Vs Yokohama F Marinos (home-ish) 22/3/26 J League East match 8

 

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 5 Yokohama F Marinos

 

Please excuse me for keeping this brief. I’m slightly surprised I’m even bothering writing anything when a couple of puking emojis would probably tell the story pretty clearly. So shit was this match, I have hardly any notes and I have no photos of the actual football. I also have no desire to write this, so I’m going to dispose of most of the usual subtitles.


1st half -

Pretty shit first half which started going wrong as soon as the VAR decision was being considered. Ref giving them absolutely everything. Marcinho must be the best dribbler in the league and maybe the worst passer. As usual, plenty of pointless possession and maybe zero good chances. Unbelievable amount of offsides. 


2nd half -

Fuck that.


Good day -

No, it wasn’t. 

Bad day -

Too many to mention really. And worryingly three players who’ve done pretty well so far this season totally fell to pieces in this match. Matsunagane was the senior centre back in the pairing, which is a bit of a crazy thing to say. He thought he’d scored, it was ruled out, and things went steadily downhill from there. Broderson flapped on quite a few occasions. I don’t know if this is because the defence let him down. From miles away in the stands it looked like he was more at fault though which is absolutely the opposite of every game so far this season. Equally though, he did prevent them from reaching double figures which at one stage looked like it could easily happen. Maruyama came on and was very quickly at fault for two goals. Not great for him and not great for the tactical genius who made that change. The weird thing is, aside from these three, no one else really stood out as being particularly bad. Well apart from the manager maybe as the main takeaway from our play was that it was an absolute waste of time and was absolutely pointless. We never looked like we’d score. Even when we had a decent chance we just rolled the ball to their keeper. Individual errors were the reason we conceded so many. The reason we created absolutely nothing and had no response to constantly conceding is something more like collective apathy and that has got to go down to Hasebe. I’ve tried to give him the benefit of the doubt but it’s difficult to come away from this game not thinking that he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. We’re unbelievably inconsistent when it comes to results, but perhaps quite consistent in that we’re always pretty dull, (but sometimes get lucky). I’m not sure ‘looking forward to’ is the right phrase, but I am certain interested to hear his post match comments. They’re not up on the website yet. In previous shitty performances I’ve been surprised how he’s apparently seen quite a lot of positives in our stodgy and ineffective play. I don’t think even he can say that after this match. (I’ve read them now, and astonishingly, he pretty much did). And although, once again, we’re stacking up the injuries, there surely was a safer option at centre back than giving someone his debut who joined from the youth team last year and partnering him with someone who hasn’t really played many more games for us than Hayashi has.  And playing that ‘senior’ player on the side of defence that means he is predominantly on his weaker foot. Add to this the fact that the attacking instructions seemed to be something along the lines of the best form of attack being to play the ball backwards towards our defence as often as possible. Hmmmm. Somewhat amusingly, at the end of the game I think the only centre back who wasn’t at fault for at least one goal was Hayashi. But presumably he’ll also be suffering the mental destruction that seems to be par for the course when we inexplicably play young centre backs in games we fuck up against YFM.

Any other business - 

- Miura did a bit better in this match which suggests that Hasebe did the right thing by finally dropping him for a game. Sadly that was about the only right thing he did. 

- Late on in the game there was the joyful announcement on the big screen of the 50000+ attendance being the biggest ever home attendance in the club’s history. At the same time it felt like we could also be heading for the worst result in our history too. It’s a bit of a shame because the club had put a lot of effort into making the day a success and now anyone is going to remember is that we got absolutely thumped and created nothing on our big day at the national stadium. Probably pIenty of trauma there for some players. I can’t imagine any neutrals would have got turned on to Frontale after attending this unless they were ultra masochistic. I suppose though that there weren’t the usual massive amount of free tickets given away so maybe there weren’t many neutrals attending anyway. 

- If you want to see the absolute encapsulation of our performance in this match, check Wakizaka’s corner at 68:38. Guess we’ll blame the pitch, right? Maybe we should blame the pitch for the tactics and substitutions too.

WOW! -

Sounds a lot like sour grapes but the ref Ikeuchi, who is resolutely one of the worst in the league was an absolute shithead in this match giving almost every decision in the first a half to them. Even with a decent ref Hasebe would probably have contrived to have got us walloped but at least it wouldn’t have been as irritating an experience as seeing Ikeuchi consistently cock everything up. He absolutely deserves this title. Although we were so bad in the second half, conceding from pretty much every attack, that even Ikeuchi’s uselessness doesn’t linger in the memory. 


Utterly humiliating. The one game many fans desperately wanted to win in this pointless mini season and instead we allowed our most hated rivals to score only two fewer goals than they had scored in the seven previous games they’d played this season. They were averaging a goal a game until they come up against us. Every time they play us they seem to raise their game, no matter how badly their season is going. Every time we play them we seem to not really care. Thankfully we don’t have a game midweek, which might give some people a chance to recover. Seems like Taniguchi is maybe seriously injured. Sasaki is injured. Uremovic hasn’t had a look in at all this year and given that he wasn’t even in the squad for this match it might mean that he’s got injured too. And don’t forget that Maruyama was apparently not 100% fit (perhaps explaining his errors). Even when we have loads of centre backs it seems that we can manufacture a central defensive injury crisis, doesn’t it? But obviously people make mistakes. It’s a shame so many people made so many in one game though. But at the same time even though we conceded five, I feel like the bigger worry is that we created fuck all again and never looked like scoring. Marcinho dribbling through numerous defenders across the YFM box and then passing gently to their keeper was about as dangerous as we got. I speculated that after the shitty Kashima game there might have been a clear the air bust up. God knows what needs to happen now. Maybe burn the entire club to the ground and start again in the local leagues. Fuck me this was awful. And the next ‘fun’ we have is Machida away. Fucking hell, things are grim. I have to work on the morning of that game, quite a long way from Machida, so maybe if I decide to walk to the stadium straight from work I might be able to arrive late enough to see only the teams lining up after the final whistle, thereby saving myself the stress and frustration of watching another utterly shit game like this. If Hasebe isn’t skating on thin ice after this, he really should be. His apparent lack of ideas and fear of taking any kind of action has irritated in previous fixtures but it really pushed me over the edge in this match. When the only positive things you can say about the match relate to the fun things that went on before kick off and at half time you know we’re in trouble. And the fact that there was a lot of booing at the end of the match, (any booing is an extremely rare thing at Frontale), shows that it’s not only pessimistic me who’s thinking that this all seems pretty gutless and utterly awful right now. 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 33. LEE Keun-Hyeong
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for TACHIBANADA 76')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 61')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 60')
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for HAYASHI 61')
DF 30. NODA Hiroto
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for KONNO 61')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 76')

Man of the match

...

 

Goals

TANIMURA (YFM) 30' 0-1
AMANO (YFM) 53' 0-2
AMANO (YFM) 62' 0-3
YURI ARAUJO (YFM) 72' 0-4
QUINONES (YFM) 78' 0-5

Highlights

 

 

Vs Tokyo Verdy (away) 18/3/26 J League East match 7

Tokyo Verdy 0 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale 

Well I never, this was a welcome result that gives us a bit of refreshment after some very dry weeks. I’ve long been saying that this ridiculous half season is a joke of a tournament and therefore it doesn’t matter when we lose. So logically, I shouldn’t get too excited about us winning either. But blimey, we needed something to get at least slightly happy about after some of our recent games. We never seem to play particularly well against Verdy. Some might point to our win there two years ago, but in that match, hiding not so subtly behind the five goals we scored were the four goals we conceded. And that match was very much an outlier. Games between the two teams usually tend to pretty dour and goal shy affairs. So in a way, it’s a bit of luck that we got a couple of early goals in this match. Particularly considering that getting shots on target has been a bit of a challenge for us recently. With three games in nine days, there was always going to be a bit of rotation. Well, I say that but I probably should have said ‘always should have been’ instead of ‘was always going to be’. But the rotation seemed to be effective and was pleasantly surprising. Anyway, with another game coming up soon, it is imperative that I get this out of the way quickly.

1st half -

Much better first half. Miura dropped so I feel like a genius at the moment after saying that should happen. We’ll see how long that lasts. But to be honest this is clearly a rotated side, which is exactly what we should be doing more. Team seem like they’re up for it. We’ve made chances. We’ve looked reasonably solid! Whats going on? Stats are surprisingly dull when it comes to us but don’t really reflect the way the game has gone. Wakizaka looking much better. Feel like there was maybe a bit of a clear the air bust up after the last game?

2nd half -

How nice it was to not concede! In my mind this was a fairly comfortable 90 minutes for us, but again the stats don’t seem to really back this up. Taniguchi might have a hamstring injury. The club and player are keeping shtum about this at the moment which isn’t normally a good sign. When he went off we almost saw a debut for Hayashi, but instead Miura came on and Nagane moved to centre back. Miura did a lot better than he has in any other game this season. Whether that was as a reaction to being dropped out of the starting line up or was just the fact that he normally does a bit better at the end of games, I’m not sure. Guess there are some decisions to be made for the next game now depending on the injury situation. Still no sign of Sasaki… The best thing about this game was that we didn’t constantly give the ball away. Hang on, actually the best thing was that we scored and won but not giving the ball away constantly definitely contributed to this. Yamamoto had a decent game too. Let’s not get carried away, but this was definitely a step in the right direction.


Good day -

Good day for Lee, who made it into a match day squad for the first time. Credit to Hasebe for rotating the sub goalkeeper as only in very rare situations will they actually be needed. Perhaps this was the thinking behind putting Hayashi in the squad too, but he came very close to having to come onto the pitch until Hasebe changed the plan and moved Nagane across. Was good to see Kobayashi back in the squad again. Wouldn’t mind seeing some more variation in the subs, but I understand that Hasebe probably wants to get us playing a bit better before doing those kind of things. Good day for Hasebe as he might have played a blinder by dropping Miura. Must be a good thing as we looked better without him and maybe it will also give him kick up the backside. We know he’s a good player, he just needs to get out of the funk that he’s currently in. Guess we’ll see what happens at the weekend, particularly given that the injuries are piling up again. But well done Hasebe, job done, not in a thrilling style, but job done all the same.

The ref was Nagamine and much like against JEF, he seemed to have brought his little linesman friend along with him. Do refs and linesman work in teams? It might make sense actually. I have no idea. Maybe I was just in a better mood in this match than on Saturday, (actually, that maybe is not only superfluous, it is perhaps even disgracefully misleading. I definitely was in a better mood), but I don’t recall shouting at the ref much at all. So I suppose that means he should be in the good day section.

Bad day -

Bad day for whoever has to deal with the massive amount of green light sticks that Verdy will have left over this morning. Apparently they were giving away 11000 of them and the stadium wasn’t exactly full. Check online auction or resale sites today if you’re interested in purchasing one, or perhaps even a few hundred. Not much else to snark about really. It’s quite a refreshing feeling.

Perhaps bad day for Taniguchi who on his return to his old team got booed, got injured and then got sad. Hopefully the injury isn’t serious as he seems to have settled in pretty well. 


Any other business -

I don’t think there is.


WOW! -



I also don’t think there is for this section either. 


So, a mercifully short blog post, perhaps due to the fact that I took almost zero notes and instead of getting furious by the constant cheating of the opposition club from top to bottom (Kashima) and the incompetence of the referee (Kamimura in the Kashima game), I just watched the match and had a little sing. Let’s not kid ourselves though, we still didn’t do that much in this match, but the consolation is that what we did was to a slightly higher standard than it has been recently. The big game comes next. When I say big game, I don’t mean important for the league or against tough opposition. It’s just that we’re playing YFM at ‘home’ on Sunday and perhaps many Frontale fans, certainly me anyway, will be very keen for us to win that match against our despicable and disgusting neighbours. Obviously, I think it is rotten that we’re playing a home game at the National Stadium and would normally rail against these kind of things and was set to do so. However, I heard that it was essential for us to bow to the pressure of the league and kiss the ring by having a game here in order to be able to potentially use the stadium when it comes to redeveloping Todoroki the season after next. Not sure this is 100% true and I’ve only heard a rumour, but it seems plausible. It will be interesting to see what line up Hasebe goes with. I hope on Sunday night I still have the same sense of calm that I do right now. 

 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto (Yellow card 64')
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 51')
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 33. LEE Keun-Hyeong
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for TANIGUCHI 60')
MF 15. MYOGAN Toya (on for WAKIZAKA 90+4')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for KONNO 60')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 60')
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for MARCINHO 88')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 79')

Man of the match

Weird that I gave this out against Kashima but don’t feel like doing so in this match. Nagane did well, as he has every time he’s been called on this year, which remains pleasantly surprising. Marcinho got two assists too. But I think we won because of a general raising of standards all round rather than anyone standing out. Does that mean I should give it everyone or no-one? So…

EVERYONE or NO-ONE - I explained this above. You choose which one, depending on your current mood.

 

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 9' 0-1
ERISON (Frontale) 23' 0-2

 

Highlights

 

Vs Kashima Antlers (away) 14/3/26 J League East match 6

 

Kashima Antlers 1 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

Ah, absolutely gutted. I guess I was expecting disappointment but I hadn’t banked on it coming in this way. I’m sure plenty of people will disagree, but I think Kashima absolutely stole the three points in this game. I guess this is a bit one-eyed though as we didn’t come very close to taking any of our limited chances. But fucking hell Kashima are a bit rubbish and fluked a goal and with it the win. As I sit here on the bus in the car park after the game at the designated departure time, I am fully aware that me writing this blog post will probably take less time than it takes us to get out of the car park here. At least it's something to keep me occupied whilst we go absolutely nowhere. As the reception is so poor in the rural industrial wasteland, (perhaps a slight contradiction there, but anyone who’s been here will probably understand), that the Kashima stadium is in I can’t really check any incidents from the match, and can’t even see the stats. With that in mind, expect some inaccuracies but I’m sure you’d expect nothing else. I also suspect that the WOW! section might be longer than the rest of the post this week. But maybe that’s what some of you come here for anyway. Let the vitriol begin!


First half -

They seemed scared of us for some reason. And maybe if we’d been playing with 11 players they would have had reason to be. Have a guess who the two below par players were on our side this week? Yep that’s right Miura and Wakizaka. Although that’s extremely unfair on Wakizaka who was just a bit below par, in contrast to Miura who did absolutely nothing other than give the ball away and stand around pointing whilst the game went on around him. No, come on, that’s a little unfair. At one point he also left the field to change his shorts. There weren’t many chances for either team but Broderson had to make one good save. 0-0 was absolutely the right scoreline. Thankfully we managed to squeeze in our first shot on target just before half time. We were mostly in control but failed to trouble their keeper. Hang on, I feel like maybe we’ve heard that one before, haven’t we?


Second half - 

We really had them rattled. They looked extremely dodgy at the back and in midfield. We had some good chances which we blasted either high or wide. Miura was still shit. Well up until the final ten minutes when it seemed like he remembered it wasn’t a training session. Their goal was fluky, completely against the run of play and utterly undeserved. Although our failure to trouble their keeper probably suggests that we didn’t deserve much either. But damn it, we really had them wobbling but couldn’t score. Which makes the defeat all the more frustrating. At least we didn’t go to penalties I suppose. That could have caused issues with the buses which were ‘leaving’ at 17:30. Although it is now 17:48 and the wheels of the bus haven’t even gone round once, let alone been able to ‘go round and round’. There are a few things I’d like to look at when I can as I was quite irritated on a number of occasions by the officials. Will add a little ‘In the cold light of day’ section when I’ve done that. 

Good day - 

Good day for fans of certain players. Oshima and Maruyama were unexpectedly back in the side. Apparently Hasebe rewarded the players who’d done well in the training match we played last week. (Bit more on that in the bad day section). On the pitch, Maruyama and Tachibanada stood out for good reasons. Oshima too. He did plenty of things for people to clip up and post as short videos. (I haven’t checked but I suspect the club has probably done this, apparently unaware that we lost the game. Perhaps creating social media content and getting ‘impressions’ is more important to them than us actually winning games). I really hope he can stay fit as he’ll be very important if he can. But I’m totally aware that we’ve said this many times before. Good day for people who like to watch a real battle of a game. And for people who like to watch build ups that never reach the having-a-shot stage. Good day for people who want to scream as there was plenty to get angry about. Good day for whoever apparently bribed the ref as he did exactly what they wanted. 

Bad day - 

Bad day for fans of correct decisions. Bad day for Miura (obviously). Not a great day for Hasebe as we still seem to be stuck in the toothless attack doldrums. It’s good that he rewarded those players who’d done well in training, but it’s a massive black mark against his name for not removing Miura from the team. I know I always moan about this and I know I moan more than most people, but there definitely seemed to be some frustration from others around me in the stand with Miura. Also a bad day for Yamaguchi who once again wasn’t in the match day squad. Apparently in the training match he was the goalkeeper who absolutely gifted the university team opposition their two goals. It doesn’t look good for him. 

Any other business - 

Let’s just go straight to the WOW! Section. 

WOW! - 

The first WOW is a quite all encompassing one. All the Kashima players, staff, fans, ball boys, everyone connected with the club in any way definitely slots into this category perfectly. They’re such a scummy club from top to bottom. Things that irritated me about the team in this match included their fucking infuriating gamesmanship, clogger play, constant whinging to the referee, extreme time wasting, injury feigning, dirty fouling, and most of all spawny luck. Three points for them from this game is an absolute injustice. The ball boys were clearly under instruction from the club to not give us the ball for throw ins under anything except for the most extreme circumstances, just let that time ebb away, even when they were drawing. Don’t think that the fans are going to escape from this. It was an appallingly low attendance for what they seemed to think was an important and tricky game. If it hadn’t been for the Frontale fans I think they would have struggled to get over 15000. Presumably it’s a bit easier for their fans to get to the stadium so they can’t even blame the horrific bus journey. Actually though, the coaches from Tokyo are probably at least 50% full with ‘home’ fans. My contention that Ota-ku, Setagaya-ku and Shibuya-ku are fair game for being Frontale territory is intended mainly to wind up FC Tokyo fans. But I think it takes a bit of a leap though for someone living in Tokyo to choose Kashima over a closer team particularly given that everything about the club is so scummy. Imagine doing that bus journey for every home game. Blimey. These wonderful fans also broke off a song midway before the game in order to boo our goalkeepers coming out. And they’re not even as good at booing as Urawa are. 

Let’s not leave the stadium experience out of this slagging. Now they allow you to retain your PET bottle lid when entering the stadium. Amazing! There’s no longer any re-entry though, so I guess they’ve worked out that any revenue lost from people no longer having to replace spilt soft drink bottles is more than made up for by the fact that none of that food stalls outside the ground will be getting any custom from away fans who are scrambling for the unreserved seats once the ground is open. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have gone out anyway, as I don’t enjoy wandering around rural industrial wastelands, but their commitment to stamping out any kind of enjoyment or fan mingling from the match day experience is impressive. I guess the mantra is to just keep the experience aggy, like it is on the pitch. And maybe in an attempt to further increase the irritation, the in stadium music was horrendous. The choice of songs was awful but the fact that they even went further and chose cover versions that efficiently stripped away anything that was interesting about the originals shows a real commitment to the cause. Oniki famously had never been to a concert before one of our fan events, and this music selection really had the whiff of being chosen by someone who hates music. Maybe they don’t need to spend as much on royalties for those versions. At least Urawa fully commit to having the original versions of their pre-game gay anthems soundtrack. The Saitama stadium experience wouldn’t be the same without them! (Are you impressed that I am somehow managing to slag off both Kashima and Urawa in the same post and hopefully the fact that I am comparing them will hopefully further irritate fans of both teams).

So, awful club, awful people, awful experience. Surely we can’t go any lower? Somewhat surprisingly all of these things may have been eclipsed by the ref. We’ve now had a couple of dodgy games with him but this one really took the biscuit. He gave us absolutely nothing, showed an almost Jesus like approach when it came to forgiving the sins of multiple Kashima players who pulled and fouled constantly but for the most part avoided cards. When Tagawa attempted to break Ozeki’s ankle, he got away with a yellow. He hassled us for dilly-dallying over a goal kick in the first ten minutes of the game but let Kashima take as long as they wanted to do anything after they’d gone ahead. After a coming together where we won the ball he let play continue till the ball went out and then took it back for a Kashima free kick, apparently playing the advantage for us, but then giving the decision the other way. Maybe he's just a bit simple and it takes his brain a little while to catch up. The linesman at our end was equally bad. But basically, a fucking absolutely useless arsehole of a referee who was terrified of giving any decisions against those scary Kashima guys. I don’t know if the ref has a vineyard, brewery or dairy farm, but he definitely showed that he is an excellent bottler. So not a completely useless human being I suppose. Just completely useless when it comes to football. We didn’t lose because of him because he wasn’t the one who couldn’t hit the target more than once a half, but he definitely affected the way the game played out.


In the cold light of day - 

So this part has been written at home and not on the bus and I’ve now watched a few things back so can give you the low down about things you probably already know. I didn’t go as far as watching long sections of the game though, (life’s too short, and I don’t want to get the resentment boiling up again), so I’m going to just presume my feelings at the time were correct when it comes to thinking that the ref was generally intimated by the Kashima players. One thing I didn’t notice at the time but irritated me intensely when I saw a replay was Ito being blocked by the ref. Absolutely sums up how bad Kamimura is, body checking a player who’s trying to get to the ball. Ito’s face said a lot. I think the ref’s lack of a backbone and Kashima’s dirty tricks is really displayed when the ref gives Tagawa a yellow. It looked like a dodgy tackle at the time but was a bit too far from me to be able to really see it properly. The replay is damning though, both players sliding in, Ozeki pulls out and puts his boot down as it clearly is going to be a dangerous collision and Tagawa slides right into his ankle, boot off the ground, no intention of stopping himself. The ref gives a yellow, but I have no idea why VAR didn’t suggest he have another look at it. To be honest, we should be thankful for the yellow. As soon as the ankle-break attempt is complete Kashima players surround the ref, suggesting he’s given the foul the wrong way and that Ozeki should be sent off. Even the prick Tagawa seems to be suggesting that Ozeki has made a grievous attempt to injure him by attacking the sole of his boot with his ankle. That one small incident sums up the whole game really. The ref making a mistake in favour of Kashima who were intensely irritated that the mistake doing go even more in their favour. It wouldn’t have made a difference if he’d sent him off as it was probably too late anyway. It might have made a difference though if he hadn’t let them get away with their shittiness for the whole match.

Looking for the yellow card incident in the highlights I’ve inadvertently stumbled across one of the absolutely mind-numbingly bad decisions from the ref. It’s around 89 minutes and the defender has his arms completely round Erison and pulls him to the floor and the ref isn’t interested at all. It says a lot that our players didn’t complain more. They presumably knew by this stage that we weren’t getting anything from the ref. After all, the same thing happened throughout the game and he wasn’t interested on any of the other occasions. Maybe he also officiates in Judo matches so thinks that throwing opponents to the floor is all part of the game. I think it’s not an accident too that Oniki walks out of his technical area and almost directly in front of us taking the throw. Anyone who is still of the opinion that Oniki is a nice guy probably needs to rethink. It seems that anyone that is touched by Kashima turns to the dark side.
 

So, in the cold light of day, my thoughts that the ref was useless and that Kashima are a despicable bunch of pricks was exactly right. Bravo to me!


What a crappy end to what at some stages looked like it could be a good day. If we want to take some positives it must be that we really had them wobbling on a lot of occasions. If we want to undermine those positives, well, two shots on target in 90 minutes and we lost. It’s now 66 minutes since our buses departure and we still haven’t made it to the expressway. But to be honest, I think we’re a bit ahead of schedule compared to previous years. I’m intending to have a few drinks when we get back to civilisation so that should soften the blow a bit I think. It’s a shame the season is so totally over so early. But equally, it’s a relief that we’re farting around like this in an utterly meaningless season. I think it’s time for the club to admit we’re not going to win the league and start trying some new things. It seems that there has always been a reason why the time wasn’t right to try something new. Clearly now there’s nothing to lose. Please let us see some new faces and maybe, shock horror, some new tactics…. Lot’s of people are talking about how Miura and Ito don’t play well together but still Hasebe is still persisting with it. Personally I think that this year Miura and no-one plays well together and that is mostly because Miura is in horrific form. For god’s sake change something Hasebe! Bet he won’t. Well, aside from the normal tiny changes of the midfielders and attackers who dropped out of the team for this match coming back in for the next match. There have been a few minor changes but he basically seems to go from line up A, who don't do the job and are dropped, to line up B, who don't do the job, so are dropped for line up A, who... you get the message here I'm sure. He has experimented with line up AB at times, but to be honest, that just seems to be a way of him demonstrating he's doing something. And given that whoever plays we have the same shittiness problems, is it not clear that there it's a bigger problem than personnel? Next up Tokyo Verdy away on Wednesday. I’ve just seen that they’ve beaten Urawa today. LOLZ! They’ve had some good results and fun so far this year, so maybe they’ll be good neighbours and let us have some. We’ve now played five games, over a quarter of this mini season, and in a normal season we’d be sitting here with just five points, having failed to win since the first fluky game of the season. It’s not massively encouraging, is it? But somehow I don’t feel massively disheartened. Might be feeling that way soon though. I feel like every week I’m coming away with the impression that we just need to make a little change and we’ll be off and flying. But every time the following game comes round, the little change we need to make hasn’t been made. I’d love to sign off here with some kind of optimistic flourish. Clearly we’re not rubbish and there are plenty of teams in a worse position than us. At the start of the year on the J Talk Podcast I said that we could have a great season as all the pieces of the puzzle were there but Hasebe just needed to put them together. Sadly, it seems like he just can’t stop using the instructions Oniki left behind instead of doing what he knows best. If things carry on like this, I don’t think it will ruin us, but I can’t see it’s going to help Hasebe get another job after he leaves us, (which presumably will happen after the next full season unless there is a massive change in fortunes). There is a certain irony that in looking for something positive to finish this post on, I’ve ended up making things even more depressing. The feeling straight after the match was that we’d been unlucky, but a little reflection made me think that the best we could have hoped for was a 0-0 anyway. So given that even when I felt like we’d done quite well it was basically a backhanded way of displaying we’re not very good, perhaps keeping things depressing at the end is exactly the right way to finish. 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for OSHIMA 66')
FW 9. ERISON (on for ROMANIC 83')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for TACHIBANADA 83')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for ITO 83')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for IENAGA 60')


Man of the match

Kind of a shock that I’m doing this given the result and my inherent sulkiness, but I like to think this shows that I’m at least a little bit fair. We weren’t great, but some people deserve a mention. Lots of people have said Oshima, and whilst I’d agree with that to some extent, I think he was slightly outshone by two others whose good performances were more surprising. So I’ll give it to…

MARUYAMA Yoichi and TACHIBANADA Kento - probably neither of these players would be in most people’s preferred starting lineup, but both put in full effort and showed some of their underperforming team mates the way to go. Extra props to Tachibanada as he was not only playing in midfield but also left back in the first half whilst Miura strolled around doing nothing.

 

Goals

LEO CEARA (Kashima) 79' 1-0

 

Highlights

 

Vs Mito Hollyhock (home) 1/3/26 J League East match 4

 

Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 2 Mito Hollyhock

I haven’t exactly been putting off writing this post, but there certainly was a feeling of not being bothered to write it. I feel pretty stupid after starting the year with some confidence. At the time it seemed like it made sense as we’d strengthened well in the exact areas that we needed to, so all seemed good. Little did I know that the kind of indifference I had towards this interim season system would also spread through the club so much. In the week there were people talking about Taniguchi commenting on how the club seemed a bit too laid back compared to his previous experiences and expectations. This definitely rings true when you consider that quite a few players have been playing as if they don’t give a shit. The past few games have been so bad that I am starting to feel that even if all of our players started making a proper effort we might still have problems due to the lack of ideas from the manager. It’s been very easy to point the finger at Miura, Wakizaka and Yamamoto for their pretty dodgy performances in previous games, but the fact is it seems that we don’t actually have any idea of how to play at the moment. Hasebe’s attempts to keep it tighter at the back have failed two-fold. Not only have we kept it tight for almost all, but crucially not all of the game, the few occasions when we haven’t kept it tight, we instead kept it incredibly… loose? But also the fact that there seems to be no plan other than to keep it tight and keep practicing keeping-it-tight defending means that every time we manage to stop an attack, we are so tight that we have almost no-one to have a go at attacking. Hence the ball keeps coming back, again and again, and sooner or later we concede an extremely soft goal. Or two as the case was in this game. The only time we actually got going in this game was when things were getting desperate towards the end when presumably the game plan had been abandoned. Maybe we should abandon the game plan at the start of the match instead and see how that works… Anyway, there will be more moans later, so let’s end this intro paragraph here and get on with the usual crap.


1st half -

Complete control with absolutely no threat and then complete self destruction. Seemed like we were showing a bit more guts and effort, but of course it didn’t translate into anything meaningful. Or actually anything at all. Fucking terrible stuff. Four shots in the whole first half, none of which were on target and then dropped a couple of clangers to intensify the frustration. I don’t think anyone covered themselves in glory and in fact a few people covered themselves in something considerably less desirable and a lot more stinky.


2nd half -

Of course the only way was up. And in the end we absolutely cheated Mito out of a win. It felt like a bit of an injustice for us to get an equaliser. I think this is partly my pessimism speaking though, as in reality it had been a dull game and probably a draw was a fair score. A 0-0 probably would have been fairer. Of course that would have also resulted in penalties, so perhaps justice was done after all. It didn’t feel like it to me though. Not saying I didn’t enjoy the ‘win’, but it was a feeling more of relief than anything triumphant.


Penalties -

Felt like Brodersen was a lot closer on a lot more occasions in this shoot out than in the previous one. And his save was a nice one. Well done to him! Pleased again that we seemed to be able to put our penalties away pretty nicely. Probably should bear in mind that the two shoot outs we’ve had have both been against promoted teams so maybe we shouldn’t get too excited about any kind of penalty prowess at this stage.

Good day -

As strange as it is to say this, I thought the ref did a reasonable job. The last time we had him I noted that even though he’s a youngster he had already attained the necessary level of total shitness to make it as an established J League ref. In this match I thought we got away with a few fouls that could have been yellows, which was kind of the reverse of the last game we had with him, (away at Nagoya), so maybe he goes a bit easier on the home team. Perhaps me saying that he had a good game is as a result of him maybe giving us a bit of a break. Also somewhat bizarrely, I’m going to say that our main supporter group had a good day too. We were utterly shit in the first half and as our fans sang the team off at half time I commented that anyone singing must have been a complete idiot after what the team had served up. As the players came out for the second half they started up a different song than the usual post half time one and then… proceeded to sing the same song for the whole of the second half without stopping. They clearly are better people than I am. I was kind of sulking and moaning whilst trying to detach myself from the experience slightly. I feel like that is the healthy thing to do. But clearly we are in a mess at the moment and sometimes it’s not particularly helpful for arseholes like me to just whinge. But in my defence, I do usually try to support the team as much as I can. I’m not sure if singing the same song for fifty minutes managed to inspire the team to get the result, but it definitely did send a signal I think. We’re in a bit of a mess which is an amazing thing to say so early in the season and with the points on the board that we have. I think a comeback like this might be what we need to have a bit of a shake up and use the next two weeks between games to sort ourselves out a bit. Finally, although he didn’t have a great day on the pitch, well done to Wakizaka for saying that we shouldn’t be doing the usual end of game sing and jump thing that we do when we win if we’ve only managed to scrape through a penalty shoot out. I was certainly hoping that they didn’t do it. So good on him for having a bit of humility in the situation.


Bad day -

Maybe I should have done the bad day part first as now it looks like I’m a build ‘em up and knock ‘em down kind of guy. The toils of our midfielders continued in this match. Hasebe had changed things up… a bit. But it seems like 2026 is going to be the year that our midfield, which is usually the strongest part of our team, turns to shit. I think the only two players who’ve played in there this year who come out with any credit are Kawahara and Tachibanada. Wakizaka has started every match and hasn’t been very good. Yamamoto has been in and out of the team but has shown consistency in not being very good, and even Ozeki who we’ve all been clamouring to see play more, was in this game… not very good. Wakizaka and Yamamoto in particular seem to be way too casual this year, getting caught in possession on numerous occasions and giving the ball away cheaply on an equally numerous amount of occasions. I think this is partly why we we’ve been conceding so many opportunities recently. It probably should be noted that we only gave away ten chances in this game which is less than half of our previous best this season. Although saying that, we did still concede twice. Miura was also pretty dodgy again. If Taniguchi was trying to single anyone out subtly with his comments it could well be the guy who is to his left in defence. Much like in the last game, he started reasonably, but seemed to give up pretty quickly. I really don’t know what’s happened to him. He hasn’t been the same since his last injury, but his level has dropped off so dramatically that it’s pretty weird. Obviously given that I was moaning that Wakizaka and Miura are undroppable for Hasebe even though they’ve both been way off the pace, it was inevitable that they should combine for the late equaliser. I like that fact that my hot takes are more often than not extinguished by fact. It keeps me from getting cocky I guess.

It’s very easy to slag off players, and believe it or not, I don’t actually enjoy doing it. So far I haven’t really slagged off the manager much. Every game comes round with me thinking that surely he has to try something a little different. In this game, he kind of did. He made a few changes to the starting line up in the midfield and swapped the front three around a bit. It didn’t really alter the outcome much though. I think the thing that is starting to irritate me is that he’s used the same maybe 20 players in the same positions with the same tactics, over and over and over again. It’s like he has a massive lego box full of exciting pieces and can build anything he wants. But instead he insists on making a little wall out of his favourite twenty bricks and occasionally changes it from being a blue and black wall into a black and blue wall. He could build so many more exciting things, but I don’t think he wants to if he doesn’t have the instruction booklet. I really hope he tries something different soon. Surely he realises that we’re absolutely shite at the moment and are just about scraping by. 

Any other business -

- Mito’s away shirt reminded me of a red bull can. I have nothing amusing to say about this really. It’s just a dull observation.

- Our crossing in this game was truly terrible. It didn’t matter who was doing it, they were all poor. I think we’re starting to get some kind of fore-goal dysfunction because it wasn’t really only the crossing that was poor, but just pretty much everything that took place within shooting distance. On the contrary, Miura’s corners seemed a bit better than Wakizaka’s efforts but maybe only because they were going all the way over everyone rather than always hitting the first defender. If only we could anticipate these apparent mishits and have someone stand by the touch line on the opposite side of the pitch we might be able to retain possession. It would probably be a unique corner routine too. We tried a few short ones but they more often than not were just a handy way of us being able to get the ball back into our own half quicker, which in recent weeks seems to be what we’ve been trying to do as a matter of extreme importance.

- I’m not going to moan too much about this as we were pretty shit, but their second goal getting called offside and then the offside decision being overruled by VAR after a massive delay seemed pretty dodgy to me. It really doesn’t seem like J League stadiums have sufficient cameras to judge these kind of tight offsides. I didn’t moan about it at the time, but the lengthy digging to find a reason to allow it was quite annoying. I don’t know how many times I’ll say the same two things on this blog, but here we go. Firstly, if it’s a clear and obvious error it shouldn’t take so long to determine, should it? Are they more just trying to find a reason to justify their own existence as VAR officials? And secondly VAR is so detrimental to the stadium experience that I would still like to see it booted into the ocean. But it does seem like the league thinks it’s a good thing. Shame they didn’t decide to prioritise training their refs. After listening to the J Talk Podcast I discovered that they too thought this decision was a bit dubious which made me think that perhaps I was being a bit harsh on the team when I said how bad we were. But at the same time, without those two Mito goals it would have been 0-0 at half time with us having just four off-target shots in 45 minutes so maybe I’m not so crazy after all.

- I feel sorry for Romanic. I don’t know if he accidentally farted in the changing room or something, but it seems like he always passes to someone in a better position, but never gets the ball passed to him when he’s in a better position. I guess when so many players aren’t playing well, lots of them want to do something dramatic and impressive to get their confidence back and their form going. But they could do that by getting an assist for a goal rather than trying to score by themself. One opportunity sticks in the memory where Konno shot from a difficult angle and obviously missed, (as did everyone in the first half), while Romanic was waiting for the ball, unmarked, directly in front of the goal with a potentially easy finish. It’s weird as when were in the middle third of the pitch we seem extremely happy to pass the ball rather than attack, but as soon as we get near the goal we seem like we feel like we’re on a shot clock and need to finish the attack as soon as possible. Maybe another thing for Hasebe to sort out. 


WOW! -

Bit disappointed to not have anyone to put in here again. I could extend it to figures outside of football but I don’t think anybody needs to read that, do they? Given the next opposition, there is certain to be someone who qualifies next time!


All of this has left me a bit confused. Are we absolutely awful? Or are we terribly unlucky? Are we a clear the air talk and a little break away from taking the handbrake off and going absolute gangbusters in the league? Or are we just repeating the same insane inconsistency that plagued us last year? To me it seems like our midfield is the problem. But the sheer amount of goals conceded might suggest it’s the defence. And don’t forget the forwards who struggle to muster more than one shot every fifteen minutes , let alone one on target. So basically, I guess we’re still in exactly the same position as after the Tokyo game, but somehow with two extra points. I think it’s too early to start calling for Hasebe to go, but at the same time I am still not sure he has the guts or the inclination to shake up our current stodgy football. I reckon a nice easy game next should help us get back on track. Maybe a game against a newly promoted team… oh we played both of them already and drew…. who is it then? Oh, just the defending champions away from home who seem to be absurdly lucky when it comes to things going their way. At least a significant portion of the next blog post will be dedicated to moaning about the bus journey. It’s one of our furthest away trips in this shittier than shit half season. A distant away trip usually means some excitement and fun, but this is Kashima, so it will be nothing more than the game and the bus ride there and back. No fun allowed. If it’s another stinker I might find the usual one hour getting out of the car park and to Kashima Station (one mile away) significantly more enjoyable than the 90 minutes. Yikes…

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for YAMAMOTO 76')
FW 9. ERISON (on for ROMANIC 62')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for KONNO 62')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for OZEKI 90')
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 62')
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro


Man of the match

 

Still absolutely no need for this section to exist. 

 

Goals

KATO (Mito) 45' 0-1
KATO (Mito) 45'+4 0-2
ERISON (Frontale) 84' PEN 1-2
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 90+3' 2-2

 

Highlights