Today, the last part of stage one of my end of season posts and it's my impressions on our performance in the various competitions we took part in this year. As you might expect, it's not the most cheery of posts. All of the end of season posts can be seen here. After this, it will just be the survey results but I'm going to leave that till I get back to Japan after my Christmas holiday, so still plenty of time to get your responses in for that.
League
Another pretty disappointing season to be honest. A late run of good results definitely put a gloss on our record and pushed us up the table, but to be honest, we were so bad for the first three quarters of the season that finishing eighth was a bit of a miracle. The turn around in our form neatly coincided with us ditching Oniki’s favoured 4-3-3 formation and tactics. I dread to think where we would have ended up if we’d continued with the same old stuff for the whole season. Even though we finished up in eighth, we were significantly closer when it came to points to the relegation zone than to the champions. It was a weird year in the league with everyone being able to beat anyone. Close examination of our games against the top teams makes it look like a better year than it was. We easily beat Kobe once and totally messed up against them once. We drew twice against Sanfrecce. We hammered Machida and stuffed up the other game against them. The one thing that we could consistently rely on was our inconsistency. If you look at games against the relegated teams, things look a lot bleaker. One point from a possible six and seven goals conceded in the two games against Jubilo. One win and one defeat to Consadole. One slightly fluky win against Sagan Tosu but once again, seven goals conceded in the two games against them. Our late season semi-recovery came with a lot of goals, and this was a big part in the fact that we finished the season as the second highest scorers, only behind recent perennial chokers Sanfrecce. It’s a miracle we scored so many as there were long periods of the season where we were lucky to even break the five shots total in a match. Clearly the problems were at the other end of the pitch where only six teams conceded more goals than we did. And I dread to think what might have happened if Sung-Ryong hadn’t saved us on numerous occasions. Definitely this was a season to forget, but the problem is that the trauma from some of the games might make that a difficult thing to do. However, the late flurry might have eased some people’s anxiety a little bit. When I do my end of season survey I think there will be no shortage of options for worst game of the season, and when this is the case, you know things haven’t been great. Fingers crossed for 2025.
Emperor’s Cup
Well, if the league was disappointing, surely we have something fun to write about in the cup, right? Absolutely not! As is our way, we managed to just about squeak past a non-league team in our first match. And as is also our way we got knocked out by a J2 team in terrible form in the next round. I didn’t see that match but I think we can safely say we were shite. Nothing more to add. Our 2024 Emperor’s Cup campaign was a disaster.
Levain Cup
As we were taking part in the ACL, we joined the Levain Cup at the quarter final stage and were handed the easiest possible tie, against Kofu, a J2 team in pretty bad form. We struggled to an underwhelming, (that word seems to sum up a lot of our wins in 2024), win at home, and then were somehow equally bad in the second leg. A very late equaliser in the away leg saw us through. It was a good feeling when the goal went in, but afterwards felt a bit hollow as we’d really struggled. After that we faced Albirex and blimey, we were even worse, losing 4-1 in the away leg and then, needing plenty of goals in the return fixture, proceeded to also lose that. A 6-1 humiliation against a team in dodgy form! You couldn’t write it? Actually you could, it happens quite often to us in the cup. I really can’t decide which cup campaign was worse.
ACL
Perhaps the one saving grace of 2024 was our ACL campaign. At least that’s how it feels right now. But don’t worry, I’ve got some moaning to do here too, as don’t forget in 2024 we played in two different ACL competitions. Many months ago in February we did a decent job of winning 3-2 in the away leg of our round of sixteen game against Shandong Taishan. Great! And of course then we proceeded to totally mess up the home leg, losing 4-2, crashing out to a last minute goal, just as we were thinking about extra time. This game still sticks in my memory for containing perhaps the absolute pinnacle of terrible Wakizaka corners, where he tried to play it short, instead passed it directly to the opposition who went straight down the other end and scored. It was definitely not just down to him though. Everyone was awful. To be honest, at this stage we should have realised what was coming in 2024.
Somewhat bizarrely though, when it came time to start the following ACL campaign we seemed to do much better than we were doing in the league. An early win away against our ACL nemeses Ulsan looked like a bright start. On reflection though, they have been pretty terrible in the ACL this year. The next game followed our 2024 script more, being a 1-0 home loss to Gwangju where we perfectly replicated our appalling league form on the continental stage. We followed this up with another defeat, slightly mitigated early on by a classic Marcinho red card. So with three games gone we had scored one goal and had lost twice. Writing this now I’m realising that our later ACL form really helped to wipe the memory of some very bad games. We followed up these first three games with three wins on the bounce, going goal crazy to boot. This has all left us in a pretty good position going into next year’s final two group stage games. One is away to the team sitting immediately below us in the table and looks tricky. The other is at home to the team right at the bottom who have one point from six games. So in theory, we should be ok. But of course, things never really work out how they should in theory, do they? And as we have a new manager for the remaining two games, I guess no-one really knows what will happen. Only four of the twelve teams will be eliminated, so if we went out from where we are now, it would be a big surprise with only six points left to play for. Initially I was very suspicious of the new format of the competition. In practice, I think it has turned out better than I expected, but I still don’t think the changes were necessary and don't understand what the point of making them was. The big problem at the moment though is that the competition is spread over two seasons. This won’t be the case for much longer as the J League season is moving, (a decision which I think is absolutely idiotic). The ACL is still a bit of an enigma for us. I don’t think it is ever fair to say that we haven’t taken it seriously, but from looking at our sometimes baffling results you could be forgiven for thinking we haven’t. But in a year that has been filled with some truly terrible games and performances, praise be to the ACL which has at least given us something to be cheerful about at the end of the season. Once again, fingers crossed for 2025.
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