FC Tokyo 2 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale
Well
that was shit, wasn’t it? Maybe not quite as bad as against Urawa but
pretty close. And at least in the Urawa game we had two shots on target.
In this one we managed just one. Three shots on target in 180 minutes
of football. Truly woeful stuff. And still Hasebe seems to think we’re
making progress. His post match comments are top level gaslighting at
this stage. He says our defence is slowly improving, apparently unaware
that we’re still conceding goals for fun. He says we need to improve our
attacking. No shit! Don’t forget his intention when he arrived was to
tighten up our defence a touch and keep the exciting attacking. He’s
done the opposite with both of those things. And apparently hasn’t
really noticed. I know this season is a pointless waste of time but it
would be nice if we weren’t playing like we had that at the forefront of
our minds. An attack every now and then would be nice. And it’s not as
if Hasebe is using the opportunity of having a pointless season to try
some things out. Even the slightest tweak is immediately erased and we
return to the same old crap. The booing at the end of the game spoke
volumes. I don’t particularly like to boo, but on this occasion I did.
You could argue that it’s the fault of the manager rather than the
players, but there definitely are some of them that are stealing a
living at the moment. As I’m currently on a train and won’t be home till
shortly before the next match, this post will be quite threadbare till I
have time to add the usual bits. But let’s be honest, I don’t think
anyone wants to read much about another shitty game, so I think it
doesn’t really matter.
A few words about this travesty. Hasebe did
exactly what I hoped he would after the Urawa debacle. He switched to
4-4-2 and dropped Wakizaka. Sadly in a Trump rivalling U-turn, he
brought Wakizaka on at half time. And also Marcinho, who let’s be
honest, has really struggled recently. So two of our most ineffective
players against Urawa were supposed to come on and turn the game around.
Marcinho isn’t having a good year. At the moment he only seems to be
able to run fast and occasionally successfully dribble, but his passing
and crossing are awful right now. I wish I could be so positive about
Wakizaka, whose main contribution seems to be giving the ball away
stupidly to start dangerous opposition attacks. Hasebe did the right
thing to leave them out, but you know, HACO, Hasebe Always Chickens Out.
His response to us not setting the world on fire after trying something
slightly different for 45 minutes is to go back to the old way which
has failed for most of this year and last year. Such is his
skill-sapping influence that I think if he took charge of the most
successful top league moneybags team in any country, he could probably
have them in non-league within just a few years. Shortly after their
fourth successive relegation was confirmed he’d probably comment that
their defence is steadily improving. I think our squad is pretty good,
so it takes a really special manager to get so little out of them and
make the football they are playing so unappealing.
Erison and Kanda up
front seemed like a strange choice. It looked like they hadn’t even met
before, let alone played together. Miyagi was on the wing again and
underwhelmed again. He had a great game when he played up front but
clearly that was a bit too daring for H(ACO) so he has never been played
there since. Last year, Ito, fresh from a disappointing European stint
was keen to impress and was on fire. But don’t worry H(ACO) has now
squashed all of that out of him. Both of these players got 45 minutes
and then were replaced by Wakizaka and Marcinho. Wakizaka on the wing
never works but still it’s H(ACO)‘s answer if the formation we’re
playing doesn’t suit Wakizaka. And no worries anyway, Wakizaka will
wander across the field anyway, meaning that one of our strikers ends up
on the wing. All good, as long as Wakizaka gets what he wants and can
move into more central areas to wave his arms, tell people what to do
whilst doing nothing himself other than giving the ball away to start
dangerous opposition attacks. We’re fucking shit! We spent about a whole
minute camped in their box in control of the ball and failed to even
have a single shot instead just moving the ball from side to side
presumably waiting for the defenders to get bored and get out of the way
to avoid prolonging the tedium. I just don’t understand what the game
plan is. I suspect there maybe isn’t one.
There’s no point me writing
any smart arse comments about the opposition. I can’t even be bothered
to write about the shit ref. It’s all down to Hasebe and he’s almost
certainly not the man to sort the situation out. The board seem to be
equally or perhaps even more useless, so don’t expect anything to change
on the managerial front. As long as the club keeps making money the
club president Yoshida is happy. He is a businessman with absolutely no
understanding of football. I wish he’d fuck off back to Fujitsu where
his talents might be more appreciated. Our president doesn’t understand
football, our manager doesn’t seem to be able to manage and our players
have lost the ability to play. And this all is kind of understandable,
because as a supporter, I’m losing any enthusiasm for supporting. I
don’t have any problem with losing to better teams. I have a big problem
with us losing every match before a ball has even been kicked because
the game plan is so stupid and the manager seems to be incapable of
motivating anyone. If he hasn’t lost the changing room, he really should
have done by now. Someone needs to say something. Or are the players
being gaslit too?
Even when we’ve won this year it has more often than
not been luckily. Great players are becoming shit players and there
still seems to be the feeling that we should just say ‘oh well, let’s
move on and support even more in the next match’. Considering the shit
we’ve been put through by a string of awful games we should really be
reacting in a way that isn’t just shrugging our shoulders and looking
forward. If I succeed in getting a ticket for the Mito game I will have
seen every fucking minute of this awful season and I feel that rather
than unconditionally giving my support for every subsequent game I
should be getting a handwritten apology from the club and some payment
for the massive amount of wasted time and effort. Think of all the more
exciting things we could have done instead of watching these matches. We
could have counted how many grains of rice there are in a 5kg bag. We
could have unfurled and then rerolled a Costco bumper size pack of
toilet paper. We could have reread every one of these awful blog posts
and counted how many times I’ve used the word ‘shit’. All of these
things currently sound more appealing prospects than watching another
turgid 90 minutes of so called football. But as I’m an idiot, I’ll go to
the next game.
Next up Tokyo Verdy at home on Wednesday. The away leg
was a shockingly boring game and since then we’ve absolutely regressed
so expect an absolute rotter. If there was any justice, Hasebe would
start the match with a completely different team from the ones who’ve
started the last two matches. I want to see Hayashi, Kan, Noda,
Mochiyama. And some of the players who have been in and out and have
been doing their best. But the problem is that we can’t drop the manager
so we’d still be shit. It’s going to be 4-2-3-1 again with the usual
players, isn’t it? Two shots on target against Urawa, one in this match,
so presumably on Wednesday we’ll fail to hit the target even once. But
we’ll still get the post match comments saying how we’re improving
defensively, in spite of conceding five. Maybe I’ll take a book to read
and some noise cancelling headphones. That way it won’t have been a
complete waste of time.
GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 66')
FW 38. KANDA Soma
Subs
GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for TACHIBANADA 79')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for ITO 46')
MF 23. MARCINHO (on for MIYAGI 46')
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for KANDA 57')
Man of the match
SATO (FC Tokyo) 41' 1-0
NOZAWA (FC Tokyo) 56' 2-0
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