Tokyo Verdy 4 - 5 Kawasaki Frontale
There’s a strange kind of symmetry in the fact that as Oniki’s tenure comes to an end, we seem to have gone back to playing the kind of football that we were before he took over. To be honest, it’s a very welcome thing for me. I always had a soft spot for the Kazama approach of relentless attacking, whilst at the same time perhaps being not so keen on the part that included kamikaze defending. But one thing that you can’t deny is that as a combination, these two things make for exciting matches. And this ticked all the boxes when it came to excitement. Throw away a two goal lead - check, in fact check that one twice. Late, late winner - check. Absolutely hopeless refereeing to get everyone riled up - CHECK!!! This game had it all. Well maybe everything apart from competent defending. But blimey, it was a fun match! I’m not going to hang around with this as we’ve got another game coming up on Wednesday and I’m slightly under the cosh to get this blog post up before then. So here we go under the usual old headings.
Us -
We are playing fun football again! 4-4-2 seems to be the way Oniki is going to go till the end with us now, (watch him change it for the ACL game, and if he does, watch us do terribly with his old favourite formation). I’m all in favour. We made a lot of chances in this game and scored a lot of goals. Yamada getting a hat trick was a lot of fun. I remain deeply unconvinced and a bit irritated by his penalty run up though. I wouldn’t mind a change in that law to be honest. Surely nobody wants to see that jogging on the spot thing, do they? Yamada is now third in the league’s top scorer chart. Would love to see him overtake Anderson Lopes in the final game but that would mean him scoring five times against Avispa, a team whose manager is strongly rumoured to be joining us next year. I was asked about my player of the season nominations a couple of days before the game and got it down to a shortlist of three, Sung-Ryong, Sasaki and Yamada. At the time I added that I didn’t think Yamada should get it as I have a bit of a problem with some of the great opportunities we’ve missed through his unwillingness to pass sometimes. At the same time it would be a bit weird to give it to anyone connected to stopping us conceding goals as we’ve been doing that for fun this year. I think after this match, Yamada is probably going to get it though. You can’t deny the fact that he does the job when it comes to scoring. I think he’s perhaps had a bit more of a chance to score than other strikers as Oniki seems quite unwilling to leave him out of the team or substitute him. But he’s had a really good year, so well done to him. It’s a good thing he scored a late winner too, as at the start of the second half he went almost directly from missing a sitter to assisting Verdy for a goal, laying the ball off perfectly for their player to slot home. But I shouldn’t moan. He certainly wasn’t the only player to gift them a goal. And as I said, I don’t mind conceding four so much if we score five. It certainly makes a change from the extremely mind-numbing stuff we’ve seen for large parts of this year. Would be nice in the future if we didn’t concede from almost every one of their set pieces though. But you know, beggars can’t be choosers.
Them -
Verdy have had a great first season back in J1 so well done to them for that. It was a lot of fun to beat them though, particularly in the way we did it. I don’t particularly have any grudges against their players. My slight animosity is all a result of them being a former Kawasaki team. Or rather maybe that should say a team who played in Kawasaki as the general feeling was that they didn't care much about the city. After the game though I guess I have a new boo boy in their manager who spent the entire game getting furious about everything which as far as I am concerned was a bit strange for reasons I’ll go into later. There’s no doubt that he should face some kind of punishment for apparently being so angry that he wanted to fight the ref or the fourth official after his booking. For once, I think the people surrounding him actually really needed to restrain him, unlike that time when those furious Antlers fans were held back from unleashing their wildest hooligan dreams on a group of pensioner security guards by a flimsy plastic barrier that came up to just over their knees and was probably being supported and stopped from collapsing by some of their number. I don’t know if the gender of the referee was part of what provoked such a reaction. But trying to have a fight with someone whilst dressed in a suit is never really a good look, is it? Like some kind of coked-up city boy on a Friday night who’s spilled their pint and is trying to fight the staff member who's trying to clear it up. If he had been sent off, as he really should have been, would he have been banned from the post match end of season ceremony? That would have been amusing. Oh, and apparently the reason for his fury was that Yamashita had (apparently totally correctly and absolutely within her rights to do so), overruled the linesman who had signaled for a corner. But yeah, there’s not much to say here really so let’s move on to the main focus of this post.
Ref and officials -
Oh dearie me, this was an absolute stinker of a game for the officials. Back in charge again was Yamashita, fresh from her absolutely shite performance when we played Gamba at home in October. In that blog post I praised her for fighting sexism by being absolutely as bad as her male counterparts and therefore fitting in perfectly. I think she had a worse game on this occasion though. I feel like her big problem is the fact that she doesn’t have much confidence in her abilities. (Hmmm, perhaps this is a sign of her having fantastic and accurate judgement though…). Clearly she made some weird decisions, but the worst thing for me is that after she gave one thing slightly contentiously to one team, you could guarantee the next thing would go the other way to make up for it, with each subsequent decision further stretching the bounds of credibility. Perhaps some might see this as balance, but for me it seems to be more like the perfect way to annoy absolutely everyone. I guess a lack of confidence in her abilities, either from herself or from her colleagues also accounted for the interminable VAR delays in this game. It seemed like everything was getting checked, often without any clear signal that it was, the only evidence being that nothing was happening on the pitch. As I said above, I was kind of surprised that Verdy were so annoyed by her performance as I thought she ruled wildly in their favour. But I’m fully aware that this is the judgement of someone who is biased towards one team. I haven’t gone back and checked any of these incidents, (I don’t want to prove myself wrong so would rather not), but notes I made at the time suggest that her most egregious misjudgements as far as I was concerned were not giving us a second penalty in the second half, an extremely dodgy free kick given to them that lead to a goal for them, another goal for them coming from a corner they shouldn’t have had, giving them a free kick when one of their defenders ‘fouled’ their own keeper and towards the end of the match, a throw in being awarded, resulting in Erison kicking the ball away and justifiably getting booked, which Verdy thought should have been a free kick and she was happy to oblige and let them take it. At times it felt like Verdy had a VAR button that they could press every time they wanted something checked when things didn’t go their way.
Us -
We are playing fun football again! 4-4-2 seems to be the way Oniki is going to go till the end with us now, (watch him change it for the ACL game, and if he does, watch us do terribly with his old favourite formation). I’m all in favour. We made a lot of chances in this game and scored a lot of goals. Yamada getting a hat trick was a lot of fun. I remain deeply unconvinced and a bit irritated by his penalty run up though. I wouldn’t mind a change in that law to be honest. Surely nobody wants to see that jogging on the spot thing, do they? Yamada is now third in the league’s top scorer chart. Would love to see him overtake Anderson Lopes in the final game but that would mean him scoring five times against Avispa, a team whose manager is strongly rumoured to be joining us next year. I was asked about my player of the season nominations a couple of days before the game and got it down to a shortlist of three, Sung-Ryong, Sasaki and Yamada. At the time I added that I didn’t think Yamada should get it as I have a bit of a problem with some of the great opportunities we’ve missed through his unwillingness to pass sometimes. At the same time it would be a bit weird to give it to anyone connected to stopping us conceding goals as we’ve been doing that for fun this year. I think after this match, Yamada is probably going to get it though. You can’t deny the fact that he does the job when it comes to scoring. I think he’s perhaps had a bit more of a chance to score than other strikers as Oniki seems quite unwilling to leave him out of the team or substitute him. But he’s had a really good year, so well done to him. It’s a good thing he scored a late winner too, as at the start of the second half he went almost directly from missing a sitter to assisting Verdy for a goal, laying the ball off perfectly for their player to slot home. But I shouldn’t moan. He certainly wasn’t the only player to gift them a goal. And as I said, I don’t mind conceding four so much if we score five. It certainly makes a change from the extremely mind-numbing stuff we’ve seen for large parts of this year. Would be nice in the future if we didn’t concede from almost every one of their set pieces though. But you know, beggars can’t be choosers.
Them -
Verdy have had a great first season back in J1 so well done to them for that. It was a lot of fun to beat them though, particularly in the way we did it. I don’t particularly have any grudges against their players. My slight animosity is all a result of them being a former Kawasaki team. Or rather maybe that should say a team who played in Kawasaki as the general feeling was that they didn't care much about the city. After the game though I guess I have a new boo boy in their manager who spent the entire game getting furious about everything which as far as I am concerned was a bit strange for reasons I’ll go into later. There’s no doubt that he should face some kind of punishment for apparently being so angry that he wanted to fight the ref or the fourth official after his booking. For once, I think the people surrounding him actually really needed to restrain him, unlike that time when those furious Antlers fans were held back from unleashing their wildest hooligan dreams on a group of pensioner security guards by a flimsy plastic barrier that came up to just over their knees and was probably being supported and stopped from collapsing by some of their number. I don’t know if the gender of the referee was part of what provoked such a reaction. But trying to have a fight with someone whilst dressed in a suit is never really a good look, is it? Like some kind of coked-up city boy on a Friday night who’s spilled their pint and is trying to fight the staff member who's trying to clear it up. If he had been sent off, as he really should have been, would he have been banned from the post match end of season ceremony? That would have been amusing. Oh, and apparently the reason for his fury was that Yamashita had (apparently totally correctly and absolutely within her rights to do so), overruled the linesman who had signaled for a corner. But yeah, there’s not much to say here really so let’s move on to the main focus of this post.
Ref and officials -
Oh dearie me, this was an absolute stinker of a game for the officials. Back in charge again was Yamashita, fresh from her absolutely shite performance when we played Gamba at home in October. In that blog post I praised her for fighting sexism by being absolutely as bad as her male counterparts and therefore fitting in perfectly. I think she had a worse game on this occasion though. I feel like her big problem is the fact that she doesn’t have much confidence in her abilities. (Hmmm, perhaps this is a sign of her having fantastic and accurate judgement though…). Clearly she made some weird decisions, but the worst thing for me is that after she gave one thing slightly contentiously to one team, you could guarantee the next thing would go the other way to make up for it, with each subsequent decision further stretching the bounds of credibility. Perhaps some might see this as balance, but for me it seems to be more like the perfect way to annoy absolutely everyone. I guess a lack of confidence in her abilities, either from herself or from her colleagues also accounted for the interminable VAR delays in this game. It seemed like everything was getting checked, often without any clear signal that it was, the only evidence being that nothing was happening on the pitch. As I said above, I was kind of surprised that Verdy were so annoyed by her performance as I thought she ruled wildly in their favour. But I’m fully aware that this is the judgement of someone who is biased towards one team. I haven’t gone back and checked any of these incidents, (I don’t want to prove myself wrong so would rather not), but notes I made at the time suggest that her most egregious misjudgements as far as I was concerned were not giving us a second penalty in the second half, an extremely dodgy free kick given to them that lead to a goal for them, another goal for them coming from a corner they shouldn’t have had, giving them a free kick when one of their defenders ‘fouled’ their own keeper and towards the end of the match, a throw in being awarded, resulting in Erison kicking the ball away and justifiably getting booked, which Verdy thought should have been a free kick and she was happy to oblige and let them take it. At times it felt like Verdy had a VAR button that they could press every time they wanted something checked when things didn’t go their way.
And there was a definite officiation through consultation feeling, with almost every decision being greeted by a long chat with whinging players (from both teams). I guess the problem is that Yamashita let everyone get away with this kind of thing and did herself no favours when it came to getting respect for future decisions. Don’t get me wrong though, it wasn’t all down to her. The linesman closest to our fans missed the ball clearly leaving the pitch on three occasions. Not sure what he was looking at when it happened THREE TIMES. But it was so blatantly off the pitch that it was shocking the first time it happened, truly unbelievable the second time, and then the third time, well, I guess we were probably half expecting it by then. I guess we all want consistency and the one thing we get almost complete consistency in is the fact that every week, more often than not, every single one of the officials is absolute dogshit and absolutely not up to the job. Bravo!
So, one game left in the league and one ACL game left this year. It’s kind of shocking that in a season in which we’ve had games where the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot doing the pregame penalty thing looked to be more likely thing to happen than us score a goal, we are now the second highest scorers in the league. Of course we knew the defensive situation was going to be a bit dodgy, (as it has been for a while because of our refusal to sign any defenders. To be fair, this year looked like it might be a bit better than usual, but ermmm, that didn’t quite work out did it?), but it’s a shame that Oniki’s insistence on sticking with 4-3-3 way past the time he should have abandoned it meant that we were so blunt up front for long periods of the year. I always knew we had the players to play exciting football which made it all the more frustrating when we seemed intent on breaking the world record for passes completed without taking a shot or even threatening to do so. Perhaps a decent ACL run can save this season (or next season, the split season thing is a bit of a mess isn’t it?). Guess we’ll have more of an idea about that after Wednesday’s game at home against Shandong. We owe them a pasting after they cruelly knocked us out of the previous ACL earlier this year when we decided to not bother turning up for the second leg. The cheek of them, eh? Even though I’ve long been calling for his replacement, it would be nice if Oniki could finish with some decent results, wouldn’t it? So no 4-3-3 please Toru and instead keep the sharp attacking going and as long as we score more goals than the opposition we won’t mind conceding a few. Let’s hope it’s a fun evening.
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 11')
DF 13. MIURA Sota
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 11')
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 17. TONO Daiya
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 17. TONO Daiya
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
Subs
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 4. JESIEL (on for SASAKI 57')
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 90+6') (on for TONO 82')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 57')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for MARCINHO 77')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for IENAGA 77')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 4. JESIEL (on for SASAKI 57')
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 90+6') (on for TONO 82')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 57')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for MARCINHO 77')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for IENAGA 77')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
This game was a bit too nuts for me to be able to think about this clearly.
Goals
YAMADA (Frontale) 16' PEN 0-1
YAMADA (Frontale) 22' 0-2
MIKI (Verdy) 42' 1-2
TANIGUCHI (Verdy) 49' 2-2
VAN WERMESKERKEN (Frontale) 57' 2-3
YAMADA (Frontale) 16' PEN 0-1
YAMADA (Frontale) 22' 0-2
MIKI (Verdy) 42' 1-2
TANIGUCHI (Verdy) 49' 2-2
VAN WERMESKERKEN (Frontale) 57' 2-3
TANIGUCHI (Verdy) 71' 3-4
TANIGUCHI (Verdy) 83' 4-4
YAMADA (Frontale) 90+4' 4-5
Highlights
TANIGUCHI (Verdy) 83' 4-4
YAMADA (Frontale) 90+4' 4-5
Highlights
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