their fans are just fucking ignorant shitheads. Hmmm, maybe there’s actually a decent amount of evidence for that latter supposition.


Ref -

Sutani was a new name for me. He’s not particularly young and apparently not a new ref. I thought he was shit, but of course I’d say that. Definitely a ref from the ‘let the game flow/let everything go’ school which I believe definitely favoured Kashima. But it wasn’t his fault that we lost. The yellow card that Miura got was ridiculous. He didn’t seem particularly interested in trying to stop Kashima attempting to cripple some more of our players like they did to Ozeki in the away fixture. The tackle in this game on Miyagi wasn’t as bad as the one on Ozeki in the previous match, and given that the useless officials in that game thought that was only a yellow I guess there was no way they were going to get particularly punished for anything in this match. I guess I can at least be grateful that on this occasion we didn’t get any thrilling over five minute VAR breaks. 


So, a game where we weren’t particularly worse than the opposition but one in which we didn’t really deserve anything. There were some shocking misses, as you’d expect. Confidence must be sinking again. If only there was someone whose job it was to motivate the players with enthusiasm and fresh ideas. I think most people expect Hasebe’s days to be slightly numbered, but with the clown chairman we have in charge, I don’t expect this to happen mid season. And presumably he’ll get another win sooner or later to stop the run of awful results and give him a bit of breathing room. I don’t know how dictated it was by injuries, but maybe the one positive from Hasebe in this match was his inclusion of Osa and the fact that he gave him a chance from the bench. I thought he looked quite bright, but probably could have done with some time on the pitch when we weren’t desperately chasing the game. Everybody knows this season is over for us, so why not really shake things up in the next match by getting some more youngsters involved. I fear that much like when Oniki was with us and we were playing out dead rubbers at the end of a disappointing season, Hasebe might be too worried about his stats and the end of season points total to actually take too many risks. I don’t know about other fans, but I’d be much happier to see something different, whether it’s different players or a different formation. Anything is, if not better, at least more interesting than the same old shit with the same old outcomes. And who knows, maybe if you don’t use the same players who aren’t playing well, we might even end up scoring a goal!

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota (Yellow card 63')
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON 

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
MF 15. MYOGAN Toya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 82')
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for ITO 65')

DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke

MF 34. OSA Ryuki (on for MARCINHO 65')

FW 38. KANDA Soma
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 72')

Man of the match

Nope. And I don’t mean the new extremely hyped soft drink. (I had it, it was ok). Actually maybe I do mean the soft drink. Let’s give it to…

NOPE - a new soft drink that is alright and had nothing to do with this match. It being ‘alright’ makes it a lot better than most of our players were in this match. 

 

Goals

SUZUKI (Kashima) 53' PEN 0-1
LEO CEARA (Kashima) 64' 0-2

Highlights

Vs Urawa Reds (home) 5/4/26 J League East match 9

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 2 Urawa Reds 

Wonderful, wonderful! Football is great! I’ve been saying that all season, right? I know it’s slightly unorthodox of Hasebe to try to lower our expectations as much as possible in order to make the joy of this last minute victory over a despicable rival all the sweeter, but damn it has made me feel very good after what was basically going to be an extremely insignificant match in an extremely insignificant, (as we’re so far off the pace), half season. This match was the second of a run of game against the teams that I consider to make up the most scummy of tiers of J League clubs (in my opinion, naturally). The first against Machida didn’t exactly go as we might have hoped but at the same time didn’t go as badly as we might have expected. This game wasn’t great, but the outcome definitely was, and the manner in which we got to that outcome was quite lovely. Would be fantastic if we could continue with the wins as we go on to face Kashima and YFM. I don’t have a massive amount of confidence that we will, but hopefully this win will have given the squad a bit of a boost. Don’t for a moment imagine that it being a 3-2 win meant that it was a quality game between two good teams. Certainly we were quite evenly matched, but that was because both teams seemed intent on trying to play football at a skill level that was absolutely above their abilities. It was a bit like two pub teams who, whilst getting smashed watched some top quality football on TV in the local on Saturday night and decided to have a go at recreating it hungover on Sunday morning. If someone asked me how we score goals or how we intend to try and score goals I would not be able to tell them because all we usually do is move the ball slowly and patiently up the field and then give it away before getting the chance to have a shot. By contrast, Urawa’s modus operandi seemed to be to grimly hang on in defence before launching the ball forward and sprinting after it. To their credit, this approach at least resulted in them having some chances. The only reason we were even at half time was due to a hilarious own goal that so embarrassed the scorer that he had to get injured and subbed in order to get out of sight and presumably have a little cry. Anyway, I’ve changed the usual headings a little this week for no particular reason. So here we go.

Good day / bad day -

- Good day for people who like seeing scummy sides defeated. Coming into the game both the teams were in a bit of a state. Delighted that Urawa are now in more of a state. There was maybe even a feeling that this match was something of a sack race, with the defeated team getting one step closer to a managerial change. Whether that will happen at Urawa, we’ll see. But it’s now four defeats in a row for them. So a good day for people who like seeing Urawa suffer, mainly due to problems they create for themselves.
 

- A good day for Romanic and Kawahara, who both scored. Hopefully that goal will set Romanic on a little scoring run as I felt he just needed his first goal to get going properly. And good to see Kawahara score as he could justifiably feel quite aggrieved for getting dropped after the Machida game I think. More about that in a minute. 

- Bad day for the club behind the scenes. As we’ve toiled a bit this year I’ve got increasingly onboard those who see our travails as having quite a lot to do with the top brass, (obviously as well as the players and manager who clearly also have some responsibility). If you compare the home and away games between us and Urawa it’s always evident that they give us a tiny away allocation and we are happy to give them as many tickets as they want. Of course the club wants to sell tickets to get money, but I think it’s probably more important to try to win games, and intentionally dulling our home advantage by inviting a massive away support is not going to be helpful in that respect. It’s true that the attendance would have been pretty bad with a smaller away allocation, (not Machida vs FC Tokyo bad obviously, but pretty bad), but the reason there were so many tickets available for resale is almost certainly to do with how awful our games have been this year. But maybe the top brass aren't able to make this connection. I will always go to the games, but at times this year the match has definitely been the thing I have to suffer through in order to enjoy the post game activities. I would be quite happy to see changes at the top. I think it’s unlikely, but if we had someone in charge who had any interest in or understanding of football, I think it would help.

- From a player point of view, it wasn’t a great day for Yamamoto and Wakizaka again. As I say every week. Yamamoto’s cross for the winner was great though. I can’t remember us scoring a goal like that for a very long time. So maybe there is a tactical reason why two of our best players aren't doing very well this year. Wakizaka is confusing me. The things he said after the massive defeat against YFM were great. The fact that he said we shouldn't over celebrate penalty wins was good too. But he did recently seem to suggest that the reason we hadn’t won against Machida was at least in part because he wasn’t playing. This seems quite delusional as he’s been playing in the rest of the games this year and the second half against Machida was better than a lot of our other matches. Of course the fact that he was back in the side and we won makes it look like I’m an idiot and he was right, and almost certainly the former is true. But he still isn’t playing very well, and it seems like he isn’t going to be dropped. If he’s playing we don’t seem to be able to break away from the rotten formation we are apparently tied to. Hopefully this win is a fresh start for us and we can forget about everything that's gone on so far this season.

- Hasebe… hmmmm. Good and bad day, I think. Good day for him personally in that he’s probably moved one step back from getting sacked. I don’t think it would have happened, but it definitely should have at least been being considered. Probably not such a good day when you consider that once again his starting line up and tactics proved utterly ineffective and once again it wasn’t until the plan was thrown out the window that we started making things happen. And for us to concede so early in both halves (thankfully the one in the second half was ruled out), doesn’t say a lot about the way he motivates the players at the start of the game and at half time. I was pleased when he changed the formation for the Machida game, but equally disappointed that in this game we went back to the same old thing. Perhaps it was enough for him to be seen to be doing something, and changing back to the same old stuff for the next game was fine. Miyagi, who had one of his best games for us can’t have been too happy to be dropped for the following match. I just wish Hasebe would do something a bit more often instead of just tweaking our old style which clearly doesn’t work any more. But anyway, let’s hope that this game can be a reset for everyone and we can get ourselves together for the rest of the half season.

- Oh, one more good thing, NO PENALTIES!

WOW! - 

I mean, the Urawa fans can always at least get a share of this. That could have been said for sure even before the match as it just seems to be inherent in their support. However, two guys wanted to make sure their names were up for this, so put in truly horrific WOW! performances. Or perhaps if they were aiming at taking this title, you might have to say that put in a great performance as without a doubt the ref and the VAR ref absolutely deserved this. First of all, on the pitch Fukushima was just shit. Maybe it’s because we merely whinge after the event rather than angrily getting up in the ref’s face, but it seems that more often than not, in our recent games the ref has been more than wiling to take advice and get guidance from the opposition players. I know I always think J League refs are awful, but when we got to the pub after the match, the first thing the normally rational regulars did was to comment on how bad the ref had been. For the most part the yellow cards went only one way.  Wakizaka's yellow was an absolutely clear cut one so he got that right, but similar actions from Urawa players in similar positions and constant hacks and kicks from them apparently weren’t worthy of punishment. Erison’s card was an absolute joke. But what do you expect from the reliably terrible J League ref community? I have long said that Araki hates us, so I was filled with some trepidation when I saw his name down for VAR. Maybe Araki not only hates us, but also hates football as he seemed to want to take every opportunity to slowly make his judgements, ensuring that any enjoyment the crowd might be getting from the game was slowly and relentlessly undermined. As it's something I always say and always seem to have the need to say, I’m going to separate this next bit so it’s easy for me to cut and paste in future blog posts

.

VAR is supposed to deal with clear and obvious mistakes, so it doesn’t make sense that it takes five minutes to judge whether a clear or obvious mistake has been made. 

VAR overturning the offside decision in the first half took so long that even though the game kicked off at 16:00, I started worrying that I wouldn’t make it in time for last orders. And looking at the replay on DAZN, even when the decision was made after endless procrastination, I  still don’t think they have enough evidence to overturn the original decision. VAR’s intervention helping to rule out the goal in the second half was equally ridiculous, but this time for the fact that it was so clear that the goal shouldn’t stand immediately, but still Araki and Fukushima decided they should drag it out so they could make themselves the centre of attention for even longer. Apparently they weren’t sure if a player lying on the floor and tripping over the goal keeper counts as interfering with play. As there is clearly no point me even bothering to write these things, I’ll just finish with a couple more statements for easy cutting and pasting in the future. 



Of course it’s a difficult job to be a referee, but it must take some real effort to be as clueless as the J League referees are.

In my opinion, VAR is a blight on football, but I’m sure not everyone agrees. What I would imagine everyone does agree with though is that it’s not good that J League VAR takes an interminably long time, and even after these massive disruptions, due to the apparent idiocy of the officials, you can’t even be sure that they will make the right decision. Even though whilst taking all that time to make the decision they probably would have enough time to read the whole fucking rule book cover to cover.

Aaaaahhhhhh. What a lovely finish to the game that was. And we have something nice to think about for a whole week. Schadenfreude is never particularly nice, but when you’re enjoying the misery of the Urawa Lads, Garçons, Boys, Striplings, Fledglings, Tots, Kiddies, Nippers, Chicos, Ragazzi, Rapazes, Chaps, Males and Tykes, (perhaps they haven’t used some of those for a flag or supporter group yet, but it’s surely only a matter of time), I think it is perfectly acceptable. So let's enjoy it, right up until next week when we come up against Kashima. I can’t remember what their fans call themselves but judging by a recent photo, I would say that ‘shirtless, slightly overweight, middle-aged, should-know-better knuckle-draggers’ might work. This is probably our last chance to do something which might have some effect on the outcome of the league, so hopefully we’ll be charged up to put a dent in someone else’s half season and make the East at least slightly more interesting. Clearly my mood might not be as buoyant next week, but until then, I’m going to enjoy this week to the max.  

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 43') 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 45+4')

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
MF 15. MYOGAN Toya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 89')
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 69')
MF 26. YUI Kota

DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke

FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for ITO 76')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 69')

Man of the match

Dunno really. No-one particularly stood out. But Miura did well again and as I’ve slagged him off quite a lot recently, I should at least mention him. But in the absence of an obvious stand out winner, let’s give it a miss this week.

 

Goals

NEMOTO (Urawa) 2' 0-1
OWN GOAL (Urawa) 9' 1-1
KANEKO (Urawa) 62' 1-2
ROMANIC (Frontale) 77' 2-2
KAWAHARA (Frontale) 90+4' 3-2

Highlights

 

Vs Machida Zelvia (away) 28/3/26 J League East match 5

 

Machida Zelvia 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

(Machida win 3 - 1 on penalties) 

With most of the league off on an international break, maybe all eyes were on this massive game being played in a stadium with a cauldron like atmosphere. Hmmmm. It’s impressive that we’ve arrived in a nothing to play for situation before we’ve even got half way through the league. Maybe this will give us an opportunity to try some new things. Well, we definitely will have the opportunity, but whether we will or not is another question. There was a certain amount of experimentation with this line up, but it’s difficult to say whether that was enforced or whether Hasebe was finally cutting loose. Probably the former, but to give the boss the benifit of the doubt, which seems to be something that not many are willing to do anymore, I think he at least tried something interesting in this match which kind of worked for a while. I’m slightly surprised by my fairly laid back feeling after this match. After all Machida are a truly scummy club and I would have loved to have beaten them. At the same time, results are pretty insignificant now, given that Kashima already have double the points we do after only 45% of the season being completed. So maybe you might be surprised to see me reasonably positive after this match. But don't forget, it was a draw. Don’t believe the people who tell you Machida won. 🙂

Good day -

Kind of good day for Hasebe as he got fully into the spirit of things and tried to fake out Machida with our team announcement. Miyagi was listed as a defender, presumably making everyone think that it was going be a 3-4-2-1 formation. Instead Miyagi played up front with Erison in a 4-4-2. (Although Flashscore disagrees with this and said it was a 3-4-2-1. As did DAZN). As far as I'm concerned though, Hasebe still seems to be terrified of playing a back three. This may be something to do with injuries though. Maybe. It’s feels weird to say Hasebe’s changes to the starting line up were good as the first half of this game, whilst feeling like an improvement on the debacle of the previous week, ended up with the same score and even less goal threat from us. The second half though was a different matter. We really had them rocking and could have, maybe should have won. Clearly we have good players, but the morale is really suffering at the moment, so hopefully the second half gave us a boost in that respect. It’s a bit of a shame that we had to have the penalties at the end though as that may have set things back again slightly. There were a few players who had a good game I thought, but I’ll save that for the man of the match section.

Bad day -

Kind of bad day for Hasebe. Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you? We still can’t win. The first half saw us have two shots, both off target and we could easily have been 2-0 down. I saw some criticism of his tactics when he replaced two reliable, (touch wood), penalty takers late on with some players who probably couldn’t be trusted so much, but I think I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that I was pleased that he made the changes as it meant we were really trying to win the game in the 90 minutes and could have done. Erison was looking knackered, I think I might have left Miyagi on though. The subs were a bit strange in this match as they followed the old Oniki pattern of moving someone all over the pitch in small stages. In this match it was Miyagi. And the first change seemed to mess up what had been a quite effective system. But what do I know? I always feel uncomfortable writing these kind of hamfisted attempts at some kind of analysis. So let’s double down and ask why it always seemed that when Machida were crossing, we always had either Tachibanada or Kawahara being the ones challenging for the headers. If Tachibanada had been just a little taller we might have won the match. But if he’d been a little taller, he presumably wouldn’t have fulfilled the criteria we look for when we’re signing players.

High point -

Definitely seeing Erik get sent off. Even when the ref is dodgy, you do sometimes get a moment of absolute justice. No surprise the ref missed it in the moment though.

Low point -

Their goal being scored through the axis or arseholery combination of Soma and Erik. I’ve really got to stop slagging players off before the game as it seems that every time I do it they then go on to score.

Any other business -

- Wonder what happened to Wakizaka? Not on the bench even. I don’t think he would really fit into this system, but you’ve got to think that Hasebe would still include him on the bench. Maybe he’s injured or maybe we could start a rumour about him and Hasebe having a falling out. (I don’t think this has happened, just for the record). I don’t think he’s had a particularly good season so far, so don’t mind him not playing. The bench looked quite light in midfield though, which makes me think it’s probably an injury. 
- I saw a Machida fan at the station wearing a shirt with the name Kuroda on the back and instead of a number, a big GO on it. What kind of person admires Kuroda? Very bizarre.
- They may have enough big bucks to buy or at least compete with Vissel Kobe for every ex J League star who's made a slightly disappointing move to Europe and is returning to Japan with their tail between their legs, but it’s clear that money can’t buy everything. One of the most amusing things, (in a laugh at them way, rather than with them), is the fact that the merch stall outside the stadium is referred to as a 'weapons and armor shop' and is decorated with those kind of images too. Guess they are trying to make a big thing out of the ‘Fortress Nozuta’ thing. Dunno if that really makes sense though as I don't think it’s somewhere that the opposition team doesn’t like to visit. Certainly there isn’t going to be anything resembling a fortress when it comes to the Machida fans who are pretty quiet and not exactly numerous. Maybe a lot of them were still trying to get to the stadium long after the game had been completed. I don’t think the numerous hooligan/right wing related flags are going to make them more feared either. Particularly not the one behind the goal that just said ‘The Blokes’. Think I might have written all of this last year maybe. So I guess it must all be because of those guys with the big flags wearing the medieval style bondage gear on the pitch before the match. Certainly had me shaking with fear. Well, right up until one of them slipped over mid-routine, presumably giving himself a medieval style leather wedgie. Fair play to him, he didn’t seem to let it interfere with his big flag waving afterwards, 

- The big talking point about Machida away is normally the access. To be honest though, getting there was a breeze this time. As my bus pulled away from the station around 13:00, the line of people waiting was quite short and there was another bendy bus waiting. So it looks like they’ve got that part sorted. Afterwards our plan was to walk the 5km back to Tsurukawa. If you’ve got to walk one way, it certainly makes sense to do it downhill. I’ve no idea how bad the buses were afterwards, but the queue did look impressively long. As this is all sounding a bit too positive, let’s undercut that. Apparently in response to the awful bus situation after games, they have now introduced a new system, whereby if you pay a premium fee you’ll be able to get on a bus before anyone who is paying the normal fee. A pretty despicable way to do things, I think. But in the light of their recent rise, it’s easy to say C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Machida).
- Fucking hell our penalties were bad. In a way I’m glad that three people missed as it doesn’t put the guilt on any one person. But when we saw Kobayashi stepping up for one, it was difficult not to remember the time when he was our regular penalty taker and the fact that it was definitely not a good idea to implement that policy. I suppose we can take some consolation in the fact that all three were saved rather than missed, can’t we? Hmmmm, actually maybe that’s not as positive as it might sound. Combine this with the fact that penalties definitely don’t seem to be Brodersen’s speciality, it’s a bit of a worry. But at the same time, this is only going to be an issue in this stupid half season as normally we won’t be having many penalty shoot outs. On the same topic, I wasn’t particularly enthused about this league’s format before the start of the season so was surprised when I heard some people saying that the penalties were a bit of fun. If those people still think this, I’d be surprised, as I find the shoot outs quite annoying already. Definitely boring. And they way the staff on the sidelines line up as if the shoot out is to decide the World Cup final is kind of irritating too. Oh well, at least we know we won’t have any more than 11 more penalty shoot outs this season. What a relief!

WOW! -

With no Shimoda in the match day squad for Machida this could easily just be a list of their players, their manager and the ref. But let’s get a little more specific. Of course Erik, Soma, Tani and Kuroda aromatically qualify for this category, even when we’re not playing Machida, so they definitely get it. The new Machida striker / beanpole Yengi was quite annoying, his main abilities seeming to be falling over and complaining to the ref. But once again it has to be the man in black who takes the cake. Ueda had definitely researched Machida before the match. He probably read the part about them being fierce and the ground being a fortress and was pleasantly surprised. But he clearly had also heard about power harassment and maybe either in an attempt to avoid being harassed himself, or in order to stop some backroom staff being singled out as ‘dissenters’ he decided to give everything their way. Even with the red card, he didn’t even see it as a yellow card offence till he was told to get a grip by VAR. There were multiple yellow cards that he wasn’t interested in, instead going for a policy of just let the Machida ‘blokes’ express themselves through a bit of elbowing, diving, pulling, hacking and of course whinging. There was one occasion where they tried to steal almost half a pitch length at a throw in. The ref told them to go back. They did it again. He told them to go back again. They did it a third time and the ref decided to just turn his back rather than have to do anything. I know refs are supposed to let things go a bit this year, but Ueda’s commitment to letting things flow clearly favoured Machida. I don’t think Erison got a single foul on him given. In the past Ueda has been pleasantly insignificant in the matches we’ve had with him. But he definitely was all in favour of being assisted in his decision making by the Machida players in this match and they were well up for telling him which way he should give everything.

Next up, Urawa at home next weekend. They are about as shit as we are this year, so everything points to it being a stinker of a match. We definitely owe them one for the pasting they gave us at the end of last season. But hang on, that was mainly Yamaguchi’s doing, so maybe we owe him instead. No midweek game means that maybe we can get some players back from injury. At the same time, we don’t really know who is injured and how seriously, so this is all merely guesswork. I will say though that we saw some players after the game (Sasaki and Ozeki) so maybe they are closer to coming back than some others (Taniguchi). After that match we’ll be halfway through the half season. Obviously it’s over already, so I guess the only fun we can really have now is messing up other people’s seasons and maybe seeing some new ideas. I am praying that we can see both of these things at some stage in the next 11 games.

 

Team

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 28. YAMAMURA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 33. LEE Keun-Hyeong
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for ITO 76')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for TACHIBANADA 86')
MF 15. MYOGAN Toya (on for MARCINHO 86')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 30. NODA Hiroto
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for MIYAGI 90+1')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 90+1')


Man of the match

There are a few players who deserve a mention here I think. I’d like to give it to Maruyama who was great after a very dodgy cameo against YFM. Similarly Matsunagane did petty well after a confidence mashing last match. Kawahara looked good in the middle I thought. And Miura played well again. Maybe he really needed that dropping against Verdy. But I think it has to go to someone who I probably never imagined would ever get this ever again…

MIYAGI Ten - has really flattered to deceive since he came back from his loans… whenever that happened. Seemed to vacillate between being utterly focused on scoring a goal by getting the ball and not giving it to anyone before shooting (and missing), and hanging around looking not very interested waiting for a penalty he could take (and score). But in this match, playing up front with Erison, I thought he had the best game he’s ever had for us. Clearly this is the position he should play in. Whether he’ll get more chances to do so in the future, I’m not sure, but this was a really refreshing and promising game from him.

Goals

ERIK (Machida) 41' 1-0
ERISON (Frontale) 59' 1-1

Highlights

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (home-ish) 22/3/26 J League East match 8

 

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 5 Yokohama F Marinos

 

Please excuse me for keeping this brief. I’m slightly surprised I’m even bothering writing anything when a couple of puking emojis would probably tell the story pretty clearly. So shit was this match, I have hardly any notes and I have no photos of the actual football. I also have no desire to write this, so I’m going to dispose of most of the usual subtitles.


1st half -

Pretty shit first half which started going wrong as soon as the VAR decision was being considered. Ref giving them absolutely everything. Marcinho must be the best dribbler in the league and maybe the worst passer. As usual, plenty of pointless possession and maybe zero good chances. Unbelievable amount of offsides. 


2nd half -

Fuck that.


Good day -

No, it wasn’t. 

Bad day -

Too many to mention really. And worryingly three players who’ve done pretty well so far this season totally fell to pieces in this match. Matsunagane was the senior centre back in the pairing, which is a bit of a crazy thing to say. He thought he’d scored, it was ruled out, and things went steadily downhill from there. Broderson flapped on quite a few occasions. I don’t know if this is because the defence let him down. From miles away in the stands it looked like he was more at fault though which is absolutely the opposite of every game so far this season. Equally though, he did prevent them from reaching double figures which at one stage looked like it could easily happen. Maruyama came on and was very quickly at fault for two goals. Not great for him and not great for the tactical genius who made that change. The weird thing is, aside from these three, no one else really stood out as being particularly bad. Well apart from the manager maybe as the main takeaway from our play was that it was an absolute waste of time and was absolutely pointless. We never looked like we’d score. Even when we had a decent chance we just rolled the ball to their keeper. Individual errors were the reason we conceded so many. The reason we created absolutely nothing and had no response to constantly conceding is something more like collective apathy and that has got to go down to Hasebe. I’ve tried to give him the benefit of the doubt but it’s difficult to come away from this game not thinking that he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. We’re unbelievably inconsistent when it comes to results, but perhaps quite consistent in that we’re always pretty dull, (but sometimes get lucky). I’m not sure ‘looking forward to’ is the right phrase, but I am certain interested to hear his post match comments. They’re not up on the website yet. In previous shitty performances I’ve been surprised how he’s apparently seen quite a lot of positives in our stodgy and ineffective play. I don’t think even he can say that after this match. (I’ve read them now, and astonishingly, he pretty much did). And although, once again, we’re stacking up the injuries, there surely was a safer option at centre back than giving someone his debut who joined from the youth team last year and partnering him with someone who hasn’t really played many more games for us than Hayashi has.  And playing that ‘senior’ player on the side of defence that means he is predominantly on his weaker foot. Add to this the fact that the attacking instructions seemed to be something along the lines of the best form of attack being to play the ball backwards towards our defence as often as possible. Hmmmm. Somewhat amusingly, at the end of the game I think the only centre back who wasn’t at fault for at least one goal was Hayashi. But presumably he’ll also be suffering the mental destruction that seems to be par for the course when we inexplicably play young centre backs in games we fuck up against YFM.

Any other business - 

- Miura did a bit better in this match which suggests that Hasebe did the right thing by finally dropping him for a game. Sadly that was about the only right thing he did. 

- Late on in the game there was the joyful announcement on the big screen of the 50000+ attendance being the biggest ever home attendance in the club’s history. At the same time it felt like we could also be heading for the worst result in our history too. It’s a bit of a shame because the club had put a lot of effort into making the day a success and now anyone is going to remember is that we got absolutely thumped and created nothing on our big day at the national stadium. Probably pIenty of trauma there for some players. I can’t imagine any neutrals would have got turned on to Frontale after attending this unless they were ultra masochistic. I suppose though that there weren’t the usual massive amount of free tickets given away so maybe there weren’t many neutrals attending anyway. 

- If you want to see the absolute encapsulation of our performance in this match, check Wakizaka’s corner at 68:38. Guess we’ll blame the pitch, right? Maybe we should blame the pitch for the tactics and substitutions too.

WOW! -

Sounds a lot like sour grapes but the ref Ikeuchi, who is resolutely one of the worst in the league was an absolute shithead in this match giving almost every decision in the first a half to them. Even with a decent ref Hasebe would probably have contrived to have got us walloped but at least it wouldn’t have been as irritating an experience as seeing Ikeuchi consistently cock everything up. He absolutely deserves this title. Although we were so bad in the second half, conceding from pretty much every attack, that even Ikeuchi’s uselessness doesn’t linger in the memory. 


Utterly humiliating. The one game many fans desperately wanted to win in this pointless mini season and instead we allowed our most hated rivals to score only two fewer goals than they had scored in the seven previous games they’d played this season. They were averaging a goal a game until they come up against us. Every time they play us they seem to raise their game, no matter how badly their season is going. Every time we play them we seem to not really care. Thankfully we don’t have a game midweek, which might give some people a chance to recover. Seems like Taniguchi is maybe seriously injured. Sasaki is injured. Uremovic hasn’t had a look in at all this year and given that he wasn’t even in the squad for this match it might mean that he’s got injured too. And don’t forget that Maruyama was apparently not 100% fit (perhaps explaining his errors). Even when we have loads of centre backs it seems that we can manufacture a central defensive injury crisis, doesn’t it? But obviously people make mistakes. It’s a shame so many people made so many in one game though. But at the same time even though we conceded five, I feel like the bigger worry is that we created fuck all again and never looked like scoring. Marcinho dribbling through numerous defenders across the YFM box and then passing gently to their keeper was about as dangerous as we got. I speculated that after the shitty Kashima game there might have been a clear the air bust up. God knows what needs to happen now. Maybe burn the entire club to the ground and start again in the local leagues. Fuck me this was awful. And the next ‘fun’ we have is Machida away. Fucking hell, things are grim. I have to work on the morning of that game, quite a long way from Machida, so maybe if I decide to walk to the stadium straight from work I might be able to arrive late enough to see only the teams lining up after the final whistle, thereby saving myself the stress and frustration of watching another utterly shit game like this. If Hasebe isn’t skating on thin ice after this, he really should be. His apparent lack of ideas and fear of taking any kind of action has irritated in previous fixtures but it really pushed me over the edge in this match. When the only positive things you can say about the match relate to the fun things that went on before kick off and at half time you know we’re in trouble. And the fact that there was a lot of booing at the end of the match, (any booing is an extremely rare thing at Frontale), shows that it’s not only pessimistic me who’s thinking that this all seems pretty gutless and utterly awful right now. 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 33. LEE Keun-Hyeong
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for TACHIBANADA 76')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 61')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 60')
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for HAYASHI 61')
DF 30. NODA Hiroto
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for KONNO 61')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 76')

Man of the match

...

 

Goals

TANIMURA (YFM) 30' 0-1
AMANO (YFM) 53' 0-2
AMANO (YFM) 62' 0-3
YURI ARAUJO (YFM) 72' 0-4
QUINONES (YFM) 78' 0-5

Highlights

 

 

Vs Tokyo Verdy (away) 18/3/26 J League East match 7

Tokyo Verdy 0 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale 

Well I never, this was a welcome result that gives us a bit of refreshment after some very dry weeks. I’ve long been saying that this ridiculous half season is a joke of a tournament and therefore it doesn’t matter when we lose. So logically, I shouldn’t get too excited about us winning either. But blimey, we needed something to get at least slightly happy about after some of our recent games. We never seem to play particularly well against Verdy. Some might point to our win there two years ago, but in that match, hiding not so subtly behind the five goals we scored were the four goals we conceded. And that match was very much an outlier. Games between the two teams usually tend to pretty dour and goal shy affairs. So in a way, it’s a bit of luck that we got a couple of early goals in this match. Particularly considering that getting shots on target has been a bit of a challenge for us recently. With three games in nine days, there was always going to be a bit of rotation. Well, I say that but I probably should have said ‘always should have been’ instead of ‘was always going to be’. But the rotation seemed to be effective and was pleasantly surprising. Anyway, with another game coming up soon, it is imperative that I get this out of the way quickly.

1st half -

Much better first half. Miura dropped so I feel like a genius at the moment after saying that should happen. We’ll see how long that lasts. But to be honest this is clearly a rotated side, which is exactly what we should be doing more. Team seem like they’re up for it. We’ve made chances. We’ve looked reasonably solid! Whats going on? Stats are surprisingly dull when it comes to us but don’t really reflect the way the game has gone. Wakizaka looking much better. Feel like there was maybe a bit of a clear the air bust up after the last game?

2nd half -

How nice it was to not concede! In my mind this was a fairly comfortable 90 minutes for us, but again the stats don’t seem to really back this up. Taniguchi might have a hamstring injury. The club and player are keeping shtum about this at the moment which isn’t normally a good sign. When he went off we almost saw a debut for Hayashi, but instead Miura came on and Nagane moved to centre back. Miura did a lot better than he has in any other game this season. Whether that was as a reaction to being dropped out of the starting line up or was just the fact that he normally does a bit better at the end of games, I’m not sure. Guess there are some decisions to be made for the next game now depending on the injury situation. Still no sign of Sasaki… The best thing about this game was that we didn’t constantly give the ball away. Hang on, actually the best thing was that we scored and won but not giving the ball away constantly definitely contributed to this. Yamamoto had a decent game too. Let’s not get carried away, but this was definitely a step in the right direction.


Good day -

Good day for Lee, who made it into a match day squad for the first time. Credit to Hasebe for rotating the sub goalkeeper as only in very rare situations will they actually be needed. Perhaps this was the thinking behind putting Hayashi in the squad too, but he came very close to having to come onto the pitch until Hasebe changed the plan and moved Nagane across. Was good to see Kobayashi back in the squad again. Wouldn’t mind seeing some more variation in the subs, but I understand that Hasebe probably wants to get us playing a bit better before doing those kind of things. Good day for Hasebe as he might have played a blinder by dropping Miura. Must be a good thing as we looked better without him and maybe it will also give him kick up the backside. We know he’s a good player, he just needs to get out of the funk that he’s currently in. Guess we’ll see what happens at the weekend, particularly given that the injuries are piling up again. But well done Hasebe, job done, not in a thrilling style, but job done all the same.

The ref was Nagamine and much like against JEF, he seemed to have brought his little linesman friend along with him. Do refs and linesman work in teams? It might make sense actually. I have no idea. Maybe I was just in a better mood in this match than on Saturday, (actually, that maybe is not only superfluous, it is perhaps even disgracefully misleading. I definitely was in a better mood), but I don’t recall shouting at the ref much at all. So I suppose that means he should be in the good day section.

Bad day -

Bad day for whoever has to deal with the massive amount of green light sticks that Verdy will have left over this morning. Apparently they were giving away 11000 of them and the stadium wasn’t exactly full. Check online auction or resale sites today if you’re interested in purchasing one, or perhaps even a few hundred. Not much else to snark about really. It’s quite a refreshing feeling.

Perhaps bad day for Taniguchi who on his return to his old team got booed, got injured and then got sad. Hopefully the injury isn’t serious as he seems to have settled in pretty well. 


Any other business -

I don’t think there is.


WOW! -



I also don’t think there is for this section either. 


So, a mercifully short blog post, perhaps due to the fact that I took almost zero notes and instead of getting furious by the constant cheating of the opposition club from top to bottom (Kashima) and the incompetence of the referee (Kamimura in the Kashima game), I just watched the match and had a little sing. Let’s not kid ourselves though, we still didn’t do that much in this match, but the consolation is that what we did was to a slightly higher standard than it has been recently. The big game comes next. When I say big game, I don’t mean important for the league or against tough opposition. It’s just that we’re playing YFM at ‘home’ on Sunday and perhaps many Frontale fans, certainly me anyway, will be very keen for us to win that match against our despicable and disgusting neighbours. Obviously, I think it is rotten that we’re playing a home game at the National Stadium and would normally rail against these kind of things and was set to do so. However, I heard that it was essential for us to bow to the pressure of the league and kiss the ring by having a game here in order to be able to potentially use the stadium when it comes to redeveloping Todoroki the season after next. Not sure this is 100% true and I’ve only heard a rumour, but it seems plausible. It will be interesting to see what line up Hasebe goes with. I hope on Sunday night I still have the same sense of calm that I do right now. 

 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto (Yellow card 64')
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 51')
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 33. LEE Keun-Hyeong
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for TANIGUCHI 60')
MF 15. MYOGAN Toya (on for WAKIZAKA 90+4')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for KONNO 60')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 60')
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for MARCINHO 88')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 79')

Man of the match

Weird that I gave this out against Kashima but don’t feel like doing so in this match. Nagane did well, as he has every time he’s been called on this year, which remains pleasantly surprising. Marcinho got two assists too. But I think we won because of a general raising of standards all round rather than anyone standing out. Does that mean I should give it everyone or no-one? So…

EVERYONE or NO-ONE - I explained this above. You choose which one, depending on your current mood.

 

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 9' 0-1
ERISON (Frontale) 23' 0-2

 

Highlights

 

Vs Kashima Antlers (away) 14/3/26 J League East match 6

 

Kashima Antlers 1 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

Ah, absolutely gutted. I guess I was expecting disappointment but I hadn’t banked on it coming in this way. I’m sure plenty of people will disagree, but I think Kashima absolutely stole the three points in this game. I guess this is a bit one-eyed though as we didn’t come very close to taking any of our limited chances. But fucking hell Kashima are a bit rubbish and fluked a goal and with it the win. As I sit here on the bus in the car park after the game at the designated departure time, I am fully aware that me writing this blog post will probably take less time than it takes us to get out of the car park here. At least it's something to keep me occupied whilst we go absolutely nowhere. As the reception is so poor in the rural industrial wasteland, (perhaps a slight contradiction there, but anyone who’s been here will probably understand), that the Kashima stadium is in I can’t really check any incidents from the match, and can’t even see the stats. With that in mind, expect some inaccuracies but I’m sure you’d expect nothing else. I also suspect that the WOW! section might be longer than the rest of the post this week. But maybe that’s what some of you come here for anyway. Let the vitriol begin!


First half -

They seemed scared of us for some reason. And maybe if we’d been playing with 11 players they would have had reason to be. Have a guess who the two below par players were on our side this week? Yep that’s right Miura and Wakizaka. Although that’s extremely unfair on Wakizaka who was just a bit below par, in contrast to Miura who did absolutely nothing other than give the ball away and stand around pointing whilst the game went on around him. No, come on, that’s a little unfair. At one point he also left the field to change his shorts. There weren’t many chances for either team but Broderson had to make one good save. 0-0 was absolutely the right scoreline. Thankfully we managed to squeeze in our first shot on target just before half time. We were mostly in control but failed to trouble their keeper. Hang on, I feel like maybe we’ve heard that one before, haven’t we?


Second half - 

We really had them rattled. They looked extremely dodgy at the back and in midfield. We had some good chances which we blasted either high or wide. Miura was still shit. Well up until the final ten minutes when it seemed like he remembered it wasn’t a training session. Their goal was fluky, completely against the run of play and utterly undeserved. Although our failure to trouble their keeper probably suggests that we didn’t deserve much either. But damn it, we really had them wobbling but couldn’t score. Which makes the defeat all the more frustrating. At least we didn’t go to penalties I suppose. That could have caused issues with the buses which were ‘leaving’ at 17:30. Although it is now 17:48 and the wheels of the bus haven’t even gone round once, let alone been able to ‘go round and round’. There are a few things I’d like to look at when I can as I was quite irritated on a number of occasions by the officials. Will add a little ‘In the cold light of day’ section when I’ve done that. 

Good day - 

Good day for fans of certain players. Oshima and Maruyama were unexpectedly back in the side. Apparently Hasebe rewarded the players who’d done well in the training match we played last week. (Bit more on that in the bad day section). On the pitch, Maruyama and Tachibanada stood out for good reasons. Oshima too. He did plenty of things for people to clip up and post as short videos. (I haven’t checked but I suspect the club has probably done this, apparently unaware that we lost the game. Perhaps creating social media content and getting ‘impressions’ is more important to them than us actually winning games). I really hope he can stay fit as he’ll be very important if he can. But I’m totally aware that we’ve said this many times before. Good day for people who like to watch a real battle of a game. And for people who like to watch build ups that never reach the having-a-shot stage. Good day for people who want to scream as there was plenty to get angry about. Good day for whoever apparently bribed the ref as he did exactly what they wanted. 

Bad day - 

Bad day for fans of correct decisions. Bad day for Miura (obviously). Not a great day for Hasebe as we still seem to be stuck in the toothless attack doldrums. It’s good that he rewarded those players who’d done well in training, but it’s a massive black mark against his name for not removing Miura from the team. I know I always moan about this and I know I moan more than most people, but there definitely seemed to be some frustration from others around me in the stand with Miura. Also a bad day for Yamaguchi who once again wasn’t in the match day squad. Apparently in the training match he was the goalkeeper who absolutely gifted the university team opposition their two goals. It doesn’t look good for him. 

Any other business - 

Let’s just go straight to the WOW! Section. 

WOW! - 

The first WOW is a quite all encompassing one. All the Kashima players, staff, fans, ball boys, everyone connected with the club in any way definitely slots into this category perfectly. They’re such a scummy club from top to bottom. Things that irritated me about the team in this match included their fucking infuriating gamesmanship, clogger play, constant whinging to the referee, extreme time wasting, injury feigning, dirty fouling, and most of all spawny luck. Three points for them from this game is an absolute injustice. The ball boys were clearly under instruction from the club to not give us the ball for throw ins under anything except for the most extreme circumstances, just let that time ebb away, even when they were drawing. Don’t think that the fans are going to escape from this. It was an appallingly low attendance for what they seemed to think was an important and tricky game. If it hadn’t been for the Frontale fans I think they would have struggled to get over 15000. Presumably it’s a bit easier for their fans to get to the stadium so they can’t even blame the horrific bus journey. Actually though, the coaches from Tokyo are probably at least 50% full with ‘home’ fans. My contention that Ota-ku, Setagaya-ku and Shibuya-ku are fair game for being Frontale territory is intended mainly to wind up FC Tokyo fans. But I think it takes a bit of a leap though for someone living in Tokyo to choose Kashima over a closer team particularly given that everything about the club is so scummy. Imagine doing that bus journey for every home game. Blimey. These wonderful fans also broke off a song midway before the game in order to boo our goalkeepers coming out. And they’re not even as good at booing as Urawa are. 

Let’s not leave the stadium experience out of this slagging. Now they allow you to retain your PET bottle lid when entering the stadium. Amazing! There’s no longer any re-entry though, so I guess they’ve worked out that any revenue lost from people no longer having to replace spilt soft drink bottles is more than made up for by the fact that none of that food stalls outside the ground will be getting any custom from away fans who are scrambling for the unreserved seats once the ground is open. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have gone out anyway, as I don’t enjoy wandering around rural industrial wastelands, but their commitment to stamping out any kind of enjoyment or fan mingling from the match day experience is impressive. I guess the mantra is to just keep the experience aggy, like it is on the pitch. And maybe in an attempt to further increase the irritation, the in stadium music was horrendous. The choice of songs was awful but the fact that they even went further and chose cover versions that efficiently stripped away anything that was interesting about the originals shows a real commitment to the cause. Oniki famously had never been to a concert before one of our fan events, and this music selection really had the whiff of being chosen by someone who hates music. Maybe they don’t need to spend as much on royalties for those versions. At least Urawa fully commit to having the original versions of their pre-game gay anthems soundtrack. The Saitama stadium experience wouldn’t be the same without them! (Are you impressed that I am somehow managing to slag off both Kashima and Urawa in the same post and hopefully the fact that I am comparing them will hopefully further irritate fans of both teams).

So, awful club, awful people, awful experience. Surely we can’t go any lower? Somewhat surprisingly all of these things may have been eclipsed by the ref. We’ve now had a couple of dodgy games with him but this one really took the biscuit. He gave us absolutely nothing, showed an almost Jesus like approach when it came to forgiving the sins of multiple Kashima players who pulled and fouled constantly but for the most part avoided cards. When Tagawa attempted to break Ozeki’s ankle, he got away with a yellow. He hassled us for dilly-dallying over a goal kick in the first ten minutes of the game but let Kashima take as long as they wanted to do anything after they’d gone ahead. After a coming together where we won the ball he let play continue till the ball went out and then took it back for a Kashima free kick, apparently playing the advantage for us, but then giving the decision the other way. Maybe he's just a bit simple and it takes his brain a little while to catch up. The linesman at our end was equally bad. But basically, a fucking absolutely useless arsehole of a referee who was terrified of giving any decisions against those scary Kashima guys. I don’t know if the ref has a vineyard, brewery or dairy farm, but he definitely showed that he is an excellent bottler. So not a completely useless human being I suppose. Just completely useless when it comes to football. We didn’t lose because of him because he wasn’t the one who couldn’t hit the target more than once a half, but he definitely affected the way the game played out.


In the cold light of day - 

So this part has been written at home and not on the bus and I’ve now watched a few things back so can give you the low down about things you probably already know. I didn’t go as far as watching long sections of the game though, (life’s too short, and I don’t want to get the resentment boiling up again), so I’m going to just presume my feelings at the time were correct when it comes to thinking that the ref was generally intimated by the Kashima players. One thing I didn’t notice at the time but irritated me intensely when I saw a replay was Ito being blocked by the ref. Absolutely sums up how bad Kamimura is, body checking a player who’s trying to get to the ball. Ito’s face said a lot. I think the ref’s lack of a backbone and Kashima’s dirty tricks is really displayed when the ref gives Tagawa a yellow. It looked like a dodgy tackle at the time but was a bit too far from me to be able to really see it properly. The replay is damning though, both players sliding in, Ozeki pulls out and puts his boot down as it clearly is going to be a dangerous collision and Tagawa slides right into his ankle, boot off the ground, no intention of stopping himself. The ref gives a yellow, but I have no idea why VAR didn’t suggest he have another look at it. To be honest, we should be thankful for the yellow. As soon as the ankle-break attempt is complete Kashima players surround the ref, suggesting he’s given the foul the wrong way and that Ozeki should be sent off. Even the prick Tagawa seems to be suggesting that Ozeki has made a grievous attempt to injure him by attacking the sole of his boot with his ankle. That one small incident sums up the whole game really. The ref making a mistake in favour of Kashima who were intensely irritated that the mistake doing go even more in their favour. It wouldn’t have made a difference if he’d sent him off as it was probably too late anyway. It might have made a difference though if he hadn’t let them get away with their shittiness for the whole match.

Looking for the yellow card incident in the highlights I’ve inadvertently stumbled across one of the absolutely mind-numbingly bad decisions from the ref. It’s around 89 minutes and the defender has his arms completely round Erison and pulls him to the floor and the ref isn’t interested at all. It says a lot that our players didn’t complain more. They presumably knew by this stage that we weren’t getting anything from the ref. After all, the same thing happened throughout the game and he wasn’t interested on any of the other occasions. Maybe he also officiates in Judo matches so thinks that throwing opponents to the floor is all part of the game. I think it’s not an accident too that Oniki walks out of his technical area and almost directly in front of us taking the throw. Anyone who is still of the opinion that Oniki is a nice guy probably needs to rethink. It seems that anyone that is touched by Kashima turns to the dark side.
 

So, in the cold light of day, my thoughts that the ref was useless and that Kashima are a despicable bunch of pricks was exactly right. Bravo to me!


What a crappy end to what at some stages looked like it could be a good day. If we want to take some positives it must be that we really had them wobbling on a lot of occasions. If we want to undermine those positives, well, two shots on target in 90 minutes and we lost. It’s now 66 minutes since our buses departure and we still haven’t made it to the expressway. But to be honest, I think we’re a bit ahead of schedule compared to previous years. I’m intending to have a few drinks when we get back to civilisation so that should soften the blow a bit I think. It’s a shame the season is so totally over so early. But equally, it’s a relief that we’re farting around like this in an utterly meaningless season. I think it’s time for the club to admit we’re not going to win the league and start trying some new things. It seems that there has always been a reason why the time wasn’t right to try something new. Clearly now there’s nothing to lose. Please let us see some new faces and maybe, shock horror, some new tactics…. Lot’s of people are talking about how Miura and Ito don’t play well together but still Hasebe is still persisting with it. Personally I think that this year Miura and no-one plays well together and that is mostly because Miura is in horrific form. For god’s sake change something Hasebe! Bet he won’t. Well, aside from the normal tiny changes of the midfielders and attackers who dropped out of the team for this match coming back in for the next match. There have been a few minor changes but he basically seems to go from line up A, who don't do the job and are dropped, to line up B, who don't do the job, so are dropped for line up A, who... you get the message here I'm sure. He has experimented with line up AB at times, but to be honest, that just seems to be a way of him demonstrating he's doing something. And given that whoever plays we have the same shittiness problems, is it not clear that there it's a bigger problem than personnel? Next up Tokyo Verdy away on Wednesday. I’ve just seen that they’ve beaten Urawa today. LOLZ! They’ve had some good results and fun so far this year, so maybe they’ll be good neighbours and let us have some. We’ve now played five games, over a quarter of this mini season, and in a normal season we’d be sitting here with just five points, having failed to win since the first fluky game of the season. It’s not massively encouraging, is it? But somehow I don’t feel massively disheartened. Might be feeling that way soon though. I feel like every week I’m coming away with the impression that we just need to make a little change and we’ll be off and flying. But every time the following game comes round, the little change we need to make hasn’t been made. I’d love to sign off here with some kind of optimistic flourish. Clearly we’re not rubbish and there are plenty of teams in a worse position than us. At the start of the year on the J Talk Podcast I said that we could have a great season as all the pieces of the puzzle were there but Hasebe just needed to put them together. Sadly, it seems like he just can’t stop using the instructions Oniki left behind instead of doing what he knows best. If things carry on like this, I don’t think it will ruin us, but I can’t see it’s going to help Hasebe get another job after he leaves us, (which presumably will happen after the next full season unless there is a massive change in fortunes). There is a certain irony that in looking for something positive to finish this post on, I’ve ended up making things even more depressing. The feeling straight after the match was that we’d been unlucky, but a little reflection made me think that the best we could have hoped for was a 0-0 anyway. So given that even when I felt like we’d done quite well it was basically a backhanded way of displaying we’re not very good, perhaps keeping things depressing at the end is exactly the right way to finish. 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for OSHIMA 66')
FW 9. ERISON (on for ROMANIC 83')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for TACHIBANADA 83')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for ITO 83')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for IENAGA 60')


Man of the match

Kind of a shock that I’m doing this given the result and my inherent sulkiness, but I like to think this shows that I’m at least a little bit fair. We weren’t great, but some people deserve a mention. Lots of people have said Oshima, and whilst I’d agree with that to some extent, I think he was slightly outshone by two others whose good performances were more surprising. So I’ll give it to…

MARUYAMA Yoichi and TACHIBANADA Kento - probably neither of these players would be in most people’s preferred starting lineup, but both put in full effort and showed some of their underperforming team mates the way to go. Extra props to Tachibanada as he was not only playing in midfield but also left back in the first half whilst Miura strolled around doing nothing.

 

Goals

LEO CEARA (Kashima) 79' 1-0

 

Highlights