FC Tokyo 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale
Another Tamagawa Classico and it was another fun game for Frontale fans. As I’ve left it a bit since the game to start writing this, and as I spent the night of the game over-imbibing in the company of home and away fans, the details are all a bit hazy now. But hopefully I have just enough memory of the day left to be able to at least give you some kind of insight that you wouldn’t have got from watching the match online. Probably most of it will be poking fun at Nakagawa though. Let the poking begin!
Us -
We perhaps seem to have gone back to the early season thing of having a very average first half and then taking the brakes off in the second. Have to say, I don’t mind if that kind of thing continues. The first half of this match was quite unremarkable for us. Those with a better view than us right down the other end of the pitch might point to Takai’s ruled out goal as being something at least slightly remarkable. But from where we were, we weren’t even aware that the ball had gone in as there didn’t seem to be much in the way of celebration, complaint or VAR. Recent line ups have probably made Hasebe’s first choice preferences a little clearer. And… they are pretty similar to Oniki’s. On this occasion we got to see Oshima start again. Maybe Hasebe is using him in a little bit of a different way to Oniki. In the past, we’d wait ages for Oshima to recover from his latest injury, he’d be back in the team for a few games and then out again. Maybe Hasebe is using him more sparingly. We saw him against Shanghai Shenhua, he was absent for the trip to Okayama, and then back in for this game. If managing his minutes helps him stay more injury free, that will be great. He had a pretty good game again, so I guess the real challenge facing Hasebe is to work out how to make the midfield work when Oshima is not playing, as it was a total mess away against Okayama. (But so were the attack, and the defence too…). I think this back four represents what Hasebe considers our best back four and you can’t really argue with that at the moment. Jesiel back on the bench was a nice surprise, but Maruyama and Takai seem to be working well together. Kawahara didn’t start this game which I guess means he’ll start against Shonan. Ienaga was on the right, did well again and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down like he did at times last year. I’m very happy with the rotation that Hasebe is doing from match to match right now. I think this would be what he'd say he thinks is our best eleven. The only position where I think he might have a dilemma is choosing between Yamada and Erison, as both have been doing…ok. They haven't been bad, but neither has been doing amazingly well so it's quite hard to choose between them right now. But rotation works for me and I hope it works for them. I never liked the whole thing of sticking with the same players forever until they break down, one by one. I don’t have much else to say about us in this game. It was nice to us crank it up a bit in the second half. I enjoyed the goals a lot. The first was quite hilarious in the way that it just dribbled over the line. In the ensuing celebratory melee, someone high-fived me in the eye. It was a small price to pay and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intentional. If it was, I got the upper hand as with the subsequent two goals I managed to not get high-fived in the face by the same person. High-five me in the face once, shame on you. High-five me in the face twice, shame on me. Ito seemed very pleased to have scored and is fast becoming a fan favourite for his passion. He also was apparently irritated by what was perhaps the worst foul throw I have ever seen. Like the tired old git that I am, I often find myself bleating in a whingy voice ’foul throw referee! I can’t believe they didn’t notice it…’. On this occasion the throw was so appallingly bad there was no way anyone could miss it, and the natural reaction was to burst out laughing. Apparently Yamada complained to the ref about the decision which is some prize winning brass balls behaviour. It was around 12 minutes into the second half if you missed it and want to check. It was also quite amusing when about ten minutes later, two of our players tried to take the throw in simultaneously from different positions with different balls. I like the fact that as we were clearly on the up at that stage we wanted to keep things moving. Let’s hope for more throw in giggles caused by our team being relentlessly up for attacking in the future. Oh, and one last word to say that Yamaguchi’s save with his face was pretty brutal. Can’t believe he got up immediately and was ready for the following shot. Well done to him!
Them -
At one stage last year, when the Oniki to Kashima rumours seemed to be being denied, I wondered if maybe we’d be seeing Oniki in charge of FC Tokyo this year. Although that didn’t happen, there was a hint of Oniki in the fact that Tokyo dominated possession but for the most part didn’t seem to threaten that much. Don’t get me wrong, I thought they were well in it in the first half, but a lot of the time they were on the ball was accompanied by Oniki style sideways passing. They had a decent amount of chances, but aside from the face save one, I can’t remember any that came that close. Perhaps this was in part due to them playing my perennial hate figure Nakagawa up front. There was something extremely amusing about seeing Nakagawa standing next to Takai. Takai is 192cm, so I suppose that is almost double the height of FC Tokyo’s Donald Trump-alike. It looked a bit like a heartwarming father and son scene, the ‘father’, who in this case was much younger, towering over the ‘son’, and occasionally letting him have the ball briefly before teaching him a life ain’t easy kind of lesson and taking it off of him. The image was further enhanced by the fact that Nakagawa seemed to be waddling looking like he was a toddler that had recently filled his nappy. Ironically, [Please add your own joke about Nakagawa being 70 years old here. I’m writing this in a bit of a hurry]. I know it’s not very becoming to just be mean about someone on the internet so I should probably stop doing it. But he did do that sliding on the knees goal celebration in front of our fans, when scoring against the club he played for as a youth player. And those kind of things are quite hard to forget. So with that in mind, I’ll make a joke about his hair, which just keeps on getting more ridiculous year by year. When he first came on to warm up it looked like someone had a glued a freshly washed and pressed white handkerchief onto the middle of a totally bald head. I don’t know if he actually is balding, but when you see that whiff of hair that looks like the top curl of a soft serve ice cream you’ve got to think that something funny is going on. As this is all a bit like a personal bullying campaign, let’s spread the net further and make some wisecracks about the stadium music instead. I was trying to put my finger on the ‘vibe’ that was being created by the techno version of ‘The Final Countdown’ and was still pondering it when we moved into the house version of ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’. It wasn’t until Abba’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ came on, that I realised, when my wife said that it felt like a hen night DJ’s playlist. Good to see that Tony from the local Eikaiwa has another string to his bow so now doesn’t have to solely rely on the income from his ‘Laydeez and Jennelmen’ announcing duties. This wouldn’t be a Tamagawa Classico post if I didn’t mention ‘You’ll Never…’. The lack of gusto in their fans' rendition always amuses, but the absolutely suicidal decision to fade out the karaoke backing track halfway though the first verse, presumably imagining that the crowd would be belting it out by that stage, resulted in a complete silence, which initially bewildered, then became very amusing. I presume that was why the music stopped, but it ended up appearing more like a technical error. Also somewhat surprising was that after the game Tony introduced the day's highlights video. Fair play to them for showing our goals, but given that they didn't score, this basically meant that our fans delightedly cheered every highlight, given that they were all either our goals, or FC Toyko missing chances. With the fact that this is supposed to be a football blog in mind, maybe I should write something about their football? They didn’t deserve to lose 3-0. That’ll do.
Ref -
So here you are, the section where the real bitching comes out! Fukushima was the ref in this game. When we had him for the Kashiwa away game I was quite irritated by his refusal to book anyone and his general awfulness. In this game he again didn’t book anyone and… I thought he had a really good game. I’ve got no complaints really. Of course I moaned at the time about plenty of things, but that’s the point of going to the game, isn’t it? I was really impressed with the way he dealt with a bit of handbags from Ienaga and a Tokyo player. Wasn’t sure about the decision that he didn’t give previous to the incident, but that’s because it didn’t go our way. He seemed to easily diffuse what could have become a bit of a boiling point. And after that decision Ienaga was very charged up and that worked out well for us. So yeah, kind of unusual to praise the ref for doing the same thing that I criticised him for doing in a recent post, but it just felt like I didn’t have much to moan about, and that is a very rare thing. I guess we did win though, so maybe if we didn’t I might be moaning a bit more. You will know that I have reached the stage of true enlightenment when I can accept that a ref had a decent game even after we’ve lost.
Next up, Shonan at home on Wednesday and then Machida away on Sunday. It’s a busy schedule so hopefully we’ll see some rotation but hopefully the same kind of result that we got in this game. We have four games in between Shonan at home on the 2nd and Verdy at home on the 20th. So a game every three days, roughly. I’m already peed off about having to write so many blog posts. But they’re a bit easier to write after wins, so please let’s keep that up as long as possible!
Us -
We perhaps seem to have gone back to the early season thing of having a very average first half and then taking the brakes off in the second. Have to say, I don’t mind if that kind of thing continues. The first half of this match was quite unremarkable for us. Those with a better view than us right down the other end of the pitch might point to Takai’s ruled out goal as being something at least slightly remarkable. But from where we were, we weren’t even aware that the ball had gone in as there didn’t seem to be much in the way of celebration, complaint or VAR. Recent line ups have probably made Hasebe’s first choice preferences a little clearer. And… they are pretty similar to Oniki’s. On this occasion we got to see Oshima start again. Maybe Hasebe is using him in a little bit of a different way to Oniki. In the past, we’d wait ages for Oshima to recover from his latest injury, he’d be back in the team for a few games and then out again. Maybe Hasebe is using him more sparingly. We saw him against Shanghai Shenhua, he was absent for the trip to Okayama, and then back in for this game. If managing his minutes helps him stay more injury free, that will be great. He had a pretty good game again, so I guess the real challenge facing Hasebe is to work out how to make the midfield work when Oshima is not playing, as it was a total mess away against Okayama. (But so were the attack, and the defence too…). I think this back four represents what Hasebe considers our best back four and you can’t really argue with that at the moment. Jesiel back on the bench was a nice surprise, but Maruyama and Takai seem to be working well together. Kawahara didn’t start this game which I guess means he’ll start against Shonan. Ienaga was on the right, did well again and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down like he did at times last year. I’m very happy with the rotation that Hasebe is doing from match to match right now. I think this would be what he'd say he thinks is our best eleven. The only position where I think he might have a dilemma is choosing between Yamada and Erison, as both have been doing…ok. They haven't been bad, but neither has been doing amazingly well so it's quite hard to choose between them right now. But rotation works for me and I hope it works for them. I never liked the whole thing of sticking with the same players forever until they break down, one by one. I don’t have much else to say about us in this game. It was nice to us crank it up a bit in the second half. I enjoyed the goals a lot. The first was quite hilarious in the way that it just dribbled over the line. In the ensuing celebratory melee, someone high-fived me in the eye. It was a small price to pay and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intentional. If it was, I got the upper hand as with the subsequent two goals I managed to not get high-fived in the face by the same person. High-five me in the face once, shame on you. High-five me in the face twice, shame on me. Ito seemed very pleased to have scored and is fast becoming a fan favourite for his passion. He also was apparently irritated by what was perhaps the worst foul throw I have ever seen. Like the tired old git that I am, I often find myself bleating in a whingy voice ’foul throw referee! I can’t believe they didn’t notice it…’. On this occasion the throw was so appallingly bad there was no way anyone could miss it, and the natural reaction was to burst out laughing. Apparently Yamada complained to the ref about the decision which is some prize winning brass balls behaviour. It was around 12 minutes into the second half if you missed it and want to check. It was also quite amusing when about ten minutes later, two of our players tried to take the throw in simultaneously from different positions with different balls. I like the fact that as we were clearly on the up at that stage we wanted to keep things moving. Let’s hope for more throw in giggles caused by our team being relentlessly up for attacking in the future. Oh, and one last word to say that Yamaguchi’s save with his face was pretty brutal. Can’t believe he got up immediately and was ready for the following shot. Well done to him!
Them -
At one stage last year, when the Oniki to Kashima rumours seemed to be being denied, I wondered if maybe we’d be seeing Oniki in charge of FC Tokyo this year. Although that didn’t happen, there was a hint of Oniki in the fact that Tokyo dominated possession but for the most part didn’t seem to threaten that much. Don’t get me wrong, I thought they were well in it in the first half, but a lot of the time they were on the ball was accompanied by Oniki style sideways passing. They had a decent amount of chances, but aside from the face save one, I can’t remember any that came that close. Perhaps this was in part due to them playing my perennial hate figure Nakagawa up front. There was something extremely amusing about seeing Nakagawa standing next to Takai. Takai is 192cm, so I suppose that is almost double the height of FC Tokyo’s Donald Trump-alike. It looked a bit like a heartwarming father and son scene, the ‘father’, who in this case was much younger, towering over the ‘son’, and occasionally letting him have the ball briefly before teaching him a life ain’t easy kind of lesson and taking it off of him. The image was further enhanced by the fact that Nakagawa seemed to be waddling looking like he was a toddler that had recently filled his nappy. Ironically, [Please add your own joke about Nakagawa being 70 years old here. I’m writing this in a bit of a hurry]. I know it’s not very becoming to just be mean about someone on the internet so I should probably stop doing it. But he did do that sliding on the knees goal celebration in front of our fans, when scoring against the club he played for as a youth player. And those kind of things are quite hard to forget. So with that in mind, I’ll make a joke about his hair, which just keeps on getting more ridiculous year by year. When he first came on to warm up it looked like someone had a glued a freshly washed and pressed white handkerchief onto the middle of a totally bald head. I don’t know if he actually is balding, but when you see that whiff of hair that looks like the top curl of a soft serve ice cream you’ve got to think that something funny is going on. As this is all a bit like a personal bullying campaign, let’s spread the net further and make some wisecracks about the stadium music instead. I was trying to put my finger on the ‘vibe’ that was being created by the techno version of ‘The Final Countdown’ and was still pondering it when we moved into the house version of ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’. It wasn’t until Abba’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ came on, that I realised, when my wife said that it felt like a hen night DJ’s playlist. Good to see that Tony from the local Eikaiwa has another string to his bow so now doesn’t have to solely rely on the income from his ‘Laydeez and Jennelmen’ announcing duties. This wouldn’t be a Tamagawa Classico post if I didn’t mention ‘You’ll Never…’. The lack of gusto in their fans' rendition always amuses, but the absolutely suicidal decision to fade out the karaoke backing track halfway though the first verse, presumably imagining that the crowd would be belting it out by that stage, resulted in a complete silence, which initially bewildered, then became very amusing. I presume that was why the music stopped, but it ended up appearing more like a technical error. Also somewhat surprising was that after the game Tony introduced the day's highlights video. Fair play to them for showing our goals, but given that they didn't score, this basically meant that our fans delightedly cheered every highlight, given that they were all either our goals, or FC Toyko missing chances. With the fact that this is supposed to be a football blog in mind, maybe I should write something about their football? They didn’t deserve to lose 3-0. That’ll do.
Ref -
So here you are, the section where the real bitching comes out! Fukushima was the ref in this game. When we had him for the Kashiwa away game I was quite irritated by his refusal to book anyone and his general awfulness. In this game he again didn’t book anyone and… I thought he had a really good game. I’ve got no complaints really. Of course I moaned at the time about plenty of things, but that’s the point of going to the game, isn’t it? I was really impressed with the way he dealt with a bit of handbags from Ienaga and a Tokyo player. Wasn’t sure about the decision that he didn’t give previous to the incident, but that’s because it didn’t go our way. He seemed to easily diffuse what could have become a bit of a boiling point. And after that decision Ienaga was very charged up and that worked out well for us. So yeah, kind of unusual to praise the ref for doing the same thing that I criticised him for doing in a recent post, but it just felt like I didn’t have much to moan about, and that is a very rare thing. I guess we did win though, so maybe if we didn’t I might be moaning a bit more. You will know that I have reached the stage of true enlightenment when I can accept that a ref had a decent game even after we’ve lost.
Next up, Shonan at home on Wednesday and then Machida away on Sunday. It’s a busy schedule so hopefully we’ll see some rotation but hopefully the same kind of result that we got in this game. We have four games in between Shonan at home on the 2nd and Verdy at home on the 20th. So a game every three days, roughly. I’m already peed off about having to write so many blog posts. But they’re a bit easier to write after wins, so please let’s keep that up as long as possible!
Team
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 4. JESIEL
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 4. JESIEL
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for OSHIMA 78')
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 78')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 71')
FW 18. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for IENAGA 86')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 86')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 78')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 71')
FW 18. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for IENAGA 86')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 86')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Hmmm, I’ve realised I’ve given this no thought whatsoever till this moment and no-one is jumping out to me, so I guess it was an all round decent performance. Would do the usual cop-out thing and give it to the whole team, but instead, let’s go a little left-field and give it to…
HASEBE Shigetoshi - Brought on Ito and three minutes later he scored. Brought on Erison and five minutes later he scored. We’ve all heard of super-subs, but maybe Hasebe could be a super-subber.
HASEBE Shigetoshi - Brought on Ito and three minutes later he scored. Brought on Erison and five minutes later he scored. We’ve all heard of super-subs, but maybe Hasebe could be a super-subber.
Goals
YAMADA (Frontale) 55' 0-1
ITO (Frontale) 73' 0-2
ERISON (Frontale) 83' 0-3
Highlights
