Vs Kashima Antlers (away) 17/3/24 J League match 4

Kashima Antlers 2 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Well, what is there to say? Another loss, this time away from home, just to inject a bit of variety. After keeping a perfect 0% home record in 2024 it seems that Oniki wants to get to work and change that away result success rate. In recent years we never lose away at Kashima. But recent years haven’t been years when Oniki was at his completely-out-of-ideas stage and that’s clearly where we are now. Plugging away with the same tactics which haven’t worked for about three years. Keeping all the same players in, some of whom who have been playing like they’re recently new to the sport. Making sure that the one certainty is that there will be a midfielder playing out of position at full back. To be honest, I’m not sure I need to even write this post, do I? You know what I’m going to say and even if you have never agreed with my opinions, you’ve got to say there is some evidence for them being accurate now, isn’t there? I’m going to try to keep this as brief as possible as the only people who could get any joy out of reading this are Frontale haters and I’m not going to waste any effort pleasing them. So here we go.

First half we got a bit battered down our right hand side, as was expected with us playing a midfielder there and as has been the case every time we’ve done that recently. We scored a goal, slightly against the run of play and not via the method that Oniki seems to be wedded to using. He must have been furious! In the second half, after a classic Oniki half time team talk, we conceded twice in the first five minutes and then proceeded to get a red card. We had a marvelous 59% possession and had a momentous two shots, both of which were off target. Much like in the last game we’re averaging around 200 passes for a shot on target. It’s truly turgid stuff. The second half was a perfect demonstration of Oniki’s master plan. Even trailing and with hardly any time left, we were still fucking around passing the ball along the defence line. But it wasn’t really a surprise, was it? Oniki’s subs were just bizarre, deciding to remove our better midfielders and leave his favourites on the pitch. The bench was just weird, basically leaving us with no real way of changing the game given that we are apparently playing wearing the virtual handcuffs of always, no matter the situation, having to stick to Oniki’s master plan. But to be honest, I’m not that upset. I totally expected the game to go this way and in the end we were lucky that we only conceded twice. But, just one more reminder that in the whole game we had two shots on target, managing to do even worse than the three we had against Kyoto. And the worst thing is that the two shots we had on target in 90 minutes against Kashima came in the same attack! Basically, aside from our goal, we didn’t even come close. An absolute waste of time!

 A rare foray into the opposition half

Here’s what I think are some of our issues, basically stated as I feel there’s no need for me to spend time trying to justify them particularly:

- The defence is a mess, as you might expect given that most weeks we’ve had at least one player in there who’s not a defender or at least one player playing out of position. I think we’ve now tried pretty much all of the possible combinations of Jesiel, Takai, Ominami and Maruyama. The one that looked reasonably steady was of course Oniki’s idea of what is our second string and was naturally changed for the following match and that back foru combination has not been seen since. I think pretty much everyone who’s played there has had at least one nightmare game. In this game their first goal came from Maruyama charging half way up the pitch to beat Yuma Suzuki to a header and totally missing it, leaving the ball to run through to an almost empty defence. That was probably another Oniki tactical innovation though so maybe it's a better idea to point the finger elsewhere? I guess you know where I'll point it?

- Probably neither Kamifukumoto nor Sung-Ryong are the answer in goal sadly. The endlessly repeated myth of Kami being crucial for our build up is, as far as I can see, total nonsense. He’s not really much better than Sung-Ryong on the ball, but seems to have an endless appetite for trying to do things he’s not quite capable of, like when he raced out of goal to reach one of the many Kashima hoofed long balls and messed up his header, glancing it behind for a corner. I haven’t watched it back, but Kami looked absolutely bewildered for their second goal. (Actually this is a bit unfair now having seen it as the ball bounced weirdly off the bar from the cross. The Kashima player celebrated as if that was his intention… To be honest though, I think there’s a chance that even if it hadn’t, Kami would have still been watching the ball sailing over his head). And not long after that goal he booted the ball off the pitch from a totally miscued goal kick. That’s what he’s in the team for! Apparently... I love Sung-Ryong but I think time is catching up with him a bit. I don’t think either keeper can be blamed too much though as the mess that’s in front of them can’t help and can't give them much confidence. So until that’s sorted out, it probably doesn’t matter that much who’s playing in goal.

- Oh my god, the endless ridiculous insistence on playing 4-3-3 with Ienaga in a free role. Particularly dangerous when we have a midfielder behind him at right back. (For some reason a lot of Kashima's attacks were going down that side. I wonder why...). And never thinking of trying anything else. And even if he is wedded to the formation and the same players, why does he never even consider that he could change our approach? The absolute arrogance of the man! Against Kyoto we went with that plan and Tachibanada at right back. Until we abandoned it because it wasn’t working. And then in the next game, went back and gave it another go! And it didn’t work again! Good thing Oniki changed it, right? After a terrible first half it might have made sense to change it at half time, but instead he decided to leave it till after we’d conceded twice. Genius level stuff! The mid-half triple change was perhaps even stupider, completing his mission to remove the midfielders who were playing the best, leaving the others on the pitch and adding a striker to the midfield. To an extent he’d hamstrung himself by bizarrely choosing the players he put on the bench. There was a bit of trouble in our end at the end of this game with a couple of our supporters scuffling. Presumably this was down to one of them saying we’d been totally shite and someone else going with the usual, ‘well done guys, let’s try again next game and definitely not complain’ mantra. I’m sure you know who I think is right. Of course, I'm not saying that fighting about it is the right thing to do as it obviously isn’t. But I do think we should stop celebrating awful performances because we are nice guy supporters. Instead much better to just fuck off out of the stadium at the final whistle. Equally, I can’t see any real benefit in booing the players, especially as I think the problem stems from elsewhere, but at the same time, I’m not going to give them a good old clap for losing yet another game.

- Pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass and pass. Repeat. And repeat again. Don’t even think about trying to attack. All any fan wants is completed passes! Pass and pass and pass. Don’t try to score as moving the ball forwards makes it more difficult to rack up the completed passes. Far better to do it in front of your own goal, particularly if you're losing as the opposition aren't as bothered about trying to get the ball off you. So we can carry on with the pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass...

Bit of positivity, the bus back wasn’t so bad! On the way it took about two and a bit hours and on the way back, around three hours. Obviously it’s a significantly worse journey when you’re coming back with no points but at least it gave me the opportunity to start writing this shitty post. I think perhaps they have alleviated the traffic situation slightly by changing the departure time of the buses to more than an hour after the game was due to end. I guess if we’d won we could have enjoyed this extra hour celebrating in the stands, but as it was, instead of spending the extra hour sitting in traffic, we instead spent it sitting on a bus which wasn’t due to depart for about 55 minutes. So much of a muchness really, but you know, I’m just trying to draw out any kind of positivity that I can right now.

Kashima were Kashima-esque. Unbelievable play acting for most of the game, definitely a focus on the dark arts. I think they aren’t that good this year. But not as bad as us, obviously. Yuma Suzuki did Yuma Suzuki things. And his teammates also did Yuma Suzuki things. At one stage one player fell to the floor and seemed to be confused as to whether he should be clutching his face or his leg. The ref bought it. In the past I’ve thought that Nakamura was one of the better refs but he was all over the place in this game. Somewhat amusingly the big screen seemed to be proactively highlighting his mistakes by playing replays that showed he’d obviously cocked up. He lost control of the game later on and seemed to be intimidated by the Kashima players. He was pretty shit. The thing he did that annoyed me the most was that after a long run of giving them a free kick every time we made a tackle, he decided to give us a free kick for a Kashima offside, just as we were racing up the pitch counter attacking, not even considering playing the advantage. But maybe he did us a favour, as it allowed the Kashima players to retreat back into defence and therefore we were in a much better position to be able to rack up some more passes! It’s all we fans want to see! Not saying he was biased at all. I think the big screen replays demonstrated that his stupid decisions were going both ways. Although it perhaps hurt us more as both of Marcinho’s yellows looked a little borderline, at least with my Frontale hat on. No need to blame the ref. No need to blame the players. There’s only one person to blame when it comes to this defeat and that is the clown prince of Kawasaki, Oniki.

Can say with confidence that this did not lead
to a shot on target as it happened in the second half

Four games done and after a lucky first win we have three defeats in a row. We’ve played three teams that could be troubling the bottom third of the table and even though we usually play badly against these kind of teams, we’ve done extra badly this year. Against Kashima, perhaps we had a chance to play a bit better as they probably would try to attack us a bit more. But no, we just carried on playing badly. There is nothing to feel even slightly optimistic about. The one goal head start that we got from Erison playing has disappeared now he’s injured. Well, at least that’s what we believe is the case. I don’t think the club officially said he is, and therefore we’ve had no hints to the possible length of his absence. Maybe Oniki’s decided we have better routes to goal. There has been some talk online lamenting how many important players we've lost since last year and blaming that on our 2024 malaise. I think this is hugely off the mark though. I think our squad is better than it was last year but is just being chronically mismanaged. Some might say that we're much weaker at right back but I think that ignores the fact that Yamane really dropped off last year and the fact that we keep playing people who aren't right backs there. Nobori was also slightly on the slide, and whilst I think Miura isn't quite with it yet, he will be better when he settles in a bit more. Perhaps Miyashiro is the biggest loss, but then again we never used him properly anyway, so the loss is more of a conceptual one than anything to do with reality. Once again for me it comes down to how the players are being instructed and managed and surely no-one can think that's being done well at the moment, can they? Next up, FC Tokyo at home, but !!PRAISE THE LORD!! that’s not for two weeks. I’m looking forward to next weekend already as there is no football, which suits me fine at the moment. I would say that if Oniki’s legendary skills make it four losses in a row he should be under some pressure, but who am I kidding, there’s no way he’s going anywhere. I wish he would go… anywhere. We’re fifteenth right now, and I get the feeling that he won’t be under any pressure until our relegation is mathematically confirmed. Then the geniuses up top in the club, might decide they need to have a word with him and will probably end up accidentally giving him a new contract because he won our final dead rubber match of the season. And can you imagine how bad Oniki's tactic, (the singular is intentional here and not a typo), would be in J2? That's truly the stuff of nightmares.

 

Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 34')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 54', second yellow/red card 75')

Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (on for JESIEL 64')

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for YAMAMOTO 53')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 64')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for SEKO 64')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MIURA 81')


Goals

MARCINHO (Frontale) 36' 0-1

CAVRIC (Kashima) 47' 1-1
SUZUKI (Kashima) 50' 2-1

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

I don't think so, do you? Oh actually, he's probably got nothing to do with Frontale, but I'll give it to the guy sitting in the weird hut by the touchline. No idea what's going on in there. But even if he totally messed up whatever he's supposed to be doing, he still did better than any of our players.

 

Unusual place to put a shed, but why not, eh?

 

 

Highlights

 

Vs Kyoto Sanga (home) 9/3/24 J League match 3

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 1 Kyoto Sanga 

Congratulations Oniki! You’ve achieved a new record for earliest loss of hope for a season. I realise that this is exactly the kind of petty comment that people come flocking to this blog to read but don’t get me wrong, I’m actually kind of thankful he has managed to so successfully crush my hopes so early this year. For the remainder of 2024 there will be no grinding of teeth with frustration about how badly we are doing. Instead, just a little smile and wink to myself as I see Oniki repeat, time after time, the same dodgy selections and push on with the same tactic that was last effective some time around four years ago. Bravo Oniki! No more weekends ruined by us performing at a level that is unbelievably further below what even a random team and tactic selection might result in. (It’s a real talent to get us playing the worst possible stuff. Like drawing the one ticket that was put into the tombola by accident and doesn’t even get you a tin of mandarin orange slices). How could a weekend ever possibly be ruined by a game turning out exactly as expected? As sure as summer in Japan will be horribly hot, as sure as any musical release involving any former member of Oasis will sound like the Beatles and be extremely shit, as sure as any 7-11 item that looks vegetarian contains gelatine. That’s how sure we can be that Oniki will keep persevering with his beloved tactic and that we will continue to get horrible and utterly justified results. We’ve played three times at home and have lost them all. We’ve played three teams widely predicted to finish near the bottom of the league and have lost to two of them. I’m seriously worried what will happen when we play a team who are expected to finish above 12th in the league. And the most depressing thing is that we have months of this same old rubbish ahead of us, until we even get the hope of a little break with a cup game, the same players being trotted out every week with micro changes to the starting line up, and the one consistent thing being that at least one player will be played out of position. I suppose at least it makes these posts a little easier to write. In fact I’ll make a new section below that i can cut and paste for future games. Lovely!

How did we play? -

There was a small adjustment to the usual starting eleven. We decided to build extremely slowly with plenty of passing along the back. Once the requisite number of pointless passes was reached, we either booted the ball forward for Marcinho to run on to, hang on to too long, and then lose, or just hoofed it straight to the opposition cutting out the middle man. And also, we occasionally gifted possession to the opposition, somehow with all of our players out of position and looking in the opposite direction to where the ball was, allowing them a relatively easy finish to take the lead. After which point we continued with the same tactics and players, before shaking things up around 60 minutes with some like for like changes, ensuring that even if one of the players subbed off was playing out of position, there was at least one player coming on who was also playing out of position. At the end of the game, we added a new option, booting the ball forward after only half the usual number of prepaatory pointless passes, but still failed to score, as we lost the ball before we could even have a shot. Oniki said the usual things in his post match interview. But apparently decided that his plan was 98% correct and we’d been unlucky, so has decided to give it another go in the following game.

Anything of note in this match? -

No. Our performance was less blood and thunder and more ketchup and light drizzle. One shot on target for every 200 completed passes. It was truly turgid stuff!

Bitching about the opposition -

Their shorts and socks were weird. They looked like they’d been subject to a laundry error. Their player Kawasaki was once again a thorn in our side and is as far as I can tell, still a bit of an arsehole. Their manager, shock horror, knows what he’s doing and actually thinks about the upcoming game before it starts. How nice it would be to have someone who didn’t think the solution to every situation is to do the same thing. They had two massive centre backs. Oniki played Yamada there by himself. And then put Tono and Kobayashi up against them. Who needs to win headers anyway, eh? Their keeper looked quite dodgy, almost giving us a goal but completely mis-controlling / missing the ball from an early back pass. Their keeper was so dodgy that… he kept a clean sheet. They didn’t bring that many fans, which I was surprised about, as I was pretty sure they’d win the game. Perhaps they too thought that result would be so predictable that it wasn’t worth bothering with.

Ref -

We had a guest ref from overseas! I spent a long time trying to work out who he was and where he was from as his name was listed on the J League site as ‘スミス　ルイス　ディーン’. So was this Smith Lewis-Dean? Dean Smith-Lewis? Smith Ruiz-Dean? Smith Luis Dean? It was Lewis Smith, apparent rising star of English refereeing who was perhaps surprised to find that everyone in Japan was including his middle name every time they referred to him. Slightly worryingly he seemed to have only had one game in the Premier League before he came to Japan, so only one experience of VAR before he got thrown in at the deep end in the country where there is no guarantee that the people watching the replays from numerous angles will even understand the rules of the game enough to male the correct decision. And right away after six minutes, off we went again for a lengthy VAR review. Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but I’m guessing Smith doesn’t speak Japanese, so that added an extra level of… what’s the opposite of streamlining?… obfuscation maybe, to the whole thing. Our last two games have for me compounded how much of a game killing waste of time VAR is. I don’t even care if it means that the right decisions are being made (if that is indeed the case. I think it’s not a given in the J League). I think the only people who like VAR must be the people who never go to the stadium to watch a match. VAR saved us in the 6th minute and took a goal away from us in the 88th. On both occasions the wait was interminable, players and fans alike just twiddling their thumbs whilst some out of sight people do their best to kill any kind of atmosphere in the stadium. These awful delays are the reason that almost half of the photos on this post are of people standing around doing nothing. As for the ref, I thought he was alright. Definitely one of those refs who wants to ‘let the game flow’ and consequently doesn’t whistle for much. This approach probably favoured Kyoto who seemed to have come with quite a physical game plan. (Oniki was presumably surprised and shocked by this. Almost everyone else on earth expected it). But I don’t mean to say the ref favoured Kyoto. I thought he was very even handed, and I’m sure everyone on the pitch knew after the first ten minutes or so how the officiating was going to pan out and exactly what they could get away with. So basically no complaints about the ref, which is a rarity. I will say though that I got quite a strong young-school-teacher-‘call me-by-my-first-name’ vibe from him. Plenty of I’m-not-like-those-other-stuffy-refs,-let’s-just-have-some-fun-here-and-shake-things-up-a-bit energy.

Looking forward -

Who will get the opportunity to play out of position in the next match is the big question I think. At least we now have an idea of the pecking order for the right back spot. Well, we at least know that one of our more exciting signings pre-season is lower down in that pecking order than a left back playing out of position, a midfielder playing out of position and a striker playing our of position. I know Oniki is almost permanently incapable of leaving out one of his favorites so perhaps that was why he moved Tachibanada there. This move also saw the reemergence of last season’s tactic where we use the right back coming inside to the defensive midfield spot to start building attacks. I suppose Tachibanada is more suited to this role than a right back might be. The big question though is probably why we’re bothering to try this as it seems to have absolutely zero effect when it comes to varying out attacks. It’s basically just a new way to start doing the move which leads to the same pointless end. Up front, Erison is injured, which is a huge shame as his goal per game guarantee would have got us a point in this match. It seems clear that Gomis is at best Oniki’s fourth choice in a position where we usually only play one player. I’m gutted that his goal got ruled out as we’re all desperate for him to score. When the replay was shown on the big screen, his facial expression did suggest that he thought it might not stand. I think the goal keeper situation is no clearer after this game. I think Kamifukumoto has done ok when he’s played this year. I’d say no better and no worse than Sung-Ryong, who has had the misfortune to have to play behind some defensive horror shows. Ominami and Maruyama looked reasonably solid. but it’s worth remembering that that partnership let in four goals against Shandong, so perhaps we shouldn’t be that positive too quickly. Who knows what’s happened to Jesiel? I’m pretty sure he’s not injured. Just too far down the tactical master’s preference list. The midfield looked pretty bad again I thought. But to be fair, Wakizaka’s corners were better than in recent games. Sp how do we get out of this mess? My first solution would be to smash Oniki’s magnet board to pieces. I think he’s hopeless now and somehow seems to have way too much courage in his own convictions to have noticed quite how much his selections and tactics suck. I’m sure we won’t get rid of him this year, but I think that if we did it would immediately cause a change in fortunes as our players are good but seem to be losing both their footballing skills and any kind of enthusiasm under his charge. As Oniki will remain in charge, slowly further trashing his reputation, I think my other ideas for what should change are about 0.0001% likely to happen. But, I don’t think Wakizaka, Ienaga and Maricnho should be playing every game. Our attacks are woefully predictable and horribly blunt and as long as those players are in the team following the Oniki plan, I can’t see anything changing. The ‘route to goal’ will remain the long bal for Marcinho to chase, with nothing going down the other side because there’s no-one there. But basically with Oniki in charge, and no new ideas, I think the most we’ll get is a little shuffle in other positions, the ‘thinking’ being that the reason we’re so crap is because we haven’t yet discovered the right player to play out of position at right back.

Next up, Kashima away, who’ve just lost to Machida, which would be funnier if it weren’t for the fact that Machida’s ‘fairytale’ promotion to J1 came backed up by just the massive oil tanker full of cash. And also would be funnier if we hadn’t lost to Kyoto and Jubilo already this year. We normally do well there, but I can see us getting hammered to be honest. Especially if we approach the game in the same way, and let’s be honest, it will be an absolute miracle if we don’t. Normally one consolation when taking the horrific bus journey back after the game is the fact that we have got three points in the bag, and those three points have on more than a few occasions been absolutely robbed from Kashima. If we have to get on the bus after a humiliation it will take a significant amount of booze to erase the memory after arriving at Tokyo station. Luckily though, I’m now in my happy place, with expectation levels at absolutely rock bottom! At home games I can enjoy the fun at the usual after game pub. Last night, I seemed to be the most positive person there, in no way disappointed as what I knew would happen had happened. Away games still carry the excitement of visiting different places. Well, normally that’s the case, but very much isn’t for Kashima away, where the local highlights basically extend no further than the stadium car park. At least we’re getting the game out of the way early on in the season, meaning that the worst away trip will be done and we can look forward to more exciting destinations. Like… Chofu?

 

 

Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota (Yellow card 36')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 80') (on for WAKIZAKA 79')

MF 6. ZE RICARDO
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 70')
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS (on for IENAGA 84')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 70')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for SEKO 79')


Goals

KAWASAKI (Kyoto) 65' 0-1

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Hideji's Doppelbock was a real surprise inclusion and ended up being the star performer of the day.

 

 

Highlights

Vs Jubilo Iwata (home) 1/3/24 J League match 2

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 5 Jubilo Iwata

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I think there’s no other appropriate reaction to another horrible performance but this time at least we had a crazy game to take the edge off a bit. 'Friday Night J League' is not something I get particularly excited about, but maybe that’s just me. If you win, well maybe it’s a good start to a nice weekend. If you lose, it has weekend ruining potential. In this case, the game was just… stupid… and in its stupid weirdness, it actually worked quite well when it came to just putting it behind me and just getting on with the weekend. Well, apart from the fact that I have to write this blog post I suppose. In a game where we conceded five times to a newly promoted team who only had nine shots in 107 minutes it was something of a surprise to see that people didn’t seem to be absolutely furious at the final whistle and instead sank into another one of those late defeat post game silences. To be honest as they scored goal after goal there also didn’t seem to be much anger or frustration in the stands and more, well, ironic laughter at the absurdity of the situation.

In the pub before the game I heard someone say that we were looking pretty good this season. At the time I found this more than a bit of a stretch, but now, well it looks almost like trolling. I dunno though, I’d probably say that we have a better squad this year than last year. We’ve got a player who looks like he will score in every game he plays. But sadly for 2024 Oniki Frontale, scoring a goal a game is nowhere near what we need to end up taking any points. We’ve now played five games this year, two at home and three away from home. The fact that we’ve won every game away from home might make it look like we’re having a great year. The win away at Shandong was looking like a decent result until we just started slinging out goals for free. The win away at Shonan showed us just about coming out on top over a team many people have down to be relegated in a generally fairly low quality game. The only one where the performance looked in any way assured was the Super Cup final against Kobe where what Oniki considers to be our B team kept things tight at the back against last year’s J League champions and won. At home, when Oniki puts out his A team we’ve lost 4-2 and 5-4, conceding for fun against teams we probably could have beaten quite comfortably. Nothing to worry about here, we only concede an average of 4.5 goals each time we play at home! It’s wonderful value for money when it comes to entertainment for the neutral. Sadly there probably usually aren’t that many neutrals in the stadium, and even last night when the atmosphere in the stands was much better than it deserved to be considering what was gong on on the pitch, there’s probably only so much that even the happiest clappiest of supporters can put up with. Well that would be the case at most clubs, but somehow people seem to be on Twitter trotting out the usual, oh well, on we go to the next match, it was probably just a blip stuff. I have a horrible feeling the maybe we might have peaked already this year by being in sixth after the first game.

 

Unsurprisingly, we went with the same line up as against Shonan, perhaps not noticing that we weren’t very good in that game. There were changes on the bench and people were delighted to see Kobayashi and Tono fit and back in the matchday squad again. Well, some people were. Probably Ze Ricardo and Gomis weren’t so happy, especially considering that neither of them had even a minute on the pitch in the last game but were dropped. There is a huge irony in that this was the first game when we didn’t have a defensive midfielder on the bench and Oniki chose it as the game in which he’d sub off the defensive midfielder at half time. To be fair to him, you probably can’t really complain about Tachibanada being taken off as he hadn’t done much. In fact the whole midfield hadn’t done much at all again. All we seem to get from this midfield recently is the occasional attack and nothing when it comes to stopping the opposition from just having a run at our defence. I felt a bit bad about having slagged off Wakizaka so much recently but that corner in the ACL still really irritates me. Of course I understand that everyone makes mistakes, but I dunno, he’s starting to become a bit Yamane-esque to me, interested mainly in scoring and not much else. Apart from getting irritated at his teammates. In this game, our best midfielder was again the one that has only been with us a few months. But I bet Wakizaka and Tachibanada will both start the next game.

When Seko came on and took a set piece, we immediately scored from it. Presumably this irked Wakizaka and he took the set pieces afterwards and we didn’t. I think the only reason Seko had the chance to take it was because it came straight after a corner on the opposite side and Wakizaka wasn’t making it across the pitch quickly enough. Miura took the free kicks against Shonan last week and they seemed to be ok I thought. Well he took the free kicks where we weren’t shooting. In this match, whenever a shooting opportunity came about you could be sure that Wakizaka would be there to put it over the bar. Perhaps it’s something similar to the situation with Tachibanada last year, in that when he became captain, he simultaneously became not very good at playing football, but because of the captaincy, was not dropped until much later than he should have been. I don’t know if the pressure of being captain is weighing on Wakizaka, but he shouldn’t be starting the next game, as far as I’m concerned. So yeah, the midfield was a bit of a mess. At the back, Takai seems to be repeating his 2023 season, where he came in, had some great games and just as he looked to be settling, had an absolute mare of a match where he was at fault for numerous goals. I feel really sorry for him. He’s definitely a good player, but I’m sure he’ll be affected by having another horrible game. Definitely not helped by our lack of midfield though.

Perhaps more infuriating though were the tactics, which let's be honest, I shouldn’t be that angry about, as they are more predictable than the sun rising every morning. Perhaps some kind of nuclear winter / meteor strike extinction event would be what is required for Oniki to change our tactics. You could perhaps draw some comparisons between yesterday’s game and Kazama Frontale games. I don’t remember them being quite so depressing though. And even though we scored four times, the fact the majority of the first half was spent with us passing the ball sideways along the defence line, over and over again, until launching a long ball forwards for Marcinho to run fast with and then lose without threatening the goal meant that our attacks were neither exciting nor effective. I guess our approach this year is a bit like the one that those guys who do the trick shots online have. Hours and hours of failed attempts of which only a handful are shown before the basketball launched off a shovel from about 50 meters away finally goes through the hoop. Sooner or later it will happen. Just keep repeating it, over and over and over again. 

 

Perhaps the tactic might work a bit more often if a couple of things changed. Firstly it might work a bit more often if Marcinho could pass the ball a bit better or earlier. We know he can, but this year he seems to be nowhere near as good. Even when we scored from this tactic in the first half it came after Marcinho lost the ball, we had a shot from the loose ball which was saved, and then luckily bounced to Erison who scored. The other thing that might make this tactic a bit more effective is if it weren’t our only method of attack. It’s probably quite easy to prepare for playing us, just get the strikers to stand a little bit off our defence whilst we pass the ball amongst ourselves, then when you are sure that the rest of the team are in the correct position, pressure us a bit, at which point we’ll hoof the ball to Marcinho who’ll run and then lose it. It’s not fair of me to say that Oniki has no other tactics. In this game he switched Erison to the right and put Ienaga in the middle. When this happened we had two approaches instead of the usual one, and some attacks went up the right! Sadly though, there wasn’t anyone in the middle as Ienaga was probably doing his own thing somewhere around the left back spot at the time. Oniki switched them back after about four minutes. He also did change things up a bit later when we were desperately trying to get back into the game, doing a quadruple substitution and changing the formation to…. I dunno really, but Sasaki was kind of playing centre back but going forward a lot, Segawa was at right back and as for what was going on ahead of them, who knows really? Probably don’t need to point out that the handball that gave them the penalty for their winning goal came from Segawa, who once again has proved that he’s not the best defender. Which obviously isn’t a surprise as he’s a striker. But you know... Oniki, eh?

As I’m slinging around the moans everywhere here, I probably should say again that maybe Ienaga shouldn’t be playing as much as he is. Wherever he is played, the most notable thing is his absence from that area. That’s why we’re always playing it to Marcinho. There’s nobody on the right, so no other option. Ienaga is nowhere near as effective as he used to be. Of course this is the case as he’s getting older. His one arm stretched out holding off of the opposition doesn’t even seem to work as well anymore. Yet still he’s starting every game. Which once again means we’ve got to turn the blame back to Oniki. I don't like criticising the players. I know they are good players. Believe it or not, I don’t particularly like criticising Oniki either, but I would be really interested to see how someone with anything more than the one approach Oniki has would do with the same group of players. Surely some of the Oniki lovers must be having at least some doubts now? Surely he must have realised that what we’re endlessly repeating doesn’t work? Surely! SURELY!

Much like us, Jubilo employed just the one tactic in this game. However, there was a significant difference in that their tactic worked. You would have thought that after a first half of Oniki watching them sit back and then hit us with a fast counter attack, (and more often than not score), he might have tried something to stop them in the second half? Naaaah. It’s not like other teams haven’t played with those tactics against us over the last five or six years and quite often succeeded with them. So we’re really talking about five or six years of Oniki pondering on how to deal with teams who play like that against us. As of yet, still no ideas. Jubilo striker Germain, who has scored 19 goals in the last seven years put four past us in one game whilst Oniki watched and probably fiddled with his magnets. I mean two of them were penalties though, so let’s be fair. If you take the penalties out, Germain only scored one quarter of the goals he scored in the whole of last season in J2 against us in one J1 game. This is not sour grapes though. They stuck to their plan, which they had thought about before the game, and did a job on us. I don’t have any complaints about them, aside from Ricardo Graca, who seemed to be claiming he’d been elbowed in the face by Erison in the build up to our first goal. Well, he said he was elbowed by Erison, but in the replay you can clearly see Graca hack Erison down, get back up, run to inadequately defend his goal, and then after the ball went in, drop to the ground clutching his face, the apparent pain of the assault on him by a waft of air only then sinking in. Was quite funny to see him give away a penalty later on. And yes, it’s these small things that you have to clutch close to your heart on these occasions. Clearly he got the last laugh though. But at least after another horrible defeat for us, we could gain some pleasure in discovering that YFM had lost to Avispa. But clearly they had the last laugh too, as they’d only conceded once to a team who finished 7th in the league whilst we conceded five to a team who weren’t even in J1. Hmmmm. We don't even get the last laugh. This game was so shit that even the Schadenfreude isn’t hitting the spot….

A few words about the ref. I don’t really like Iida, and even though he’s considered to be one of the best in the league at the moment, I think he’s pretty bad. However, I thought he had a decent first half, aside from the fact that I thought Miura was fouled in the run up to their first goal but he wasn’t interested or didn’t notice it. In the second half the game went VAR crazy, to the extent that the final whistle only went in the 107th minute. I’m not sure what was going on when he was checking what seemed to be Jubilo’s winning goal for an attacking handball, only to find a defending handball and then award them a penalty instead. I guess it was because both teams had handled. If it had worked in our favour and the penalty hadn’t been scored, I think there would have been some very angry Jubilo fans in the stadium. And probably rightly so. Without a doubt, this was a crazy game, but I don’t think Iida helped matters. Considering his seniority, it did seem that quite a lot of his onfield decisions were proved wrong by VAR. Which I know is the point of VAR, but doesn’t say much about the quality of the ref. And just the whole messy feeling of the game was undoubtedly enhanced by a chaotic refereeing performance. It’s a real quality of mine, that in a blog post that has been mainly about moaning about my own team, I found time to praise the opposition a little, very faintly and with an undercurrent of having a dig, and still take time to go in two-footed on a ref who had a decent first half. I should say though, that we lost because of the way we played and didn’t lose because of the ref, and he probably got most of the decisions in the game right. But still, and with not much evidence on this occasion, yeah refs are shit. Yaah!

In past seasons we’ve been slow starters. I don’t know what kind of starter we are this year. Mixed starters? Mmmmm, that sounds quite delicious actually. One thing’s for sure, we’re slow starters in absolutely every match we play this year. Next up we have Kyoto at home, when we’ll have to do our best to not concede in the opening eight minutes like we have in the last three games. As I write this, Kyoto are losing to Shonan, so surely we should beat them, right? And they did draw with Kashiwa who have just beaten Vissel Kobe. Who we beat with our B team. So if my calculations are right, if we play the B team we should be able to beat the team who drew with the team that beat the team we beat and who are losing to the team we beat. Right? Well, 'if we play the B team' is a massive if. If this was 2023, I’d be pretty sure that Oniki wouldn’t change the team for the next match. I’m not sure 2024 Oniki is that different from 2023 Oniki, but I think after conceding nine goals in two home games, he is probably going to have to change something. Bet it will be one or two players though and not any kind of approach or tactics. Expect plenty of sideways passing. At least it won’t be on a Friday evening. That will be our third league game of the season and the third which you could say are against teams expected to finish in the bottom half. If we don’t win it, I think it's quite likely that we will be finishing in the bottom half. 

 

If any Sorare players are reading this hoping for a line up prediction for the next match, well, forget it. Some people who’ve contacted me on Twitter asking have been quite nice and polite, but some are really rude once they have received my opinion, and to be honest, I can’t really be bothered to deal with people like that. I don’t know anything that I haven’t said in this post, so if you didn’t find an answer here, you won’t get it elsewhere from me as I don’t know. Sorry to any Sorare players who have read this far expecting something and who have been subjected to and now targeted by my moans. For me, and I’m sure for many, football is an emotional thing. Plenty of things I say on here are huge exaggerations of what I might really think if I sat down with my lab coat on and got my clipboard out and that’s because I care about how my team does. The reason I end up arguing on Twitter with analyst experts is because I watch the games with some emotional investment rather than just to count passes and describe passing moves, all to bolster my self-appointed status online. I don’t really understand people who support the league rather than a team and are interested in every Japanese player that plays anywhere in the world. Anyway, seems like I’m in danger of offending an even larger amount of people than usual with this post so I should probably leave it here.

 

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong (Yellow card 79')
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 36')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 82')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for TACHIBANADA 46')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 82')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for TAKAI 82')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 90+6') (on for YAMAMOTO 82')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi

Goals

UEMURA (Iwata) 6' 0-1
GERMAIN (Iwata) 18' 0-2
GERMAIN  (Iwata) 29' 0-3
ERISON (Frontale) 36' 1-3
ERISON (Frontale) 55' 2-3
MARCINHO (Frontale) 59' 3-3
GERMAIN  (Iwata) 7' PEN 3-4
YAMADA (Frontale) PEN 24' 4-4
GERMAIN  (Iwata) 7' PEN 4-5

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Not a huge appetite to do this, so let's just quickly give it to...

ERISON - second time in a row, but he just scores goals which is exactly what he should be doing. Big fan favourite already. And well done to him for letting Yamada take the penalty. Must be wondering what he has done to deserve signing for us. I'm sorry Erison! Sack your agent!

Highlights