Vs Tochigi SC (home) 26/8/26 Emperor's Cup second round

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 1 Tochigi SC

I always enjoy the Emperor’s Cup games. Well, maybe that’s not the case during or after some past games. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I always enjoy anticipating Emperor’s Cup games. There’s always a little bit of excitement about who will be in the team. It’s a chance to see some new faces. I say a chance because quite often we’ve gone with only a few changes and the whole process has been quite dull. I guess going into these games a manager has two choices. You can play the normal players and sometimes lose in humiliation, or rotate the line up and sometimes lose in slightly less humiliation. I’m glad on this occasion we went for the latter and even managed to avoid the losing part. Given that we’ve drawn every game in the league so far, there’s a definite feeling that we adjust to the level of whoever we’re playing. For a while it looked like that might happen again. Well maybe that was the optimistic way of looking at it when we went behind to a J3 team. To be honest though we dealt with this match fairly comfortably on the whole. But don’t forget, we usually win our first match against J3 or University team in this completion and then go out in the next round to a J2 team. This year we’ll be playing Tegevajaro Miyazaki in the third round. Apparently it’s away. I quite want o go, but recognise that this is a kind of stupid idea. We’ll see…

Fair play to Tochigi SC for bringing a decent amount of fans. Kyoto Sanga didn’t bring that many more. And good on them for taking the lead. You can probably guess who I’ll blame for the goal, but before it got to the stage where Yamaguchi started his dive after the ball had already entered the net, we had had a series or increasingly ridiculously unlucky ricochets as we struggled to clear the ball. It was a nice finish from Tochigi’s Otabor though, a player who I saw play for Grulla Morioka plenty of times. One other bit of Yamaguchi bashing I need to include was the absolutely insane time wasting he did when he dithered over a goal kick which got turned into a corner by the ref. It was clearly going to happen if he didn’t get a move on so quite why he decided to delay further even as the ref clearly counted and I shouted to him to hurry up, I don’t know. This cock up meant that Kan who was waiting to come on for his debut didn’t actually manage to touch the ball as the substitution was delayed as we had a corner to defend. 

Maruyama was back in the team but only lasted till half time. I don’t know if this was tactical or due to an injury. Uremovic started and grew into the game I thought. Maybe his Frontale future is looking a bit brighter. Yamaichi came on for his debut late in the game which was nice. He missed most of last season due to ‘illness’. Was never really sure what that was. Nagane played right back and looked pretty good as we might expect after his involvement last year. Mochiyama played the Wakizaka role and did a decent job. Would have liked him to play a bit further forward alongside Derik, who was another debutant, but we got some player rotation so we probably can’t moan about the completely unsurprising tactical inflexibility. Derik had a good game I thought. He likes to put himself about a bit. His first real involvement was a bit of a shocker of a miss, but he improved and assisted for one of the goals and was a general nuisance. It was nice to see Konno score as he’d had a bit of a quiet first half, the ball just never seeming to go anywhere near him for some reason. Ozeki got two goals which is great and did some good stuff, but also made a few cock ups, one of which lead to their goal, and seemed to want to over complicate things sometimes. Hopefully he’ll focus more on the good stuff he did and start making a real challenge for a starting spot. I realise I’ve mentioned a lot of players here but for the first time this year there was someone who actually deserved the man of the match award so check that out below. It might be surprising. 

What else is there to say? An unknown ref who didn’t seem to make any horrendous errors, but obviously booked the big Brazilian as always tends to happen. No VAR, an absolute delight! I suppose I need to mention the usual weird Emperor’s Cup pre-game music. I think this year they might have asked AI to make them some music with the prompt of there being lyrics about being ‘Ready!’ and telling us to ‘Go!’ They cycled through a few genres but the same limited lyrical theme kept coming up. Quite weird, quite amusing and definitely more interesting than the usual never ending funky rock loop they have gone for in the past. One final highlight, the local school brass band and cheer group at half time were great. As they were last time. I dunno why I like it so much but I think it’s always fun to see people dancing whilst playing brass and wind instruments. 

So, next up JEF at home on Saturday. Whether we can take anything from this match into that one, I don’t know. Whether anyone who came into the team for this game will feature in that one, I don’t know. I doubt it, but who knows? I’m pleased that Hasebe did the right thing as far as I’m concerned when it came to the players he picked for this match, so hopefully he’ll continue to do that going forward. We’ll see. After that, it’s a quick turn around before Machida away on Wednesday. I really hate Machida. Presumably they’ll beat us, but of course I hope they don’t. 

Team 

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 97. DERIK LACERDA (Yellow card 16')

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO (on for MARUYAMA 46')
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC (on for DERIK LACERDA 59')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 69')
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto (on for MOCHIYAMA 69')
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 31. KAN Noriharu (on for KONNO 90+3')



Man of the match

The first time this season I’ve felt even slightly inclined to give this and I never would have expected I’d be giving it to…

MARCINHO - recently has seemed to have increasingly less ‘final product’ but in this match he did the usual running fast thing but actually managed some decent passes on top of it. Hopefully this is him getting back into his best form!

 

Goals

OTABOR (Tochigi) 29' 0-1
OZEKI (Frontale) 45' 1-1
KONNO (Frontale) 50' 2-1
OZEKI (Frontale) 56' 3-1

Highlights

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 22/8/26 J League match 3

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Our 33.3% record is still intact! Sure, when it comes to consistency, you might be also be able to point at Machida, Kashiwa and  Kashima, (played three won three), but when we come to play them, you’ve got to be confident that we’ll bend things our way and keep our perfect drawing record going. At the same time, you could point to the perfect records of Urawa and JEF, (played three lost three). The weird thing is that our next league game is against JEF and I just imagine that our perfect draw record will more likely be smashed by a defeat to them, than by a defeat to Machida in the following game. We’re so weird this year. I can’t work out if we’re alright or terrible. I think a bit of both to be honest. Certainly our shooting remains awful. It was quite fun to come back from a goal down against Sanfrecce who previous to this match had been scoring for fun, and ruin the day of the majority of fans inside the Piss Swing stadium. With another game coming up soon, (Emperor’s Cup at home on Wednesday), let’s get this post done as quickly as possible.

Pretty much the same players again, pretty much the same approach again, pretty much the same outcome again. We’ve certainly play kind of well in periods of matches, but our inability to take the relatively rare good chances that we make is a real problem. When Marcinho was through on goal there was an inevitability that he was going to blast the ball over the bar and that’s exactly what he did. Ito too. As has been the case for the last few years, for some reason the actual shooting chances we make rarely fall to the guy who’s on the pitch whose main job it is to score. I can’t explain tactically why this happens and I really can’t understand why successive managers over successive seasons have either not noticed it or have been unable to do anything about it. I still stand by what I said about the apparently unnegotiable presence of Wakizaka on the pitch for every single minute of every game not helping us when it comes to tactual flexibility. In this match it was even more stupid than it has been in previous games. It seems inevitable that after a period where we can’t get much going, Hasebe will do his semi regular recent change of bringing in Ozeki and moving Wakizaka to the right. He can’t really play there, (I reckon even the Wakizaka lovers would agree with this), but he is just seems to be eternally unsubbable. Even in this match where he could barely walk towards the end of the game. Maybe Hasebe makes a plan and nothing will allow him to deviate from it. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for why an obviously injured and knackered Wakizaka, playing out of position to the extent of being more of a hinderance than a help, was overlooked and Tachibanada was taken off as our last change. Wakizaka was even on the side of the pitch where Hasebe was sitting so presumably it’s not a problem with his eyesight. He didn’t have a particularly good game, (again), but I can’t imagine he’ll ever get dropped. Unlike Miura who was on the bench for this match. It was definitely a good idea as much like in the half season, Miura hasn’t started at all well this year and last year it took him being benched to get him back to his normal ways. When he came on in the second half he started pretty brightly and I was delighted. But there was one horribly vivid memory I have of him strolling back after an attack which resulted in nothing, and as Sanfrecce attached, it was left to Osa and a midfielder to do their best to cover for Miura. So maybe he needs a little bit longer on the bench, eh? But anyway, as I said, I can’t really explain what’s going on. Apart from the obvious bit where if you can’t shoot for shit, you’re unlikely to be able to score. I felt like we were the team more likely to win it towards the end, even if we did have one injured player on the pitch. This match saw the debut from the bench of Rin Honma, a player who’s still at university but is with us on one of these special contracts. I’m a bit confused why Hasebe, after choosing Mochiyama for the first game of the season, now seems determined to not play him even from the bench. But in any case, Honma did look quite lively. Once again, it’s just a shame that all of these players, (plus plenty of others too), are all competing for the one striker spot. Us playing with one striker also seems to be something that’s unnegotiable.

A few words about Sanfrecce and the ref. Once again, when we play them in this stadium they came as a package. I don’t know why the J League persists in getting a local lad in for every game we play in this stadium and I also don’t know, (but I can guess), why the local ref seems to always bottle it when it comes to giving a red card to a Sanfrecce player. Local lad Takasaki completely ignored the high shin-level raised boot tackle on Ito in the play off game, not even giving a free kick as far as I remember, and in this game we had Sutani, not actually from Hiroshima this time, but from neighbouring Shimane prefecture instead, who didn’t spot a foul on Marcinho and gave a throw in instead. Then we had the joy of an over five minute VAR delay. Of course he finally came to the conclusion that he’d accidentally missed the foul but decided that in spite of Marcinho being about to shoot as he entered the box and with the covering defender having no chance of getting there on time, it wasn’t a DOGSO. Probably this was because it was early in the game, was one of Sanfrecce’s legendary grandad trio of centre backs and, because J League refs are FUCKING USELESS! I can’t understand how it could be a yellow card and a free kick. Surely if there was contact and it was a foul it should have been a red. But I guess Sutani didn’t want to upset his neighbours. And I suppose you could say that Marcinho being though on goal doesn’t actually really count as a goal scoring opportunity… By the way, is it just me or does Shiotani look a bit like a baby who’s been left alone with the felt tips and has drawn on a moustache and beard to his own face? Maybe that influenced the ref too. The look on Shiotani’s face after he got the yellow suggests that he knew he’d got away with one, I think. I thought the ref was horrendous, but expected nothing else. so it didn’t come as a great surprise. What did come as a great surprise was the fact that the Sanfrecce fans also thought he was terrible. I’d never realised they were the kind of fans who just want to see correct decisions being given, even if they go against their own team. It was very honorable of them to boo the ref for consistently ruling in their favour. Bravo Sanfrecce fans! That is what they were moaning about, right? The Sanfrecce keeper whose name I insist on mispronouncing as OUCH!-i seemed pretty angry too. After we scored he spent the rest of the match moaning to the ref apparently claiming that there was a handball for our goal. A quick look at the replay for that shows quite how baffling this opinion is. Even after the final whistle he was still going at it. Presumably he was hoping that the ref would take another look at the goal and replay the final 35 minutes of the match. Oh, and Romanic’s yellow card was a joke. As you’d expect from a local ref trying to help out his mates. (I’m constantly told that of course the refs aren’t corrupt, and I’m not saying they are. But they definitely aren’t accurate as far as I’m concerned. And when you give local refs games in their local stadium with presumably their local team, I think you’re not making it any easier for them as when they are utterly useless, (as Sutani is in every match to be fair), it’s way too easy for idiots on the internet (Hello! That’s me!) to moan that they local guy is doing local things).

Yeah, well, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on with us. As I’ve long been saying, at least we can enjoy these baffling performances with horrible shooting in some different cities this time round. Who knows, maybe we’ll win a game soon? I suspect we will probably lose before we win though. We can say that we’re still unbeaten but this result saw us drop down the table one spot. Three points from three games isn’t great and whilst even if we draw every match, we’ll probably get a lower mid-table finish and should probably see us safe, it would be an extremely irritating season if we failed to win even a single game. A winless JEF at home in the league next weekend would seem like the perfect opportunity to pick up our first three point haul, but as they’re in terrible form and the game will see Erison back at Todoroki, clearly they are going to beat us and he’s going to score. Before then, we have Tochigi SC at home in the Emperor’s Cup on Wednesday. I’m not sure what kind of team will play this game. Given that the U21 league has now started, (I watched it on a tiny screen whilst in the pub so am not going to make any comments on it), maybe some of the players we might in our wildest drams have expected to take part might be rested for the next U21 game instead. But I do like these kind of games, so am looking forward to it. Hopefully it won’t be a draw…

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC (Yellow card 72') 

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for SASAKI 59')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for ITO 59')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 81')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 34. OSA Ryuki (on for MARCINHO 59')
FW 36. HONMA Rin (on for ROMANIC 73')

Man of the match

No, I’m still not going to give this. 

Goals

KATO (Sanfrecce) 29' 1-0
YAMAMOTO (Frontale) 58' 1-1
 

Vs Kyoto Sanga (home) 15/8/26 J League match 2

 

Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 2 Kyoto Sanga

I’m delighted to be able to say that we are STILL UNBEATEN! There you go! However, that might be all the positivity over and done with. Looking from the other direction you could also say that we’re still winless. It is absolutely astonishing that we are in 13th and no lower after the start to the season we’ve made. Of course we’ve only played two games. And I suspect that these two games were against teams that most people would expect to pick up points against this year. And who do we have coming up next? Just a team that are second in the league at the moment with a 100% record, an average goals scored per game of 4.5, and with only one goal conceded so far. We conceded more goals in four minutes of the second half against Kyoto. But with Sanfrecce’s 100% record and our, ahem, 33.3% record at stake, something’s got to give. Will we be able to drag them down to our tedious level? Actually, that would be quite funny. But quite unlikely, I think. Maybe we’ll suddenly get a bit better at taking chances. Whatever happens, at least we’ll have a nice city to go out in after what will presumably be a return to getting humiliatingly defeated.

This game felt a little better than last week. Certainly the first half was pretty positive. There were definitely echoes of the Verdy game though with us possessing and attacking but not really threatening that much. Ito was back on the right and looked somewhat back to his great early Frontale form. I know in the past he’s said that he’d prefer to play on the left but maybe when he thinks about it, it might be a lot better for his morale and his career if he stuck to the right. We even scored in the first half! Looking back it does appear that Miura was shooting and not crossing though. But if part of him once again having a terrible start to a season is that his shots are so off target that they end up being extremely hard hit and unintentionally pin point crosses, maybe that’s one positive thing we can say about his poor form. What on earth does he do in the break between seasons? There was definitely a feeling that if we didn’t take our chances whilst we had the upper hand we would probably get the usual consequences. But for once we scored! Obviously things weren’t positive enough for us to actually get more than one goal though. Luck didn’t seem to be on our side with us hitting the post and bar and shooting narrowly wide. But a lead was a very welcome thing, even if it just suggested that we’d be spending the rest of the game grimly trying to hang on to that slender advantage.

If only! Hasebe weaved his half time magic and by the 58th minute we’d conceded twice and were behind. To be honest though, I’m being a bit harsh. Their first goal was a pretty good one. Apparently we were starting to prepare Sasaki to come on for Miura and didn’t manage to complete the sub till we’d conceded two and were behind, which just seems to be say so much about us right now. If Hasebe had singled that area out as a problem, as presumably anyone who’d noticed Miura in the first half had, not sure why he decided to wait till the 59th minute to make the change instead of doing it at half time. Once again, up against it whilst paying a team that will probably not do much to threaten most opposition teams this year. We were back level not long after the sub, from what initially looked like an amazing header from Marcinho but on watching the replay it became clear that it was either a massive deflection or 100% an own goal. I suspect from Marcinho’s slightly confused lack of celebration he might not have touched the ball at all. At this stage it seemed clear what was gong to happen. Like-for-like subs right up until the 85th minute when Hasebe decides to cut loose and go fully crazy by playing more than one player up front. But astonishingly that’s really not what happened… 

 

I guess I have to apologise to Hasebe from presuming he’d follow his usual pattern. Instead he implemented some tactics that he must have been working on at the training ground. Oh, sorry, typing error there. That should have said some tactics he’d been working on in a cheese dream. Uremovic came on and… played at right back. He seemed as surprised as the rest of us. Taking off Ito meant that Wakizaka was moved out to the right, the position where he’s even more ineffective than he has been in the middle so far this year. (Hasebe, you do know that he doesn’t have to play every minute, right?) So our right side was Wakizaka in front of Uremovic. If Kyoto knew what they were doing, they really should have immediately shifted all of their focus to attacking the part of the pitch where no-one really knew what they were doing. Thankfully they didn’t seem to want to do that. The Uremovic experiment didn’t last long, but was entertainingly amusing whilst it did. Realising that it had perhaps been a bit of an ask to use someone who hadn’t played a minute of football for ages and get them to bomb up and down the wing playing in a position where they had no experience, Hasebe decided to switch Uremovic and Romano and ask Romano to do that instead. This was also wonderfully entertaining and seemed quite a bit more effective than anyone might have thought. The highlight of the game for me was Romano’s first throw in. His throw in style really looked like he was about to one-hand-overarm-fling the ball forward. It was a true laugh out loud moment and was amazing. We didn’t go on to get a winner. We had plenty of good chances. Maybe we’re unlucky. Maybe we’re not good enough. Probably both. I don’t know which of the players who aren’t making the match day squad are injured. I can’t really explain why Hasebe would go with the same group two games in a row and pretty much the same starting line ups. Who knows what he’ll do for the next game? There definitely seems to be plenty of players who don’t really seem to be justifying their place in the starting line up. At the same time there is a still lingering feeling that it doesn’t really matter who you pick with these turgid tactics as most of the time we’re terrible and only occasionally, with absolutely no apparent reason, we play a bit better. I guess I should mention that Miyagi now seems to be seriously injured after stretching for a ball late on. He looked in a lot of pain, so I can only imagine it’s a serious one. Also Hasebe said that the reason Yamahara came off was because maybe something wasn’t quite right. There was some optimism that a new fitness coach might help us avoid getting quite so many injuries so it would be disappointing if we ended up with two in the second game. Guess it’s preferable to players getting injured in training which seemed to happen endlessly last year.

A few words about the opposition and the ref. Firstly on this occasion with the announcement about thanking the opposition fans, they could easily have mentioned them all by name. Their support was tiny. Maybe they’re all saving themselves for the ACL or something. If you watched online you probably know better than me, but I’ve heard that on DAZN there was a Kyoto fan who was shown picking her nose and eating it. I have no idea how old they were, but it would certainly be amusing if the answer was that she was in her early twenties. There was something kind of impressive in the action that Kyoto’s Alex Souza managed to cram in to the short time that he was on the pitch. He got injured in an attack, left the field for treatment looking like his game was up. Managed to make it back on to the pitch and immediately committed a foul, got a yellow and injured himself again. An impressively intensive contribution! Popovic is kind of annoying, but there’s no point getting annoyed by him as he’ll presumably have left in a few months as normally he just joins a club, stays for a little while and then pees off. The ref was Nakamura, who’s been on a rollercoaster as far as I’m concerned in recent years. I don’t have too much to complain about on this occasion, although I did make a note to check something around 42 minutes and it did seem like he made a bit of a stupid decision against us. But hell, we’ve all made some stupid decisions relating to Frontale recently right? I went to both of our opening matches. An absurd amount of people seem to have bought Wakizaka shirts. Hasebe, well he’s made plenty too! So yeah, guess I can’t moan too much about the ref. And I even have some sympathy for them now. The absurd amount of things that they are supposed to be counting seconds for now is very confusing. And I think it’s different lengths of time for different things too. I will say though that different refs have considerably variable interpretations of how long a second lasts. Nakamura’s ‘second’ must have been somewhere between 1.5 and 2 seconds I think. Maybe he uses the ‘one Mississippi, two Mississippi method but struggles with the pronunciation a little. I suppose if you count the seconds more slowly it means there’s less chance of you actually having to take some kind of action when too much time is taken, so that might be the thinking behind doing it. 



Ugh… Hopefully recalling this game to write this post won’t send me to my sick bed for four days like it did when I wrote the last blog post. Considering I have been sick for the majority of the week, you might expect that the game, even though it was a draw, would be the best thing that happened this week. I’m not sure I can go that far as even thought it was fairly entertaining, the absolute squandering of the talents we have available undercuts any kind of good feelings. Perhaps the new player announcement videos were the highlight. There’s a very good bit where they show the number first, then flash up a few pictures of past players who’ve worn that number before showing the player who’s now wearing it. Aside from Romano’s throw in, this video was definitely the best part of the week and luckily we’ll get to see that at every home game! What a surprise, nostalgic old git likes nostalgia. I guess we should all appreciate nostalgia considering we don’t have much to get excited about at the moment. Next up Sanfrecce Hiroshima away on Saturday. Of course the game itself will be awful. so I’m looking forward to having a nice trip and not worrying about football. Wonderful! Then the following Wednesday, a home Emperor’s Cup game! That should actually be fun! Well, not judging by past experience I guess, but I’m trying my best to be hopeful. 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for MIURA 59')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto  (Yellow card 80') (on for ITO 76')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 76')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC (on for YAMAHARA 80')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 80')
FW 34. OSA Ryuki


Man of the match

No one no one no one no one no one not one single one.

 

Goals

ROMANIC (Frontale) 43' 1-0
FUKUDA (Kyoto) 54' 1-1
RAFAEL ELIAS (Kyoto) 58' 1-2
MARCINHO (Frontale) 64' 2-2

Highlights

Vs Tokyo Verdy (away) 9/8/26 J League match 1

Tokyo Verdy 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale 

So begins a new season. It goes without saying that after the absolute mediocrity of the last half season, there’d definitely be something to work on and room for improvement in the break before the new season proper kicked off. We signed some players. Not many, but some. Two Brazilian strikers and one Brazilian centre back. Of course one of these stickers was presumably to replace Erison who perhaps felt dissatisfied with the situation at Frontale and left for JEF. The fact that we now have plenty of numbers up front and at centre back hinted that perhaps we might be seeing some kind of new approach. So naturally I anticipated the team announcement for the first game with some excitement. I only really have myself to blame for that I guess. Probably shouldn’t have been so optimistic. A couple of tiny changes to what was basically the starting line up from the start of last season. And exactly the same approach. Hip hip hooray.

Thankfully after seeing the starting line up I managed to temper any kind of anticipation I might have had so didn’t end up crushingly disappointed. And in a way, I could also say that our total tedium in this match was a useful thing for me as I was intending to trim down these blog posts a bit and if there’d been something exciting to write about I might have had to make a bit more effort. As I’m always the first to admit, I don’t really understand tactics so I’m going to try to steer away from talking about them so much. I will say though that I do understand utterly pointless tedium football as I’ve become so accustomed to it over the last year or so and that was very much on display in this match. 70% possession so lots of the ball. Almost absolutely zero attacking threat. Our late equaliser was in some ways deserved as Verdy looked as shit as us, but at the same time was utterly undeserved as we hadn’t troubled their keeper for the rest of the game. This is going to be a very long and extremely boring season. 

Maybe some positives are that the away kit looks nice. Pedro Romano looks decent. And… erm… that’s it. Unless you go to games looking forward to watching pointless passing in which case you have a lot to look forward to. Negatives, plenty. Fucking hell Hasebe, you had the first season where you didn’t want to rock the boat considering we were in the late stages of the ACL so didn’t change anything. Then we had the half season where we had a free hit and plenty of opportunity to change something and we didn’t change anything. And then the break between another eight place finish and this season where we once again we changed nothing. What’s he doing? Kengo on the bench next to him must feel a bit like his potential successor picking up some tips before he takes his job. I truly hope Kengo doesn’t take any tips from Hasebe though, as all he seems to be able to do is repeat the same thing eternally. Quite why we have five payers in the squad vying for the one striker spot, I don’t know. We’ve got seven players who can play centre back and we’ll seemingly only ever use two of them. I always imagined that the person who signs the players for the club communicates with the manager but I’m starting to think he’s making purchases according to email instructions he’s still getting from his last job or something. If we’re not doing at all well in a game Hasebe’s response is some good old like for like subs, bringing on the players he thought weren’t good enough to start the match. To give him credit he did make a tactical change in the 85th minute with his final sub. To take all the credit back, pretty much everyone in the stadium apart from him must have been able to see how badly we were playing, how much we needed to change something and how insane it was to wait until the game was almost over to do it. I know he’s a nice guy and everything but his eternal optimism when it comes to post match thoughts where he pretty much says we did well but need to score more is absolutely grating on me and it’s only the first game of what will almost certainly feel like a very long season. Fucking hell. Hasebe the baker is constantly praising his assistant bakers for measuring and combining the ingredients perfectly and doesn’t seem worried that no one in the bakery ever thinks of putting the cake in the oven. Hasebe the fashion expert has put together, through wonderful use of layering, a sensational outfit and has accessorised perfectly. Oh, but he didn’t think he’d need to go as far as dress the bottom half, so the model is walking around half naked. Hasebe the hobbyist has built a magnificent train set in his loft but isn’t going to bother with buying any trains. Hasebe the musician has rehearsed for weeks with his band and is now in perfect condition to not bother turning up to play the gig. But in all of these cases he’s reasonably pleased with how the half finished job has turned out. 

A few words on the ref as it would be remiss of me to not slag him off. After watching a World Cup with plenty of dubious decisions it was delightful to get back to the J League and see that the refs are just as shit as they have always been. Even among J League ref apologists, I think the name Mikuriya is one that fills people with dread and so it proved to be again. I came up with a very NSFW nickname for him that doesn’t really work that well. but does absolutely suit him down to the ground. If you’re interested in knowing what it is, please ask. The rules saying you need to take throw ins, goal kicks and make subs quickly from the World Cup are now in evidence in the J League, which I’m not sure is a great idea as the poor refs aren’t even really up to actually refereeing to the old rules so to put more on their plate is a bit unfair. Obviously Mikuriya thought we were delaying on one of our throw ins and gave it to them, even though we were trailing at the time so wouldn’t have made much sense to time waste. Making keepers not waste time on goal kicks is an interesting rule. And one which seems like it’s a bit pointless if you only start counting after the keeper has crawled on his hands and knees to retrieve the ball, dropped it a few times, had a couple of drinks, and possibly a light meal before putting the ball on the spot. The fact that the Verdy keeper was wasting so much time in the second half without any kind of censure made it all the more enjoyable that he conceded extremely late on. Also, I think we need some kind of paranormal investigator to have a look at the game, as every time a Verdy player was about to be changed they were suddenly struck down by a phantom condition that meant they needed lengthy treatment. However you feel about these new rules’ implementation at the World Cup, it was always going to be just one more thing for the useless bastards in charge of the J League to mess up. Oh, and finally, Ito's yellow card was a joke, but that's to be expected with Mikuriya. There truly is nothing to look forward to. Apart from the 2027/28 season if we manage to be able to start that one in J1.

Such a pointless game. Such a boring game. Such a predictable game. The finger clearly has to be pointing at Hasebe at the moment. On this showing we’ll be extremely lucky to finish in our usual 8th. Probably much closer to 18th. And for the final crucial game of the season where we’re battling to avoid relegation Hasebe will probably still be going with the same formation, players and tactics and will afterwards comment that we did really well passing the ball sideways back and forth in our own half and that we’ll have to work on actually shooting before the next match. Fucking hell. At least we’ll have some fun away games this time round! 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 68')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for TACHIBANADA 76')
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC (on for MOCHIYAMA 61')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MIURA 76')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 23. MARCINHO (on for KONNO 61')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for YAMAMOTO 86')
FW 34. OSA Ryuki


Man of the match

You’ve got to be kidding me.

 

Goals

MIZOGUCHI (Verdy) 46' 1-0
ROMANIC (Frontale) 90+6' 1-1

Highlights

 

New player songs 2026/2027 season

Have just about got this up before our new season kicks off. Most of these are for the (not many) new players we signed in between that rotten last half season and now. Some are for players who had a song last year, but not at the start of the season. And for some reason we have a new team song called 'Champione'. Bit optimistic that, but you've got to admire the positivity. By the way, Yamamoto's song seems to have changed. Where you used to sing 'la', we now are going to sing 'na'. That update was pretty crucial, I'm sure you'll agree. 


4. PEDRO ROMANO



Pedro Romano
Pedro Romano Vamo Pedro
Pedro Romano
Pedro Romano Vamo Pedro

Original song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywFoBur6waE


21. HAYASAKA Yuki



Hayasaka Yuki
Hayasaka Yuki
Goal o mamorinuke
Hayasaka!

Original song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3RyqCAJkRU


31. KAN Noriharu



Kan Noriharu
Kan Noriharu
Kan Noriharu, o o o o 

Original song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6eRLVDxoXM


32. HAYASHI Shunsuke



Hayashi Shunsuke
Laa la laa laa laa
Hayashi no chikara o misetsukero

Original song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of02XzNFq7Q

34. OSA Ryuki



Oh o o oh o Osa Ryuki
Oh o o oh o Osa Ryuki

Original song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_5gxPRusYg 

93. KAYKE QUEIROZ



Kayke Queiroz
Omae ni muchu
Get goal
Get goal

Original song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yXpgBUshz8


97. DERIK LACERDA



Derik go
Derik go
Derik Lacerda go

Original song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rvqWa8Mnsg


New club song

Champione



Naa na na na na na naa na na naa na na na naa
Naa na na na na na naa na na naa na na na naa
Oh o o o oh oh o o o oh
Oh o o o oh oh o o o oh

Original song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocvKNTMy_ls