Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 1 Gwangju FC
It was perhaps appropriate that after I missed one game, on my return to watching Frontale, we picked up exactly where we’d left off against Nagoya. Whilst that game was widely said to be perhaps the worst match of the year so far, the first half of this match was maybe at an even lower level. So one thing seems to be clear. I am the jinx. If we lose to Machida that feeling will be reinforced. Either I’m the jinx or our manager is the problem but somehow manages to fluke a win. I guess it’s up to you to decide which is correct. One of the options will be easier to test in the next week or so as I won’t be going to Niigata away. Even nice away trips are losing their lustre a bit recently. But I suppose rushing to Niigata for a Wednesday evening game and then having to rush back the following morning probably doesn’t quite count as a top tier nice away trip. If our football wasn’t so awful this year it would have been fun though. And the fact that we’ve got a load of Friday Night J League’s for all but one of our remaining league home games doesn’t seem that appealing either. And it can’t be good for the club’s finances either. Don’t you get the feeling that Friday Night J League as a concept is a bit of a weird one? Somehow they’ve managed to give it a name and a logo that suggests it is something special, but the experience is more akin to waving around a ‘Liquidless Medicine Party’ sign whilst giving an aging relative their daily dose of pills but with the special and exciting twist that they have to take them without water. I guess one thing that is marginally easier to swallow is the fact that after a shocker of a Friday night performance we at least can forget about football for the whole weekend and concentrate instead on having a nice time. That is unless you have to write a sodding blog post about the game. Anyway, this is a long introduction, so let’s get on to this match with the old bullet points, but as a nice twist, in reverse order.
Ref and officials -
The VAR in this game was astonishingly quick. Normally that’s a good thing, but on this occasion it made me think that maybe the VAR guys system had gone down and they were too embarrassed to admit it, so instead just added a few random pauses where they briefly flashed up the VAR graphic before hastily removing it and turning back to trying to untangle the mess of cables and attempting to work out what had come unplugged. The ref, as often seems to be the case in ACL games, seemed pretty shit. So no real change from the league then. As we had no idea what was being checked and then refused with the numerous VAR interventions, it’s hard to say if they got anything wrong. Looking at replays for our disallowed goal, it looks pretty generous to rule it out for looked a pretty soft coming together, but the ref did that I think, rather than the VAR guys. Their penalty was probably fair enough as far as I could see. At the time it looked a lot clearer, but on the replay there’s more than a hint of a dive, but you know, it was always probably going to be given. So no real complaints there. I was kind of annoyed by the ref for his numerous ‘final warning’ hand gestures which on the next dodgy challenge by the same player were upgraded to a ‘final final warning’ and thereafter a ‘final final final warning’ and never a card. But who am I kidding, our loss had nothing to do with the officials, so there’s no point moaning too much about them. But, I will have at least the one moan that the ref was clearly wrong when he totally missed the Gwangju defender’s handball in the 84th minute. I say clearly but it’s hardly noticeable on the DAZN feed and there were no replays as far as I could see. But looked nailed on from my seat. Presumably the VAR guys had given up trying to untangle the cables by this stage and were already packing up their stuff. So, quite a few small decisions that didn’t go our way, but we were hardly robbed.
Them -
It’s kind of annoying that after squeaking a win against our ultimate ACL nemesis team Ulsan we then followed it up by losing to a team who only just qualified for the competition and who aren’t doing as well this year. I mean, the same could be said about us. In fact the saying the same about us would be a massive understatement as we almost stole our way into this competition and we’re utterly shite this year. But Gwangju just looked like they were at a totally different level to us. In the first half we couldn’t get anywhere near them. They had a plan (unlike us) and stuck to it. I don’t know if the reason we kept giving them the ball was because we are utterly awful or whether they were pressuring us into mistakes but maybe in this section I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. The first 30 minutes of the game were so one-sided in their favour that it was to the point of being ridiculous. I suppose at least we didn’t lose 7-3. In the second half when we came back into the game a bit they defended well and whist they rode their luck at times, they didn’t concede so in that respect they clearly deserved the victory. The less said about our ability to get anywhere near scoring in spite of us dominating, the better. I quite liked their kit too. Not much else to say really as I’d much rather spend time writing shitty things about us.
Us -
One good thing about us losing this match is that it makes it a little less likely that our clown of a chairman will see two ACL wins and immediately offer Oniki a new contract. If we get an announcement that Oniki will be in charge next year I think it could quite easily ruin the rest of this year and the whole of next year for me. At least from a footballing point of view. I’m doing quite well forgetting about the football quite soon after the games recently. After perhaps flukily coming up with a plan that somehow worked against Niigata, Oniki wholesale abandoned it for this game and changed most of the players too. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to the reason for that. Is he focussing on the league? Is he focusing on the ACL? Is he focussing on irritating me? Well, at least if it is the latter he’s actually getting the job done. People were talking about how good the combination of Yamamoto and Erison was at the start of the season and how when they were back together again against Niigata we were back scoring again. So in this match Oniki dropped one of them and asked the other to spend most of his time playing in between our two centre backs. Our flirtation with 442 was abandoned and we were back to the 433 that has served us so badly for the majority of this year. Ienaga was back and was awful in the first half. He did get significantly better in the second though. Tachibanada was back. From where, nobody knows. As I said, it’s impossible to know who is being rested or who is injured and who he thinks is really doing the job. You would have to imagine that Yamamoto would be nowhere near the team still if Oshima hadn’t got injured. But it seems that he made a real difference against Niigata. Any changes that are made that result in something positive usually come about through Oniki having no other option and having things forced on him it seems. And as soon as he notices them having an effect he backtracks to some old stuff that didn’t work previously and probably won’t in the future. It might seem harsh to blame him too much for this game as we were unbelievably bad on the ball in the first half and in the second half were unbelievably bad at shooting. But the fact remains that he made wholesale changes to a team who’d had our best result for ages and reverted to his old plan which resulted in the kind of stuff we got when we used it before. So yeah, don’t blame Oniki for the horrendous errors, but do blame him for the fact that we keep making them. I’m really sick of his post-game comments. Start with some platitudes about how they really wanted to win because of all the fans who’d come to watch and were cheering them on. Then waffle on about something tactical in ridiculous detail which would suggest a genius level understanding of the game, whilst at the same time ignore the fact that your genius level understanding of the game has resulted in defeats for us in most games this season. I’m always the first to admit that I don’t really understand tactics and maybe I always make myself look like a fool in these posts. But in my defence, I do know what it’s like to watch our players do the same thing over and over with zero success and from that presume that the 0% success rate thus far might suggest that in the future we can probably expect the same thing to happen.
To have a quick break here in between the moaning, I’d say that Miura had a decent game I thought. Recently I’ve criticised him quite a lot but this was definitely one of his better games. Where else can I go for a bit more positivity….? Erm… oh. Ok, back to the moaning, It was another horrendous Takai cock up for their goal. But he was by no means alone when it came to making horrendous cock ups in this game, No-one really seemed able to pass. I would say that Gwangju did a great job of winning the ball back from us, but to be honest, it was more a case of us just passing the ball to them. I don’t understand the point of us passing the ball thirty times amongst the defenders, tempting the attackers closer and closer, if the end result is us just giving the ball to them in a more dangerous area than it would have been if we’d tried to get out of our own box. I know Oniki wants to ‘draw out the opponents’ but even when we successfully manage to do that as soon as the ball crosses the centre line we slow things down. I feel like I write this in every post. I probably do. Likewise, our obsession with taking every free kick short and quick is infuriating, given that we do it when their players are right next to us and ready to take the ball back with ease. Or if we manage not to lose the ball, our quick and short free kicks more often than not result in us putting out foot on the ball and slowing things down. It’s just insanely irritating. And our obsession with building slowly from the back reminds me of a young boy who is determined to beat the world record for highest tower of cards, keeps knocking it down after he puts the tenth card in place, but somehow remains convinced that it’s only a matter of time before he breaks the record by triumphantly putting the 143001st card on the top. Come on Oniki, wise up. No one is falling for this shit anymore. Opposition teams I mean, but equally that could be directed at our fans too if they weren’t so relentlessly positive. The regularity with which we cock up makes me think that it’s almost as if the bit where we lose the ball is all part of the plan. It took us 40 minutes to have a shot on target in this game. It was around the same time that we took a corner that managed to get past the first defender. This also seems to be part of the game plan. It’s all just so crap. It really says something that a second half where we consistently fucked up chances and missed open goals made me feel that it was a massive improvement on the first half. That’s how bad the first was and apparently that’s how low my expectations now are.
So a game where the opposition were fast, strong and skillful and Oniki Frontale were slow, soft and shite. Glorious! Saying that, if we manage to win on Saturday away at the much detested Machida, I think plenty of people will ease up on the criticism. Let’s hope that Oniki comes up with a ‘master plan’ that is in the classic Oniki style, ie. completely inappropriate for how he thinks the game will be, but which on that occasion will be somehow exactly the right thing to do. At least at that game we’ll only have to put up with gamesmanship and shithousery of the highest order rather than the weird spectacle of the video with a guy from the ACL telling us about the competition. I couldn’t quite decide if he was a real person or an AI creation so absolutely corporate were his pronouncements and so perfectly English public school was his accent. Once again, a football organisation, (presumably run by loads of people in their late fifties, utterly out of touch with the experience of attending an actual game), in an attempt to make something look fresh, exciting and contemporary managed to make it look like an absolute combination of the worst parts of numerous decades (when those bigwigs were in their pomp), combined with the most expensive but least interesting video production technology, all with the soul and emotion of a corporate training video. This might feel a bit unfair but don’t forget the ACL has made an absolute dog’s breakfast of the format of this competition so they probably deserve to be mocked a bit. This will do, won’t it? I think I’ve run out of steam a bit. This relentless moaning is taking it out of me. And I presume I’ll need to save some ire for the next post.
Ref and officials -
The VAR in this game was astonishingly quick. Normally that’s a good thing, but on this occasion it made me think that maybe the VAR guys system had gone down and they were too embarrassed to admit it, so instead just added a few random pauses where they briefly flashed up the VAR graphic before hastily removing it and turning back to trying to untangle the mess of cables and attempting to work out what had come unplugged. The ref, as often seems to be the case in ACL games, seemed pretty shit. So no real change from the league then. As we had no idea what was being checked and then refused with the numerous VAR interventions, it’s hard to say if they got anything wrong. Looking at replays for our disallowed goal, it looks pretty generous to rule it out for looked a pretty soft coming together, but the ref did that I think, rather than the VAR guys. Their penalty was probably fair enough as far as I could see. At the time it looked a lot clearer, but on the replay there’s more than a hint of a dive, but you know, it was always probably going to be given. So no real complaints there. I was kind of annoyed by the ref for his numerous ‘final warning’ hand gestures which on the next dodgy challenge by the same player were upgraded to a ‘final final warning’ and thereafter a ‘final final final warning’ and never a card. But who am I kidding, our loss had nothing to do with the officials, so there’s no point moaning too much about them. But, I will have at least the one moan that the ref was clearly wrong when he totally missed the Gwangju defender’s handball in the 84th minute. I say clearly but it’s hardly noticeable on the DAZN feed and there were no replays as far as I could see. But looked nailed on from my seat. Presumably the VAR guys had given up trying to untangle the cables by this stage and were already packing up their stuff. So, quite a few small decisions that didn’t go our way, but we were hardly robbed.
Them -
It’s kind of annoying that after squeaking a win against our ultimate ACL nemesis team Ulsan we then followed it up by losing to a team who only just qualified for the competition and who aren’t doing as well this year. I mean, the same could be said about us. In fact the saying the same about us would be a massive understatement as we almost stole our way into this competition and we’re utterly shite this year. But Gwangju just looked like they were at a totally different level to us. In the first half we couldn’t get anywhere near them. They had a plan (unlike us) and stuck to it. I don’t know if the reason we kept giving them the ball was because we are utterly awful or whether they were pressuring us into mistakes but maybe in this section I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. The first 30 minutes of the game were so one-sided in their favour that it was to the point of being ridiculous. I suppose at least we didn’t lose 7-3. In the second half when we came back into the game a bit they defended well and whist they rode their luck at times, they didn’t concede so in that respect they clearly deserved the victory. The less said about our ability to get anywhere near scoring in spite of us dominating, the better. I quite liked their kit too. Not much else to say really as I’d much rather spend time writing shitty things about us.
Us -
One good thing about us losing this match is that it makes it a little less likely that our clown of a chairman will see two ACL wins and immediately offer Oniki a new contract. If we get an announcement that Oniki will be in charge next year I think it could quite easily ruin the rest of this year and the whole of next year for me. At least from a footballing point of view. I’m doing quite well forgetting about the football quite soon after the games recently. After perhaps flukily coming up with a plan that somehow worked against Niigata, Oniki wholesale abandoned it for this game and changed most of the players too. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to the reason for that. Is he focussing on the league? Is he focusing on the ACL? Is he focussing on irritating me? Well, at least if it is the latter he’s actually getting the job done. People were talking about how good the combination of Yamamoto and Erison was at the start of the season and how when they were back together again against Niigata we were back scoring again. So in this match Oniki dropped one of them and asked the other to spend most of his time playing in between our two centre backs. Our flirtation with 442 was abandoned and we were back to the 433 that has served us so badly for the majority of this year. Ienaga was back and was awful in the first half. He did get significantly better in the second though. Tachibanada was back. From where, nobody knows. As I said, it’s impossible to know who is being rested or who is injured and who he thinks is really doing the job. You would have to imagine that Yamamoto would be nowhere near the team still if Oshima hadn’t got injured. But it seems that he made a real difference against Niigata. Any changes that are made that result in something positive usually come about through Oniki having no other option and having things forced on him it seems. And as soon as he notices them having an effect he backtracks to some old stuff that didn’t work previously and probably won’t in the future. It might seem harsh to blame him too much for this game as we were unbelievably bad on the ball in the first half and in the second half were unbelievably bad at shooting. But the fact remains that he made wholesale changes to a team who’d had our best result for ages and reverted to his old plan which resulted in the kind of stuff we got when we used it before. So yeah, don’t blame Oniki for the horrendous errors, but do blame him for the fact that we keep making them. I’m really sick of his post-game comments. Start with some platitudes about how they really wanted to win because of all the fans who’d come to watch and were cheering them on. Then waffle on about something tactical in ridiculous detail which would suggest a genius level understanding of the game, whilst at the same time ignore the fact that your genius level understanding of the game has resulted in defeats for us in most games this season. I’m always the first to admit that I don’t really understand tactics and maybe I always make myself look like a fool in these posts. But in my defence, I do know what it’s like to watch our players do the same thing over and over with zero success and from that presume that the 0% success rate thus far might suggest that in the future we can probably expect the same thing to happen.
To have a quick break here in between the moaning, I’d say that Miura had a decent game I thought. Recently I’ve criticised him quite a lot but this was definitely one of his better games. Where else can I go for a bit more positivity….? Erm… oh. Ok, back to the moaning, It was another horrendous Takai cock up for their goal. But he was by no means alone when it came to making horrendous cock ups in this game, No-one really seemed able to pass. I would say that Gwangju did a great job of winning the ball back from us, but to be honest, it was more a case of us just passing the ball to them. I don’t understand the point of us passing the ball thirty times amongst the defenders, tempting the attackers closer and closer, if the end result is us just giving the ball to them in a more dangerous area than it would have been if we’d tried to get out of our own box. I know Oniki wants to ‘draw out the opponents’ but even when we successfully manage to do that as soon as the ball crosses the centre line we slow things down. I feel like I write this in every post. I probably do. Likewise, our obsession with taking every free kick short and quick is infuriating, given that we do it when their players are right next to us and ready to take the ball back with ease. Or if we manage not to lose the ball, our quick and short free kicks more often than not result in us putting out foot on the ball and slowing things down. It’s just insanely irritating. And our obsession with building slowly from the back reminds me of a young boy who is determined to beat the world record for highest tower of cards, keeps knocking it down after he puts the tenth card in place, but somehow remains convinced that it’s only a matter of time before he breaks the record by triumphantly putting the 143001st card on the top. Come on Oniki, wise up. No one is falling for this shit anymore. Opposition teams I mean, but equally that could be directed at our fans too if they weren’t so relentlessly positive. The regularity with which we cock up makes me think that it’s almost as if the bit where we lose the ball is all part of the plan. It took us 40 minutes to have a shot on target in this game. It was around the same time that we took a corner that managed to get past the first defender. This also seems to be part of the game plan. It’s all just so crap. It really says something that a second half where we consistently fucked up chances and missed open goals made me feel that it was a massive improvement on the first half. That’s how bad the first was and apparently that’s how low my expectations now are.
So a game where the opposition were fast, strong and skillful and Oniki Frontale were slow, soft and shite. Glorious! Saying that, if we manage to win on Saturday away at the much detested Machida, I think plenty of people will ease up on the criticism. Let’s hope that Oniki comes up with a ‘master plan’ that is in the classic Oniki style, ie. completely inappropriate for how he thinks the game will be, but which on that occasion will be somehow exactly the right thing to do. At least at that game we’ll only have to put up with gamesmanship and shithousery of the highest order rather than the weird spectacle of the video with a guy from the ACL telling us about the competition. I couldn’t quite decide if he was a real person or an AI creation so absolutely corporate were his pronouncements and so perfectly English public school was his accent. Once again, a football organisation, (presumably run by loads of people in their late fifties, utterly out of touch with the experience of attending an actual game), in an attempt to make something look fresh, exciting and contemporary managed to make it look like an absolute combination of the worst parts of numerous decades (when those bigwigs were in their pomp), combined with the most expensive but least interesting video production technology, all with the soul and emotion of a corporate training video. This might feel a bit unfair but don’t forget the ACL has made an absolute dog’s breakfast of the format of this competition so they probably deserve to be mocked a bit. This will do, won’t it? I think I’ve run out of steam a bit. This relentless moaning is taking it out of me. And I presume I’ll need to save some ire for the next post.
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR (Yellow card 21')
DF 13. MIURA Sota
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR (Yellow card 21')
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 17. TONO Daiya
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 17. TONO Daiya
Subs
GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for CESAR HAYDAR 46')
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 90+4') (on for SEGAWA 74')
GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for CESAR HAYDAR 46')
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 90+4') (on for SEGAWA 74')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 67')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for KOBAYASHI 67')
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for TONO 74')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
MF 34. YUI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
Goals
ASANI (Gwangju) 21' PEN 0-1
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 67')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for KOBAYASHI 67')
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for TONO 74')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
MF 34. YUI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
Goals
ASANI (Gwangju) 21' PEN 0-1
Highlights
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