Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 0 Tokyo Verdy
I know it’s not very edifying to be the guy who moans after a win, so I’ll try to avoid that as much as possible, but there is definitely a case to made for our run of awful performances continuing in this match. Of course this definitely wasn’t as bad as the FC Tokyo or Urawa games, but if Brodersen hadn’t made a couple of important saves and Wakizaka’s shot hadn’t gone in, this could easily have been another dull as ditchwater shitty game. Actually, there’s definitely a case to be made that it was exactly that. In the previous two games we had three shots on target in 180 minutes, so one shot on target every hour. Astonishingly this stat has got even worse after another extremely blunt 90 minutes. So now we have one shot on target around every 70 minutes. It’s truly turgid stuff. Exactly the same problems are still evident and Hasebe rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic with his tiny shuffling of players, (which was in part enforced by Erison’s suspension), seems a pretty inefficient response to us being in pretty bad shape. Like the spoilt child that I am at heart, I approached this game with an attitude of ‘I’ll sing if you give me something to sing about’. I ended the game without having to trouble my vocal cords whatsoever. Maybe the win has taken the pressure off the players and the manager a bit, but the truth is it will all come piling back on as soon as we have our next shocker. Clearly the morale of the team isn’t helping things and perhaps you could say we just need to get a couple of lucky breaks and then things will swing in our favour. But the truth is we haven’t been particularly unlucky this year. You can’t say we’ve been unlucky to lose when we confine ourselves to just one or two shots which even have the slightest chance of going in per match. It’s clear that we need to get this horrible season out of the way as soon as possible. The big worry though is that we’ll start next season with exactly the same plan and things will go exactly the same way. As I have no desire to write much about this match, I’m just going to do a few little bullet points and then get out of here. Much better to put the club and even the entire sport out of our minds until we next have to confront another tedious 90 minutes.
- Hasebe’s name was not sung by the Kazoku in this game. I don’t know how to feel about this, as I was fully intending to not sing it myself but when the main supporter group didn’t even bother with the usual song, it maybe made me feel a bit stupid about my own choices. Definitely Hasebe is not doing a good job. Definitely he needs to do something different. Probably he won’t do something different. I wonder if he noticed. I feel a bit sad that maybe he was waiting for that bit when he stands up and bows to the crowd as his name is sung. I wonder if they’ll sing it on Sunday away at Kashiwa seeing as we won a game. I wonder if anyone apart from me cares either way.
- In the past I’ve moaned about our inability to do anything as soon as we reach the final third of the pitch. We’ve been passing the ball around nicely till then and then apparently come up against an invisible barrier. That is long gone now as we don’t even make it out of our own half with the ball. We pass it around at the back for a while and when things get dicey the ball gets hoofed up the field straight to the opposition keeper or defence. Or the alternative is to hoof it for Marcinho to chase after, win the ball dribble a bit and then mess up the cross or pass. It’s never been his strong point but it seems really off this year. Perhaps a confidence thing. Or maybe because our tactics don’t seem to allow us to attack in any other way than with at most two players at a time. I didn’t think it was possible to make our awful tactics even more ineffective and dull, but it seems to have happened. In this match we didn’t even have the usual recent fleeting attempt to play with two up front which I feel has something in it, but that thing hasn’t really ben discovered yet. Probably the big palm into the face moment in this match was when Wakizaka was moved to the right, where he never plays well, (and that’s saying something considering how bad he’s been for most of this year), without us even doing the two up front thing. When you consider quite how many different options we might have when it comes to ways to play, it is completely bizarre how we seem to judiciously avoid anything that might have a chance of being interesting and instead seem obsessed with attempting every tiny variation of something that probably won’t work.
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| A photo perfectly encapsulating this thrilling game |
- We had the ref exchange program thing happening again so had a ref and a linesman from Poland. Presumably the other linesman was chosen for his English speaking ability because it certainly couldn’t have been for his ability to keep up with play and give accurate offside decisions. I don’t have much to say about the ref except that it seemed weird to me that shoving someone in the back was ok but a shoulder to shoulder challenge was not ok. I thought the opposite was true, but as I never tire of saying, I don’t really know anything. Kasahara was on VAR so obviously we were never going to get anything from him. I think we had a good shout for a penalty around 20 minutes for a handball but Kasahara turned it down without suggesting the ref have a look. Maybe he couldn’t remember the English words ‘check’, ‘monitor’ or ‘handball’.
- Osa started a game for the first time. This meant Ito was on the bench and he didn’t even get brought on. Ozeki back on the bench was a very welcome thing. I thought it would be classic 2026 Frontale if he’d been brought on too early from his return from injury and got injured again. Thankfully that didn’t seem to happen. At this stage though, I don’t think we can really say that our problem is not having or not playing the right players. Sure we’ve still got loads of injuries, but as long as we are sticking with the tactics that generate one shot on target every 67 minutes and five shots in total in 90 minutes, I don’t think it really matters who’s on the field and where they are.
So an amazing win against a Tokyo Verdy team who only changed seven players from their last starting line up. Clearly they thought we were there for the taking and they were absolutely right. But somehow we sneaked it. We now only have Kashiwa away, Machida home and Mito away left this season. Oh and then the thrilling playoff game against the similarly placed team in the West section. Of course the game between the first placed teams has some significance. Maybe 10th vs 10th also carries some weight as no one wants to be officially the worst team in J1. But don’t underestimate how much passion there will be in the 8th vs 8th game. Or the 5th vs 5th game. So much to play for! So much excitement! I had serious doubts about this league format from the start and the fact that we’ve been rubbish hasn’t helped when it comes to my enthusiasm. I’m really looking forward to the off season as it’s the only time I can be sure that we won’t be playing terribly. 15 games into this season, we’ve only kept three clean sheets. We’ve not strung together more than two wins in a row. It’s been pretty grim stuff. The only thing that’s up for debate is which of the shocking games was the worst. It says a lot that there are plenty of contenders for that title. Hopefully the remaining three games won’t add to that list.
GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 34. OSA Ryuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC
Subs
GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for YAMAHARA 76')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for OSA 89')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 89')
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 68')
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
Man of the match
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 73' 1-0
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