Yokohama F Marinos 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale
Surely this run can’t go on much longer. Recently, we’ve faced a scummy team every week and dispatched them with relative ease. Perhaps this was the easiest of all the dispatchings though. And maybe until this game any thoughts that YFM were actually going to end up getting relegated were just wishful thinking. But on this evidence, they are in real trouble! It’s quite annoying that none of the teams below them really managed to take full advantage of another delightful YFM defeat. I think the only thing that could save them now is the deficiencies of those teams below them. I guess it’s just going to be a matter of who is least bad over the rest of the season. YFM have games remaining against four of the top six. For Shonan it’s two, YFC three and Albirex two. Seven of YFM’s remaining nine games are against top half teams. They have no six pointers left. Oooooh, not looking good is it? Apparently some YFM fans online are already worrying that going to J2 would mean that a lot of their fans would transfer their ‘loyalties’ to Frontale. This is quite a bizarre point of view but I guess they must have some reason for saying it. All very intriguing going into the last stretch of the season, isn’t it? Anyway, please excuse me for apparently enjoying the potential demise of YFM more than us winning. It’s not really that way. Of course I want us to win more than anything, but having that win topped with a potentially dangerous defeat for your irritating neighbours is lovely! I was trying to think of a food related comparison but as my taste is quite pedestrian the best I could think of was the fact that chips are great, and cheese is great, but cheesy chips are really great. Doesn’t quite work, but hopefully you can see what I’m going for here.
Us -
Unsurprising starting line up again apart from the usual shuffling in the midfield. And why would you fix something that isn’t broke? Our schedule isn’t so busy at the moment so we even have a bit of recovery time in between matches. Erison and Ito both have seven goals in six games. Amazing! In this match we even managed to get a clean sheet. This was probably mostly due to the opposition though. (One shot on target, hehehehehe). Hasebe has reinvented Tanabe as a marauding substitute winger. It’s insane! He had two good opportunities to score in this match and was unlucky with both. It would be wrong of me to not mention that we are kind of hanging in there at the back with not many options when it comes to defenders. Hopefully the current guys can stay fit as if one of them gets injured it will either be Kamihashi, Tsuchiya, Tanabe or Noda coming in, most of whom have hardly any experience. Yamaguchi had almost nothing to do in this game but I was very happy to see him have a right moan at the ref after he let a bad tackle on one of our defenders go. I have nothing much else to say. Nothing to moan about. Just hope we can keep this run going.
Them -
Aaahhhhh. Lovely! ‘Be a Stunner’ is YFM’s slogan for this season. It’s a strange choice, as I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to mean. The only use of stunner when referring to people I know of is the kind of thing a tabloid newspaper would use to describe a very attractive person. Might have made more sense in the passive voice. ‘Be Stunned’. And that’s probably true but not in the way that they might have hoped. I was stunned how bad YFM were in this game. Normally even in terrible seasons for them they somehow raise their game when they play us, presumably because they hate us. On this occasion they definitely had the amount of fouls and cards you might expect from a team playing a grudge match, but when it came to football, they were horrendous. I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t take more advantage of the upper hand we had in this match and give both their goal difference and morale a massive pasting. But it’s always tricky when we have to play against 10 men. Talking of the red card, it’s baffling that their players thought that it shouldn’t have been a penalty. Their fans probably were delighted when they got the potential lifeline of a VAR check, imagining that they were about to get away with no penalty. In the stadium the screen said they were checking whether it was a penalty or not. When the ref came back and canceled the yellow and brought out the red it was delightful! Why they thought that Yamamoto with the goal gaping and the ball right in front of him would dive rather than score is hard to believe. But then again the stadium did seem to be full, (or should I say half full), of their fans wearing the same giveaway replica shirt, so perhaps there were more than a few people there who don’t usually go to games and maybe were only introduced to the sport of football earlier in the day. With the rules changing every few months or so I had to google to check the details. The penalty and a red card thing is now ok. It would have been a yellow if the defender had at least tried to get the ball, but as he just hauled Yamamoto to the ground it’s a red. Cheerio! 41000 is a decent attendance, but probably at least a third were Frontale fans and maybe another third were people there on freebies. There certainly didn’t seem to be much atmosphere coming from the other end of the stadium. They recently had some kind of ban though didn’t they? There were no big flags, (lucky them, not having to spend most of the game ducking and weaving to try and see what’s going on). Not sure if their drums were banned too. It sounded like it. But you can’t really be surprised the atmosphere was a bit flat. They’re having a shocker of a season (about as bad as Postecoglou’s first season, but hopefully they’ll go one… better… this time), their team are awful bunch of cloggers and the stadium announcer tried to build up the vibes by playing a Coldplay ballad. Blimey. I did quite enjoy singing along to the Black Eyed Peas… classic, ‘I gotta feeling’ with my own lyrics, ‘I gotta feeling, that you’re going to J2, going to J2, going to J J 2’. Yes, I’m immature, but I would expect them to do exactly the same if the situation was reversed. They were very, very poor. We won. Lovely.
Ref and VAR -
As mentioned above, I enjoyed that VAR intervention a lot. I also enjoyed the fact that the ref was very tall. Ohashi isn’t a famous ref, and the one previous time we had him I said ‘I don’t have anything to say about him’ which I’d echo for this match and which is the absolute highest of high praise.
Next up, FC Tokyo at home which, contrary to some people’s opinions, for me means the end of the run of us playing against scummy teams. Hopefully it won’t be the end of us winning games though. The ACL clubs will now be having midweek games which should hopefully cause them some problems. Bravo to Oniki for giving us a rest from that competition this time around. I still don’t think we’re going to win the league, but I am very much enjoying this run and hope that soon we can be the league’s top scorers on our own, rather than having to share that title with Kyoto. Which all seems destined to set up a 0-0 or defeat where we fail to score. Hopefully not. Fingers crossed!
GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON
Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 72')
ITO (Frontale) 4' 0-1
ERISON (Frontale) 62' PEN 0-2
MIYAGI (Frontale) 90+8' 0-3
Highlights
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