Kashiwa Reysol 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale
Our run of three 4-2 wins in a row is over. But don’t worry pattern fans, we now have three consecutive draws away at Kashiwa! Hmm, not quite so thrilling, is it? At least on this occasion we got a goal, unlike two years ago. Kashiwa’s ground seems to be a popular one amongst J League fans. I always say that I suspect this is for people who go there and sit in the home end as they tend to treat the away fans like shit. This year there was a slight improvement as instead of cramming the food and drink into the small area in front of the toilets, they instead put it outside the gates on the bit of grass where you used to have to queue before the days of reserved seating/standing. I guess it might get a bit messy if it rained though. And it normally does rain when we go to Kashiwa. I’m sure no one can forget the year where the rain was so heavy that the match should have been postponed but they instead went ahead and attempted to play a game of football on a heavily waterlogged farmer's field. I presume this was the same year where there were hundreds of people sheltering in the toilets from the typhoon as that was the only place with any kind of cover. But such are our games there that it could easily have been another year. This year, the game was a lot more significant for Kashiwa than it was for us. They really need some points to avoid getting dragged back into the relegation battle. Well, to be honest, they are still in it, I guess, but with games running out and them currently ahead of two teams with only one going down, it probably means that they’re in a decent position. For us, perhaps we were looking at it as a possible dress rehearsal for the Emperor’s Cup final. Jeez… from the first half, I hope not. We have nothing left to play for in the league, but in spite of the hopes of many fans, that doesn’t mean Oniki is going to try any of the younger players. So we went with the usual players, with the one exception being that Ominami was unavailable due to his injury in the last game. (Apparently, it might not be as bad as feared. But at the same time, we are kind running out of games so maybe it won’t have much difference with regard to this season). So, pretty much the same starting players, same formation, same tactics, I wonder what happened in the first half?
Unsurprisingly, pretty much the same as in the last few games. We weren’t very good. As usual, lots of lovely possession. Lots of apparently pointless passing. A lack of shots, particularly ones that are on target. The stats say we had one on target in the first half, but once again I don’t remember their keeper having to make any saves. We rode our luck with them having a goal ruled out for offside and hitting the post. Rode it right up until we conceded. It was quite an open game where everything was shared fairly. They had the shots and we had the pointless possession. Gomis had a goal ruled out, (well, actually, not given and then the decision upheld by VAR I think, if that distinction is important), down the other end of the pitch and even I with my bias and my astonishingly bad view from the other end of the stadium felt that it probably was the right decision. Probably also a good thing as it would have been a shame for Gomis’s goal celebration to come down the other end of the pitch and as the result of a VAR overrule. Hope he scores soon though as I think he needs a goal. He had by far his best game for us so far in this match though, and was given not much protection by the ref. More on him later. Gomis hit an absolute belter of a shot in the second half, directly in front of us which hit the join of the post and the bar at a right pelt. It was such an exhilarating moment that it was celebrated almost as much as a goal in our end. If he can start doing that on a regular occasion we have some real fun in store. Well when I say doing that, I mean shooting and the ball going in rather than hitting the post. So, it was a good game for Gomis, I thought. In his first few games the ball seemed to bounce off him a bit, but in his match it was really sticking. Very nice! Not having such a good game, Yamane, who looked more knackered than ever before. Perhaps he doesn’t deal well with flying or something, but every time he got the ball, he seemed like he wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible by hitting it first time. Perhaps this was another Oniki tactic, (if it was, it didn’t work, as more often than not we lost possession), but yeah, he just looked tired. Jesiel was back (probably should have mentioned that earlier!) and whist it was great to see him back, I suspect that he wouldn’t have been thrown in to the team so quickly had it not been for our continuing defensive injury crisis. You could see that he hadn't played for a long time. Often when he kicked or headed the ball it shot off at a weird angle, as if both his head and boots were pentagon-shaped. But I’m not criticising him or Yamane. One has played way too many games, and one has hardly played in a few years. If I have to moan about something, (aside from the ref naturally), I’d probably say that we were back to the same old plodding tactics again. On the rare occasions that we tried to move the ball forward a bit quicker, pretty much every midfielder misplaced almost every pass. Maybe I should give Kashiwa some credit for cutting out our passes or something, but it was weird that it happened to Seko a lot in the first half, and then to Tachibanada and Joao Schmidt in the second. Don’t remember it happening to Tono, but then again there’s a reason for that…
As he had done on a few occasions recently, Oniki changed one of his central midfielders at half time. On this occasion it was Seko who got the hook, being replaced by Tono, who’d got the hook to be replaced by Seko in the previous game. I don’t know if Oniki is just trying to share the starts between them or he really doesn’t know who he wants to play. In any case, it doesn’t really matter that much as in most games recently, we’re not very good in the first half. Tono lasted eight minutes before he got a straight red after a VAR intervention. Before this has happened he’d been totally clattered by a Kashiwa player after he’d passed the ball and the ref gave nothing, so perhaps he had a sense of injustice in mind. It didn't look like a great tackle at the time, and the VAR replay didn’t make it look much better. I don’t think he really touched their player, who seemed to jump out of the way, but apparently, (and I say apparently because I think I heard a ref talking about this somewhere but can’t fully remember), you don’t actually need to make contact to get a red for dangerous play. If this is true, well, we probably can’t argue about it. However, bizarrely it seemed like the ref hadn’t even considered a card till he was told to check the monitor. Tono must be living in fear now, as the last player who got a straight red shortly after coming on was Kozuka and he was soon sent to join a K League relegation battle. Hopefully that doesn’t happen again. I have said it before, but I don’t want Tono playing in midfield. He’s a striker, which might explain the slightly dubious tackle. But Oniki is determined to make him a midfielder it seems. So down to ten men again. I suspect we won’t be winning the fair play award this year. In fact, I think if there is an opposite award to that, we’ll probably get it. (Have just checked red cards and we’re right up there at the top with Kashima Antlers, and when you consider most of theirs are probably for abusing officials and booting things into the stands, we can stand proud in the knowledge that we are the team who have done the most dangerous tackles and denied the most goal scoring opportunities this year. Don’t you dare say we’re not the best at something!) Again, as has happened on numerous occasions this year, we played better with ten men than eleven. I have no idea why this is the case. It did take Oniki several changes to try out a few variations of ten men formations before we finally started going for it, but this is always the case with him. The subs are merely steps to reaching his formation goal. Don’t know why he doesn’t skip these steps and just go to the effective formation in just the one change rather than moving players all over the pitch in the interim, but you know, don’t question the genius, I guess. Some fans definitely thought there was some managerial masterclass display going on apparently, as they sang his name at the end of the game. I think it probably had more to do with the players getting a bit pissed off by the ref and Kashiwa though. Whatever caused it, I don’t care. It was a genuinely fun second half and coming back to draw after getting the red whilst already losing meant like it felt almost like a win. I guess it helps that the number of points we got in the game didn’t really matter. If we’d been in a title race, I wouldn’t have been quite so pleased with a draw. Once again Tachibanada was the goal hero. It’s weird as it seemed like he really couldn’t shoot for a long time, but recently he’s banging them in for fun. Long may that continue! I reckon that in the end we could have easily won the game, as we were threatening a lot more at the end. But at the same time, Kashiwa had missed some good chances, and we probably could have just as easily lost from one of their many counter attacks. So yeah, a draw will do! Particularly when you check the stats and see that we only had nine shots in the whole game and only three on target. Lots of lovely possession though, eh?
It would be remiss of me not to write a little bit about the ref. Previously my comments on Fukushima are that he is a ref that doesn’t like to give out cards and doesn’t even like to give free kicks that often. Since I’ve started keeping track of refs this is the first time he’s given us a card in a long time (the only other occasion was the Super Cup game against Cerezo in 2018!), and in this game too it seemed like he didn’t really want to do that. Previously I’ve faintly praised him for not getting in the way and kind of letting the players get on with the game. I think on this occasion though, he was absolutely useless. Perhaps the reason he doesn’t get in the way is because he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. In this match he looked like he'd mistakenly wandered on to the pitch on the way to the supermarket, even then not realising he was in the middle of a football game, froze to the spot, trying to remember the final item on the shopping list that he thought of at the last minute but hadn’t written down. 'Olive oil…? No…. cabbage…? No… But I think it was something green… Cress…? No, I don’t even like cress… oh maybe it was cress after all. So perhaps I don’t need it. Yes! It was cress! Cross it off the list. Hang on, I think I dropped the list… Where's it gone? Somewhere over towards the yellow area? Hang on, why's there a big yellow area here in the park?' Probably the reason his decision making was so random was perhaps due to him only blowing the whistle to try to imitate the song of a passing bird or sing along to the music running round his head, and then when the players asked him why he blew, he had to quickly make a random decision. 'CRESS!!! Sorry, I mean free kick. Who to? Errrmmm, the team with the taller goalkeeper'. Actually, all this moaning is just because he missed what was one of the foulest of foul throws I have ever seen and failed to punish Kashiwa’s winger for a blatant dive. So to be honest, I should probably not moan so much, as most refs probably don’t know what constitutes a foul throw and hell will freeze over before a J League ref gives a yellow card for a dive. So he probably isn’t that bad. But on this occasion he seemed particularly bewildered by where he was and what was going on around him.
So a 1-1 draw against the odds in a generally pointless game. It was fun to get frustrated about the ref, but ultimately the result was probably right as we weren’t very good for most of the game and they were as bad at taking chances as we were. It’s a point that is ultimately pointless (Yes, I enjoyed that unintentional play on words!) for us, and perhaps ok but not that good for them. Personally, I want YFC to go down after getting irritated by some of their fans being arseholes on Twitter. It seems that your enemy’s enemy is not necessarily your friend. Particularly as they have now got rid of all of our old players. It’s pretty tight down there though, and it looks like their game against Shonan will be crucial. Good luck to Abe, Nakano and Mawatari in that game! Kashiwa look like they have the toughest run in though… Anyway, this is all veering dangerously close to being an informative and balanced look at the current J League situation. Screw all of them! Next up, Pathum in the ACL at Todoroki after we’ve had a bit over a week off. Hopefully we can win that game, which on paper is probably the easiest of all our ACL group games. Definitely a defeat coming then! Then after that we have Kyoto and Kashima at home before finishing off the league campaign by getting absolutely smashed on shochu in the stands away at Sagan Tosu. Me that is, not the team, although the game is meaningless, so if the players want to, why not, eh?
Unsurprisingly, pretty much the same as in the last few games. We weren’t very good. As usual, lots of lovely possession. Lots of apparently pointless passing. A lack of shots, particularly ones that are on target. The stats say we had one on target in the first half, but once again I don’t remember their keeper having to make any saves. We rode our luck with them having a goal ruled out for offside and hitting the post. Rode it right up until we conceded. It was quite an open game where everything was shared fairly. They had the shots and we had the pointless possession. Gomis had a goal ruled out, (well, actually, not given and then the decision upheld by VAR I think, if that distinction is important), down the other end of the pitch and even I with my bias and my astonishingly bad view from the other end of the stadium felt that it probably was the right decision. Probably also a good thing as it would have been a shame for Gomis’s goal celebration to come down the other end of the pitch and as the result of a VAR overrule. Hope he scores soon though as I think he needs a goal. He had by far his best game for us so far in this match though, and was given not much protection by the ref. More on him later. Gomis hit an absolute belter of a shot in the second half, directly in front of us which hit the join of the post and the bar at a right pelt. It was such an exhilarating moment that it was celebrated almost as much as a goal in our end. If he can start doing that on a regular occasion we have some real fun in store. Well when I say doing that, I mean shooting and the ball going in rather than hitting the post. So, it was a good game for Gomis, I thought. In his first few games the ball seemed to bounce off him a bit, but in his match it was really sticking. Very nice! Not having such a good game, Yamane, who looked more knackered than ever before. Perhaps he doesn’t deal well with flying or something, but every time he got the ball, he seemed like he wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible by hitting it first time. Perhaps this was another Oniki tactic, (if it was, it didn’t work, as more often than not we lost possession), but yeah, he just looked tired. Jesiel was back (probably should have mentioned that earlier!) and whist it was great to see him back, I suspect that he wouldn’t have been thrown in to the team so quickly had it not been for our continuing defensive injury crisis. You could see that he hadn't played for a long time. Often when he kicked or headed the ball it shot off at a weird angle, as if both his head and boots were pentagon-shaped. But I’m not criticising him or Yamane. One has played way too many games, and one has hardly played in a few years. If I have to moan about something, (aside from the ref naturally), I’d probably say that we were back to the same old plodding tactics again. On the rare occasions that we tried to move the ball forward a bit quicker, pretty much every midfielder misplaced almost every pass. Maybe I should give Kashiwa some credit for cutting out our passes or something, but it was weird that it happened to Seko a lot in the first half, and then to Tachibanada and Joao Schmidt in the second. Don’t remember it happening to Tono, but then again there’s a reason for that…
As he had done on a few occasions recently, Oniki changed one of his central midfielders at half time. On this occasion it was Seko who got the hook, being replaced by Tono, who’d got the hook to be replaced by Seko in the previous game. I don’t know if Oniki is just trying to share the starts between them or he really doesn’t know who he wants to play. In any case, it doesn’t really matter that much as in most games recently, we’re not very good in the first half. Tono lasted eight minutes before he got a straight red after a VAR intervention. Before this has happened he’d been totally clattered by a Kashiwa player after he’d passed the ball and the ref gave nothing, so perhaps he had a sense of injustice in mind. It didn't look like a great tackle at the time, and the VAR replay didn’t make it look much better. I don’t think he really touched their player, who seemed to jump out of the way, but apparently, (and I say apparently because I think I heard a ref talking about this somewhere but can’t fully remember), you don’t actually need to make contact to get a red for dangerous play. If this is true, well, we probably can’t argue about it. However, bizarrely it seemed like the ref hadn’t even considered a card till he was told to check the monitor. Tono must be living in fear now, as the last player who got a straight red shortly after coming on was Kozuka and he was soon sent to join a K League relegation battle. Hopefully that doesn’t happen again. I have said it before, but I don’t want Tono playing in midfield. He’s a striker, which might explain the slightly dubious tackle. But Oniki is determined to make him a midfielder it seems. So down to ten men again. I suspect we won’t be winning the fair play award this year. In fact, I think if there is an opposite award to that, we’ll probably get it. (Have just checked red cards and we’re right up there at the top with Kashima Antlers, and when you consider most of theirs are probably for abusing officials and booting things into the stands, we can stand proud in the knowledge that we are the team who have done the most dangerous tackles and denied the most goal scoring opportunities this year. Don’t you dare say we’re not the best at something!) Again, as has happened on numerous occasions this year, we played better with ten men than eleven. I have no idea why this is the case. It did take Oniki several changes to try out a few variations of ten men formations before we finally started going for it, but this is always the case with him. The subs are merely steps to reaching his formation goal. Don’t know why he doesn’t skip these steps and just go to the effective formation in just the one change rather than moving players all over the pitch in the interim, but you know, don’t question the genius, I guess. Some fans definitely thought there was some managerial masterclass display going on apparently, as they sang his name at the end of the game. I think it probably had more to do with the players getting a bit pissed off by the ref and Kashiwa though. Whatever caused it, I don’t care. It was a genuinely fun second half and coming back to draw after getting the red whilst already losing meant like it felt almost like a win. I guess it helps that the number of points we got in the game didn’t really matter. If we’d been in a title race, I wouldn’t have been quite so pleased with a draw. Once again Tachibanada was the goal hero. It’s weird as it seemed like he really couldn’t shoot for a long time, but recently he’s banging them in for fun. Long may that continue! I reckon that in the end we could have easily won the game, as we were threatening a lot more at the end. But at the same time, Kashiwa had missed some good chances, and we probably could have just as easily lost from one of their many counter attacks. So yeah, a draw will do! Particularly when you check the stats and see that we only had nine shots in the whole game and only three on target. Lots of lovely possession though, eh?
It would be remiss of me not to write a little bit about the ref. Previously my comments on Fukushima are that he is a ref that doesn’t like to give out cards and doesn’t even like to give free kicks that often. Since I’ve started keeping track of refs this is the first time he’s given us a card in a long time (the only other occasion was the Super Cup game against Cerezo in 2018!), and in this game too it seemed like he didn’t really want to do that. Previously I’ve faintly praised him for not getting in the way and kind of letting the players get on with the game. I think on this occasion though, he was absolutely useless. Perhaps the reason he doesn’t get in the way is because he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. In this match he looked like he'd mistakenly wandered on to the pitch on the way to the supermarket, even then not realising he was in the middle of a football game, froze to the spot, trying to remember the final item on the shopping list that he thought of at the last minute but hadn’t written down. 'Olive oil…? No…. cabbage…? No… But I think it was something green… Cress…? No, I don’t even like cress… oh maybe it was cress after all. So perhaps I don’t need it. Yes! It was cress! Cross it off the list. Hang on, I think I dropped the list… Where's it gone? Somewhere over towards the yellow area? Hang on, why's there a big yellow area here in the park?' Probably the reason his decision making was so random was perhaps due to him only blowing the whistle to try to imitate the song of a passing bird or sing along to the music running round his head, and then when the players asked him why he blew, he had to quickly make a random decision. 'CRESS!!! Sorry, I mean free kick. Who to? Errrmmm, the team with the taller goalkeeper'. Actually, all this moaning is just because he missed what was one of the foulest of foul throws I have ever seen and failed to punish Kashiwa’s winger for a blatant dive. So to be honest, I should probably not moan so much, as most refs probably don’t know what constitutes a foul throw and hell will freeze over before a J League ref gives a yellow card for a dive. So he probably isn’t that bad. But on this occasion he seemed particularly bewildered by where he was and what was going on around him.
So a 1-1 draw against the odds in a generally pointless game. It was fun to get frustrated about the ref, but ultimately the result was probably right as we weren’t very good for most of the game and they were as bad at taking chances as we were. It’s a point that is ultimately pointless (Yes, I enjoyed that unintentional play on words!) for us, and perhaps ok but not that good for them. Personally, I want YFC to go down after getting irritated by some of their fans being arseholes on Twitter. It seems that your enemy’s enemy is not necessarily your friend. Particularly as they have now got rid of all of our old players. It’s pretty tight down there though, and it looks like their game against Shonan will be crucial. Good luck to Abe, Nakano and Mawatari in that game! Kashiwa look like they have the toughest run in though… Anyway, this is all veering dangerously close to being an informative and balanced look at the current J League situation. Screw all of them! Next up, Pathum in the ACL at Todoroki after we’ve had a bit over a week off. Hopefully we can win that game, which on paper is probably the easiest of all our ACL group games. Definitely a defeat coming then! Then after that we have Kyoto and Kashima at home before finishing off the league campaign by getting absolutely smashed on shochu in the stands away at Sagan Tosu. Me that is, not the team, although the game is meaningless, so if the players want to, why not, eh?
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (on for MARCINHO 59')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for GOMIS 82')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (Red card 54') (on for SEKO 46')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (Red card 54') (on for SEKO 46')
DF 29. TAKAI Kota
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for NOBORIZATO 68')
FW 33. MIYASHIRO Taisei (on for IENAGA 68')My Frontale Man Of The Match
The second half was pretty gutsy and showed that a lot of our players really care about winning even when the game is kind of pointless. But we did only score once and only shoot nine times, so with that in mind, I'll give it somewhat randomly to...
Bafetimbi GOMIS - Purely for the improvement since his last game and the shot that was almost an amazing goal.
Goals
YAMADA (Kashiwa) 40' 1-0
TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 70' 1-1
Highlights
