Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 0 Shandong Taishan
Our bizarre end of season form continues! After limping through most of the year unable for the most part to even make shooting chances, let alone hit the target, we’re now a goal crazy side playing exciting football! What’s happened? I think it’s great that the Oniki era can end like this rather than with a bit of a sour taste in the mouth. The handbrake is well and truly off now. The only slight regret is that we didn’t try this a bit earlier in the season / a bit earlier in the last four years. We’ve really stagnated recently and there seemed to be a lack of awareness of this, let alone any idea of how to change it. But 4-4-2 came to the rescue and football is fun again. This was a kind of weird selection. Not only has Oniki realised that he can play a formation other than 4-3-3 it also seems that he’s realised that rotation is a good thing when you have a busy schedule. Although it’s a bit tough to work out exactly what his preferred starting 11 is, it’s clear to say that in recent times he’s been a lot more prepared to change players and this seems to have really worked in our favour too. I wonder if I’m right in thinking that this recent run of decent form has coincided with us actually playing players in their preferred positions too. Truly these are magical days. One game left for Oniki now and somehow he might have managed to convince the Oniki out brigade, (of which I was a fully paid up member), that due to his new found freedom loving side, perhaps our descent into true shitness wasn’t as inevitable as we thought. But this is probably a lot to do with the end of term feeling. Everyone’s having a good time and whilst there’s not much studying going on, we are all learning something even if we’re not sure exactly what it is.
Some might say we owed Shandong a spanking after they dumped us out of the ACL earlier this year. Others might quite accurately say that it’s more accurate to say that we contributed a fair bit to dumping ourselves out. That disastrous Wakizaka short corner that led to a goal for them still haunts me. Perhaps we were lucky to play them a few weeks after their domestic season finished. Training when most players in your league have their feet up can’t be the best for morale and that probably isn’t the best way to prepare for a game. As presumably we’ll find out when we have to play two important ACL games as part of our preseason activities next year. Aside from a couple of dodgy moments, this Shandong team didn’t seem to be as scary as the previous one which was very good at taking their chances. Saying that, if Sung-Ryong hadn’t made an amazing double save with us just one goal up the game could have turned out quite differently. But thankfully he did, and even though he let in four against Verdy, (not really his fault I think), he seems to be in sparkling form recently. Also doing really well for us were Kawahara who had one of his best games for us and Erison, who despite not scoring, was just unplayable, working really hard. Would have loved him to have got a goal and he looked quite frustrated when he was subbed. But he did really well I thought. Other highlights from a Frontale point of view included some pitch time for Kanda again. This time he only assisted rather than scored but blimey he’s started well with a goal and assist in what is probably only 15 minutes on the pitch so far.
Also we all got a free Frontale bobble hat. That was a major highlight for me. Slightly confusing for me was the fact that we decided to try to create some National Stadium type atmosphere by bringing in some pyro. I’ve long said how naff it is, particularly during daytime games, but I have to say after an initial cringe when I first saw it, it was kind of fun when they moved it behind the goal and set it off every time we scored. Each goal’s celebration was accompanied by a little giggle at the massive sparklers going off. In future I’d like to see them extend its use. Set them off for every sliding tackle or something like that. Why not have a little splutter every time the ref blows his whistle? Get them going every time a linesman raises his flag? I guess it helped that we won, as otherwise it might have looked a bit like us trying to put a gloss on what might have been a dodgy performance. I’m not sure we need them for every game. In fact I’d be a bit embarrassed if we had them for every game. But it was quite amusing, in the same way that I can enjoy the annual YMCA or the game when they drive stuff around the running track for some obscure reason. I guess I have to remember that not everyone in the stadium is a cynical old bugger, in fact most people aren’t, and I’m just going to embrace the fun. Oh, and no mention of Frontale highlights would be complete without talking about Yamamoto’s great free kick. Bravo!
I’m just going to lump everything else together in this paragraph. In the usual ACL style, there was something a bit off about the hoardings in this game. I think I’ve previously spoken about ACL related things just not quite feeling very authentic. It’s as if they don’t know what football really is and have asked AI to write the script for the pregame presentation. On this occasion the weird thing that stood out was some of the advertising hoardings which looked like they’d be transplanted from a computer game with no commercial contracts. I’m not sure if ‘Fantasy Football - create your squad’, ‘Ace’, ‘Tecno’ and the straight to the point ‘€ Football’ are adverts for real things or were just made up in a hurry as the deadline rapidly approached. But they did help contribute to the slightly weird atmosphere. Add to this the Shandong fans, who seemed to have mostly arrived in identical fluorescent orange jackets, transforming the away end into something that looked like a road sweepers union meeting. It wasn’t everyone, and given that when our fourth goal went it, most of the orange jackets walked out, I wonder if it was some kind of freebie thing offered to Chinese people living in Japan, or a bunch of club officials, or some paid help. Whichever way. It did make the away end look pretty good. After the game walking back to the station there were some Shandong fans and having no knowledge of what they were saying, I’m going to take a leap and say that they seemed like a nice bunch.
When our players went over to thank their fans at the end of the game there was an initial moment of shock as something was thrown from the crowd towards them. The shock died off as the towel which had been thrown flew about as well as you’d expect one of those towels to fly and dropped limply to the floor. When a steward tried to return the towel to the fan, it seemed like they communicated that it was in fact a gift for our team and we got to keep it. Kind of strange, but I did quite like it. Sometimes the ACL does bring up nice little things like this. I’ve seen fans swapping towels on a few occasions so this seemed like another thing that should make everyone feel a bit better. Particularly considering it’s a Japanese team and a Chinese team, two countries who don’t always seem to like each other that much. At least from a governmental perspective. One last part of Shandong praise. I think their kit is pretty damn snazzy. That fluorescent orange with the red shorts goes really well. Do I need to mention the officials? I think they were normal kind of ACL officials, ie. pretty useless. There were some dubious decisions but nothing got me particularly annoyed which in a way is the highest of high praise. But then again that could have been because the game was going our way. I’m sure I’ll be back moaning about refs very soon.
Next up, the final Oniki game, a home league match against Avispa. Segawa almost certainly won’t be involved as his injury looked pretty bad. But I hope it isn’t as bad as it seemed. It would be nice if we could see out Oniki’s time with a win, particularly as his successor could be in the opposition dugout. It wasn’t a great look for Oniki, who was being strongly linked with Kashima, to do atrociously in our game against them. I’m not going to complain too much if Hasebe does similarly on Sunday. After that, a nice break, but I guess I’ll be writing end of season posts and doing the survey as usual. I suspect the responses could be more interesting than usual this year.
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 60')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 24)
MF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (Yellow card 33')g
FW 9. ERISON
Subs
GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for YAMAMOTO 68')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 17. TONO Daiya (on for SEGAWA 49')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for KOBAYASHI 68')
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 32. KANDA Soma (on for ERISON 84')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for MARCINHO 68')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
I dunno, maybe I got a bit distracted by the sparklers. I'm not sure who to give this to. Could have been Yamamoto or Kawahara. Or Sung-Ryong again for that important double save. But for his general performance plus one magic moment, it will go to...
ERISON - there can't be many people who weren't very excited when Erison won the ball in our right back position and dribbled the whole way up the pitch, shrugging off or beating player after player. It was amazing. I can't remember if this was the same attack where he did that weird overhead flick thing, but I'm guessing it probably was. Great stuff!
Goals
MARCINHO (Frontale) 3' 1-0
YAMAMOTO (Frontale) 41' 2-0
JESIEL (Frontale) 65' 3-0
YAMADA (Frontale) 90' 4-0
Highlights
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