Vs Buriram United (away) 26/11/24 ACL 2024/25 game 5

Buriram United 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale

As I can never really pay full attention to games that I'm watching on a laptop, this is a blog post that is a bit of a mess. I'm toying with the format slightly and this is basically a few things I thought as I watched the match, slightly edited to look less ridiculous.

First half -

Absolutely awful first half of utter shit against a team who on paper look exceedingly average. Although maybe the fact that we are supposedly better on paper shows just how unreliable these kind of things are. No shots on target from either team. And extremely difficult to pay attention to as there are far more interesting things to do, like listening to the rain outside or pondering how many crisps you get in a tube of fake Pringles versus a tube of real Pringles. Perhaps the most exciting thing to watch on the screen is the massive amount of adverts that they have, which is kind of weird considering DAZN is a service that you have to pay for anyway. Need a significant improvement in the second half if we are going to avoid a classic 2024 Oniki Frontale type result in a game most would expect us to win.

Second half -

Start of the second half was so exciting that the most fun was checking where Tabinas’s brother is now playing after leaving Grulla. 60 minutes of utter trash. Presumably the first two changes will be on the 62nd minute as they almost always are regardless of what is happening in the game. And here they are, right on time! Don't say I know nothing! We hit the post which provided a brief blast of excitement but then back to the same old stuff. Finally! A goal! Finally a shot that doesn’t trickle along the floor or go off target. Well done Miura! Five minutes later, there's a replay showing that someone was offside for the goal, apparently unaware that as they were so far away from the action, they clearly weren't affecting play. The ACL continues to be comically tinpot. Good to see the refs know at least a little bit more than the TV people. Kanda comes on for a long overdue debut! And we almost immediately score! And then a goal for Kanda! Kind of amusing as a significant part of the build up was a fantastically mishit pass from him. But who cares? Finally he's been given a chance! Hope we'll see more of him before the season finishes.

Conclusion -

A scoreline that was completely unreflective of the generally poor game, but which was a very welcome one anyway. Three goals in our last two ACL games nicely covering up the fact that we'd only scored one in our first three. Our position in the table looks a lot better now but it's still all quite close. Fingers crossed for the last ACL game we have before the break against Shandong next week. Next up Verdy away on Saturday.

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi

DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 24)
MF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 4. JESIEL (on for MARUYAMA 83')

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 17. TONO Daiya (on for YAMAUCHI 63')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 83')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for KOBAYASHI 63')
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
FW 32. KANDA Soma (on for ERISON 90+3')
MF 34. YUI Kota

DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

Goals

MIURA (Frontale) 79' 0-1
TONO (Frontale) 90+4' 0-2
KANDA (Frontale) 90+7' 0-3

Highlights

Vs Urawa Reds (away) 22/11/24 J League match 28 Part 2

Urawa Reds 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale 

This is the second part of a blog post about a game that was started on the 24th August. You can read that bit here

 

This part should probably have the subtitle 'Iwate Grulla Morioka 1 - 4 Fukushima United' as you can probably tell from the pictures.

Sorry, but the second part of this blog post is even less informative than the first. A rearranged 45 minutes at a stadium that is a pain in the arse to get to and the surrounding area of which offers absolutely nothing of interest was always going to be a hard sell. As it was we already had a trip booked in which we saw Ozeki and Matsunagane play for Fukushima United against Grulla and in spite of it being bloody cold at the game, (J League, once again give yourselves a pat on the back for your genius idea of changing the season dates in a couple of years time. Clearly a lot of the Tohoku teams’ home games are going to be pretty inhospitable). It will come as no surprise to hear that Ozeki is looking very good. Matsunagane had a decent game too, I thought, but got stitched up by the officials on a few occasions. And I would say that we should never moan about our refs as the J3 contingent are truly terrible but that sounds too positive. The truth probably is that J1 officials are hopeless and J3 ones are on the career path to progress from being truly hopeless to just plain hopeless. Good luck to them. So yeah, back to Frontale and there's nothing much I can write in the second half of this blog post. We scored and therefore drew. With everything surrounding the game, it was always going to be a bit of a weird one. That’s all I know really. The team have already flown to Thailand for the game against Buriram on Tuesday. I’m not going to that one either so I guess that blog post will also be a short one. And the Saturday after that we have Verdy away. Some might say we are out for revenge, but as far as I can remember, the home game against them was one of exceedingly low quality and extremely lacking in excitement, so not sure how that really fits into the whole revenge thing. Two more league and two more ACL games to go for the Oniki Frontale project and then we can start thinking about what a new manager can bring to us in 2025. I guess that counts as semi-exciting times, particularly after experiencing large parts of 2024.

 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 4. JESIEL (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 81')
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 81')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for WAKIZAKA 46')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto

MF 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 73')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for OSHIMA 56')

DF 44. Cesar HAYDAR

Goals

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 55' 1-1

 

Highlights

 

 

Vs Kyoto Sanga (away) 9/11/24 J League match 36

Kyoto Sanga 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

It may surprise some readers to hear me say this, but this was quite an entertaining match. Of course the result wasn’t the best, but a draw against a team who with three games to go in the season still weren’t certain to avoid relegation is in 2024 actually a pretty positive outcome. We’ve been atrocious against teams in the bottom half this year. It was especially positive considering that at the final whistle we also were still not mathematically safe from relegation either. This post is going to be light on detail and content for a few reasons. Firstly, I’m writing this on a bus to Tokushima where I intend to consume a lot of alcohol, so there’s definitely a feeling of getting the witting of this out of the way. Secondly, I spent most of the game ducking and weaving trying to avoid the two massive flags in front of me. These flags made large portions of the pitch and the game completely invisible to me. Your guess is probably better than mine for what went on. But don’t worry, I clearly saw all the idiotic things the ref and linesman did though. Finally, this will be light because this game ultimately wasn’t that important and probably won’t live long in the memory. But for once it’s nice to not have an awful performance casting a long shadow over what was supposed to be a nice weekend away. Ok, so let’s get on with this.

As I said, it was a fun game. Large periods of it were end to end, particularly in the second half. Kyoto have been in decent form recently so a draw against them is perhaps a good result. Whilst the game was quite exciting, it wasn’t really very pretty. We were totally on top in the first half yet only managed our first shot around the 35th minute. A very familiar story. After that and before half time we did come alive, but didn’t manage to actually force a save, so perhaps it was more a case of just waking up than being brought back from the dead and given superpowers. Although it didn’t feel like it, it seems like Kyoto really dominated the chances in the second half. Certainly Sung-Ryong made some great and very important saves. But I felt like we were having good chances of our own, so I was a bit shocked when I saw the stats. As the real story of the game for me is the performance of the officials, maybe I should get the Kyoto bitching part over in this paragraph. They’re definitely a physical team, spending quite a lot of the match trying to kick lumps out of us. They are also definitely a team of whiny little arseholes, moaning about every decision, even the ones that went their way. I imagine they’d only be happy if every attempted Frontale tackle resulted in the execution of the player responsible and them being awarded five bonus goals for having to put up with us trying to get the ball. I also noticed that behind the goal in the home end there was one of those usual nationalist flags. It’s not uncommon for teams to have some kind of knuckle-dragger fans whose whole reason for living is to try to be an edgelord waving them but usually they at least attempt to cover things up a little by having them in their team’s colours. Not on this occasion. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it in the first half, so maybe they only decide to wave it if there’s a Korean player nearby. Can’t say for sure but it definitely seemed to be the case to me.

This is all probably quite biased though. However, I think both sets of fans were irritated by the person that I’ll dedicate a whole paragraph to. Kasahara was back again and it seems he’s still useless and he still hates us. Perhaps he was wound up by our stubborn refusal to give him a DOGSO red opportunity. It certainly seemed like he had a bit of a grudge against us when he openly laughed as he waved away what I reckon could have been a penalty for a shove in the back on Ienaga. Reckon this decision could have gone either way really, but it was a bit weird to see the enjoyment he took in making it. I guess the big talking point of the game was the penalty. Or rather I should say penalties. I haven’t yet seen a replay of Sung-Ryong apparently moving off his line for the first one which he saved. To be honest though, I’d say that anytime the taker does one of those stupid run ups the keeper should have the right to not only leave his line but also smack the taker in the face. It’s really annoying and I’m disappointed that I’ve seen some of our players do it this year. I’m not sure how jogging on the spot doesn’t count as stopping halfway through the run up, but it seems that plenty of refs are ok with it. Both of the penalties definitely included clear stops in the run up. Would have been nice to see the officials pay as much attention to that as they did to movement off the line. The most annoying thing though is that it was even given. Kasahara missed it and after VAR drew his attention to his ‘clear and obvious error’ it took him ages and numerous replays to apparently see that it hit Tachibanada’s arm. To be honest, I don’t think that part was even worth debating it was so obvious. The stupid part is the fact that refs are supposed to take into account body position and distance from where the ball was kicked in these cases. Tachibanada was touching the attacker so couldn’t have been closer. Quite how he’s supposed to get his arms out the way as an attacker kicks the ball right at him from point blank range, I don’t know. As soon as he went to the monitor I just knew he was going to give it though, the stupid arsehole. He’d already stiffed us in the first half by not sending Appiah off for a second yellow. Clearly it was a yellow card offence but Kasahara didn’t want to give it in front of the home end. It was particularly galling that he gave Sai a yellow for a very similar incident in almost the same place in the second half. But I guess it’s no surprise we don’t get consistency from these refs as they seem unaware even of the rules of the game, so it’s expecting a bit much for them to apply them on a fair basis. Kasahara should consider a new career. Not just because he’s a hopeless ref, but also because I think he do really well having his own winery as he clearly is excellent at bottling things. To be fair though, he wasn’t helped by his linesman at our end who was also hopeless. But similarly to how I stated above, if the refs are shit, it’s no surprise that the guys who aren’t good enough to be awful refs are also not good at their job. I’m not sure anyone ever dreams as a youngster of being a linesman, do they? But anyway, useless ref, useless linesman, but it probably helped when it came to my enjoyment of the match. I shouted quite a lot. I suspect I might shout more when I watch some replays.

So an enjoyable game and thanks to Gamba beating Jubilo, a point that ensures our safety, so there’s… erm… something to celebrate tonight. Hmmmm. Our matches have seemed kind of pointless for a lot of this year, but now they are officially pointless. Well, apart from the ACL games. Next up, the second half of our match against Urawa. I’m not going to that one as I have much better plans. Going to Saitama Stadium is a pain in the arse even when there are no caveats, so the thought of going there for only 45 minutes is a big ask. And we’re losing at half time. After that it’s Buriram away in the ACL, so I’m not going to be attending a match for a while. Might give me an opportunity to get my voice back properly before presumably ruining it again when the next clown of a ref rolls into town. Oniki lovers will be sad that the Oniki Frontale games are running out fast now. I’m pleased that we don’t have any relegation worries so I can probably have a little truce with him. He’s obviously done a lot for the club and it’s a bit of shame that he didn’t leave in a better circumstances than a hopeless season, but at least he didn’t get us relegated. Come on Oniki and give us something to cheer about by smashing five past Urawa!
 

 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai (Yellow card 52')

DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. TONO Daiya
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke
FW 9. ERISON

 

Subs

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 4. JESIEL (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 84')

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for YAMAMOTO 46')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for MARCINHO 84')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 46')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for TONO 46')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Haven’t done this for ages but given that I made a note that he was single-handedly keeping us alive in the game it has to go to…

JUNG Sung-Ryong - I’m slightly worried that he might be leaving us at the end of the year, presumably to retire. This match showed that there’s no need for him to retire just yet. Great stuff again!

Goals

YAMADA (Frontale) 24' 0-1
RAFAEL ELIAS (Kyoto) 79' PEN 1-1

Highlights

Vs Shanghai Port (home) 5/11/24 ACL 2024/25 game 4

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 1 Shanghai Port 

I think all the best writers always start everything they write with a massive cliche, don’t they? I think it’s a sign of someone being extremely skilled with words. With that in mind, football’s a funny old game isn’t it? Last Friday Oniki kept to his favoured 4-3-3, we started atrociously, conceded three times in the first half before playing a bit better in the second half, getting a late but utterly pointless consolation goal. Oh, and I was utterly pissed off with football. Fast forward to Tuesday when Oniki ditched his 4-3-3, we started brightly, scored three times in the first half before being pretty flat and getting kind of overwhelmed in the second half, conceding a late but utterly pointless goal. Oh, and I was somehow over the moon. So yeah, it’s a funny old game isn’t it? Well, it is if you forget the fact that we are always useless playing 4-3-3 recently and we’ve done considerably better when we play 4-4-2. So maybe football isn’t funny after all. Maybe the funny thing is that Oniki keeps going back to 4-3-3. I suspect we’ll see it again on Saturday in Kyoto as he does tend to revert to it after a win in order to reset us back to losing ways. I don’t know if he is now trying to change the formation to suit the game and the opposition. If this is the case, and I somehow doubt it is, perhaps someone at the club should point out to him that we have a significantly higher chance of not being shit when we play 4-4-2. Maybe that analyst we hired could tell him. But anyway, this was a win, and a very important one, so let’s not get bogged down in this moaning, and instead use some minor success as an opportunity to speed through a blog post in a slightly different format to usual, with Frontale Rabbit’s reasons to be cheerful.

Reason 1 - A right back at right back and a left back at left back.

I know this is something of a wild innovation for us recently, but you know, maybe it’s something we could stick with in the future. All over the pitch we had players playing in their preferred positions! Amazing! Well perhaps aside from Ienaga who was on the left wing. But let’s be honest, he did well! Maybe that was the secret Oniki has been working on unlocking for so long. Ienaga never really stays where he is supposed to be playing but was a bit more disciplined, (at least in that respect), in this game. With players in position our attack looked sharp and we scored goals with plenty of different players. Erison didn’t get one, but definitely put in a good performance. It was a nice game to watch and good to see our players looking a bit happier.

Reason 2 - We’re not out of this competition.

This was threatening to be a possibility if we lost to a team that had just won the Chinese league. Maybe they were slightly hungover from that achievement and we got them at the right time. Or maybe the Chinese league isn’t actually that good and our travails against Chinese teams are due to our own cock ups. But this win was crucial. We’ve moved up to 8th in the group, the last place that goes through to the next round. And our remaining games are against the two teams immediately above us and two who are below us. It seems that the group is quite open, and we should have a decent chance of going through. Unless he switches back to 4-3-3 for the remaining games. Hmmm. Now I’m not so confident….

Reason 3 - Oscar and Kevin Muscats would have been annoyed about the result.

I feel a bit bad about still moaning about Kevin Muscats. He was by far the least annoying and least obnoxious of the three Australian YFM managers. (I’m not including the current guy as we’ve only encountered him once and he’s not got the profile of the others. And also, checking if he was in charge for our last disaster against YFM, I discovered that he is, perhaps erroneously, down as coming from Malta on Flashscore). But even so, it’s nice to get one over on Kevin Muscats. It was something of a surprise to see him wearing a big puffer jacket with the hood up during the game whilst I was in short sleeves. I thought he was one of football's hardest hard men. So, sorry Kevs, for being happy in your disappointment. It’s not about you, it’s about the club you used to manage who I dislike intensely. On the other hand, what a delight to see that little shit Oscar lose the match and stomp over to the ref at the final whistle as if his team had been mortally cheated. Quite ironic given that about five minutes previously he had done an unbelievable bit of cheating to get Ienaga sent off. It’s kind of annoying that VAR, which seems intent on destroying most moments of excitement in a match can’t intervene when Oscar gets felled by a waft of fresh air and a useless ref gives Ienaga a second yellow for it. There was so much wrong with this decision that it’s irritating that VAR couldn’t do anything. There didn’t seem to be any contact. Even if there was, it was more of a shrug than anything. Oscar clutched his face which absolutely nothing had touched. The ref signaled an elbow as he took out the card but surely if the situation was as Oscar was claiming and he was elbowed in the face it should have been a straight red? I think perhaps the issue was that with such ridiculous simulation and both players on a yellow, the ref was going to have to send someone off and just went for the easy option in order to avoid a Brazilian mega-sulk. I guess it’s a positive for Oscar that he was able to recover so quickly from his fractured skull that he was able to cry to ref at the end of the game and stomp off down the tunnel as quickly as possible. Perhaps also, when he got back home he was able to have a soak in his golden bathtub full of cash. Oscar definitely loves cheating, but perhaps judging from the fact that he went from playing in the English Premier League to the Chinese league and has stayed there ever since, he probably loves cash more than anything. I’m kind of surprised he’s still there to be honest, given that the money has dropped out of that league but you can be sure he’s still getting loads of cash. And judging by the reactions of some of his other foreign teammates to him being generally not that good apart from cheating, (numerous misplaced easy passes), I’d guess that they aren’t too happy with him either. Clearly he still believes that he’s the best player on the team. But aside from the dark arts parts, I think he was probably one of the weaker links. It’s a totally hacky to say something like this, and unfortunately I still haven’t been able to make the cliche work properly, but considering he’s a player who loves to try to portray something that isn’t actually happening, Oscar is worthy of an Oscar. But the truth is that Oscars are supposedly given for good acting and I think it was pretty clear to everyone in the stadium apart from the clueless officials that Oscar’s acting was very unconvincing. So maybe let’s stick to saying something like Oscar gave himself that nickname because he wanted to pursue a career in acting, but all the castings he went to found him ridiculously over the top and unconvincing. Not only is Oscar a terrible actor, the officials in this game are terrible at both officiating a football match and also at interacting with performing arts, particularly in the thespian field. I guess their favourite movie is Tommy Wiseau’s ‘The Room’, mainly because they find themselves getting lost in the movie because due to the strength of the performances, and they just can’t believe it’s fiction rather than a documentary.

No blog post on here would be complete without a bit of pessimism, so let’s finish here with a small dose of reality. We won this game fairly easily, but with a couple of caveats. I’m not sure that if we hadn’t built up decent lead with a good first half performance that we would have held on. As soon as they scored we looked like we were really wobbling and I was quite worried. If their goal hadn’t come so late I’m not sure we would have hung on for the win. And boy oh boy, did they miss some good chances in the game. Perhaps it was a good time to play them, three days after they’d won their league on the final day. So we rode our luck a bit. Once again we had a good half, and a not so good half. Thankfully on this occasion we managed to score when we were on top. The Kashima game could have been very different if we’d managed to take some of our very good chances. The fact is though, that I suspect most of us had somewhat written off this year and this tournament and it was just a matter of finishing off those remaining games and actually finally securing our J1 status, presumably with a 0-0 draw at home to a team with nothing to play for. Whilst we are still not mathematically guaranteed to survive, (or perhaps we are, I haven’t looked into all the permutations of teams having to play each other), there are so many teams that need to overtake us, it would be a huge shock if we went down. This result gave us a bit of excitement to take with us down to Kyoto to a game that looks quite like being a 1-0 defeat. And we were also treated to the first bench appearance of Kanda. Of course he didn’t come on though. Presumably he’ll have to do the season-on-loan-after-a-first-season-of-sitting-in-the-stands thing that almost all of our young exciting players do. But then again, we’ll have a new manager next year, so maybe that will change and we’ll get a chance to see him play before he’s loaned to a team in the Belgian league. Back to the pessimism, I suspect we’ll play 4-3-3 on Saturday with the at least one midfielder or striker playing at full back. And as I said above, I suspect we’ll lose. But at least it’s a nice away trip. After this one we’ve only got Tokyo Verdy away, (well, and the second half of Urawa away, but that’s no more enticing), so let’s enjoy this weekend and hope that we’re only marginally distracted from having a nice weekend by the football game. Remember, don’t let a shocking away performance ruin what could be a fun time! 

 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. TONO Daiya
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 86', second yellow/red card 90')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke
FW 9. ERISON

 

Subs

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 4. JESIEL (on for SASAKI 85')

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for YAMAMOTO 64')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for SEGAWA 79')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 64')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for TONO 79')
FW 32. KANDA Soma
MF 34. YUI Kota


Goals

IENAGA (Frontale) 12' 1-0
SEGAWA (Frontale) 13' 2-0
VAN WERMESKERKEN (Frontale) 33' 3-0
VARGAS (Shanghai) 83' 3-1

Highlights