Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (home) 30/6/24 J League match 21

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 Sanfrecce Hiroshima

Fantastic! Entertaining! Enlightening! Really fun! Much better than things have been recently! But that’s enough about my day. I suppose you’re not reading this to hear how much fun I had taking one of my students to their first game, and rather to hear me moan about us once again being unable to win. The match itself, well, it wasn’t the best, but actually it wasn’t that bad either. Certainly not good enough to spend a lot of time writing a long blog post about though. It is now three draws in a row, and three leads thrown away in a row, and although the flaws have been consistent, there has been a little bit of variation in our performances and my feelings about the games. Away at Niigata started pretty well but we ended up running out of energy and almost fell to pieces completely. Shonan at home was just crap really but ended up with the same result. This game was more like the former, with us making a pretty good fist of it, but once again not being able to hold on to a lead and being quite lucky not to lose in the end. Perhaps the comparison falls down slightly when you consider that against Niigata we looked like we were on top and were bossing the game. In this match, we played more like we were coming up against a stronger opponent, (the last two years show this to be true, I guess). In the past we’d probably expect Sanfrecce to defend in numbers and then break quickly to snatch a goal. In this game we did that to Sanfrecce and it seemed to be working pretty well for about the first hour. Of course there were some dicey moments but I felt our lead wasn’t really that against the run of play. But naturally things fell to pieces. I don’t know if it’s completely Oniki’s fault, (I’m even boring myself with my consistent blaming of him recently), but you’ve got to say that after he brought on an extra centre back to, I guess, ‘shore things up’ we conceded shortly afterwards. I’d be hard pushed to tell you where anyone in front of the defence was playing after those changes too. It was a bit of a mess. But even so, when the inevitable equaliser came it was gutting, particularly as there was a big old deflection involved. To be fair, the initial shot that lead to our goal was similarly deflected so probably can’t moan that much, but it did feel like it was just the perfect way for us to concede to make it feel as disappointing as possible. Anyway, I can’t be bothered to write too much about this game so let’s get the ‘important’ points out of the way,

The team was pretty similar to the team that was pretty bad against Shonan. As he hasn’t been involved for a couple of games now, I think we can assume that Ienaga has been added to the injured list. Jesiel replaced Ominami which I guess shows that Jesiel is being strategically rested so probably isn’t really capable of playing that often anymore. He certainly looks like he’s half injured most of the time. I don’t know if this is age catching up with him or it’s a long term injury that’s plaguing him. I wonder if he’ll only be a bit part player in the future. If that’s the case, it’s quite sad. Yamamoto also has been absent for two games in a row. So maybe he’s inured again. Or maybe it’s just the return of Oshima that’s keeping him out. Tono on the right in the Ienaga spot wasn’t as good as him in the Wakizaka spot. With Wakizaka back, I can’t imagine Tono will get a go there again in a hurry. If Ienaga is injured, maybe Patrick Verhon could be an option up front on the right. Or Yamada. Or Kobayashi, Or maybe we could change the formation. No chance of that happening obviously! Marcinho continued his goal scoring run. Thankfully someone is scoring. I’d say Marcinho is now getting somewhere near to back to his best. Not quite there yet, he’s still hanging on to the ball for a bit too long, and some of his shots are not very good at all. But at least we have some kind of attacking threat there now. The main striker still isn’t scoring, but that’s been the case in most games for the last few years so that’s so expected that it’s probably not even worth mentioning. Sasaki had another good game. Seko too. We were alright! We definitely had chances at the end to get a winner, but there were some shocking decisions made that prevented us from doing so. Kobayashi will presumably really regret not passing to Miyagi. That one was particularly galling. Not sure we would have completely deserved to win, but it wouldn’t have been wholly unfair on how the game had gone. Bit of an Oniki moan, we definitely didn’t use our subs very well, but this is in part because we had to change Marcinho due to an injury. (Guess it’s natural that our only recent goal scorer should get injured too). I don’t know why his first change is always a single one though. On a few occasions recently we’ve been prevented from using all of our subs due to an early change of just one player. And pretty often the subs don’t really change anything. On this occasion, maybe they did, but not particularly for the better. I would have liked to have seen Gomis get the chance to knock the Sanfrecce back three about a bit. I dunno though, not particularly surprised we ended up drawing. Pleased that we didn’t lose. Gutted by the way we conceded. Oh, but there was one more emotion that was present in the stadium, wasn’t there?



 

Fury. Yes, once again we were blessed with an absolutely useless referee, Imamura, most famous recently for his out of control emotional explosion as he sent off Kozuka away at Urawa. Before the match I commented that Imamura is a classic example of short man syndrome. During the match I was surprised to see that he’s not actually that short, so he doesn’t even have insecurity about his height as an excuse for his horrendous attitude. There were SO MANY bad decisions in this game that at one stage the whole Frontale bench were standing at the side of the pitch shouting at him. Even in this situation he failed to do the right thing, which clearly would have been to book a translator or something to send the message that people should calm down. Once again I’ve got a rough voice the day after a match, not because of celebrating a goal but because of screaming at a ref. I know it’s not a very edifying thing to do but it certainly helps me express my frustration a little. Of course, we didn’t fail to win because of Imamura, but once again he made mistake after mistake in a game but presumably went home thinking he’d done a great job. To close this section, here are some words about Imamura from past blog posts that probably are still relevant:



 

‘Whilst I always moan about refs, I don’t think I have screamed so loudly at one for a long time. Let’s hope it’s a long time till we ever see him at one of our games again.’

‘Totally lost control of the game and of course was way out of his depth’

‘Clearly bottled some big decisions’

 



Good to see he’s at least consistent in his shitness.

Next up Jubilo Iwata away, a team who we conceded five goals to last time we played them. Our squad seems to be full of injuries. We haven’t won in our last four league games. Any bright sparks that our manager accidentally stumbles on are quickly extinguished before the next match. So, basically, I’m not particularly confident. But at least it will be a nice little day trip! And who knows, perhaps we could even avoid that whole massive capitulation thing that seems to be part of our game plan recently. Fingers crossed! 

 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 90+1')
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 67')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 35')
FW 17. TONO Daiya
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

 

Subs

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (on for WAKIZAKA 82')
MF 6. ZE RICARDO
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for TONO 82')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 62')
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 65')
 
Goals

MARCINHO (Frontale) 23' 1-0
MITSUTA (Sanfrecce) 88' 1-1

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

No messing around with this. And clearly I’m biased again but…

SASAKI Asahi and SEKO Tatsuki - just for the fact that they once again stood out.

Highlights