Kashiwa Reysol 2 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale
So very clearly, we’re now back to being absolutely shit again. Lovely… To be fair to the players in this match, I don’t think we were as shit as we were against YFM. But nonetheless, we were shit. It should come as no surprise, as even when we’ve got results this year, it has mainly been through some kind of lucky break. The only two games I can remember where we’ve played well were the game against Kobe, who let’s be honest were fucking crap, and the game against Kashima, who were also crap, but on this occasion we needed a very late goal to turn our domination of the match into a one point getting draw. I mean, I guess at least you could say we’re keeping things interesting when it comes to performance being related to result. We’ve had play shit and win, draw and lose, and play well and win and draw. Maybe the only ones we’re still yet to see are play equally as well as the opposition and get a draw and play well and lose. But right now the thought of us playing well in a game seems like a very unattainable goal. Not that you’d know it from the way we still sing the team off somehow ignoring the fact that we’ve once again been atrocious. As I have no desire to think about this match any longer than I need to, let’s get this over and done with.
Us -
Surprisingly Hasebe broke up the shit midfield three. Unsurprisingly that didn’t mean Wakizaka got dropped. To be fair to Wakizaka, he wasn’t crap in this game. He was by no means good, but he wasn’t terrible, so that has to count as an improvement. Their second goal did involve him losing the ball but it looked at the time like he’d absolutely been fouled but nothing was given. More of these kind of things in the ref section. Ozeki came in for Yamamoto. He did alright. To be honest, I don’t think anyone was terrible in this game. Unfortunately though, we were collectively absolutely pointless. Mochiyama started with Derik missing even from the bench. So maybe we’ve picked up another striker injury. So basically just Mochiyama and Kobayashi left now… Mochiyama didn’t have his best game but basically all we did was launch long balls up to him rather than trying to play to his strengths in any way. Well, why change a winning system… oh… Brodersen made some very good saves and their first goal which looked like it was an unnaturally awesome shot proved to be exactly that, unnatural. It took a big deflection off Maruyama so you can’t blame Brodersen for that. The first half was pretty tight I thought. Of course this is not reflected in the stats, because we absolutely never fucking shoot and they kept shooting, but Brodersen was up to stopping everything they could throw at him apart from a massively deflected shot. Our goal was a nice header from Romano, from a nice corner from Yamahara. We don’t usually do either nice headers or nice corners, so doing both at the same time was another nice thing. But that was about it. Nothing much going on, no one particularly awful, but no one particularly good either. But we were as a whole, utterly tedious. I’ve long been saying we’ve been shit because of the middle three. In this game, that three was changed and maybe we weren’t as shit. But we were absolutely pointless. I really don’t understand our tactics. They clearly aren’t working but they ever change. To say that Hasebe hasn’t had an original idea in his Frontale life is a little unfair on him though. His two approaches in this game were a bit different from the old Frontale way. The first was to eschew attacking and instead knock it around at the back for a bit before getting into trouble and lumping it forward as far as possible, more often than not directly to the opposition. For some reason this didn’t prove fruitful when it came to making chances. When we have the ball in the middle third of the pitch we look in compete control, passing it side to side, and occasionally backwards until we reach one of our two scary zones, the one near our box at which stage we lump it forward and lose it. I’d like to say what happens when we get into our other scary zone, the final third, but I honestly have no idea. It seems like we don’t like to go into that part of the pitch as presumably it’s more difficult to do sideways passes there. Perhaps noticing our lack of time in the final third Hasebe shook things up by deciding to take off our one striker and go with a no striker formation instead, to allow us to pass the ball sideways more easily. Amazingly these extra sideways passes didn’t result in a goal. And I can’t imagine why, but the no striker master plan did seem to result in us having no one to pass the ball to anywhere near the opposition goal. Well I never…
Hasebe’s subs in this game were crap. A goal down and making absolutely no chances? Change the two defensive midfielders right away! Still nothing happening up front? Take off the striker! When that unbelivably doesn’t result in a goal fest? Bring on Kobayashi, but make sure he only has ten minutes at the most. I wonder if he’s not very fit. It would make sense as he’s been out for ages. But given that he’s retiring next month, you might have thought he’d like a little bit more of a go before his career is over. The games are running out and we all want to see him get at least one more goal if possible. And there’s that other matter that we don’t have any other options, so at least give him a bit more of a try for fuck’s sake. Hasebe just doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who would try that kind of thing though. Just keep the games turning over, a few wins, a few losses, and the occasional draw. Plenty of tedium. An absolute dearth of excitement. I’m starting to wonder how I might be able to secure myself a season long stadium ban and then I would definitely not be able to attend matches even if I wanted to and save myself the misery. Watching this shit is making me sick of football. Slight variations of absolutely the same players every week and no other changes. Doesn’t matter if the only players we have available can’t fit into the system. Play them anyway! The system is king. After all, the system has brought us plenty of eighth place finishes in the league. Absolute tedious mediocrity. And right now even the games we win are mostly flukes and are more often than not bore tests. I’ve just read Hasebe’s post match comments and they are very short and along with the usual bullshit we get about us apparently trying to do something and failing to do it successfully, not making excuses and trying hard in the next game, there were also a couple of weird parts where questions were very much dodged. Something seems to be going on. I suppose we can at least be grateful that something of interest is happening somewhere in the club, because it absolutely isn’t on the pitch.
Them -
I thought beforehand that we would lose this game as Kashiwa are a team who like attacking and we’re a team who love conceding. And we have a shocking record in this stadium recently. So I suppose this result wasn’t a massive surprise. And of course a player who left us after not really getting a chance to shine in our unbreakable system scored twice against us. Why is it that players who leave us always score against us, but our players who join from other teams usually do nothing in the games agains their former employers? I have no hard feelings against Yamauchi as he had the opportunity to leave the sinking ship that us fans don’t. I wasn’t particularly pleased with him screaming at the ref after he’d awarded them a free kick and booked Tachibanada for something which didn’t even look like a foul. What was he expecting? A firing squad? He at least toned down his celebration in front of us when he got his second. It happened right in front of me and I did get the impression that he was enjoying his non-celebration a bit too much though. But he’s alright I guess. Not alright are Kashiwa’s one-absolute-prick-up-top strikers. Kakita did his best play acting to try to get our goal ruled out. Wanker. Hosoya, a top level arsehole for his dive around 90 mins. The linesman who was right in front of the action somehow failed to spot it. And then the prick Hosoya gestured to us suggesting that we shut up. I like to think that this was because he specifically heard the torrent of abuse I was throwing his way. Maybe he took some English lessons in advance of his impending superstar success after his transfer to Europe. Wonder when that’s going to happen? Their keeper was also not against having a go at injury faking and the ref bought that too, giving a foul against Kobayashi for absolutely no reason I can see from the replays on DAZN. I’ll speak more about the ref in the next bit. But fucking hell I’m starting to hate Kashiwa. What is wrong with them? If they’d just continued to play instead of trying to waste time and fake injuries and win fouls they could have scored ten against us. But maybe that’s no fun for them and instead they want to irritate me as much as possible. And those fucking trumpets. Anyway, feel free to call me a bad loser. Although maybe that doesn’t quite apply as I’m by no means saying they shouldn’t have won. I am however saying that they have a significant number or arseholes in their squad.
Ref -
Ohashi is a pretty young ref I think. He’s at least not a massively experienced one. The last game we had with him was this same fixture in the half-season. I was astonished that I didn’t have much to moan about when it came to him for most of the match. He definitely let a lot of things go, but that worked both ways and the players should probably have worked out that was going to happen after not much of the match and adjusted their game. He probably went in at half time feeling pretty pleased with himself. And then came out and made a terrible call with the Tachibanada yellow. And totally ignored any consideration of a card for the revenge foul on Tachibanada almost immediately afterwards. The last ten minutes of the game saw him lose his mind. I guess he’s just not very good at spotting dives. In those ten minutes he gave everything, particularly if there wasn’t any kind of foul involved at all. So he basically went from ignoring everything to creating fouls out of nothing which is an impressive 180 degree change in his attitude. It’s a shame, as aside from his permanent brain fog from the 80th minute onwards he’d done a reasonable job. Which from my mouth is high praise! But for those last ten minutes, when obviously we were going to go on and score multiple times if it wasn’t for his interventions, he can go and do one.
Next up, Kashiwa again and then Kashiwa again. I don’t hold out much hope as given that even if we had a zombie stumbling towards the training ground and a special zombie gun ready for exactly that occasion, we’d probably still all get bitten as they’d all be passing the gun around, not realising that shooting for a change might easily solve the problem. Last year in the same competition we battered them at home, apparently putting them out of the tie, before going on to fuck up the away leg even more than they’d fucked up their away leg. So honestly, there’s no hope is there? And even if we did win, it would only be providing false hope for the next game where we revert to type and bore ourselves stupid again. Thankfully I have to work on Wednesday. And getting tickets for next Sunday might be tricky. So I could be spared from attending both of the games. Although I suspect a few people who were at this match might have decided it’s not worth bothering to go back to Kashiwa again next weekend for more of the same dull shit. Whether I’m in that group, I’m not yet sure. But whichever way you look at it, the next week is probably not going to be very much fun.
Us -
Surprisingly Hasebe broke up the shit midfield three. Unsurprisingly that didn’t mean Wakizaka got dropped. To be fair to Wakizaka, he wasn’t crap in this game. He was by no means good, but he wasn’t terrible, so that has to count as an improvement. Their second goal did involve him losing the ball but it looked at the time like he’d absolutely been fouled but nothing was given. More of these kind of things in the ref section. Ozeki came in for Yamamoto. He did alright. To be honest, I don’t think anyone was terrible in this game. Unfortunately though, we were collectively absolutely pointless. Mochiyama started with Derik missing even from the bench. So maybe we’ve picked up another striker injury. So basically just Mochiyama and Kobayashi left now… Mochiyama didn’t have his best game but basically all we did was launch long balls up to him rather than trying to play to his strengths in any way. Well, why change a winning system… oh… Brodersen made some very good saves and their first goal which looked like it was an unnaturally awesome shot proved to be exactly that, unnatural. It took a big deflection off Maruyama so you can’t blame Brodersen for that. The first half was pretty tight I thought. Of course this is not reflected in the stats, because we absolutely never fucking shoot and they kept shooting, but Brodersen was up to stopping everything they could throw at him apart from a massively deflected shot. Our goal was a nice header from Romano, from a nice corner from Yamahara. We don’t usually do either nice headers or nice corners, so doing both at the same time was another nice thing. But that was about it. Nothing much going on, no one particularly awful, but no one particularly good either. But we were as a whole, utterly tedious. I’ve long been saying we’ve been shit because of the middle three. In this game, that three was changed and maybe we weren’t as shit. But we were absolutely pointless. I really don’t understand our tactics. They clearly aren’t working but they ever change. To say that Hasebe hasn’t had an original idea in his Frontale life is a little unfair on him though. His two approaches in this game were a bit different from the old Frontale way. The first was to eschew attacking and instead knock it around at the back for a bit before getting into trouble and lumping it forward as far as possible, more often than not directly to the opposition. For some reason this didn’t prove fruitful when it came to making chances. When we have the ball in the middle third of the pitch we look in compete control, passing it side to side, and occasionally backwards until we reach one of our two scary zones, the one near our box at which stage we lump it forward and lose it. I’d like to say what happens when we get into our other scary zone, the final third, but I honestly have no idea. It seems like we don’t like to go into that part of the pitch as presumably it’s more difficult to do sideways passes there. Perhaps noticing our lack of time in the final third Hasebe shook things up by deciding to take off our one striker and go with a no striker formation instead, to allow us to pass the ball sideways more easily. Amazingly these extra sideways passes didn’t result in a goal. And I can’t imagine why, but the no striker master plan did seem to result in us having no one to pass the ball to anywhere near the opposition goal. Well I never…
Hasebe’s subs in this game were crap. A goal down and making absolutely no chances? Change the two defensive midfielders right away! Still nothing happening up front? Take off the striker! When that unbelivably doesn’t result in a goal fest? Bring on Kobayashi, but make sure he only has ten minutes at the most. I wonder if he’s not very fit. It would make sense as he’s been out for ages. But given that he’s retiring next month, you might have thought he’d like a little bit more of a go before his career is over. The games are running out and we all want to see him get at least one more goal if possible. And there’s that other matter that we don’t have any other options, so at least give him a bit more of a try for fuck’s sake. Hasebe just doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who would try that kind of thing though. Just keep the games turning over, a few wins, a few losses, and the occasional draw. Plenty of tedium. An absolute dearth of excitement. I’m starting to wonder how I might be able to secure myself a season long stadium ban and then I would definitely not be able to attend matches even if I wanted to and save myself the misery. Watching this shit is making me sick of football. Slight variations of absolutely the same players every week and no other changes. Doesn’t matter if the only players we have available can’t fit into the system. Play them anyway! The system is king. After all, the system has brought us plenty of eighth place finishes in the league. Absolute tedious mediocrity. And right now even the games we win are mostly flukes and are more often than not bore tests. I’ve just read Hasebe’s post match comments and they are very short and along with the usual bullshit we get about us apparently trying to do something and failing to do it successfully, not making excuses and trying hard in the next game, there were also a couple of weird parts where questions were very much dodged. Something seems to be going on. I suppose we can at least be grateful that something of interest is happening somewhere in the club, because it absolutely isn’t on the pitch.
Them -
I thought beforehand that we would lose this game as Kashiwa are a team who like attacking and we’re a team who love conceding. And we have a shocking record in this stadium recently. So I suppose this result wasn’t a massive surprise. And of course a player who left us after not really getting a chance to shine in our unbreakable system scored twice against us. Why is it that players who leave us always score against us, but our players who join from other teams usually do nothing in the games agains their former employers? I have no hard feelings against Yamauchi as he had the opportunity to leave the sinking ship that us fans don’t. I wasn’t particularly pleased with him screaming at the ref after he’d awarded them a free kick and booked Tachibanada for something which didn’t even look like a foul. What was he expecting? A firing squad? He at least toned down his celebration in front of us when he got his second. It happened right in front of me and I did get the impression that he was enjoying his non-celebration a bit too much though. But he’s alright I guess. Not alright are Kashiwa’s one-absolute-prick-up-top strikers. Kakita did his best play acting to try to get our goal ruled out. Wanker. Hosoya, a top level arsehole for his dive around 90 mins. The linesman who was right in front of the action somehow failed to spot it. And then the prick Hosoya gestured to us suggesting that we shut up. I like to think that this was because he specifically heard the torrent of abuse I was throwing his way. Maybe he took some English lessons in advance of his impending superstar success after his transfer to Europe. Wonder when that’s going to happen? Their keeper was also not against having a go at injury faking and the ref bought that too, giving a foul against Kobayashi for absolutely no reason I can see from the replays on DAZN. I’ll speak more about the ref in the next bit. But fucking hell I’m starting to hate Kashiwa. What is wrong with them? If they’d just continued to play instead of trying to waste time and fake injuries and win fouls they could have scored ten against us. But maybe that’s no fun for them and instead they want to irritate me as much as possible. And those fucking trumpets. Anyway, feel free to call me a bad loser. Although maybe that doesn’t quite apply as I’m by no means saying they shouldn’t have won. I am however saying that they have a significant number or arseholes in their squad.
Ref -
Ohashi is a pretty young ref I think. He’s at least not a massively experienced one. The last game we had with him was this same fixture in the half-season. I was astonished that I didn’t have much to moan about when it came to him for most of the match. He definitely let a lot of things go, but that worked both ways and the players should probably have worked out that was going to happen after not much of the match and adjusted their game. He probably went in at half time feeling pretty pleased with himself. And then came out and made a terrible call with the Tachibanada yellow. And totally ignored any consideration of a card for the revenge foul on Tachibanada almost immediately afterwards. The last ten minutes of the game saw him lose his mind. I guess he’s just not very good at spotting dives. In those ten minutes he gave everything, particularly if there wasn’t any kind of foul involved at all. So he basically went from ignoring everything to creating fouls out of nothing which is an impressive 180 degree change in his attitude. It’s a shame, as aside from his permanent brain fog from the 80th minute onwards he’d done a reasonable job. Which from my mouth is high praise! But for those last ten minutes, when obviously we were going to go on and score multiple times if it wasn’t for his interventions, he can go and do one.
Next up, Kashiwa again and then Kashiwa again. I don’t hold out much hope as given that even if we had a zombie stumbling towards the training ground and a special zombie gun ready for exactly that occasion, we’d probably still all get bitten as they’d all be passing the gun around, not realising that shooting for a change might easily solve the problem. Last year in the same competition we battered them at home, apparently putting them out of the tie, before going on to fuck up the away leg even more than they’d fucked up their away leg. So honestly, there’s no hope is there? And even if we did win, it would only be providing false hope for the next game where we revert to type and bore ourselves stupid again. Thankfully I have to work on Wednesday. And getting tickets for next Sunday might be tricky. So I could be spared from attending both of the games. Although I suspect a few people who were at this match might have decided it’s not worth bothering to go back to Kashiwa again next weekend for more of the same dull shit. Whether I’m in that group, I’m not yet sure. But whichever way you look at it, the next week is probably not going to be very much fun.
Team
GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 50')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 50')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
Subs
GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for OZEKI 61')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for WAKIZAKA 81')
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for YAMAHARA 71')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 61')
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto (on for MOCHIYAMA 71')
FW 34. OSA Ryuki
Man of the match
Unusual for me to give this in a match where we were so utterly dull, but given that he played a lot better than he did last week, I’ll give it to…
Svend BRODERSEN - could have been double figures if it wasn’t for him and I don’t think you could blame him for either goal.
(coming soon)MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
Subs
GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for OZEKI 61')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for WAKIZAKA 81')
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for YAMAHARA 71')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 61')
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto (on for MOCHIYAMA 71')
FW 34. OSA Ryuki
Man of the match
Unusual for me to give this in a match where we were so utterly dull, but given that he played a lot better than he did last week, I’ll give it to…
Svend BRODERSEN - could have been double figures if it wasn’t for him and I don’t think you could blame him for either goal.
Goals
YAMAUCHI (Kashiwa) 40' 1-0
PEDRO ROMANO (Frontale) 44' 1-1
YAMAUCHI (Kashiwa) 52' 2-1
Highlights
