Vs Kashiwa Reysol (away) 19/9/22 J League match 30

Kashiwa Reysol 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

With a decent break between this match and our next game away at Sapporo we’ve got a lot of time and a lot to think about. I didn’t intend to put off writing this till after YFM decided to prolong our agony by not winning rather than just putting us out of our misery. I’m not sure that result has changed much about what I am writing, but it has perhaps kept that tiniest of flames of hope still burning. This year both YFM and us seem to want to avoid making any kind of bold moves towards any kind of success. In recent years we’ve enjoyed running away with the league but this time round it looks like there might be a much closer title race. Honestly speaking though, I’m sure it’s already over and YFM are just trolling us in a ‘look at what the situation could have been if you hadn’t been so shit’ way. Shit is a pretty succinct way of describing us over the last couple of games. I’m not sure if this game or the Nagoya one was better. Probably this one, but only in the first half. We’ve only managed to hit the target seven times in the last 180 minutes which isn’t really the way you win the league, is it? Plenty of time before the next game means that I could really spend a lot of time carefully crafting this blog post. However, it also means that I could get this done as quickly as possible and then not have to think about the title race for a pleasantly long time. I’m going to go for the latter option and I’ll do it in the old Frontale Rabbit style again.

 

Us -

Knackered players and an almost complete lack of rotation has been something of a Frontale trope recently. So surely with the prospect of a couple of weeks rest lying tantalisingly close after this game Oniki would go with the same guys who’d failed to create anything much in the Nagoya game, wouldn’t he? To causal observers that sentence might have sounded slightly contradictory but of course Oniki goes with a mantra of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it… and if it is broke, also don’t fix it’. It was also nicely described by Kawasaki Frontale FR on Twitter recently along the lines of Oniki never changes a losing team. Of course a caveat needs to be added to this saying ‘unless it is enforced’, but at the same time we could have just stopped after the word changes and the sentence would still be accurate. So it was something of a shock to see some changes in this game. Well changes to the starting line up but it was basically the same players involved as usual. Yamane was suspended so we knew we were going to have someone playing out of position at right back. It came as something of a surprise to me, (but not to others), to see that Sasaki was put in there with Nobori coming back in at left back. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Nobori fill in at right back in the past to not great success so I was delighted it was Sasaki there instead. And I thought he did really well. So that’s the positivity mostly over and done with. Kobayashi came in for Chinen, Chanathip for Wakizaka, and Miyagi for Marcinho. I thought they all did ok but all looked like they felt like they were playing for their futures. I don’t think we’ll be wanting to get rid of any of them at the end of the season, but I would completely understand it if some players decided they’d rather try their luck elsewhere. I always moan about our lack of rotation and the fact that subs hardly get a chance to stake a claim as most of them usually come on with not more than ten minutes remaining in what is usually a situation where it’s too late to have any effect. 

 

 

Add to this the fact that our tactics never really seem to change, just the personnel. I feel like I write this every week to be honest. The other recent tactics change we’ve seen is when we’re REALLY REALLY desperate is Oniki pushing Jesiel up front. It worked against YFM, but failed in this game. A quick word on the players who came in. Nobori and Miyagi had an awful start to the game but both seemed to get into the swing of things as the first half progressed. Miyagi seems so desperate to show what he can do that he often seems to over complicate things, trying something fancy instead of something simple. It didn’t work in this game for either him or Ienaga, who can normally get away with it. I’m pleased Kobayashi got his goal and he seemed fairly decent in the first half too. You could sense his desperation though in the second half when things didn’t quite go for him. A bit more pitch time might give him some more confidence. Not sure if Oniki will give it to him. It seems like a waste of time trying to send goal kicks to him to win in the air though, which is perhaps another example of Oniki not being able to change the system, only the players. Chanathip did pretty well too I think. He too must be wondering what he needs to do to get a run in the team. When he started playing well he was dropped and had only had a token one minute of pitch time at the Thai event game recently. In Nagoya he didn’t make it on even though we hadn’t used all our subs. In the second half we totally collapsed and aside from a brief flurry of action towards the end of the game we were pretty flat and maybe quite lucky to come away with a draw. People always ask me when I’m moaning what I would do differently. To be honest, I don’t know, but I’m not a football manager. And also I feel that the damage was done a long time ago, through lack of reinforcements before the season to cover injuries and our set in stone line-ups and tactics. Considering the season Kashiwa have had, a draw away there is probably a decent result. The problem is we don’t need merely decent results now as some truly awful performances earlier in the season have left us needing magnificent results and slip ups from YFM. It’s obviously still not over, but realistically it’s been over for quite a while now and we’re just playing out our remaining fixtures to try and hold on to second.

Them -

Kashiwa are a team that many neutrals seem to love for their atmosphere and stadium. Whenever I hear this I presume that these people have never been in the away section at their ground. It used to be an absolute horror of an experience with endless queuing, limited facilities, no possibility of re-entry and absolute disdain from the hosts. One of my most vivid memories of a J League game is going there during a typhoon, the game being delayed for a couple of hours and the only shelter for the away fans being in the toilets. That game should never have been played as the pitch was ridiculous but the J League does seem to be reluctant to call games off in those kind of situations. This year I’m pleased to report that things have improved! If we wanted we could leave the ground after we’d entered. Perhaps this is a COVID thing as it doesn’t make that much sense to keep people cooped up if they don’t want to be. There’s not really much in the area to do though so probably better to just stay inside and grin and bear it. They actually announced our team this time too! Previously they’ve not bothered. To make up for that generosity though the Kashiwa fans decided to start drumming as soon as the annoucement started to show what good sports they are. Slightly bizarrely they had little tables with pictures of alcohol hand sanitizer on it saying we should make sure we use it. Sadly they didn’t actually put any sanitizer there, so perhaps it was more of a slightly late piece of advice for the day or something we were supposed to think about going forward in our own lives. Much like with Nagoya, and I know this is going to sound like sour grapes again, Kashiwa could probably have won the game if they hadn’t been so focused on wasting time to get the draw. The last few minutes were absolutely farcical. More about that on the next section. Douglas seemed to be a bit of an arsehole, constantly whinging, diving and play acting. Perhaps this explains why he’s had so many clubs in the last few years. Absolutely typical that he scored. They seemed to know what to do to keep us from threatening them, with us often struggling to get out of our own half with the ball. Perhaps they have a manager who has different plans for different situations! And I should also say that the pre-game lights out and light sticks out thing was actually really good. I guess from recent matches that there aren’t many epileptic people in Japan as normally I would have expected a warning before what seemed at times to be approaching strobe lights. Really geed everyone up for the game though. We were then geed down quite quickly once the match started. One final mention of the fact that at half time they seemed to be referring to the match as a special 'excite match'. I swear it sounded like they said it was a ‘hometown sex’ match. Or perhaps they said ‘hometown sax’. Whether they were trying to encourage the locals to make beautiful music either in the bedroom or the practice room, I like to think that it was an interesting way of getting more people to the stadium.

 

Ref -

Mikuriya is a new ref for us I think. Certainly new for me. When I saw him announced it rang a bell and I found that he’d recently had a 'mare in the Gamba / Sagan Tosu game where I heard he loved to book overseas players for things that he didn’t book Japanese players for and was generally wildly inconsistent. I didn’t know at the time that he was the ref who didn’t even book Nara for his tackle on Nishimura in last week’s YFM game. I don’t think even I can pretend that was the right decision. So perhaps he thought he should pay YFM back for that error. He certainly came out of the blocks fast when it came to getting his cards out. For us anyway, booking Jesiel after five minutes. Neutral observers have confirmed that many other players made equally ‘bad’ if not worse challenges and avoided a booking in this match. He also booked Marcinho for what was probably his first tackle too. As none of the other Brazilians were booked, in spite of two of Kashiwa’s fouling a lot and doing absolutely ridiculous dives in order to try to either get Jesiel sent off or to get a penalty, I wonder if there is something else that Jesiel and Marcinho have in common that perhaps Joao Schmidt doesn’t have? He definitely seemed to not give out cards in a consistent way. I think however our biggest gripe against him will be for the total lack of control when it came to Kashiwa's approach to playing out the injury time at the end of the second half. There was an absolutely insane, almost slapstick display of time wasting from Kashiwa, with one of their players going down, feigning injury, then cramp, bringing on the stretcher, declining the stretcher, strolling over to be subbed and then four of five changes to the substitution with different numbers being held up and then taken down and changed. It lasted two and a half minutes and Mikuriya blew up a minute after the indicated four minutes had been played. Taniguchi was furious, as were quite a lot of us fans. Kashiwa were clearly taking the piss and he just let them get away with it and then didn’t add the time on. I think our frustration came more from the fact that we knew we’d messed up any chance of the title rather than any conviction that we were going to win the game in the minute and a half more that we should have had. We were having a decent period, until the initial Kashiwa play acting broke up our momentum, but I think we were pushing so many players forward that we were equally likely to concede as we were to score. But it’s nice to have someone to take out our frustration on rather than realise that the blame lies a bit closer to home. I wish we could just have a normal referee and then maybe we’d realise that we’re just not good enough this year, rather than blaming everything on being cheated. But even saying that, Please, let us not have Mikuriya again this season, or actually ever again. Another ref gets added to my black list.

 

Next up, Consadole away, which is our last fun away trip of the season. Well apart from FC Tokyo on the final day of the season, but that’s not really a trip where you can go to new places, try new beers and do new touristy stuff. I don’t think there’s anything to do in Tobitakyu or even Chofu is there? Apart from stand outside a convenience store. We'll be playing Consadole at the same time as YFM are away at Nagoya. Presumably they won’t have the same problems there that we did. We’re running out of opportunities for YFM to slip up. But as I always say, even if they do, we’re even more likely to do so ourselves. Maybe we'll manage to either hang on to or even extend a one goal lead in that match. I guess we can dream! Before that next game we have a nice two week break but Taniguchi and Yamane will be off on international duty so basically two of our players that need a rest the most won’t be able to get one. Hopefully the others will though and then I guess we’ll be back to the usual starting lineups again. It’s another singing game which I’m really happy about. I’m really looking forward to that trip. In fact I’m going to plan our itinerary now. Mustn’t forget that there’s a game of football to watch in the middle of the fun stuff. 

Team 

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 15. SASAKI Asahi

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 5')

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 18. CHANATHIP

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for CHANATHIP 71')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for IENAGA 85')

MF 19. TONO Daiya (on for NOBORIZATO 71')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 71')

FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 80') (on for MIYAGI 62')

MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Not a great deal of options for this. We looked very tired again and it just seems that we don’t really have the belief that we can win at the moment. For his semi-triumph over adversity I’ll give it to…

JESIEL - Mikuriya booking him early and probably unjustifiably could have totally ruined his game and our season (kind of…), but he played almost 90 minutes knowing that anything marginal could earn him a red and still put in a good shift.

Goals

 

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 38' 0-1

DOUGLAS (Kashiwa) 63' 1-1

Highlights 

 

Vs Nagoya Grampus (away) 14/9/22 J League match 22

Aichi Grampus 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Drinking from my Frontale mug on the morning of the game no longer works. Changing my player towel when we’re not playing well no longer works. Taking an apparently random assortment of stuffed animals to every game no longer works. The lucky charms are not lucky enough when they come up against our predictably frequent lulls of absolute mediocrity that we just keep experiencing this year. Don’t get me wrong, I know that a lot of teams would be delighted to be in our position in the league, but with the talent we have and our recent record, 2022 will have to go down as a year of massive disappointment, rivaled only by 2019, the last time we were up for the three-peat. But at least that year we just about managed to come away with a Levain cup win. This year that hope is long gone with us falling short of even disappointingly mediocre performances in the cups and being bounced out of all of them very early. So what can we take from 2022? Not much. YFM are going to win the league but they’re not even that good. The problem is that we’re utterly shit when it comes to playing ‘easily winnable’ games. We’ve spent 2022 alternating between going through some completely bizarre starting elevens and then finding something that works and utterly screwing it into the ground till it is totally dead. For example, Shonan away, Nagoya away… probably a lot more but to be honest I’m enjoying the way that I’m banishing the bad memories of awful performances this year out of my head quite rapidly. Get those toxic memories out and get on with life perhaps. I’m going to divide this post into a brief description of how and why I think we were so bad, a bit about the controversy surrounding this game and some big old moans about a ref and the stadium (or more accurately its location). These kind of fit the old ‘us’, ‘them’, and ‘ref and VAR’ headings so I’m going with those for today for some kind of retro Frontale Rabbit feel. So let’s get on with it before we have to leave for the Kashiwa game.

Us -

First, why were we so bad? We were knackered again (still the absolute minimum of rotation, as predicted, in this game, I think actually no rotation at all). We’ve played too many games with the same players with not enough breaks. It’s been obvious previously when this was starting to happen but it seemed that Oniki couldn’t spot it. To be honest, I think it’s more that he has been so desperately grasping for wins this year that as soon as we get one, the team and tactics get set in stone and become unchangeable apart from in an emergency. Shonan away was a perfect demonstration of this and that was only two games ago so it’s clear that this has been a season wide problem. And I’m pretty sure that Oniki was desperately hoping we could get through this game and the fast approaching Kashiwa game with the same players and then most of them would be able to have a rest during the international break and we could continue with the same players again after that’s done. Quite why Oniki has failed to notice our tiredness all year, I don’t know. But it’s not just that we wear out the same players all the time, it’s the tactics too. We’ve always struggled against defensive teams but still have no answer. Oniki briefly experimented with a change of shape but it didn’t work. For some reason he’s never considered a change of approach. And so it continues. In recent games we play exactly the same way regardless of the score or the stage of the match. Subs make little impact as they are made as a response to us not being able to deal with the opposition’s tactics but basically just consist of putting new players into the same impossible situation. In this game we didn't even use all of our subs, and I feel that speaks volumes. We've apparently got our best players starting and the next best players on the bench based on form. But when the starting eleven don't do the job it seems that we don't even have any hope that the subs can make that much of a difference. It's just always like for like and carry on as you were. We only had six shots in this match, and only two of them were on target. Out of these six, one was the goal and three were massive misses from very good opportunities. If you only have six shots, you've got to at least put them kind of on target, but with our fragile confidence, (up one week and crashing back down in time for the start of the next game. Who knows what's happening between matches, perhaps at the training ground?), and some additional complete fatigue it's no surprise that we're not playing well. Oh, and I feel like I’ll be moaning about backward short taken free kicks for ever. We’ve got players who are good at scoring from headers but we only ever give them a chance to head the ball at corners. I know I’ve said this before but it probably bears repeating, but there’s that cliche about how the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different outcomes. Perhaps this is a big misquote from me or I’m massively misinterpreting the meaning, but I think for Frontale fans we could simplify it by saying the definition of insanity is Oniki’s tactics. The title has been gone for a while as far as I’m concerned, YFM kept us hanging on slightly, flattering us with their shiteness, but we whacked back that shiteness second serve with a magnificent shiteness return down the line and out of reach to confirm our status as the real shiteness champions! Game set and match! Bravo! So the shiteness title cup (or is it a shield?) is something we could put in our trophy cabinet this year which is a bit of luck as there’s nothing else that will be going on there. Or actually… is there?

Them -

Forget the shiteness trophy, we can proudly display ‘the moral high ground cup’! It seems a bit weird to start the section about them talking about us, but the big story going into this game was the gripes about Nagoya basically cheating the system to get this game postponed earlier this season when it wasn’t very convenient for them. Oniki wasn’t happy about it in his pre-match comments. He once again talked about us having done the right thing when it came to COVID and the effect it has had on our season. Don’t forget, aside from us, it’s probably only been Avispa who have had to play games whilst in such a terrible state. Perhaps we can also put the ‘four goalies in a match day squad shield’ in the cabinet this year. We certainly can’t put an away win against Urawa there as we played that game ridiculously depleted and haven’t really recovered since then. I’m still not totally sure if we did the right thing. Well, obviously we did the ‘right thing’ but I can’t help but feel that if we’d played within the rules but somehow used them a bit better like plenty of others clubs have, we wouldn’t be as totally out of the title race as we now are. Nagoya’s bending of the rules allowed them to postpone a match when they had some important players missing to a time when they had a fuller squad to chose from. Oniki was further angered by the fact that the game was changed from a Saturday game that more of our supporters would have been able to attend to a Wednesday night kick off which made a day trip impossible. I think the J League should take some responsibility for this to be honest, but they never seem to take supporters into account when scheduling games. The final part of Oniki’s beef was that the game was initially not supposed to be a singing game as it wasn’t allowed then but got changed into a singing game due to the new rules. The feeing was that if it had been the other way round, we would have played the game under the conditions that the initial game was supposed to be played. I think these are all legitimate moans, but at the same time, I think them leveraging the conditions as much as possible in their favour wasn’t the reason we failed to win. That was totally down to us. Seemingly to ‘apologise’ to us, they sent their whole family of mascots round before the game to do a deep bow to our supporters. I think everyone would have much rather it had been the chairman and the board but presumably they were too busy having a good laugh about how they’d screwed us over and had got away with it relatively lightly. Shittiness from the club as a whole is something that should not necessarily be carried over to the supporters and players. But on this occasion, I think elements of both of these groups were equally shitty. Nagoya’s game plan seemed to be to go for the draw from the start and they time wasted relentlessly and rolled around on the pitch infinitely. Our goal, which if you believe Twitter moaning was a massive handball, disregarding the fact that it was referred to VAR (twice I think. It got given but then their players moaned and the ref had another finger on the ear moment. Nice to see you can challenge the decision nowadays. If they’d have been drawing at the time I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them challenge it for the remainder of the game and hold on to that precious point), and wasn’t ruled out. And also the fact that the ‘incriminating’ still was so blurred that it showed a rectangular ball. I’ll moan more about their players in the ref section though. We were so dull in the second half that Nagoya could have easily won the game if they’d wanted it a bit more and at the same time hadn’t been so utterly pedestrian. I think that they were so focussed on getting the draw that they didn’t realise a better result for them actually existed. Finally in this big old moany section, a few moans about the stadium. The Toyota stadium is a great stadium to watch football in. It’s well designed and the view is good. Sadly it’s absolutely in the middle of fucking nowhere. I know it wasn’t for the reasons I’m about to suggest, but Consadole Sapporo added Hokkaido to their name and Grulla Morioka added Iwate to their name. I know these name changes were probably to give them a broader appeal in their home prefecture. At least both of those teams actually play their games in the city that is in the team’s name though. Nagoya Grampus should be renamed Aichi Grampus while they aren’t playing games in Nagoya. It’s shocking how long the train takes to get to the stadium in Toyota city from Nagoya. For you to watch Nagoya play football. And then even when you arrive you have a 20 minute walk to the stadium. I can deal with out of town stadiums. Usually they are built in areas with transport links or they lay on shuttle buses. I totally get that you can’t build a big new stadium in the middle of a city. But quite why it has to be both miles out of the city and then still miles from the station I don’t know. After the game, we left soon after (perhaps generously) applauding the players off the pitch but before the controversy started. More on that soon. After racing pretty hard for the station in the hope that we might get back to Nagoya before they closed down the public transport for the night we found that the next train was in 20 minutes. I think we’d just missed one, but honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to that stadium for an evening game as it’s just not worth the hassle. I really hope they finish the refurbishment of the Mizuho stadium soon as although the stadium wasn’t as good, it was at least in Nagoya, and was on a train line where the frequency is more than one train every half hour. A quick last bit in this section about the controversy. Earlier I said you can’t really blame the players or fans for the club acting so dishonorably. I then went on to blame the players and now it’s time to blame fans too. Some of the Aichi Grampus fans took such offence at our post game sour grapes banners about them kind of cheating the system by trying to invade our end. I’ve only seen one video and I wonder if it might have all been a bit like when those shirtless Kashima (I think) fans were so enraged that they almost burst though the extremely flimsy unsupported plastic barrier that was ‘holding them back’. It’s pretty unedifying for us to ape Urawa and put up a whingy banner at the end of the game like we did, (although I think we do have a point, albeit one which would have seemed less whingy if made before we had failed to win), but to go for the tough guy hooligan invade the away end takes things a step more arseholey. I imagine the whole incident has started a bit of a beef between the two sets of fans now though. I think and I hope that from our side it will only take the form of a bit of booing though.

Ref -

Onto Araki, who never ceases to amaze when it comes to his level of ineptitude. I haven’t seen the reply of our goal which was apparently so controversial that according to Twitter some money must have changed hands. Presumably the same people had missed the relentless assault on Marcinho on the first half, which however bad the challenge was never reached the yellow card threshold. We got loads of them though, perhaps some justified (can’t remember, can’t be bothered to check), but whichever way you look at it, the rules weren’t being applied the same way to both teams. I think Araki might have inherited the ‘make sure you don’t favour Kawasaki as you’ve been accused of doing so, and in order to not do so, give the opposition everything’ style from the pleasingly now retired Iemoto. But I know it’s boring to moan about refs not giving your team anything. So instead let’s focus on the absolutely insane amount of drop balls he awards. What a hero for keeping the game flowing, eh? And how nice of him to relentlessly break up the game shortly after he should have fucking blown his fucking whistle and instead give himself the chance of chalking up another drop ball. Can you bet on how many drop balls are given in a match? If you can I strongly advise you putting some money on there being plenty in the next game he refs. I really hope he won’t be in charge of any more of our games this season. And then I hope he’ll retire at the end of the year. But getting rid of two useless refs in two seasons might be a bit too much to ask for. People always say that you don’t even notice the best refs. So it’s nice that Araki wants to demonstrate clearly how bad he is by giving so many drop balls that it’s impossible not to notice him, and therefore proves that he is very much not one of the best refs.

Next up Kashiwa away on Saturday, another loathsome club (in my opinion) but this time for the fact that they treat the away fans with so much disdain rather than by trying to break the rules to gain an advantage. At this stage I normally say that Oniki probably won’t change the team but I think he has to this time as I believe Yamane has got a ban due to excessive yellow cards. My guess is probably the same team but with Tachibanada moved  to right back and Chanathip taking his place in the midfield. And my other guess is we will once again be knackered, play terribly and fail to win. Oh well!

Team 

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki (Yellow card 34')

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 90+4')
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (Yellow card 70')

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 43')

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for CHINEN 73')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for TACHIBANADA 89')

MF 18. CHANATHIP

MF 19. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 73')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for WAKIZAKA 78')
MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Nothing funny to say here this week. Everyone is knackered, we never change the team, it would be like trying to pick the best Sisyphus out of 11 who all are physically incapable of competing the task, but in this case due to their boss making them do it every day for the last week and not letting them sleep. So let’s not bother with this again.

Goals

 

TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 61' 0-1

INAGAKI (Nagoya) 74' 1-1

Highlights

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (home) 10/9/22 J League match 29

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 0 Sanfrecce Hiroshima

Once again we bounced back from a terrible performance with a decent one. The problem however is that we’ve had way too many awful performances this season. It’s long been a cliche that we struggle against teams lower down in the league and we play better against teams at the top. So it should have come as no surprise that we lost twice to Shonan this year and beat Sanfrecce twice. After that second Shonan defeat I think quite a lot us we’re pretty frustrated with Oniki’s perpetual failure to even slightly change a team that is doing well but playing way too many games in a short period and is running out of steam fast. Given that we had a week between the Shonan debacle and this game I predicted he wouldn’t change anything unless he really had to and that was exactly what happened. It seems that both Kurumaya and Nobori are injured at the moment so Sasaki came in at left back. To be honest I should give Oniki some credit for not going back to Tachibanada there, particularly as he really wants to play him and Joao Schmidt at the same time and is happy to shift players out of position to accomplish that. The rest of the starting line up was the same as the one that sucked big time last weekend, but on this occasion didn't, as they had had a bit of a rest. And unsurprisingly a team that isn’t totally knackered did better than one that is. Oniki has brought unprecedented levels of success to Frontale, but I think it’s undeniable that he still doesn’t know how to rotate. And this inevitably catches up with us. We have Nagaoya away on Wednesday and Kashiwa away on Saturday. I wonder who’ll play those games? I suspect it will be the same players again. Quite when they’ll break down again, who knows, but one midweek off doesn’t really allow complete recovery to preseason freshness I’d guess. So, we might end up struggling again. And although I realistically think that the league is over, if we want to keep any tiny glimmer of hope alive, we have to win every game. YFM have played their game in hand and dispatched Shonan with ease in stark contrast to how we did against them. I hate to praise them, but they look far less likely to slip up than we do. They don’t seem to make a mess of games against relegation contenders and they’ve got plenty of them coming up. So we sit three points behind them with a significantly inferior goal difference. Just imagine what might have been, If we hadn’t shot ourselves in the foot quite so many times this year…

Apparently Hiroshima rested a lot of players for this game with only half of their first choice players starting the game. Not sure why they would have done this… oh actually maybe they watched out last game! That would make a lot of sense. Even with a weakened line up they started well and we were under the cosh from the start I thought. We were playing like a team who were tired and had for some reason, (perhaps a reason like a terrible recent performance), lost all confidence. Hiroshima seemed to want it a lot more. They were defending and attacking in numbers and seemed well organised. They even had me longing for the old days when they were utterly boring and quite ineffective. I think they’ll do really well next year. Already a bit worried about that. In response to their attacking threat we seemed to be going for a safety first approach of possession at any cost, making sure that we kept the ball, usually by passing it backwards. Our inability to do anything with a free kick other than pass it less than a metre to the player standing behind the taker is endlessly irritating. I was in a bit of a bad mood at the start of the game watching all of this. But then we scored, a bit against the run of play and suddenly everything became fun again. It wasn’t the cleanest of finishes from Ienaga, but it was a lovely assist from Sasaki and hopefully it should give him some confidence back. In his post match comments Sasaki said what has become something of a mantra among some of our players recently, something along the lines of that he saw this as his last chance for us. We constantly hear that Oniki is a great man manager and a really nice guy, but there does seem to be a streak of cold fear running through anyone who manages to get a start as they seem to feel that if they don’t do really well, they’ll be finished. And it’s not surprising I guess as the only way the team gets changed recently is if someone gets injured. Competition for places is generally considered to be a good thing, but it seems that we don’t have that when it comes to the starting lineup and instead, the only hope for a non-starting member is to get themselves onto the bench, play their five minutes they’re handed at the end of the game and be ready for when a player in their position gets injured. I don’t want to pick on any players in particular, but when you think of people who’ve had a bit of a dodgy season this year, like Kobayashi, Miyagi etc. you’ve got to wonder how they’ll ever be able to get back into form. They occasionally get a start but if things don't go their way they’re hauled off early and it’s back to the usual players. Even in the cup games we weren’t really rotating and we went out of all of those competitions very early. It’s a bit of a worrying situation. I’m sure they can’t be happy. And I’m also sure they have something to offer. But a lack of opportunities piles the pressure on them for the limited chances they get and because of the pressure they struggle even more.

 

Anyway, what’s going on here? We won this game easily so I should be a bit more optimistic I guess. It felt like we’d got a bit lucky in the first half but the stats disagree. The stats for both halves were actually pretty similar to be honest, showing us in the ascendancy. But the second half definitely felt a lot more comfortable. I guess a lead means the opposition need to take some more chances, which in turn gives us some more chances. And the more we score the better we feel and the more the opposition have to attack, so the more space we have. It was a bit of a surprise to get four through. And a bit of a surprise to see Chinen get the ball off Ienaga for the penalty. Ienaga has been pretty deadly from the spot so I wasn’t delighted to see someone else take it. Apparently Chinen asked, Ienaga refused, but let him take it after he'd asked a couple more times. To be fair to Chinen, it was a good penalty, and hopefully will give him some more confidence and gave me the chance to use my #goalmaChinen hashtag again. But I demurred as it was a penalty. But credit to him. It went in. Also surprising was the fact that a week after we lost a game because we were dead on our feet and bereft of fresh ideas, Oniki decided not to make any subs till the 82nd minute, perhaps hastening the next ‘dead on our feet’ onset. Two games in the next seven days makes this even more bizarre. And the fact that we were three goals up and fairly comfortable on 70 minutes. It’s obviously not a good idea to completely break up the momentum when we’re doing well and perhaps he had one eye on the improvement in goal difference that we’ll need to have any chance of overhauling YFM. But you know, scoring lots of goals in this game doesn’t mean much if we go on to lose one of the next two games because we’re knackered. 

 

It was just really weird. Add to this the fact that we were having a Thai themed day and there were a significant amount of Thai people in the ground. I also saw a few people wearing Vietnamese T-shirts, so maybe the theme was wider than I realised. Anyway, there was the Thai ambassador taking a penalty against a Thai kick boxer before the game, a big Thai flag on the pitch before the game, a Thai singer playing a couple of songs at half time, a Tuk Tuk driving around, presumably some Thai food at the food stands, oh and I almost forgot a Thai player on the bench. But Oniki was never going to cave to such sentimentality and give the Thai fans what they wanted. Chanathip was used as one of the final subs in the 92nd minute and just about got a half touch of the ball before the final whistle went. I’m not sure what’s happened to him. I don’t think he’s been injured but he’s definitely faded out of the picture slightly. I thought he was starting to play well before this happened but then again what do I know really? I do know that Oniki’s slightly psychopathic tendencies seem to be back again and even at the end of what was a great victory, his weirdness with subs and especially his fervent desire to not give the Thai fans what they wanted left a bit of a weird taste in the mouth. Perhaps it’s a power move to show that he picks the team and that his way is the way we’ll go rather than bowing to any kind of normal human emotions. I think however at 3-0 up with us coasting, by not bringing on Chanathip till just before the final whistle you could change the word ‘power’ for the word ‘dick’ in the previous sentence and stop it there. But yeah, he’s a football manager and I’m a guy who likes nice things to happen to people, so what do I know?

So, even when we win well against a good team I manage to sour the mood. Before I do the usual next up part it would be remiss of me to not say that the ref was rubbish again, totally living up to his reputation of being an official who gives nothing. But when you win 4-0, moaning about the ref is even more unedifying than usual so I’ll stop that kind of talk here. This was a fun game and a confidence boost for us (at least the players who were on the pitch for the the first 82 minutes), with a weird taste in the mouth ending. If that’s the way it has to be till the end of the season, well, who am I to argue? If we carry on with this lack of rotation though, I don’t think we’ll need to be paying attention till right up to the end of the season. YFM have Kyoto and Consadole next and I’d say there is zero chance of them messing those games up in the way that we might when they come up in our schedule soon. We have Nagoya on Wednesday and personally, it will be the second time we’ve gone to Nagoya for this game this year. The first time they cooked up some excuse to get it postponed and have been fined for doing so. We couldn’t cancel our trip without losing lots of money so just went anyway. I guess we’d take three points as a reasonable compensation for that inconvenience so I hope they’ll oblige. This time in Nagoya we’ll hopefully have a game to watch. I would say who knows what team we'll see, but I think the realistic answer to that is that most people know which team it'll be. Let’s just hope we have a Hiroshima home type performance rather than a Shonan away type one.

 

 

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 8')

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for CHINEN 83')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for WAKIZAKA 90+2')

MF 18. CHANATHIP (on for IENAGA 90+2')

MF 19. TONO Daiya (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 83')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 87')
MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

This is all getting quite predictable recently (aside from last week when I gave it to a player in a different match). Sasaki did well coming back into the team. And in the second half they all looked decent. But there are two players who seem to consistently perform on a higher level. So once again it’s going to go to…

JOAO SCHMIDT and IENAGA Akihiro - just looked like they were on a different level than everyone else again. Long may it continue (although as Joao will be potentially be lining up against his old team on Wednesday, what’s the betting that Oniki won’t play him and once again assert his dominance in a totally unnecessary way?)

Goals

 

IENAGA (Frontale) 34' 1-0

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 59' 2-0

CHINEN (Frontale) PEN 68' 3-0

IENAGA (Frontale) 78' 4-0

Highlights

Vs Shonan Bellmare (away) 3/9/22 J League match 28

Shonan Bellmare 2 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Well, our stay at the top of the table was pretty brief, wasn’t it? And the feel good factor hasn’t just been lost, it has been obliterated and the pieces hidden in secret places all over the world in case we get any ideas about trying to get it back again. This was an absolutely awful game for us and we got what we deserved. At the same time, I’m not sure Shonan got what they deserved. When they were drawing but well on top, they time wasted relentlessly even though it would have been easy for them to just stroll through our team and score a hatful more. A fair result in this game would have been some kind of magical score where we lost but they didn’t win. It’s obvious why Shonan are/were in the relegation fight and that’s because they can’t shoot for shit! At this point it seems appropriate to mention that they’ve only scored 22 goals in 26 games. And obviously that fact needs to be followed up by mentioning that they’ve got six of those against us. So basically without our generosity they’d only have 16 goals in 24 games. But I'm not bashing them, just trying to show quite how bad we are when we play them. Our horrible form this year against relegation contenders continues. We’ve taken 2 points out of a possible 12 playing Shonan and Jubilo home and away. This is nothing new really though, we always seem to struggle against teams near the bottom. It’s much more of a problem this year though.
 

That was a long and off the point intro, but this post will probably be a bit of a mess as I want to get it out of the way and move on to doing something a bit more pleasant. Also, as I went to get a place in the queue so early in the day, by the time the game came around I had hardly any battery left on my phone so have extremely minimal notes and just a few terrible photos (all included here for your enjoyment). We’ve gone from first to third in the league, one point behind Hiroshima and level on points with YFM. Thanks to the efforts of absolute legend Koki Tsukagawa, we could have gone top and taken a significant step towards a third consecutive title. (If we'd won...). We would have been two points clear with YFM having one game in hand. (If we'd won...). Or one point ahead of them and equal on points with Sanfrecce. (If we'd got a disappointing draw...). As it is (after a rotten defeat...), we’re equal on points with YFM and way behind on goal difference instead. So a significant step in the wrong direction. Praise the lord for Tsukagawa though. If he hadn’t scored TWICE we would have been two points behind having played one more. So now we need to wait for at least one major cock up from YFM. It’s not going to happen. Tsukagawa scoring was emblematic of a day where plenty of our ex- or out on loan players scored. Probably most notable was Abe scoring the winner against us. And Miyashiro scored one and set one up. We struggled to keep the ball, or pass the ball. Although astonishingly we had loads more possession in this game. Not loads more goals though. And our one goal came from a Taniguchi header that bounced off Chinen's head and went in. Probably not something we'd worked on at the training ground. They had two shots on target and scored twice. But as I said, if they weren’t so awful at shooting it could easily have been another game where we conceded four.

We were really sloppy and looked really tired. Probably no surprise when you consider that pretty much the same players have been playing the last three or four games. We’ve had three games in eight days with hardly any rotation. They’re tired. I’m tired. And we’re still perhaps feeling the effects of the earlier COVID outbreak. And at the same time we have some players who are fit who have basically disappeared off the face of the earth. I’m not going to start moaning about Oniki again. I’m a calm person now after all. I did say in a previous blog post that he should rotate a bit for this match and rest some of our knackered players. I also said that I was pretty sure he wouldn’t. It’s something of an Oniki trademark to shuffle the magnets to try and find a winning line up and when he finds one, absolutely screw it into the ground until everyone is physically destroyed. Looks like that might be happening again. And who have we got next…? Oh, Sanfrecce Hiroshima who are on a run of seven wins in a row. Uh oh. And we erm… don’t have a plan b and the plan a is lying in tatters again. Damn. Of course if we'd won this game no-one would be complaining about lack of rotation. But the fact is we were so far off winning this game that I'm not surprised people are moaning. But not me of course, I'm calm...

 

Oh, almost forgot, the penalty looked pretty soft, but Iida is an awful ref so no surprise. And we were crap so it didn’t really matter... Except it did. The view from behind the goal is pretty bad at Shonan but I thought it wasn't a penalty from the stand at other end of pitch. I joked about this at the time but was quite pleased when I saw the replay and discovered that I am a better ref from 100m than Iida is when he's close to the action. (This is a joke before people start quoting it on Twitter). I've noticed a few more videos of fairly dubious decisions made in the game showing up on Twitter since which kind of backs up the point. But the refs are always hopeless aren't they? And VAR doesn't seem to help. This sounds like sour grapes but it isn't. As I've said above a few times, we didn't deserve to win but it would have been nice to be able to mess it up by ourselves instead of having the ref interfere.

Oh well, eh? I have had so much fun recently with some fun wins against detestable teams and have enjoyed posting some crap on Twitter. So I guess now it’s our turn to have some crap posted about us on Twitter and we have to just suck it up. I’m not very confident about the rest of the season. As far as I was concerned, we had to win every game to have a hope of the title and now we’ve lost one, so I'm pretty sure any remaining chance is gone. Damn you YFM for giving us a little hope though. Please keep either drawing or preferably losing. At least that way we can enjoy a bit of Schadenfreude. And it would work for them too as they could enjoy our defeats. Everyone could focus on negativity. That’s probably the best we can hope for now. Joy!

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for WAKIZAKA 46')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 76')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for TACHIBANADA 83')

MF 19. TONO Daiya

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 46')
MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for JESIEL 69')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

No even halfway good performance from pretty much anyone. We looked so tired and so… shit. Which leaves me no choice but to give it to….

TSUKAGAWA Koki - I don’t usually give this to players who didn’t feature in the match, let alone ones who’ve been transferred to another team but if you can think of anyone else who might deserve it you are clearly more of an optimist than I am.

Goals

 

CHINEN (Frontale) 26' 0-1

MACHINO (Shonan) PEN 53' 1-1

ABE (Shonan) 90+3' 2-1

 

Highlights

Vs Sagan Tosu (home) 31/8/22 J League match 20

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 0 Sagan Tosu

I wonder if when we look back on this season we will congratulate Oniki for his determination to get us focused on the league by falling at the first hurdle in pretty much every other competition. Of course I’m joking but our new found clearness of vision/lack of options seems to have really given us a bit of a boost. Combine this with us actually playing players in position and perhaps you have an explanation for our recent successes. Of course this could all come tumbling down soon. Perhaps on Saturday away at Shonan. Or perhaps the following weekend at home against Sanfrecce. But before that happens let’s enjoy the fact that we’re top of the league again for the first time in months. Yeah, this is partly due to YFM still being involved in the ACL… oh that’s not quite right, perhaps I should say ‘being involved in the knockout stages for the absolute shortest time possible and then afterwards having a long rest, hopefully with the fact that they’ve lost their last four games weighing on their mind.’ Before any non-Frontale fans feel the need to remind me, I’m fully aware that they made it one stage further than we did. Let’s be honest, it would be a really weird year when we didn’t manage to mess up the ACL in a new and exciting way. I don’t particularly need that kind of innovation though and in future would settle for us doing a bit better even if it meant we wouldn’t be treated to a unique way of exiting the competition even when faced with a relatively easy route through. People might accuse us of not trying, and in a way, I wish we were not trying. It would be a lot easier to accept than playing our best side and still crashing our limply. Anyway, a small dig at YFM has turned into a massive diversion and every diversion I go down means that the limited time before our next game is shrinking so I’d better get on with this.

 

We’ve gone four wins in a row in the league now, which we need to do if we’re going to get anything out of this season. It’s not in our hands though, we still need YFM to slip up so it’s not in any way comfortable. Sagan Tosu at home (otherwise known as 0-0) is always a bit of a frustrating game. It’s strange that the fact that this game is always 0-0 is so ingrained in my mind, given that we won it 1-0 last year. The previous three years were 0-0 though and the one before that was 1-1. So I guess I was basically right to assume that this game would be frustrating and a slip up. Perhaps we got the 0-0 against Tosu out of the way in the away fixture this year. Whatever the score at that fixture, you won’t find me upset as I love that trip. And I think Sagan Tosu are a generally quite likeable team. Which makes it slightly unfortunate that we handed them a spanking. I can think of plenty of other sides who I’d rather do that to. At the same time, I’m not going to let any sentimentality get in the way of enjoying this win. We’ve finally started scoring some goals, although poor old Kobayashi still can’t get on the scoresheet as hard as he might try. Damiao seems to still be out injured. And maybe Nobori has picked up something again as he was absent from the squad. Chanathip however is not injured as far as I know, but seems to have drifted out of the picture completely. I think the reason for this is our usual plethora of midfielders and dearth of midfield spots. I’m pleased that Joao Schmidt has kept his place as recently he’s been on fire. So he has to be in the defensive midfield spot, which means that Tachibanada has to play somewhere else. Thankfully Oniki has moved him forward a bit instead of playing him at left back. I’d prefer him in the defensive midfield spot (but then what would happen with Joao…), but he seems to be getting better at playing slightly further forward. So then that leaves Wakizaka, who’s also be doing well recently. Maybe we could play the other midfielders a little further forward then…. But if we’re talking about Chanathip that really didn’t work and I’m pleased to see that Oniki has stopped trying it. Also, you cant really drop Marcinho or Ienaga at the moment. So basically, we’ve got too many good players to fit our formation so obviously someone is going to miss out. I hope the players who are missing out aren’t getting too frustrated though. If we keep winning it seems like we shouldn’t be changing things around too much. So yeah, basically I think we’ve been doing well because we’re playing players in their natural positions and we’re focused. And maybe have got a little fortunate at times. But good form means good results and that means confidence which hopefully feeds back round to the good form. Obviously it has to end at some stage but it would be nice if it didn’t, wouldn’t it?

 

A quick word about goal scorers. As I said above Kobayashi is desperate for a goal and I would have loved him to have got one but sadly it wasn’t to be. But we did have a few feel good goalscorers though. Oshima got the man of the match in the stadium probably because he scored, is often injured and people like him. It was very much a feel good moment when the ball dropped to him to smash home. Even Kobayashi whose chance had been saved, causing the ball to drop to Oshima looked pleased which shows what a nice guy he is. I hope he scores soon and is happy. Joao Schmidt looked insanely happy when his header went in. It was well deserved given how well he’s been doing in recent times. And Chinen got another goal on his first start after coming back from injury, allowing me to once again roll out my ‘goal maChinen’ nickname for him which works much better on paper than when said out loud, but is justified given how he seems to pop up and score a lot more than our other strikers. He’s definitely not to everyone’s tastes but I think he’s unfairly maligned and hope he continues putting the ball in the back of the net. It would be remiss of me to not write something about the other goal which was perhaps the most enjoyable one. Probably two of the most well known things about Sagan Tosu are the fact that they often punch above their weight and then throw in a total stinker of a performance, so basically are quite unpredictable. Well except when it comes to playing us when they are resolutely solid and unbeatable. The other thing is that their keeper continues the proud tradition of ex-YFM keepers and likes to go walkabout and gift what I believe are known as ‘Iikura chances’ to the opposition on a semi-regular basis. Well, except when it comes to playing us… But both of these ‘so reliable that they could be carved in stone’ commandments were broken in this match and Marcinho was able to take advantage with a lovely chip which I was so sure was going in that I celebrated a bit early. Which could have been awkward if it had hit the bar. But it didn’t, and it was glorious. 

Next up, Shonan away, a perennial banana skin and a team that beat us 4-0 at our place a few months ago. So perhaps we owe them one but they are fighting for survival so it won’t be easy. Hopefully we can continue our run and at the same time enjoy the news of a Tsukagawa hatrrick for FC Tokyo as they beat YFM 3-0. I don’t often hope FC Tokyo win, but I’ll certainly be hoping for that result on Saturday!

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for WAKIZAKA 64')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for CHINEN 74')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for TANIGUCHI 88')

MF 19. TONO Daiya

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 64')
MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for JESIEL 74')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

In the stadium they said Oshima, but I’m not going that way as he wasn’t on for that long and his goal was merely the icing on the cake. It’s a bit of a bore from me again, but I’m going to give it to the two players who are really on top of their game recently…

JOAO SCHMIDT & IENAGA Akihiro - just doing the business, relentlessly, mercilessly and unstoppably right now. Long may it continue!

Goals

 

CHINEN (Frontale) 26' 1-0

JOAO SCHMIDT (Frontale) 47' 2-0

MARCINHO (Frontale) 56' 3-0

OSHIMA (Frontale) 87' 4-0

 

Highlights