Albirex Niigata 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale
How utterly predictable! Of course we were never going to win an away game in Niigata. We hardly ever do. And this time, in addition to the usual we-play-awfully curse that seems to be on us at the Big Swan, we also had to deal with some (more) bad luck and some self inflicted chickens coming home to roost. Hmmm, that mixed metaphor doesn’t really work, but hopefully you’ll get what I mean later on. A 1-1 draw wasn’t something that either team wanted. As I say every week, any faint hopes of us getting anything from this season are surely now gone. (Although the teams who actually have a chance to do so keep cocking up). For Albirex, perhaps one point is better than no points, but considering the position they are in, the start they made in this match, and the condition our team was in, not getting three is a massive missed opportunity. In the section about us, there will be more talk about what happened around the game than what happened in the game. Basically because the background to the match dictated a lot of how we played. Anyway, let’s get on with this.
Us -
So after the Fukuoka game referee-created debacle we had two players missing due to suspensions. Could have been tricky, but surely we’d have enough players in the squad to deal with this, right? And then the starting line up was announced and we had three goalies in the match day squad. I wonder if Lee had been fit it might even have been four. Kobayashi, Miyagi, Tanabe and Romanic were all nowhere to be seen. So three goalies on the bench. Oh and Kamihashi and Tsuchiya, two centre backs who have hardly played at all. There must be others on there though, right? Yeah! Noda. Hmmm, another hardly used defender. But we had Kawahara, Kanda, Ozeki and Ienaga, so all good, right? Well, Ienaga wasn’t brought on, even though we only used four subs and instead of him we played a 19 year old right back with five minutes of professional football experience in the Emperor’s Cup against a J3 team. Either this was an extremely left field selection from a manager who loves taking chances and doing wild things, or Ienaga was also unable to take part. Before the game after seeing the lineup I could only suspect that there must be an illness running through the squad and in his post match comments Hasebe said some players were unwell. Watching highlights I noticed that there were no high fives when the players arrived at the stadium with fist bumping instead. Don’t know if this is significant. So basically, I don’t think Hasebe had any choice with either the squad, or even the starting lineup. Well perhaps apart from Tachibanada or Kawahara.
Us -
So after the Fukuoka game referee-created debacle we had two players missing due to suspensions. Could have been tricky, but surely we’d have enough players in the squad to deal with this, right? And then the starting line up was announced and we had three goalies in the match day squad. I wonder if Lee had been fit it might even have been four. Kobayashi, Miyagi, Tanabe and Romanic were all nowhere to be seen. So three goalies on the bench. Oh and Kamihashi and Tsuchiya, two centre backs who have hardly played at all. There must be others on there though, right? Yeah! Noda. Hmmm, another hardly used defender. But we had Kawahara, Kanda, Ozeki and Ienaga, so all good, right? Well, Ienaga wasn’t brought on, even though we only used four subs and instead of him we played a 19 year old right back with five minutes of professional football experience in the Emperor’s Cup against a J3 team. Either this was an extremely left field selection from a manager who loves taking chances and doing wild things, or Ienaga was also unable to take part. Before the game after seeing the lineup I could only suspect that there must be an illness running through the squad and in his post match comments Hasebe said some players were unwell. Watching highlights I noticed that there were no high fives when the players arrived at the stadium with fist bumping instead. Don’t know if this is significant. So basically, I don’t think Hasebe had any choice with either the squad, or even the starting lineup. Well perhaps apart from Tachibanada or Kawahara.
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| So many goalies on the bench that one of them has to warm up by the side of the pitch |
With thoughts of sickness in mind, the first 20 minutes of the game further emphasised this as we were absolutely awful. For the majority of the first half the midfield was completely absent, but for the first 20 minutes, most of the defence were too. We really could have been 4-0 down in the first quarter of the game, but thanks to Albirex’s appalling shooting we escaped relatively unscathed. Time after time they swept through the midfield and defence, which basically ran out of their way to make room for them (more illness echoes here. Perhaps we were trying to social distance. Very noble of us, but not a great idea when playing football). In a similar way, our shots mostly seemed to be applying a policy of social distancing, keeping very far away from the goal. Marcinho’s basically open goal miss was horrendous. He’s not having his best period at the moment. And likewise most of his teammates, who seemed like they wouldn’t be able to hit a barn door even if they were inches away from touching it. Only Erison seemed to be able to shoot on target. Well actually not on target I guess as he hit the bar twice. But he had shots blocked too. Thankfully Ito managed to score at the end of what must have been one of our worst first halves of the year. (How many times have I said that now?!). We were much better in the second half. Well, apart from when it came to shooting sadly. And at the end of the day, if you can’t hit the fucking target, you’re not going to score are you? Strangely enough though, I felt like this was a decent performance even though we were actually pretty shit. I say decent because clearly there was more going on behind the scenes than we know about. It will be interesting to see where we stand next week away at Nagoya. Sai will be back but now Marcinho is banned for accumulated yellow cards. One in and one out. Hopefully some of the ‘sick’ players will have recovered. Hopefully the ones who aren’t sick will have practiced shooting a bit. As much as I am being positive about a semi-decent result considering the circumstances, (as I perceive them), you’ve got to ask some questions about the club’s transfer dealings. In this window we have had six players leave us and only replaced them with two. Some might say our squad was a bit bloated but the reason teams have big squads is to deal with situations like this. And when we needed those extra players, we’d already shipped them out. I don’t know if we’ll get any more players in. I don’t even know if the window has closed. It seems that our run of bad luck is continuing, but the bad luck was partially self-inflicted. Still, it’s a shame we decided to use the smashing of mirrors as a training exercise. Given how bad our shooting is, perhaps the aim of the training exercise was to hit the ball between two mirrors and instead every time we cannoned the shots off the first mirror onto the second, ensuring the absolute maximum of bad luck from every single shot. You would have thought someone might have heard of the superstition and said maybe it wasn’t a good idea. At least we’re trying new things, eh? I’d say though that the club should probably send someone down to Kawasaki Daishi pretty quickly to pick up a box of Omamori to break this horrible run.
Them -
Albirex showed in this game why they are in so much trouble. They attacked beautifully at times but couldn’t shoot for shit. And their keeper is very dodgy, (still not dodgy enough to deflect one of our miles-off-target shots into his own net sadly). Probably the most worrying thing for them though is that they spent most of the match time-wasting. One goal up, maybe do it, but when you’re a goal up after six minutes, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work for the rest of the game. When we finally got a goal back, it seemed like they were still time wasting, now playing for the draw. I suspect if we’d gone ahead they would have continued time wasting looking to hang on to the one goal defeat. This was somewhat undermined by their fans booing Yamaguchi every time he got the ball, apparently not having noticed that their players were trying to run the clock down at every opportunity. Their fans though wanted our keeper to hurry up with his kicks and for us not to play it around aimlessly at the back for some reason. I think in the past I have made comments on their fans on here so I won’t say any more but they seemed to be a bit… confused on this occasion. The general feeling in the city seems to be that they’re going down from the people we spoke to. It will be a shame as it’s a nice away trip and they have a big, (if somewhat confused), fan base. Also, the shuttle buses on this occasion were very smooth and efficient and you don’t often get me saying that. I will say though that they could do with their local breweries upping their game a bit. But that’s just my pint of view. (I’ll leave that typo there as it seems quite appropriate).
Ref and VAR -
Hmmmm. The ref was a relative unknown and I thought on the whole he did a decent job. Would have been nice if he’d given their goalie a second yellow card for time wasting but of course no one is going to do this apart from either a very strict ref who has full command of the rules of the game, (don’t think this person exists in the J League), or is a total attention seeker. (Hmmm, definitely some of those refs around). Kamimura doesn’t fit in the latter category as a relatively unknown ref, and it seems like he doesn’t fit the first category either as he let their keeper claim the ball, dither for a bit, put the ball down, and then pick it up again when we pressed him, much to the shock and disgust of our players, Hasebe and at least me in the stand. (I suspect I shouted quite a lot when this happened so anyone else complaining got drowned out). I wanted to check the replay to see what had really happened and it seems it was exactly what I thought had happened. You can see the ref put his finger on his ear, presumably to ask the linesman or VAR, but presumably VAR can’t get involved in this and the linesman at that end was absolutely useless. But basically, aside from this major clanger, I thought the ref had a decent game. The linesman can do one though. Neither of them affected the outcome of the game though, which is a very welcome thing to be able to say!
This was a game where my general feelings seemed to be a bit at odds with other people’s. Yeah, we were quite shit, but I think there were extenuating circumstances. With so many players absent it was actually a surprise that we could start with a pretty decent lineup. Yeah, they were pretty bad, particularly in the first half, but I think they weren’t all in perfect condition maybe. Apparently the pitch didn’t suit us, (it never does, we’re delicate young flowers when we don’t play at home, aren’t we?), but I was quite pleased to see that Hasebe didn’t use this as an excuse. Our current form is pretty shit, but I’m still not getting angry with Hasebe or our players. I’m not too pleased with the club though for our transfer activity or for the people who seem to think it’s necessary to post up Instagram videos of ‘great’ play when we labour to a 1-1 draw against the team who are bottom of the league or get smashed 5-2 at home. But maybe other fans don’t feel the same way as I do. I think the general quality of this game could be guessed from the highlight video of Yamaguchi making two absolutely regulation saves which was greeted with the usual adoration and adulation from our fans. Quite strange! I’m hoping my boss posts a video of me on the school’s social media doing something equally run of the mill like maybe handing out some print outs, or writing down what page of the text book we’re doing next on my spreadsheet. Exhilarating stuff! And maybe that one commenter I saw on Instagram might suggest that I should represent the national team like they thought Yamaguchi should. Next up Nagoya away, another game that recently we always do terribly in. Since we had that COVID-times beef with them cancelling and rescheduling a game for less than honest reasons I think we’ve failed to beat them in Nagoya. Actually we’ve been unable to beat them in Nagoya since the Mizuho stadium closed as the Toyota stadium is very much not in, or anywhere near Nagoya, but you get my point, I’m sure. I remember in recent years turning up to Nagoya away extremely refreshed and that game was horrific as far as I can remember. Hopefully I can arrive only slightly refreshed this time and we can buck the trend and get a result. But we’ll probably have to have some youth team players and coaches in the squad and will have at least a couple of goalies in the starting lineup. I guess at least we have a week till the game, so hopefully some players can recover. Much like with this game, I’m not very confident, but also like with this game, we have some fun things to do lined up either side of the game, so at least we’ll be able to get some enjoyment out of the weekend. After 26 games last year we were in 11th with 34 points and a +6 goal difference. This year we’re in 8th with 39 points and a +9 goal difference. So Hasebe is definitely an improvement on 2024 Oniki. But the one thing Oniki always had was good luck and it seems that he’s taken that with him to Kashima. If it’s somehow possible for Hasebe to get rid of this terrible luck we have right now, we might be able to win a match. In the last five games we’ve taken four points from a possible 15, which is pretty bad and during this run also got knocked out of the Emperor’s Cup at home against a J3 team. Clearly this is not all down to bad luck, but jeez, it would be nice if we got a break sooner or later. Maybe a penalty, perhaps? We’ve still only had one in 26 games. Some teams get one every 26 minutes. But yeah, I guess I was surprisingly positive about this game, which might make a nice change for people reading this. Lovely! But please, by some small chance, could we actually have a game next week where I don't have to write about shocking refs and lack of options? It would be lovely to be able to get back to moaning about our football rather than all these other things.
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 85')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 45+4')
Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MARCINHO 63')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 77')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MARCINHO 63')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 77')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 30. NODA Hiroto (on for ITO 87')
FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for ERISON 87')
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Not sure anyone particularly deserves this. Maybe Ito was the player who did the most best things and the least bad things. Or maybe Erison who seemed quite unlucky. But I’m going to leave it unawarded again.
SHIRAI (Albirex) 6' 1-0
ITO (Frontale) 45+1' 1-1
Highlights
