Perhaps this is the first time I have started writing the game’s blog post whilst the match is still happening. I like to think this makes me more journalistic with a tight deadline, but at 3-1 down and looking like we’ll never score again, the truth is that even writing blog posts is more fun than watching this match. Looks like another ACL campaign has been finished by Ulsan but to be honest we can’t really blame anyone but ourselves. Well, actually some of ourselves… if that makes any sense. In the spirit of sour grapes I’m going to rush through this and put it out quickly. I have no desire to think about another failed ACL campaign for any longer than I have to. I guess after all the fifth round of games have been played we’ll have some idea if we still have even a glimmer of a chance of progressing but I’m guessing this post will be up and never looked at again by me by the time that happens. This is a game in which we’ve missed so many good chances and haven’t bothered to defend properly for any of their chances. All the positivity and confidence we gained from the second Johor game has long gone. Oniki could have started the game with the dull as ditchwater double defensive midfield and perhaps ground out a 0-0. Instead he decided to go for that approach only when we were 3-1 down already. We’ve just scored… But it’s almost certainly too little too late as the ref will probably blow up before the injury time elapses as they have in ever one of our games. He did. Game over, literally and almost certainly metaphorically for us in the competition. The final game against Guangzhou which was already kind of pointless has now become exceedingly pointless. Unless Guangzhou beat Johor and then Johor beat Ulsan. A record of two draws, one win and one loss against the teams who don’t finish last in the group will almost certainly not be enough to see us through as a second place team so our only chance would be those results mentioned above. (Actually, a Johor win and then a draw in the Johor Ulsan game might be enough too). We gave Ulsan goals in this game with some absent defending and tactics and failed to take hardly any of our chances. Even the absolute gimmes. And plenty of passing of the ball across the defensive line as we trailed by two goals set to go out. Back to the worst of our 2022 performances again with only a one game break where there was any hint of brightness. After we went against Ulsan last year Hasegawa and Joao Schmidt were frozen out of the team for the rest of the season. I wonder who Oniki will hold responsible this year? I suspect it won't be the same people as I think. Don’t blame the shit pitch, don’t blame Shanghai pulling out and screwing up the system. Blame… I’m not going to point fingers but I have people in mind. But at the same time, I have crappy days at work sometimes too. If I kept having them though, maybe I’d think about a career change.
Next up… oh fuck it, you know who it is and it’s an utterly pointless game anyway. Go Frontale do something else instead and stay as far away from Frontale and football as you can for a while. Honestly, it’s for the best for all of us.
Finally, finally, finally… perhaps we’ve got our season going properly. This sounds like a crazy thing to say with us currently sitting top of the J League, but I think anyone who’s been watching our games closely would agree that so far we have been very lucky to only lose twice and equally lucky that we’ve somehow managed to win six times in the league. Since Oniki rejigged our tactics after Cerezo hammered us it has looked like every game was probably going to finish 0-0. As I said in previous posts, I think the Cerezo game was a bit of a freak result where one player’s bad day really skewed the result. It seems that after our first game against Johor when we only had six shots in the whole game and which unsurprisingly finished 0-0, the double defensive midfield has now been abandoned. Now we’re back to having Tachibanada only in that position and we are able to attack a bit more. It certainly made a big difference when it came to both the result and actually enjoying this game. Somewhat amusingly though, we only had nine shots in the this game, so not that many more. But on this occasion we at least made their keeper do something. Of course, one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one decent result in a game that Oniki said we had to win (which in itself is interesting, as maybe he hadn’t actually considered us trying to win in the previous games…) is all very well and good but could all count for nothing if we mess up the next game against Ulsan. A loss in that game would probably see us back into third place in the group and requiring a draw between Johor and Ulsan in the final game with us racking up as many goals as possible to try and win the group on goal difference. I wonder if Oniki will play it safe and go back to the double defensive midfield and look for a draw. That would be a risk though as a Johor win against Ulsan in the final match would leave us second and with the games against the bottom teams in the group being discounted when it comes to deciding the best second place finishers, three draws and one win might not be enough. I dunno. This is all speculation depending on lots of other things happening anyway. So maybe I should just get on with writing about this game and worry about everything else when we come to it. After I apparently was entitled and arrogant about us in my last blog post (must have been all the times I said we were awful, right?), I’d better tread carefully in this post. I’m tempted to go with the old style random bullet points but that’s only because I want to use the heading ‘Return of the Wak’ but that all seems like a bit too much work for a post on a game I watched on TV, so I’ll just bang out the same old rubbish I normally do without any structure at all.
So, yeah, we played pretty well in this game. It was the first time I’ve seen us moving the ball consistently in a dangerous way this year and it was very welcome. We started with what some might consider the second choice players, but given how grindingly dull our first choice eleven have been playing recently I’d instead like to interpret the changes as Oniki finally doing something a bit different. The unused paragraph heading above refers to, if you hadn’t realised, the revitalisation of Wakizaka, who perhaps has finally got over the pressure of the number 14 shirt. His free kick goal was wonderful but maybe his pass for the goal afterwards was even better. We know he’s a great player, so I’m pleased he’s finally able to show us that this year. Also we had the return of the old Yamane too, who seemed a lot more bothered than he has been recently and put in a couple of lovely assists. And Chanathip did great too. Recently he’s looked a bit sad, as if maybe things weren’t going how he might have expected them to be, or that he was finding it a bit difficult to settle in. I think if he does feel like that he should stop being so hard on himself as I thought he was starting to play really well just before he got his one match ban. Oniki’s tactical change scuppered his progress after that somewhat, but now hopefully that has been abandoned and I hope Chana can start smiling a bit more. His assist for Marcinho’s goal was wonderful and his own goal was nice too. I hope he doesn’t get down on himself when something doesn’t go right and instead give himself a pat on the back for the good things he’s been doing. If he continues to improve he’ll be an amazing signing I think. I should probably also praise Kobayashi here too. He’s spent a lot of time on the bench and even when he’s been on the pitch he’s been out on the right. In this game he showed what we know he can do in the middle and his side footed volleyed finish was lovely. I guess we’re unfortunate in that our formation always seems to only have one central striker and we now have Kobayashi. Chinen and Damiao all vying for the same spot. But if all of them start scoring, that’s probably a great dilemma to have. But let’s not be too positive eh? Apparently Johor put out a second string team according to some on Twitter. This suggests that they weren’t too impressed with or worried about how we played last time and if that’s the case I can definitely second that emotion. It seems a bit of a weird thing to do though, considering that their next game is against Guangzhou. I guess with them already having beaten Ulsan once and drawn with us once they have a decent chance of being able to go through as a best second place finisher. There are a hell of a lot of variables involved still though so it seems like a dangerous game to play. Of course everything will be a lot clearer after the next round of games so I’ll stop speculating here and instead get on with making some stupid comments. Oniki’s dance after one of Kobayashi’s goals was pretty fun to watch. I’ve tried to capture it in a screen grab, but it in no way does it justice. Likewise I think it was the first time I’ve seen Marcinho boogie after scoring but maybe when I’m at the match I don’t really notice what he does after scoring. He was dancing in the rain in a video the club posted online recently so perhaps it’s become part of our training routine now. If that’s the case and it’s improved morale and performances, long may that continue! Oh, and finally, the ref once again blew up early for both halves.
Next up Ulsan on Wednesday. I hope we can do a bit better than we did in the first game against our recent perennial ACL rivals. This result should give us some confidence and that game is probably a ‘must not lose’ game for Ulsan so perhaps that will change their approach. To be honest though, who knows what Frontale side will turn up? The dull performances have far outweighed the good ones this year, (actually this was probably the first meaningful good one). I wonder if Johor paying in red and blue and us in white made us think it was a Tamagawa Classico match in Chofu and consequently we cut loose a bit. Hopefully we can keep a similar approach against Ulsan. Go Frontale!
We’re now halfway through our 2022 ACL group of death and have five points to show from our three games. Don’t be confused and think that ‘group of death’ means it’s a group with four good teams who will all destroy each other. In this case it’s a group of death because anyone who watches all of the games will long for the sweet embrace of death, which would be far more satisfying and enjoyable than watching us trudge through ‘performance’ after ‘performance’. Sure we scored eight times with our reserves out against Guangzhou Juniors, but the fact is our first team look unlikely to ever score again unless the ball is presented to us just in front of the goal with the keeper elsewhere. This was a painful 90 minutes to watch and I’m not particularly keen to prolong the discomfort by stretching out this blog post so let’s get things over and done with quickly using the three old-favourite bullet points
Us -
Since Oniki changed our system, if you indeed believe he has done so, rather than just change the starting members and the approach slightly, we’ve looked quite solid at the back, not looking like we’re going to conceded against Kashiwa, Ulsan (their goal was a handball) and Johor. Equally we’ve looked like we’re supremely unlikely to score too. The tactical change is a big step from Oniki who at times has tried to nudge us towards a bit more of a defensive mindset and now seems to have gone the whole hog and has banned goals and excitement at either end of the pitch. Sure the change came as a response to us conceding four against Cerezo, but when you consider that three out of the four goals in that game came directly as a result of a Taniguchi cock up, you can’t help but think that maybe he’s thrown the baby out with the bath water. Or maybe drunk the bath water, promoted the baby to chief bathing executive and then had a satisfying nap in the bath tub. I’ve long moaned about Oniki being a lucky manager rather than a good one and it seems that in order to preserve his record he’s trying to squeeze the last drop of luck out of us up front whilst grimly hanging on at the back. Hopefully this match should show him that his long awaited plan B has been found out already. Or maybe not found out, maybe has just been proved ineffective almost immediately. Our double defensive midfield enabled us to win the possession game and stop Johor from scoring. It also resulted in just six shots for us in 90 minutes, none of which were on target. That’s even less than we had against Kashiwa, but at least on that occasion half of the eight were on target and we even SCORED A GOAL NOT FROM AN OPPOSITION MISTAKE! Joao Schmidt’s long passes switching the play which were an interesting new development in the Kashiwa game have now been replaced with Taniguchi aimless hoofs (hooves?… no hoofs I think) out of defence. I’m not blaming any of the players as tactically we seemed to be playing wearing handcuffs and mud filled Wellington boots. We have skillful and exciting players but you wouldn’t believe it from watching us recently. All the confidence has gone and there’s no spark and no excitement. We were sloppy all over the pitch and got what we deserved. Oniki’s response to us trudging about the pitch with the ball bouncing off us creating nothing was to make a double change on 62 minutes by bringing on Yamamura for Kurumaya and shaking up the defence, (who hadn’t really been troubled or even really tested), and bring on the perennially out of form Wakizaka. You could say though that he was trying to inject some cut and thrust into our attack by bringing on our 2022 joint top scorer in all competitions Kurumaya, who let’s not forget is a defender and has been injured for most of the season. It didn’t change anything, and the next subs didn’t come till 85 minutes and then only two more were done. The four changes made in this match perfectly matched four of the five done in the Ulsan match (which we didn't exactly shine in...), one even on exactly the same minute. If that doesn't speak volumes about a manager who doesn't have any new ideas, I don't know what does. Clearly Oniki doesn’t have much confidence in the subs and also seems to not have the skills to get his first choice players playing even half decently. Of course, I want him to turn this around but really doubt whether he'll be able to do it. We were handed a massive boost by Johor beating Ulsan and we’ve basically handed it back saying ‘no thank you’ by drawing this game, shooting once every 15 minutes on average without getting a single shot on target.
Them -
A few words on Johor. Disappointingly for us they weren’t at the level we might have expected them to be pre-tournament and they really came out of the traps in this game with a lot of energy and fight. They’ve won the Malaysian league eight seasons in a row and have some big money investment so perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise that they beat Ulsan and drew with us. To be honest though, if they’d won this game it would have been a bit of a robbery as much like us, they didn’t really create anything. If ever a game deserved to be a 0-0 it was this one. It seems slightly unfair that they get to play all of their games in the group stage in their home stadium with their fans in attendance. The atmosphere did sound quite good though and they had an impressive amount of drummers behind their goal. However, the sides of the stadium weren’t that full so perhaps they still haven’t reached the support level that their nice stadium warrants. Still a work in progress maybe when it comes to getting the general public excited and interested. But the pitch was a lot better in this stadium than then other one, so that’s a plus. Although I guess that doesn’t really matter when we could barely pass the ball anyway. One thing they seemed excellent at was rolling around on the floor feigning injury. And the ref was very accommodating when it came to allowing them to break up the play. I’m not whinging though, they did a good job of approaching a game in which they were the underdog and came away with a good result. If Oniki doesn’t sort something out they could easily do the same again in the next match. Or perhaps even go one better. I don’t want to sound like I’m being patronising though. Perhaps they felt they should have won and will be the favourites in the next leg. The way we are playing right now, I could totally understand that!
Ref -
I started the game thinking that the ref must have been bunged a big wad of cash as quite how the Johor player didn’t even get a yellow for a shocking raised two footed challenge on Taniguchi in the sixth minute is mystery. The linesmen made a few dubious offside decisions too but I guess this happens and I’m not going to say I want VAR (even if it would have really helped us in the game against Ulsan). Throughout the match Johor did seem to be getting a lot more decisions going their way though. But this probably does tend to be the case when the support in the stadium is so one-sided. Jeez though, that sixth minute challenge was horrible and although he did book a couple of Johor players in the first half, there definitely seemed to be something of a hands off approach when it came to giving out cards. He was definitely not hands off when it came to blowing his whistle though! At times it felt like the stands must have been full of Kevin Muscats impersonators who’d come straight from a 90’s rave, whistles firmly lodged in the their mouths. The constant blowing of the ref’s whistle for fouls which often looked like nothing more than tackles disrupted the game and allowed neither team to build up any kind of momentum. Oh, and once again, the ref blew up early for both the first and second half. Is this a western Asia football thing? So yeah, I’m blaming Oniki and the ref for us being so shit in this match. Presumably we won’t have the same ref in the next game. Phew! Presumably though we will probably have the same tactics… damn…
What a waste of time this game was for Frontale fans. When I made a note saying the first shot on target of the game for either team came in the 38th minute, little did I know that after the final whistle we would still be waiting for our first shot on target. Maybe their keeper is a world beater. Maybe he’s useless. The fact is, he didn’t have to make a save in the whole game. I would say we toiled in this game but that probably makes it sound like we were working harder than we were. In the last quarter of the match it looked like neither our players or Oniki were thinking we could win the game and we were settling for the draw. Perhaps they forgot that we’re currently behind Johor in the group. This was a massive missed opportunity but at the same time a continuation of our horrible form this year. The Guangzhou game was clearly an outlier (because of the level of the opposition) and our normal approach this year will be to bore and underwhelm. Oniki’s determination to not lose has taken away any chance we might have of ever winning and I can see us ending up with a record of played six, won two and drawn four in this tournament. And given that due to the withdrawal of Shanghai Port, when determining the best second place finishers the results against the groups’ bottom teams will be disregarded, that would leave us with four draws. Definitely not enough. So what’s Oniki going to do about it? Probably exactly the same as in the first games against Ulsan and Johor. Clearly the new tactics aren’t working. His new tactics are a totally blunt instrument. But even that sounds like it might have some kind of heft behind it. Our tactical blunt instrument is more like a mallet made out of soft foam. We can hit that nail a million times but it’s unlikely we’ll make any progress hammering it into the wood. But I don’t have any confidence that he’ll change anything as I don’t think his innate conservatism will allow him to come up with anything new or exciting in time for the next game on Sunday night. So, Sunday night. Another game against Johor, another late kick off and presumably another crushingly dull 0-0 draw. What a perfect way to start the week! Ugggghhhh. At least the guy in the crowd at half time in the picture above will probably have a good time. I guess… Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 15. SASAKI Asahi
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 19. TONO Daiya
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (Yellow card 83') (on for YAMAMURA 62')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 85')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for TONO 62')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 85')
MF 25. MATSUI Renji
FW 26. EINAGA Takatora
Goals
Not a sausage. A shot on target would have been nice...
After a bit of a dodgy performance and a late scraped win against our ACL nemesis Ulsan on Friday, a game I watched and a blog post I wrote after consuming a decent amount of mid afternoon drinks, the only way was up for both Frontale and the quality of my blog posts. I watched this game in a state of complete sobriety, but somehow it was equally difficult to focus on. On Friday there was the alcohol haze and the general malaise that our toothless performances so far this year have created. On this occasion there was very much a feeling that it was a bit of an unfair contest and it felt like a training game, albeit one with two very different level teams. Once again the Chinese teams in the ACL have brought their kids to compete in this tournament. I don’t remember people getting so annoyed about that last year, but this year the general feeling on Twitter seems to be that the competition is a farce. The amusing thing is that I saw the ‘tournament is a joke’ argument used to both support and rail against the proposed Asian Super League. So basically the one true force for good to unite opposing factions right now is the shared belief that the ACL is a farce. I think it’s a bit unfair to be honest. I’m not particularly a lover of the ACL, but I don’t think it’s very fair to judge a tournament that has a massive COVID cloud hanging over it. That’s the reason the Chinese teams are sending their kids and the reason the stadiums are empty. And that’s creating the big mis-matches with apparently no atmosphere. To be fair to the AFC though, I can’t really see how the competition could be played any other way this year when you consider the countries involved. If one of the bubbles had been in Japan the only difference would probably be that there would be a few more people in the stands and bit of clapping as there aren’t any tourists being let into Japan and is still no signing allowed. Although it is apparently possible to attend these games in Malaysia, I’m not surprised that not many Frontale fans have much appetite for travel right now. Even in Johor’s first game in the competition this year, played in their home stadium, the stands weren’t that full, so it’s no surprise that the locals don’t want to go and watch a game that kicked off five hours before their game did. But anyway, enough pontification on the competition itself and let’s get on with some in depth analysis of this match.
Ha! Got you there! You thought you were going to get in depth analysis! If you’ve read this blog before you should have known better. Instead of that, here come my usual random thoughts. The line up was a weird one. We probably expected a lot of changes, and the fact that Oniki did exactly that shows quite how weak he thought Guangzhou would be. When we’ve played university sides and J3 teams in the Emperor’s Cup in the past Oniki has often gone with his first choices so it was a real shock to see him ring the changes big time in this match. Definitely big time, as YAMANE GOT A REST! Slightly bizarrely though, Sung-Ryong was still selected. In Guangzhou’s previous match against Johor, the Chinese team had two shots in the whole game. But Oniki still wasn’t confident enough to change his keeper. Some people were talking about Hayasaka starting which I thought would have been a bit unfair on both Tanno and Ando, neither of whom have had any pitch time this year and hardly had any last year either. I feel like Hayasaka probably has to wait for them to at least have one game before he’s involved. Perhaps Oniki’s innate conservatism and caution came into play as he knew he was going to name an unusual centre back pairing so thought he’d better have Sung-Ryong in there to make sure things were safe. As it was Guangzhou had only the one shot in this game and it was off target, so Oniki could have played the injured Nobori in goal and we probably would have still been OK. The inexperienced centre back pairing ahead of them was going to be Wakizaka and Kozuka if the pre-game team line up graphic was to be believed. Definitely a case of the guys who had to make it, just shrugging their shoulders and thinking that whatever they picked would probably be wrong and just going for it. Of course that was wrong and it was instead Kurumaya and Tsukagawa. Tsukagwa actually played in defence, midfield and attack in this game, so it was quite an evening for him. He looked absolutely knackered by the end of the match. Guess he hasn’t played 90 minutes for us… erm…. ever I think. I’m not going to go into any detail about other people’s positions too much as there was quite a lot of moving around. I will say though that Seko played 90 minutes at right back, Matsui had a half, somewhat surprisingly at left back, Tanabe and Igarashi played 45 minutes at left back and up front on the right respectively and Takai got a bit more than 30 minutes at centre back. So that was all quite nice to see! The best thing about these group games against weaker teams is if we can see different players play. Chanathip got his first goal for us it was a nice one. Chinen, Kobayashi and Kurumaya (!) got braces. It was all one way traffic so it’s slightly absurd to think about what we might be able to learn from this game. Especially as the pitch was pretty awful and I have a horrible feeling that all the group stage games will be played on the same surface. (After checking this I've found it's not true. They are split half and half between two stadiums, with every game Johor is involved in being played in their home stadium and the other one in the round being played on the dodgy pitch. Nice bonus for Johor for them hosting I guess!) If it’s bad now, I’m a bit worried how bad it might become by the final match day. Oh, and the ref blew up early before the end of the allotted injury time at the end of the first half again. Is that an ACL thing, I wonder?
Next up we have Johor at 11pm Japan time on Thursday night. They beat Guangzhou 5-0 and will be kicking off against Ulsan soon. I guess we probably think that Ulsan will win that game. (THEY DIDN'T!) If they do and everything goes as expected in the other games, our fifth group stage game against them will likely decide how we do in this competition. Hopefully we’ll play a bit better in that game than we did in the previous game. If that’s another draw, we probably have the dream game to finish up the group with if we’re trying to get a better goal difference than Ulsan as the last match is the other fixture against Guangzhou. Of course there are a lot of ifs before we get to the stage though. If we do manage to get through the group safely though whilst scoring lots of goals, I hope we can bring back some of that form and confidence into our league campaign, which has been pretty underwhelming so far. The results in the first game in hand that the other teams had to make up went pretty well for us and we’re still miraculously sitting at the top of the table right now. If Kashima fail to beat Cerezo that will be the case when we return to Japan! I’d say that Cerezo owe us something for the generous gift of three points and four goals that we gave them recently so hopefully they give us a nice present back. Fingers crossed! And Go Frontale!
Of course I couldn’t go to this game and had to watch it on DAZN. Therefore this post will be free from detail or insight and extremely thrown together. More than usual to be honest, as this was a very hard watch. Perhaps I shouldn’t have consumed so much alcohol mid-afternoon to celebrate completing the process of renewing my visa. Perhaps if I hadn’t done so I may have been able to concentrate a bit more on the game. But to be honest, I think it would have been hard for anyone to get any real enjoyment out of this game which really should have finished 0-0. Ulsan did a bit better in the first half. We did a bit better in the second. We were hamstrung but a total lack of ideas as we have been for most of 2022. As I don’t know much about Ulsan I won’t try and guess what was holding them back. All in all this was a dull, dull game. At least from my point of view. My notes are so slight that if I did bullet points in this post, the bullet points would mostly probably just be a sentence each, so instead I will quick fire them out in this paragraph and be done with it. Oniki stuck with the team that beat Kashiwa in what at the time felt like an exciting performance but on reflection might have just looked like it because the preceding two games had been so bad. Who would have thought that moving from 4-3-3 to 4-2-1-3 in the previous game and then to 4-2-3-1 in this one would have blunted further our already pretty blunt attack? Apparently we switched back to 4-3-3 in the second half but to be honest this is all just theoretically moving numbers around as there was no real change in shape or tactics again. And even though we had more shots and most of them were on target, we only really tested their keeper on a couple of occasions. Their goal looked like it was perhaps offside and definitely was a handball but there’s no VAR in this tournament and I will never say that I wish there was. Our goal was apparently due to an elbow on their keeper if he is to be believed, but seeing as no-one was near him, it seems that he was just trying to spare his blushes after dropping an absolute clanger after making a few good saves. To get my other boring points out of the way, Damiao missed a really good chance, we wore our away kit even though it was supposedly our ‘home’ game, and the ref blew up early for half time. Did I miss anything? Well, maybe you could say I missed the last two hours of my life which I’ll never get back and am unlikely to ever look back on with any kind of enthusiasm. But yeah, I thought it would probably be a draw before the game and that was both what happened and what both teams probably deserved, and it was kind of fun to get that draw with a last minute equaliser. Even if it came from an opposition player basically saying to us, ‘here’s the ball, have a shot at this open goal’. We’re still shite this year, and still we’re endeavouring to elevate our shiteness further whenever it comes to taking part in the continental competition. Next up, on paper an easier game against Guangzhou’s kids but one which I’m sure we’ll still labour through. What joy! Go Frontale!
It’s probably a bit too early for me to claim that the return of my old ‘Go Frontale’ sign off on blog posts has caused a massive turn around in our fortunes. After all, we only have the evidence of one game to base this on. Also, if we’re being honest, this also wasn’t the greatest of performances from us. The fact that this felt a lot more encouraging than recent games highlights more quite how boring and bad we’ve been recently rather than how well we played on this occasion. However it was lovely to leave the ground and head for our favourite post-game pub with a spring in our step instead of the usual recent heads in our hands. Kashiwa came into this game in good form and near the top of the table, one point behind us with two games in hand. They’d shocked quite a lot of people who had them down as pre-season relegation contenders and had already dispatched YFM and our last two opponents. When you consider that both our and Kashiwa’s previous two games were against Cerezo Osaka and Jubilo Iwata and they’d won both, while we just about managed to come away with one point from those two games, you might think that they would be coming into the game as favourites. That would probably be true if it weren’t for the pre-season expectations people had about them. Perhaps people's opinion on our season so far is a bit skewed if they've just looked at our better results and highlights and don’t wade through the endless crappy passages of play that we’ve conjured up so far this year. I’ve said in numerous blog posts already this season that the results we’ve been getting have been not very reflective of the quality of the football we’ve been playing. We’ve got very lucky a lot more often than we could even start to claim we’ve been unlucky. In fact, even I, the ultimate one-eyed biased commentator, would struggle to find any moments this year when we felt like we’d been hard done by. Well, maybe until this game, but more on that later. There was a certain enjoyment to be taken in the fact that this game was an ‘Excite match’ sponsored by a proctology clinic. I say proctology with the caveat that it is perhaps not totally accurate but having to make do with that word as my google search for ‘what do you call an arse doctor?’ hasn’t yielded any better results. Man of the match in the stadium Marcinho was the lucky one who received a ¥50000 voucher from the clinic for his performance. I hope for his sake that it’s a voucher for somewhere else, and that he doesn’t need to hang on to it till he has some kind of bum problem. (I’m sure I don’t need to clarify this, but for those who don’t understand British English, substitute ass for arse and butt for bum). So far, quite a lot of sentences I could never have imagined I would ever type in this post. Guess I’d better get to the root of the matter. Hmmmm. Maybe that also wasn’t a great choice of words…
I’d long been moaning that changes need to be made and it seems that finally Oniki thought the same thing. Our starting formation for this match was perhaps the first change in formation we’ve seen in a starting line up for a very long time. I say perhaps as I’m not totally convinced it was that different. But according to the pre-game display we were going with two defensive midfielders. I guess most people thought so when both Tachibanada and Joao Schmidt were announced as starting. This left Tono to fill the ‘Kengo role’, in front of them, in the middle behind the strikers. Wakizaka consequently dropped to the bench. Kobayashi totally disappeared from the squad and there was again no sign of Chanathip. And once again we went with a bench made up almost entirely of midfielders, one of whom was the lesser spotted Seko! I realise this is my own little thing that I keep on saying and most people probably don’t agree, but I still have no idea why Yamane is playing, particularly when you think that we have the ACL coming up very soon and he’s been playing 90 minutes for some team or another every other day for the last 3 years. Our ‘new system’ which I think looked a lot like our old system but with Tachibanada playing a touch further forward than he normally would and Joao taking his usual spot, didn’t have the most comfortable of starts and we had a major let off just eight minutes into the game. Thankfully for our sake this was about the last thing Kashiwa did in the game and once we’d settled down it was mainly one way traffic. Admittedly the kind of one way traffic that is often turned on its head in the 94th minute when a win is turned into a draw by one of our recently all too common last minute calamitous mistakes. Thankfully for us, it didn’t happen on this occasion, but as long as the score remained at only 1-0, it was a constant worry for me. Aside from what you would normally expect from the defensive midfielder, Joao’s main instructions seemed to be to play lovely long passes forwards for people to run on to. Recently it has been weird to see us playing a pass which ends up further from our own goal than where it started. So it was lovely to see us trying to attack a bit more quickly. Against Cerezo at 4-0 down we were still doing the whole slowly slowly build up, looking like we were aiming to hold on to the -4 goal difference. Marcinho was great in this game. His pace is fantastic and the fact that he runs with the ball towards the opposition goal instead of looking backwards all the time is a real bonus. His assist for Damiao’s goal was great and it was a lovely finish too. In all of the Marcinho excitement though I think that maybe Tono’s contribution went a little under the radar. I thought he was even better. He had a few chances where he was unlucky not to score, his set pieces caused some real danger and his whole play was just exciting. Not wanting to get too positive as I know you’re not here for that, we still have a few issues. We totally dominated the game but when I checked the stats I couldn’t believe we’d only had eight shots in the whole game. Obviously, you don’t usually score if you don’t shoot, and in a game where we in total control for long periods we still couldn’t do much up front. I suppose we did have the ball in the net on a couple of other occasions but both of those ‘goals’ were ruled out by VAR and an offside flag. Not scoring has been something that has become a bit of an issue for us both this year and in the second half of last season. We used to shoot and score a lot but recently if we’re involved in a high scoring match it will be because we’ve conceded four rather than actually done anything positive. If you believe the formation was changed, and as I said, I feel like it was at most a little slip of one of the magnets on Oniki’s board rather than anything more substantial, it’s hard to know if making our midfield more defensive will lead to us scoring more goals. It doesn’t sound like it will. And we also might have the issue that there are loads of attacking midfielders in our squad and there seems to now be only one spot for them. Whether the change is a long term one or just a brief recalibration while we get back on track and regain a bit of confidence, I don’t know. Definitely we needed this win though so well done Oniki for managing to get it and at the same time making the game quite enjoyable for the first time in a while.
There’s probably not much else to say about this game… Oh! Hang on, I forgot the one person who was the centre of attention! Ikeuchi, a referee whose name didn’t have many associations with me. When I went back through previous blog posts I discovered that he is the ref who was famous for always being horrendously one sided in favour of the away team. Of course there’s nothing wrong with this if we’re not playing at Todoroki. But sadly this was a home game for us. And boy did Ikeuchi live up to his reputation! As I said above, I have no problem with him ruling out a couple of goals for us (so much so that I haven’t even gone back and checked them on DAZN). Damn he was card happy though. And horrendously inconsistent (if you’re wearing blue tinted spectacles, with blue frames and a blue glasses case and some blue contact lenses in just in case, as I was). Apparently we only committed 13 fouls in the game compared to Kashiwa’s 12 but managed to get an astonishing 5 yellow cards, mostly for completely incomprehensible reasons. Joao’s was wrong, he clearly took the ball (edit: Oops, this comment is 100% inaccurate as the tackle I thought he'd been booked for that I watched repeatedly wasn't actually what he got the yellow for. That came about 30 seconds later. I stand by the fact that the tackle before wasn't a foul though), Ienaga’s was fair enough (kicking the ball away, but that never seems to really get given recently), Yamane’s was another possibly fair tackle where he seemed to get the ball and followed Tachibanada getting crunched and not even getting a foul. It’s a shame as Yamane hardly ever tackles recently and this will perhaps discourage him from doing so in the future. Tono got booked in the same move, apparently for aggressively throwing the ball down if we are judging by the Ikeuchi's gesture, but the he missed it himself and he needed to consult on his earpiece to find out about it. Not sure who he was talking to about it but I’ve watched the replay many times now and if he did bounce the ball aggressively he must have done it very quickly and to himself as there’s only a second or so when you can’t see the ball either at his feet as he blows for the foul or in his hands as he protests the foul. And honestly, you can’t blame our players for getting a bit frustrated as the ref was just doing his own predictable Ikeuchi thing. The one that really did it for me though was Sasaki’s yellow which looked like shoulder to shoulder to me and came just nine minutes after a similar challenge on him which didn’t result in a card. Either both are a yellow or neither. This season we have refs who love cards and refs who won’t give any cards. I guess both approaches are fine as long as they are administered fairly. Ikeuchi didn’t seem to be doing that. Presumably his reputation for favouring the away team comes from him not wanting to be seen to favour the home team and overcompensating. A bit like Iemoto giving us nothing after some nutters in our fan base applauded his announcement once. A kind of ‘I’ll show how wrong you are to think I favour team A by giving everything to team B, and then you’ll know for sure I’m not unfair’. I mean, I’ve spent way too long moaning in this section, and too long looking at replays of yellow card and non yellow card challenges. All you need to know you can learn from the clip going round on Twitter of Kengo absolutely losing it at another ridiculous Ikeuchi decision in a match a few years ago. If you can make the usually cool Kengo angry, you’re clearly making a mess of things.
As I said above, this was a performance and a win that felt much better than it probably was in reality. It’s great that we dominated but we still aren’t scoring. But it definitely gave both the supporters and the players a lift. And that’s good timing as we’re now off to the ACL in Malaysia. I’m not sure what the Chinese clubs approach will be this year. Last year they sent the kids and weren’t bothered about it at all. Our group looks trickier this year compared to last. Even the ‘weaker’ team will end up being one of the few who gets a home advantage although I hope the game won’t be played in their home stadium. And of course we’ll play Ulsan again. After all, we always play Ulsan. And we usually don’t do very well against them. Last year we went into the ACL in good form, stormed the group and got a stinker of a second round draw. This year we’re a bit all over the place but at least we have the knowledge that if we get through the group we won’t have to play Ulsan. Presumably if that does happen we’ll lose to Vissel Kobe or someone like that in more unfortunate circumstances. I would have a lot more interest in the ACL if we could actually attend. But it clearly our lack of success in the competition is a monkey that we need to get off our back. And the fact that the schedule for it is so spread out this season means that even if we did get a decent run in the competition it probably wouldn’t disrupt our schedule that much. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We struggled to get a last minute equaliser against a recently promoted team from J2 on Wednesday and that game was totally dire. One last thing, it was great to meet Tokyo Fox before the game, after following and enjoying his tweets for a long time. I’d like to offer him the job of being my official photographer as in his selfie he made me look like I wasn’t about to drop dead soon, which recently seems to be really difficult. Hope to see him again some time! Oh, mustn’t forget the old sign off. Go Frontale!
The stadium award went to Marcinho and that was a good call I think, but he’s just been really good most of the time recently so with that in mind I’ll give it to…
TONO Daiya - great game in a slightly different role. If his numerous shots (he must have had half of our total) had gone slightly closer he would have sewn this up easily but as it is, his whole contributions get him the prestigious Frontale Rabbit MOTM award. A ¥500 Quo card which he can use at the local invasive medicine clinic of his choice.
As a rule, I quite like repetition. I really like repetitive music. The first release on my micro record label was a 45 minute one song album by a French hurdy-gurdy, bass and drums trio where they basically play the same riff for the entire duration. I like routines, and enjoy going to the same places repeatedly. My job has lot of repetition in it too. Even so, you can probably take repetition a bit too far sometimes and I think we’re really reaching that point with Frontale this season now. After bumbling through the second half of last season and somehow still managing to win the league at a canter we’ve started 2022 with the same kind of useless and pointless late 2021 performances, but results seem to be finally catching up with us. You can’t deny it’s been long overdue. Nobody likes to hear me moaning about how badly we’re playing, particularly when we were top of the league and winning it like we were last year, but it was more than clear that we were getting found out then and you can firmly change that to ‘have totally been found out’ when you talk about this year. I don’t like to blow my own trumpet particularly, (well, maybe I like to do it a little bit), but I did start this year cautioning fans of any teams that played well against us and thought they had made great strides in their progress. It’s clear that we have got much worse rather than other teams getting much better. Well, at least it seems clear to me. Our victory over Kashima looks a bit weird now as they seem to be flying and we had pretty much dispatched them within the first 20 minutes. But looking closer, they did give us a goal and then we scored from a set piece, and after that just hung on for 70 minutes. Aside from those first 20 minutes, I don’t think there have really been any positive moments this season. We’ve just about scraped through on more than a few occasions. Attendances for our matches are maybe reflecting this. Perhaps we had a lot of glory hunter fans who have now seen the light and can’t be bothered to put themselves through these 90 minute assemblages of crap. Personally, the parts of the games I’m looking forward to most at the moment are the things before and afterwards. This game away at Jubilo perfectly illustrates that. It was a great day of having some nice beers and doing some tourism that was only let down by the couple of hours of the football match that was the reason for the trip. As I said at the start, I like repetition, but am fully aware that my readers might not feel the same way so I’ll keep this brief as I really don’t have anything much new to say. Ok, here goes…
We saw a few changes in the starting line up but Oniki avoided the biggest issue again and again I can’t say Yamane did much to remember. Likewise Wakizaka. Ienaga dropped to the bench which I thought was probably the right idea but I can’t say I’m sold on Kobayashi on the right. I think he is wasted there. I’d love to see him get a chance in the middle but given that it seems to be forbidden for us to change our formation he’s always going to struggle to start there with both our current top scorer Chinen and last season’s MVP Damiao being ahead of him in the pecking order. Oniki doesn’t like to change things at the best of times so the thought that he might at some stage use his apparent third choice striker up front seems to be nigh on an impossibility. I’m not going to moan about Chinen getting the nod though as I think he’s doing really well. There was one moment in this game where he looked like he was about to score an amazing goal after a lovely drag back but the shot didn’t live up to the drag back. He did save us though as we pluckily snatched a point with a 94th minute equaliser against a team who’d conceded 11 times in six games and had an aged and immobile defence who were going to be the main reason for what people consider to be their inevitable relegation. The match stats are slightly misleading as the loads of shots we had mainly came in the last ten minutes after we’d conceded. The first half stats feel more accurate for the game as a whole. Six shots from us and none on target. Apparently after last weekend’s disaster Oniki said we would be focusing on being more aggressive in defence and attack. This seemed to only manifest itself through some perhaps ‘extremely aggressive’ sideways and backwards passing. So basically no change. This game would have seemed more likely to have occurred before the Cerezo game, showing the stage where the wheels were wobbling but hadn’t quite come off. Some might have expected a spirited response to that awful performance against Cerezo with us getting hammered at home but let’s be honest, we haven’t played in a spirited way for quite a while now. The big concern is that I don’t think Oniki is willing to or maybe not capable of doing anything rather than change a player or two and carry on with the same system and style (although calling it style seems to be aggrandising the manner in which we are treading water). There is a certain irony in the way that the day of the game had been one of us watching the clock, rushing to our next exciting plan feeling like time was racing, whereas the majority of the game felt more like being at work with nothing to do apart from a very unappealing and difficult mind-numbing task. Or maybe sitting at a station with almost no charge left on your phone trying to occupy yourself during a two hour wait for a connecting train. If only they’d had a selection of leaflets available advertising the local textile or pottery museum available in the stand at Jubilo. I might have at least been able to learn something. Watching this game taught me nothing I didn’t already know, We’re suffering the three-peat wobbles again, where Oniki just does the same few things over and over again and occasionally, very occasionally, something not completely negative happens.
Quick bit of ref talk. Ueda is a ref that I thought we hadn’t had many encounters with but my blog seems to think otherwise. He’s clearly from the ‘give nothing’ group of refs. It would be nice if there were a few more who didn’t fall into the ‘give nothing’ or ‘give everything’ camp and instead just gave some stuff. To be honest though, the only complaint I have about Ueda in this game is that I reckon he could have sent off Jubilo’s Ito for a second yellow on at least two occasions in the second half. But that was it really, so this isn’t a big moan really. I can’t blame the ref for us starting slowly and remaining slow for the whole of the first half. When we finally did start to get something going at the start of the second half, Oniki made a double substitution and we were back to square one. I thought Tono did really well in this game. He was of course changed in this first lot of subs. I feel sorry for Kozuka who gave the ball away trying to run out of our own box as they scored from the chance. It seems a bit unfair that a sub should get the blame for a mistake which only highlighted the starters absolute failure to do anything in the first half. I don’t know if we have a lot of injuries or illnesses at the moment but the bench did seem a bit weird with Tsukagawa and Joao Schmidt on there. We probably wouldn’t have had to change the defensive midfielder position twice in the game. No sign of Oshima anywhere which is a bit weird. Chanathip was absent too. Many people seemed to think Matsui might be this year’s breakout star and he hasn’t even made the bench. As for Seko… Well actually I have a theory about Seko. I wonder if he is considered by Oniki to be this year’s right back cover. Oniki rarely likes to put a right or left back on the bench unless they are able to play somewhere else like Kurumaya is. So perhaps Seko is waiting for a chance to play right back when Yamane is away on international duty. After which he’ll recede into the shadows again. This point is slightly undermined by the fact that Seko clearly can play elsewhere… I wish Oniki would rest Yamane (more repetition from me here…). He looks tired and also more worryingly disinterested. If he were to get an offer from overseas I think he’d have no hesitation in going. I don’t know if Oniki is worried about upsetting him by not playing him. Or whether he just has no confidence in anyone else playing there. But to be honest, I can’t really see why anyone has much confidence in any of our team at the moment. And it also looks like the team have no confidence in themselves either. Things just really aren’t going for us right now and we need either some kind of stirring motivational words from Oniki to the team, or alternatively a change of ideas. I think the former is more likely but maybe wouldn’t be as effective as the latter. Certainly Oniki and the players have achieved so much in the last few seasons that they have earned the right to have a dodgy period. And perhaps the results we’ve got this year might have covered up the fact that we’ve have about 10 dodgy games so far this year. I just really hope we could not be quite so shit going forwards. Watching us has got very boring and it’s very frustrating considering the talent we have in the squad.
Next up, another pre-season relegation cert, Kashiwa Reysol, who have only one less point than us having played two games less. They have only conceded three times in their seven games. Combine this with the fact that we seem to be incapable of scoring at the moment, and it looks like it might not be too much fun again on Saturday. After that game we head off to the ACL, so who know what kind of trouble we might be in when we arrive back. Certainly this unrelenting misery isn’t ideal preparation for a competition that we do tend to cock up quite often. Oh, it’s all hearts and flowers and optimism from me, isn’t it? In an attempt to snatch back some lucky rituals, I’m going to go back to my old sign off on these blog posts and see if that works as most of my other pre-match customs seem to have failed now. So fingers crossed this will shift things back to being a bit more positive. Go Frontale!
Well, that wasn’t much fun. The shitty performances just keep on coming this year, and for once we actually got the beating we have probably deserved on a few occasions. Losing this game means that we have equalled our 2021 season total of defeats after having played only eight times. We’ve conceded four goals twice in these eight games, and our total goals conceded after eight games is two fifths of the total we conceded in thirty eight games last year. Plenty of people went to this game in their new 2022 season shirts which got delivered shortly after our last game. I imagine I can’t be alone in thinking that my new shirt is now unlucky. But we probably shouldn’t hold our shirts responsible. This was just a tired and unimaginative performance which is starting to become a bit of a feature of 2022. I feel quite sorry for half of the players who were on the pitch for the second half as they had nothing to do with the awful first half performance that had lost us the game. Weirdly though, most of the players who’d had the most to do with our poor first half performance had remained on the pitch after the quadruple half time change. But I’ll come on to that later (and probably bore on about it for quite a while). Cerezo are a bit of a bogey team for us. At least intermittently. We have hammered them a few times recently, but they normally seem to frustrate us when we play against them. I wouldn’t say that was the case in this game though. We basically gave them a goal which gave them something to hang on to and allowed them to move into what was more of a 9-0-1 formation. Then we gave them another goal. And another one. Then had a little break before giving them another. Before this game they’d only won once this season. And they’ve scored one third of their total season’s goals against us in this one game. I mean, I know it’s still a bit early in the season to be talking about these kind of stats. Particularly for Cerezo who have only played six games. Of course, we have played two more, and even after suffering another rotten defeat we still somehow remain ahead of YFM in the table (small consolation). However both Kashima and Kashiwa can both overtake us by taking something from their games in hand. Kashima, who everyone was saying this year would score a lot but struggle in defence have won all of their games apart from when we beat them and have only conceded five times in six games. Kashiwa who were most people’s favourites to go down and who lost the player who most people considered to be their best to Nagasaki before the season started have won four out of six and have only conceded three times! So you could say it’s a bit of a weird and surprising season so far. And although it seems slightly strange to say, it’s probably also surprising that our usual failure to have any defenders has finally caught up with us this year. It’s been a bit of miracle that we’ve dodged that bullet year after year but it’s definitely come home to roost now. Oh well, I’d better get on with the Frontale moaning.
As I said above we looked tired in this game. Which is a bit weird as all but two of the starting line up hadn’t played a match for two weeks. Perhaps the biggest issue is that the two who had played and had also traveled to Australia both started this game. Yamane, who hasn’t exactly been sparkling this year, played 180 minutes for Japan but still came back straight into the starting line up. Taniguchi played 90 minutes and sat on the bench for 90 minutes but also made the flight to Australia also started. But this isn’t really a surprise. We have been a little unlucky with injuries at the back. Maybe… I mean we knew that Jesiel wouldn’t be available for a while this year but we still didn’t sign any reinforcements (or try out any of the players we have in the squad that are actually defenders). Kurumaya coming back from injury and then getting injured again is unfortunate and has left us in the position where we have Yamamura, a midfielder, starting game after game at centre back. And with no cover on the bench. Well, maybe no cover, as it now seems that Tsukagawa is being groomed to be the new Yamamura in that he’ll be on the bench as someone who can be put anywhere on the pitch but with centre back high up on that list. Of course I would say this, but I thought he did ok at centre back in this game. Certainly better than his centre back partner. He made a few mistakes but more often than not made up for them by recovering and winning the ball back. In recent years we’ve have had a succession of players in our team who have been signed to cover the right back spot and none of them have ever really been given much of a chance. Diogo Mateus played only three games in his year with us, (playing 90 minutes each time with us not conceding and winning every game). He didn’t even make the bench for any other game. In the league, Zain made the bench and was an unused sub twice in two years and started one league game which we won and kept a clean sheet in. Yamane has played pretty much every other league game, basically 76 out of 80 games. Think Tachibanada was the other player who played right back for one game. This year we were perhaps encouraged that we’d have someone who could take some of the strain off Yamane as Seko was able to play there. I wonder what’s happened to him? I suppose the issue is that we have some players who could cover these spots but never get the chance to do so. For that, you’ve got to blame Oniki. There’s no way Yamane should have started this game given his exertions and his general flatness this year so far. You could say the same about Taniguchi, but I think that, unlike Yamane, until this game he’s had a pretty good season. And there is no-one who could take his place anyway. Blame Oniki for that again. It’s undeniable that Tanigchui didn’t do ‘pretty good’ in this game though. I tweeted during the match that Taniguchi had got a hat trick (of fuck ups leading to Cerezo goals). It was a bit unfair as the second one didn’t seem to be wholly his fault but I think it was a fair point anyway and he did mess up a bit for the fourth goal too so maybe I was being prescient. Yamane looked knackered every time he had to defend but somehow found a burst of energy when he could run forwards which is a little worrying. Please give him a rest for the next game.
So with us trailing 3-0 at half time and people having mares all over the pitch we knew changes were going to come. But wow, what changes they were. We’d named a bench with a keeper, three midfielders and three attackers on it, so immediately our options were somewhat hamstrung. Almost everyone had had a bit of a dodgy first half (one exception who’ll be mentioned later), but notably bad first halves were put in by the aforementioned Taniguchi and Yamane, along with the classic 2022 season ‘not-doing-much-ers’ Wakizaka and Ienaga. Astonishingly all of them remained on the pitch for the second half in spite of Oniki doing a quadruple substitution. Wakizaka still seems to be struggling to deal with the pressure of inheriting Kengo’s number 14 shirt. I feel like he needs to just relax a bit. He had some good touches and moves in this game but they were massively outnumbered by sloppy and costly mistakes. I think it’s a confidence thing. Ienaga got my goat a little in the last home game when he refused to be subbed in the last minute of the match. It wasn’t a good look. With us three goals down with 30 minutes left in this match his number went up, with us using our final sub, and he strolled off the pitch as if the scoreline were reversed and he was simultaneously soaking up his applause and running the clock down. This too was not a good look at all. So four early changes. But no possibility of really changing the centre backs as even though Taniguchi was having a mare, we had no-one on the bench. No, apparently we could change the centre backs as Oniki made the absolutely mind-blowing decision to take off Yamamura and leave Taniguchi on the pitch. Yamane also survived. We didn’t have anyone on the bench to play in his position, but I guess we could have moved Tachibanada there. Oh, no we couldn’t as he was also taken off and replaced with Kozuka, who seems to be one of our more attacking midfielders who was instead played in the anchor role. Tsukagawa went in at centre back, Tono came on for Chanathip and Chinen on for Damiao, who celebrated his 100th league game by being subbed off at half time. I know it’s all too easy to complain without having any suggestions so maybe I should suggest something with the big caveat that I don’t know anything. For the second half I’d have gone with a back four of Tachibanada, Yamamura, Taniguchi and Sasaki (I know Taniguchi was having a mare, but as I’ve said plenty of times, we didn’t have any other options), stick Tsukagawa in the anchor role, play Kozuka and Chanathip in front of him and then put Tono or Kobayashi in on the right, leave Damiao up front or put Chinen in, and leave Marcinho on the left. Maybe my team wouldn’t have done any better but I think it would have made more sense. But Oniki seems scared of changing Ienaga or Yamane or Taniguchi. It’s a bit of a worry. Honestly, Wakizaka, Yamane and Ienaga really shouldn’t start the next game. But I guess they probably all will. At least it will be a fun trip I suppose. Given that Iwata aren’t the strongest team we’ll be facing this year, we could probably change things around a bit. Equally though, Oniki might see this as an opportunity to get some confidence back with the same old starting lien up. If he does, I predict that confidence were be even further damaged by another horrible defeat. Don’t forget the fact that even with all these substitutions being made and with us really needing a goal we left Miyagi, probably the player most likely to actually fucking have a fucking shot on the bench as an unused sub. I guess he was somewhat scuppered by Marcinho playing in his spot and being the one player who was actually having a decent game though. I’m sure we could have accommodated both in the team somehow couldn’t we? Oh no, sorry, that would have required some kind of change of tactics or focus or even a plan B and that was never going to happen was it?
A few quick words about the ref. I’d never seen him in charge before I think. The only record of him taking charge of one of our games that I had was a game that I missed when I was on my summer holiday (call yourself a real fan etc…). I didn’t have much to moan about with him to be honest. I thought we could have had a penalty in the 17th minute but maybe I was grasping for some kind of lifeline. One thing that slightly annoyed me was that he was constantly telling Cerezo to stop wasting time (which they did pretty much from the off, even before they were leading), doing that ‘hold up your arm and point to your watch’ thing but then in spite of that and three goals having been scored only added 2 minutes at the end of the first half. To be honest though, it would only have given Cerezo more time to score more goals, so in the end he was probably doing us a favour. It was nice to see a few more people back in the stadium. We didn’t manage to break the 20000 barrier though which was a shame, but given the distinct lack of fun that we’ve had at matches so far this year isn’t a great surprise. Maybe as the weather warms up a little and, who knows, maybe we might even start playing a bit better, we might see a few more people back. There has been talk of the J League thinking about the possibility of allowing singing again. In spite of what Urawa fans might think, it’s still not allowed (oooooooh, those bad boys! They’re sooooo dangerous and ooooooooh wild). That would definitely make the experience a bit more fun and as someone who attends matches to have a nice time rather than someone who pours over the footage online searching for details to make ‘smart’ comments on Twitter, that would be a very welcome thing.
Next up, as mentioned above, Jubilo Iwata away on Wednesday. We have plans to visit two brewpubs before the game and then another two afterwards, so to be honest, the match might actually not be very clear or remain in the memory for long. How nice it would be if we could actually have a bit of a shake up of line-up and maybe we could even play some nice football for once this year. It will probably be more sideways and backwards passing against a ten man defence after Ralph has got them an early lead though. Come on Oniki, do the right thing and change things up a bit. The players need it and we need it too!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 15. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 18. CHANATHIP
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for YAMAMURA 46')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 65')
MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for TACHIBANADA 46')
FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for CHANATHIP 46')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 46')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
My Frontale Man Of The Match
You'd probably normally expect me to skip this in a hissy fit but I think there was actually, unbelievably, someone who deserved it. So, it goes to...
MARCINHO - was having a lot of joy down the left in the first half and throughout the game looked like our only real goal threat. The fact that he was still running and scored in the 86th minute with the game already well lost says a lot. Well done to him!
