Kawsaki Frontale 0 - 1 Sanfrecce Hiroshima (1-3 on aggregate)
After 20 games and a few penalty shoot outs we’ve ended our league campaign in magnificent style with a pair of defeats and a final league position of eighth. Exactly where we finished last year. And the year before. And the year before. If you want to go back as far as when we troubled the top third of the league you need to rewind to 2022. A lot has happened since then, but clearly not when it comes to where we finish in the league. To be honest, I think it’s a miracle we even cracked the top half this year. We’ve had some truly awful games. (Im actually considering running my end of season poll but with just one question, ‘Worst game of the season?’). I can’t remember a year when we’ve had so many stinkers. But surely there must have been some exciting games too, right? Ermmm, maybe the first game of the year. Since then, not really. Of course there have been extenuating circumstances. We’re always unlucky with injuries, (maybe every team thinks this…), but this year things seem to have gone to a whole new level in that respect. I don’t think Hasebe has ever been able to pick from a squad with less than five long term injuries to important players. Whether he knows who his best eleven is, is another question. Regardless of this, and perhaps in order to reward him for not finishing in a lower position than in the last the four years he was given a new contract a few days before the game. I remain utterly confused by him. I don’t know if he’s absurdly unlucky or infuriatingly clueless. I really can’t tell if either is true. Without a doubt though, I’m in no hurry for the next season to start. About the only thing of any interest for me is seeing if the new kit is an improvement on this year’s one. (It wouldn’t be that hard for it to be). There are a few talking points on the external kind of things that were going on around this game. I’ll mention them later but I guess I need to at least say something about this absolute turd of a match, which perfectly matches the numerous other absolute turds of matches we’ve been forced to endure this year.
The first leg provided us with a Hiroshima born and based ref who, well I never, gave almost everything to Hiroshima. This time we had Kasahara, who although he doesn’t seem to have any geographical ties to or bias towards Hiroshima, does absolutely hate us, so I didn’t hold out much hope. Add to this the always discouraging spectacle of us not being able to fill the bench without including multiple goalkeepers. The squad is in bits again. When you consider that this bullshit half season had been created to fill the gap whilst we transition to a season that fits in better with the international football calendar, it’s pretty annoying that for our final game of the season we had numerous players absent due to them going to add some numbers to the National Team’s pre World Cup training. It’s nice that even though the National Team manager, (who, I’m sure I’ve said this before, is a dead ringer for Pob, as far as I’m concerned. I bet Pob doesn’t burst into tears every time he hears the national anthem though…), absolutely has no interest in picking players from the J league as there are plenty of another awesome Japanese players who are making regular five minute cameos from the bench in the second tier of Maltese football, the league has still found a way to fuck up what they were trying to build up as a massively exciting climax to this season. After all, the tension of not knowing whether we’d finish seventh of eighth was absolutely gripping me in the run up to this match. There were some other absences too. There are rumours that Romanic was slightly injured. With Erison the rumours are that he’s leaving, so presumably the chairman wanted him left out in case he got injured and any financial benefits of a potential transfer disappeared. Not sure what happened to Kanda, but it probably was also one of the two previously mentioned scenarios. So basically we had an awful ref and a real patched together match day squad, so we were probably never going to score twice. Would have been nice if we’d tried though. The first half saw us have one shot and concede. The second half was better. Well, in that we had more shots and didn’t concede. But to be honest the whole game was immensely frustrating. Wakizaka was a disgrace again, perfectly summed up by some early ‘contributions’ where he (maybe) dummied the ball (probably just didn’t notice it), leaving it for a player who was absolutely nowhere near where the ball was going. Maybe he’s got his eye on the all star game that’s coming up which he was unbelievably selected for. (I think if people weren’t judging him on his reputation and instead looked at how he’s played for most of this year, he might struggle to get in a Frontale 2026 half season all star 11 selection. Of course we again went with the same fucking shitty formation and tactics. When it came to shaking things up from the bench we obviously didn’t have many options, so only made three single player changes. They didn’t change much. But how could they be expected to when most of their colleagues were already on the beach. Miura had a stinker. Tachibanada, as has been the case recently, looked tired and a bit off the pace. Marcinho did his recent usual Maricinho things. Mochiyama was constantly coming back into defensive midfield to try to get involved, perhaps because Wakizaka had left a fucking massive hole in the middle whilst he ambled away from any kind of action. Here’s what I wrote at half time:
Only thing worse than this thick as shit ref is our ability to get the ball out of our own box without fucking up. Shocking first half with absolutely nothing from us and lots of peril at the back. Plenty of players on the beach already. Wakizaka strolling around the pitch trying to avoid the ball. Yamaguchi made some saves but then let the ball go straight through him for the goal. Did that thing he always does of starting to dive only after the ball has already passed him. Three goals needed, pretty much no options from the bench and pretty much no threat so far. One shot to their 16! If every shot we took in the first half went in, we’d still be trailing in the tie.
We were absolutely terrible. Hiroshima were awful and if they had even a little bit of shooting ability we could have lost by double figures.
To slightly detract from the Frontale criticism, Sasaki Sho is just an arsehole isn’t he? Probably don’t need to write anything more about that as it’s totally evident. No wonder he gets on so well with Moriyasu! Let’s turn our attention to the ref. Absolutely useless. Both of our yellow cards were a joke. Maruyama’s was probably for his reaction to the ref giving a free kick for a foul that simply didn’t exist, the honourable Sanfrecce player only getting contact after he’d already started throwing himself towards Maruyama and ultimately to the floor. Ito’s yellow just absolutely wasn’t one. At the same time, nothing for their time wasting, and for kicking the ball away or throwing an extra ball onto the pitch to waste more time, or for injury feigning, or delaying free kicks from being taken, or dithering over every little thing they had to do when the ball wasn’t in play. And the there’s the no penalty decision at the end of the match. Kasahara didn’t give it initially because he seemed to not even notice it. Not a massive surprise because he’s useless. When it got referred to VAR it was clear that it was a penalty. I don’t think you’re allowed to step on another players foot, are you? The prick got called to the monitor, had to watch it numerous times and unbelievably still didn’t give it. I mean, it didn’t matter, but we were basically robbed of a goal in both games by awful VAR decisions. If both had been given correctly we would have had extra time. Oh fuck that, carry on with your shitness Kasahara, extra time was the last thing I wanted. But actually Kasahara, I’ve changed my mind, don’t carry on. Do the league a favour and get yourself a new job as far away from football as possible you utterly clueless shithead.
Ahhhh, and relax. Which is exactly what I’m going to do for the next couple of months. Enjoy life without having to watch our awful matches with the unluckiest man in the world in charge of the team and the most football ignorant and business loving man in the world in charge of the club as a whole. At the final whistle we didn’t hang around for the end of season ceremony. I have no desire to even be present when the chairman opens his mouth. The rumours about Erison leaving for JEF or Nagasaki were a bit of a surprise but certainly explained where he’s gone recently. Considering he was our star striker and top scorer this season and we’re happy to get rid of him, presumably to save some money, you’ve got to worry about where the club is going. Certainly things haven’t been great up front but this is almost certainly more to do with our horrible tactics than anything else. The recent emergence of Mochiyama presumably presented a much cheaper option for Mr. Money at the top of the club. His understanding of football is so deep that he thinks if someone scores three goals in one match, (against the second bottom team in the league), he will continue to do so in every consequent game. I suspect Marcinho will go too as he’s our biggest earner. Miyagi will step in in that position, although he’s never played as well there as he did in the 65 minutes he played in his preferred position. On one occasion, apparently never to be repeated. But yet again, another bargain option! Think of all the money we’re saving! I’m quite concerned where Sasaki has gone recently, and I’m sure there are some other players who I’ve forgotten who might not be up for signing on for another year of the crap we’ve just had. Yoshida is probably coming up with another genius idea as we speak. One in the vein of the Chanathip or Gomis signings, to create a buzz and sell shirts and not really have a chance to do anything on the pitch. Keep that lovely cash rolling in. How about we make a bold bid to sign Taylor Swift? I hear she has a big following. She doesn’t need to get on the pitch so it doesn’t matter if she can’t play football. As long as she’s in the squad we can make the merch and we’ll be able to cash on on the shirt sales! Lovely! Yoshida probably is a big fan of Elon Musk and has decided he is on a mission to Doge Frontale to oblivion, cutting things all over the shop without even an inkling of what might happen. He’ll probably be really surprised when attendances drop if we keep getting progressively shitter. He had no idea people could choose not to buy tickets and come. He thought it was an obligation. To be fair, it has definitely felt like something like that this year. A duty or a compulsion. Definitely a chore. It’s quite good for me that I have so much antipathy towards our chairman. That way I can remain reasonably balanced about Hasebe. I’m not particularly sure he’s very good, but it’s great to have someone else to blame for everything that goes wrong at the club. Sadly as he’s the guy at the top I guess he’s quite hard to get rid of. I wonder if he was useless at Fujitsu too and that was why he got fobbed off onto us. It seems insane that we have someone in charge who knows nothing about football and seemingly has no interest in football. If he resigned that would be the exact thing that is needed to put a spring in the step of everyone at the club. Go on, we’ve suffered a lot this year. Give us just one little thing to get excited about.
So that’s it for this cursed half season. At least when the proper season starts we’ll have some fun away trips to do. I’m thinking of cutting out some of the more mind numbingly dull Kanto away games too. There are definitely better things for me to do than to go to the absolute shithole wastelands of Kashima and Urawa away. As I said above, I’m toying with the idea of doing an end of season survey. I’m absolutely not going to do the player round up or the season round up posts or the stats. There’s just nothing to say that I haven’t already said. This was a disastrous season where it seems no lessons were learnt because every time we were in an absolute hole we somehow fluked a result and got out of it. We could have used the season to experiment and try new things, but the only thing we really tried was how to plumb new depths. I suppose we saw a few new players, but I'd say this was more because of the lack of options due to the massive and perennial injury crisis rather than for any interesting or progressive purposes. The league seemed very weak this time round. This probably explains how we managed to finish in fourth in the East section. What a joke! We’ve been woeful! And that seems like exactly the right word to sum up this year and end this post, so let’s write it one more time and leave it at that. Woeful.
GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi (Yellow card 24')
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 65')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
Subs
GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
FW 15. MYOGAN Toya (on for ITO 82')
FW 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for MOCHIYAMA 74')
DF 22. UREMOVIC Filip
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 64')
MF 26. YUI Kota
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 30. NODA Hiroto
NAKAMURA (Sanfrecce) 44' 0-1
