Vs Albirex Niigata (away) 9/10/24 Levain Cup Semi Final 1st Leg

Albirex Niigata 4 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

With a two legged-tie, the first leg can sometimes be a tough sell. We never do particularly well away at Niigata and this fairly hastily arranged game on a Wednesday evening, with us having a shit year definitely fitted that bill. So instead I went to work, feeling confident that we might do the business as recently my absence from our games has meant that we play well and my attendance meant that we just pass the ball endlessly. And as this is basically only the first half nothing would really be decided and all the excitement would come in the second leg on Sunday, right?  Well, unless we got so utterly battered to the point of almost making the second leg irrelevant. It’s a bit of a shame that happened, particularly after we smashed Machida last weekend. But somehow utterly predictable. You might imagine I would have run out of original ways to get irritated by Oniki but perhaps I’ve found another relatively new one after this match. We’ve done well in a few games recently where Oniki has finally given in to the calls to play 442 with an approach that puts a bit more emphasis on trying to score than trying to rack up passes. Yamamoto and Erison were back in the team together, (admittedly due to Oniki running out of options so definitely more by luck than judgement), and were playing well. Quite why Oniki decided to break up that partnership for every game that followed a good performance, I don’t know. All the years he’s been sticking with the same formation and the same line up in spite of us playing awfully. Finally he perhaps accidentally came up with something that did work and suddenly he wants to rotate and change the formation between every match. It’s almost as if he got a win to take the pressure off and then decided to immediately revert to working on his plan of getting his favoured formation and players back and blasting regardless of the fact that it is a terrible idea and there’s any evidence it will ever happen. Even when he’s won some games doing something different he still thinks that his original way is the best. It’s infuriating, but utterly predictable.

As I have only seen the highlights of his match, I’m not going to write anything about it apart from the moan above. Actually highlights isn’t really the right name for them. From our point of view It was more like a blooper reel. I think I can only remember two shots of ours being in there and the rest was Yamaguchi looking frustrated whilst picking the ball out of the back of the net. 568 passes for just the one shot on target. Really awful stuff, real Oniki stuff. Barring an insane comeback, Oniki’s fucked another competition at almost the first time of asking. I am really looking forward to the end of the season. Well, as long as it brings the end of his time with us. If it doesn’t, I might look into the possibility of somehow hibernating for the whole of 2025. I think we’ve reached the stage now where all of the success that he brought us has been undermined by his utter uselessness for the last three or four years. If we somehow managed to win this tournament it would be kind of undeserved as we were parachuted in to the quarter finals against a J2 team and barely scraped through. And to be honest, as petty as it sounds, I don’t really want Oniki to finish his time with us with any kind of success. He should have gone a long time ago. We shouldn’t have offered him at least the last two contract extensions, but equally he shouldn’t have accepted them. I think he’s going to be really shown up in his next job, particularly if it’s at a big money basket case team.

To make a very clumsy cooking comparison, when he took over from Kazama, he basically had to only make the change of putting the deliciously cooked meal on a plate and serving it, rather than employing the risky but admittedly more exciting route of flinging it across the room, forkful by forkful directly into the diner’s mouth. As the years have passed Oniki has used up all the pasta, run down the spice rack, gone through everything in the freezer and is now wondering why no one has done the shopping. At the same time, the kitchen is now about to properly catch on fire. Although he accidentally avoided a massive inferno on a few previous occasions by accidentally turning the gas off whilst trying to switch the lights on, he’s made sure to go back and set things on fire again immediately afterwards as he was worried that going straight from building catching fire to safety was a bit too much of an adventurous step. He’s still trying to make that original meal without realising he’s put all his new ingredients into the wrong containers. And let’s be honest, after we’ve been made to eat the same meal for eight years, even if the cooking had improved it would still be quite boring. As it is, it’s now an almost inedible mess and the best we can hope for is that we don’t get food poisoning from it. On a couple of occasions he had a go at using the rice and curry sauce he found to make a curry and it was nice! But a bit too spicy for his taste, so afterwards immediately went back to attempting to use the rice and curry sauce to make an omelet instead and was shocked when it didn’t seem to work. I know this lengthy analogy doesn’t really work, but writing it was marginally more fun than watching us play football right now.

Next up, our almost certain elimination from another competition due to our manager completely fucking things up. As I didn’t see this game, some of you might think it’s a bit unfair to criticise Oniki so much. But don’t worry, I’ve seen plenty of his uselessness already, so even from a distance feel I can spot an Oniki dog’s dinner when I see one. After that, we have Gamba at home next Friday for yet another Friday Night J League. Let the joy overflow!

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (Yellow card 81')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 17. TONO Daiya
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 46')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MARCINHO 54')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for CESAR HAYDAR 54')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for TONO 46')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for TACHIBANADA 69')

Goals

TANIGUCHI (Niigata) 25' 1-0
OTA (Niigata) 45' 2-0
HASEGAWA (Niigata) 50' 3-0
HOSHI (Niigata) 53' 4-0
SEGAWA (Frontale) 71' 4-1

Highlights