Vs Sagan Tosu (away) 15/5/24 J League match 14

 

Sagan Tosu 5 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

This morning in our hotel in Fukuoka, I decided to have a shower. I’d had one before bed last night but woke up feeling disgusting for some reason. Having checked the various bottles by the shower the previous night I reached for the one at the back and proceeded to attempt to wash myself with conditioner. Using a substance utterly unfit for the job in an act of carelessness, brought about by a feeling of confidence that was misplaced. Starting the day exactly the way Frontale had finished the previous evening. Perfect! Thankfully I was in the shower and could just wash away the error. Sadly the humiliation of a completely gutless and useless defeat isn’t so easy to rid ourselves of. Anyway, that’s enough chat about me showering. I’m sure it’s not an image that any of us wants to dwell on. This is going to be a thrown together post as I’m now on the train heading to our first in-between-games destination. I won’t be home till Sunday night after the Gamba game so this post will look horrible till then. And maybe for some time afterwards too. But once again I think that is a kind of appropriate metaphor for this dog’s breakfast of a season. The last time we won two games in a row was the first leg against Shadong and the Super Cup final. We know what happened in the second leg though, and when it comes to importance, the Super Cup makes the Levain Cup look like the World Cup final. Don’t get me wrong, I quite like the Levain Cup, and it should be more fun this year in its new format. And let’s not be under any illusions the Levain Cup is probably our best chance of salvaging anything from this season as we’ll be dropped in at a later stage of the competition due to our “ACL commitments”. Right now though, for us to have any chance of winning it we’d probably need to be dropped in at the start of injury time in the second half of the final with a seven goal head start. We’re totally shit this year, apart from in tiny bursts when the players seem to ignore what they’ve been instructed to do by our esteemed manager. Even when we have what looks like a good result, all you have to do is watch the whole game and you’ll realise that any gloss you might imagine you’ve seen is just an illusion. If the opposition doesn’t turn up in an absolute state, or give us a few free goals or get a red card, we’ll pretty much stand no chance of getting anything from a game. Sometimes the opposition does that and we still get nothing. After every game we get the same nonsense from Oniki, and then for the next game we get the same nonsense plan from Oniki. A common refrain from people who don’t like any Oniki out talk is “But who would take over?!?!”. Right now I think anyone could do a better job. Well maybe anyone apart from Nanami who’d probably somehow manage to get us to the JFL in one season instead of the three that Oniki has planned. There must be some doubts amongst the players about his abilities. There seems to finally be some doubts in the stands too, as after this game there was some booing of our players. It was a surprise and I’m not really in favour of it, but I am all in favour of shouting out “This is fucking shit!” as we concede our fifth goal. I don’t know if Oniki ever comes to talk to the supporters after a game as in these kind of situations I’m usually out of the stadium pretty quickly. Why prolong the agony? If the players have tried hard but come up short, fair enough, give them a clap. But at this game when they came over there was nothing for me to clap about. So I didn’t. A bit of silent treatment might help I think. I find the guy booing and shouting “I came all the way to Tosu to see this!” equally as pointless as clapping and singing to them after an awful game. They know they’ve had a shit game. And plenty of other shit games before it. I think the whole “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed in you” parenting thing is the right approach. 

A few words about what went wrong in this game, as if it wasn’t utterly obvious. Some truly terrible individual errors for all but one of the goals. I don’t want to single him out, but Tachibanada’s cock up for the last goal was quite emblematic of our season, pissing around with the ball just outside of our own penalty area for absolutely no apparent reason or purpose, then lose the ball and concede. We kept a clean sheet in our last game but Oniki decided to change things for what I guess he considered to be the easier of our two games this week. Hmmmm. To be honest though, I think that was probably the right thing to do. Perhaps though he shouldn’t have got the central defence pairing that conceded five goals to Jubilo back together. Wonder if Oniki has spotted that yet? Hat trick hero from the last game? Leave him at home. Players who’ve been having a bit of a nightmare recently? Keep them in! To be fair to Oniki we had a reasonable first 20 minutes. Players looked like they wanted to try to attack and we were trying some forward passes. We scored from a corner! Naturally it wasn’t a Wakizaka corner. I think maybe Takai let his first league goal go to his head though, as although in this first period he was spraying the ball around nicely, as the clock ticked on things started to fall to pieces for him and the team as a whole. As soon as we conceded the first it was like we’d been told we had to play the rest of the game blindfolded. All the confidence evaporated and we became awful. We struggled to get out of our own penalty box, let alone our own half. And as always, that pointless, pointless passing. Pass it along the defensive line, centre back to centre back to keeper to centre back to right back who gets in trouble but somehow gets out of it and passes back to the centre back etc. All of this finally results in Kami hoofing the ball upfield for the opposition to start building an attack. Absolutely no forward movement. Any opposition coach scouting us must just be rubbing their hands. ‘We don’t need to try to make chances, they’ll make them for us. Just pressure them a bit at the back and they’ll give the ball away’. I’ve got no idea how we managed to score a second goal. Even in the stadium it seemed like lots of people hadn’t noticed we’d scored. Looking at the replay it seems like it was some great persistence from Yamada. But to be honest that was about all he did in the game. He stayed on the pitch for the whole game though. Oniki’s substitutions in this match were awful. The defence was a total mess in the first half, conceded three but it still took him till the 58th minute by which time we’d conceded our 4th to change anything. We desperately needed a goal but it took him until the 68th minute to bring on Erison, our marquee signing this year. I can’t imagine Erison is going to play himself back into form with 20 minutes at the end of a game now and again. And always, it’s just the same system and approach. And the same excuses. And the same points made in these increasingly dull blog posts. We had more shots than them apparently, (I find this hard to believe to be honest. It certainly didn’t feel like that). We had loads more possession than them, (very easy to believe. But utterly pointless possession). They scored five times and we scored once and scrambled one in. 

Oh, the ref was Kasahara. He usually hates us and seems to want to sabotage us, but I think we hated ourselves and sabotaged ourselves more in this game. So another no-moans-about-the-ref blog post!

So what should we do going forward? Well the thing that would really make a difference I think is to fire Oniki but of course that’s not going to happen and he won’t quit till he’s confirmed our relegation and even then he probably will think he’s got a good chance at doing well in J2. (I disagree. There’s no way we’ll get away with this crap and pointless football there). If we dropped every player who had a nightmare in this game we’d have to change all of the back four apart from Sasaki, the goalkeeper, one third of the midfield and probably two thirds of the attack. Actually, maybe that would be kind of fun. But as I always say, if one player has a nightmare, you can blame the player. If it’s more than half the team you’ve probably got to blame the manager. I’m not a manager or tactician so I can’t tell you what we should do, but it’s pretty clear what we shouldn’t do, isn’t it? Ditch the slow build up and pointless passing. Maybe, I dunno, try something different. Remember when Oniki took over? There was a consensus that he was doing the right thing by tempering the attack crazy Kazama style slightly and giving us some defensive solidity. Eight years on and somehow Oniki has eliminated both the attacking and the defensive solidity. So what exactly do we have left? Passing! That’s what we have! Lots of passing! Who needs attacks or goals when you have passes? Oniki’s culinary style is to chop his ingredients finely. Then chop them again. And then again until the vegetables have become a big mush, at which stage he throws the ingredients in the bin and starts the process again. Who needs to eat dinner when you can just enjoy the most basic part of cooking over and over again? Chop chop chop. Pass pass pass. Chop pass pass chop. And then throw any aspirations of doing anything in 2024, of winning a game, of even scoring a goal, throw them all in the bin. So in conclusion, I dunno what to do, but please for the love of god don’t do EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME THING AGAIN. And I dunno, maybe try to attack a bit.

Next up Gamba away on Saturday. Presumably back to the two man defensive midfield to shore things up which in turn will ensure that we score NO GOALS. Fingers crossed for a 0-0 then. Recently we’ve always been pretty bad at the Suita stadium and anyone who thinks that is likely to change is a braver and more optimistic person than I am. But then again, if we played badly there when we were supposed to be good, perhaps in this shittest of shit seasons we might do well? Hmmmm. Anyway, I going to get this online ASAP so I can enjoy the rest of the week. It should be a lot of fun. Well, right up until the point I remember that we have to go and watch this ponderous and pointless crap again. Bravo Frontale!

Team

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 31. Sai VAN WERMESKERKEN

DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 17. TONO Daiya

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 4. JESIEL (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 58')

MF 6. ZE RICARDO
FW 9. ERISON (on for IENAGA 68')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for MARCINHO 58')

MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for SEKO 68')
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for OMINAMI 78')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Alcohol - the stronger the better to tolerate this shit.

Goals

TAKAI (Frontale) 13' 0-1
YOKOYAMA (Tosu) 26' 1-1
YOKOYAMA (Tosu) 37' 2-1
MARCELO RYAN (Tosu) 44' 3-1
IENAGA (Frontale) 45+3' 3-2
HARADA (Tosu) 47' 4-2
KAWATA (Tosu) 75' 5-2

Highlights