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