Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 4 Shandong Taishan (5-6 on agg.)
What an awful performance. And an awful performance merits an awful blog post, so here we go. 6 Football is crap, isn’t it? Or rather, we’re crap, aren’t we? How far we’ve fallen. 2 Ugh. Where to start with another horrible performance. 3 This was awful again. The game plan didn’t work, and we had no response to going behind. 2 Of course, you know I’m going to blame Oniki for this. 2 What a shit manager. 7 Still grimly sticking to the same formation and tactics. 7 I don’t enjoy moaning constantly about Oniki and I’m often told he’s a nice person, so it doesn’t feel good to just moan and moan, but he’s useless and totally without ideas. I really wanted him to put up his hands at the end of last year, admit he’d fucked it up and move to pastures new. Instead he’s opted for staying and trashing his reputation further. 1 It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t know where to go from here. Our system has been found out and there’s no sign of any other ideas. 2 We scored twice, but we missed an unbelievable amount of good chances. We could almost have had double figures in this game if the majority of our shots didn’t sail miles wide. 1 If I had access to a replay of the whole game, I would ideally get a screen grab of the shot of Oniki in the 88th minute with his magnets and whiteboard trying to work out something... anything, and then not bothering. As usual, too little too late. 2 I believe that as long as Oniki is in charge, we’ll continue to toil and bore our way to mediocrity. 3 If one player is playing badly in one game, well, that’s unfortunate, but it happens. If all of the players are playing badly for the whole of the season, then you’ve probably got to look elsewhere. 4 I realise you were expecting me to say this, the real stinkers once again came from Oniki. 3 The one constant is Oniki’s useless safety first approach. Could we just once take a free kick in midfield and play it into the box, rather than constantly playing it short, especially if there’s an opposition player standing very close waiting to take the ball. 5 We’ve got plenty more players to choose from but a manager who hasn’t got a clue who to pick. 7 Every week a little bit more of my sanity gets chipped away by having to watch the same old shit. It feels a bit like finding the person that irritates you the most on Twitter and blocking everyone else in the world aside from them, basically giving them a funnel to pour a torrent of horror directly into your brain without relief. It can’t be good for our health to watch these games. I’d have no problem if we just weren’t that good, but it’s just that the clown in charge keeps making the same stupid decisions apparently unaware of any detrimental effect they might be having. 6
Perhaps that first paragraph seemed a bit weird. Or perhaps it didn’t. It’s made up entirely of direct quotes from various blog posts over the last six seasons (see the footnotes at the bottom). I guess the point I’m making is that nothing changes, and we’re still dealing with the same problems we have been for years, which were only swept under the carpet by us fortunately having some very good players who mismanagement couldn’t stop from playing well. I’ve long said we have succeeded in spite of Oniki and not because of him, but unbelievably there still seems to be confidence in and good feeling towards him from the majority of our fans. It’s taken me four days to write this blog post. Not because I am so traumatised by our defeat but more because I’m just totally fed up with writing about Oniki Frontale and with arguing with people about it on Twitter. On paper this is probably a tie that we should have won. We stormed through the group but once again totally shat the bed when it came to the knockout stage. Funny that, eh? Oniki is a manager who in the past could deal with the league format reasonably well as more often than not his one tactic worked, as the players were good. In a one off game though, he can’t rely on being able to back up the bad performances with some good ones afterwards and instead has to think on the go and actually make some changes that might affect the game. I don’t know if it’s all his fault. There is clearly a malaise at the club at the moment, particularly since the new and apparently clueless chairman joined. After the game our main supporter group the Kazoku demanded to see him. Apparently, (and really don’t quote me on this as it’s only information I’m getting second hand), they were upset at the club’s failure to get more fans in the stadium for the game. I’ve got a couple of issues with this, as while the attendance of about 12000 was pretty low, the game was at 5pm so 12000 seemed kind of decent. I have my theories about why the kickoff might have been so early but have yet to have them confirmed, and instead have been told by people who don’t actually know anything about the J League or Frontale that my theory is almost certainly wrong. And in any case, like I said, our support was actually pretty good. Much better than the performance of most of the players. I don’t think an extra 5000 supporters in the stadium would have changed anything when it came to the three major cock ups that our players made that led to three of their four goals. Like I said in the introduction though, one player playing badly or making a horrendous error can be blamed on the player. The same thing happening with three different players in one game, well, you’ve probably got to look at the manager. So basically, I don’t know if the Kazoku’s complaint to the chairman was right, but I am totally with them when it comes to wanting to complain to him. The exodus of important back room staff speaks volumes about something not being right behind the scenes. Anyway, if I went into detail about every moan I had about this match, this post would extend to novella length and much in the way that I don’t think anyone wants to read that, I don’t want write it. So instead I’ll just whinge away in bullet point form.
- Shocking from Ominami for their first goal, dodgy from Maruyama giving the ball away for the late attack that lead to their fourth, but the one that made me the most angry was the ridiculous corner from Wakizaka that lead to their second. His corners have long been terrible, but this was really sinking to a new low. Please can someone else take them.
- Oniki’s lack of a clue is perhaps evident in the fact that the two games in which he’s played what he thinks is our strongest line up, we’ve played worse than in the game when he played what he considers to be the second team. Kind of weird that the only changes he made from the first Shandong game to this one were to drop Jesiel for Maruyama, (who was ok in the Super Cup but not immediate-elevation-to-starter level ok) and to change the left back. Quite concerned how little confidence Oniki seems to have in Jesiel now. At the same time, a bit confused that Takai had a great game in the Super Cup and wasn’t chosen to start this game if a change had to be made. Similarly, perhaps the one player who didn’t play that well at the Super Cup also jumped into the first team. In the case of Miura replacing Segawa, it was quite welcome to see a left back playing at left back instead of a striker. And to his credit, the things that looked a bit dodgy about Miura, (kept getting knocked off the ball very easily), in the Super Cup seemed to have been completely eradicated in this game. He had a decent game I thought and his goal was nice. So I guess I’m saying credit to Oniki here…
- By the way, the rumoured line up for the Shonan game only has two changes. Sai replacing Sasaki and Takai replacing Ominami. If this is the line up, I guess it shows that Oniki was on the whole quite pleased with how this game went…
- The above point is backed up by the fact that it took him till the 84th minute to make any changes in a game that we were losing and had looked generally clueless in. And even then the changes were pretty bad. The whole front three were replaced, but instead of removing a tiring Ienaga, he was instead moved into the midfield where his do-what—I-want style proved to be a lot more dangerous for us. So basically no change of approach, just ploughing on with the same formation and tactics. The change of approach came on 90+9 minutes, three minutes after the game should have ended, when he brought on Takai and Jesiel and sent them up front for one hoofed ball. 84th minute subs seemed to be the wrong changes, way too late, but par for the course for a manager whose only new idea is to grow a beard so that he looks less young for the benefit of the refs. So, actually I should apologise as I’ve long been saying he has no new ideas. He had one - grow a beard!
- I think the big aim for 2024 was to make the most of getting through to the knockout stages of the ACL and have a real good go at it. Our aim for 2024 has bitten the dust before our J League campaign has kicked off. Because we were in the ACL, we won’t be joining the more exciting looking than in previous seasons 2024 Levain cup till the later stages, so now we can ‘concentrate on the league’ with our squad that contains players who will almost certainly have almost no involvement. Poor Matsui, Yui, Kanda and probably more, whose season is now probably done before it began. But this is all a bit of a moot point anyway, as Oniki was never a great fan of rotating that much, was he? There is some irony in the fact that this year we probably have a decent amount of centre backs and now Oniki doesn’t appear to know who to play. We’ve had three games with three different combinations so far. The Paradox of Choice seems quite relevant in this situation. Still, never mind, we’ll probably start getting the injuries and red cards flowing soon and he’ll be back on more comfortable ground.
- The ref started the game pretty well I thought, playing a decent advantage and seemed to be in control. This didn’t last long though and he really should have sent off at least one Shandong player in the first half for a second yellow, (for his third of fourth bookable offense). In the second half he was all over the place and the game got quite physical, but by this stage he was only interested in booking numerous staff on the Shandong bench. He did also award Shandong the corner that they scored their winner from after the six minutes were already up. But obviously his performance wasn’t why we lost the game. That was down to us being useless and Shandong really wanting it. They were a different team in the second leg. Or perhaps I should say they were a different team after we gifted them their first goal in the first leg. After that, the gifts continued to flow, our manager watching as the tie slipped away from us, perhaps hoping that sooner or later the boost of him having grown a semi-beard would kick in. It didn’t. They were by far the better team on the day. The only aspect that we bettered them in was with the ‘giving the ball away in potentially fatal areas’. We were SO much better at that.
Anyway, let’s tie all this up with a suitably meandering last paragraph. As I’ve been stewing in my frustration for the last few days, dreading another whole season of this crap, the one image that keeps coming into my head is a strange one. It is of Oniki, whose job is to move some water from one bucket to another, and is trying to do it using only his hands. He keeps stopping halfway between the two buckets water pouring from his inadequately cupped hands whilst he looks at his magnet board and considers perhaps a slight change of the colour of the buckets, all the time not realising that he could have just carried the first bucket to the second one and poured it in to complete the job in an efficient way. There were many people in the stadium on Tuesday who’d taken time off work to watch what they hoped would be a solid performance, seeing out the tie in what was supposed to be the easier second leg. Little did they realise that Oniki and most of the players had also booked time off work and hadn’t showed up. If we agreed to or even didn’t protest the ridiculous early kick off, diluting the home advantage and inconveniencing ourselves, there really is something wrong with the club. I love that fact that we are a family club and welcoming and friendly to all. I don’t believe this should extend to changing kick off times for the benefit off the opposition, (if this is what happened). This was also displayed when Shandong scored their winner and one of their fans jumped the barrier, did a quick turn, leaving one of our security staff on their backside, ran to celebrate with the players and still eluded the security for a while before being ‘apprehended’ and gently ushered back to their seat. Even when we’re supposed to be throwing people out of the stadium we just let them go back and have a sit down. They probably got him some refreshments after his exertions. After these kind of disasters I usually try to be optimistic and say that hopefully this will give us a kick up the backside going forward. Whether that happens remains to be seen. Tomorrow we’ll be going to play Shonan away and kick off our league campaign. We have a pretty mixed record there. If, as it seems, we go with almost the same line up and get another shocking result, don’t expect the next blog post to be very long. Now we’re out of the ACL, (at the first time of asking), Oniki presumably has time to get going with his new tactics and approach that wouldn’t have been ready for the ACL game. Whether I did actually read this online and it’s true, or if it was just a dream I had where my subconscious was trolling me, I don’t know. I don’t believe he has any new tactics or a new approach and now we’ve seen that the grow a beard thing doesn’t work, I suspect we’ll just be stuck with the same old stuff for the whole of 2024. And what better way to finish this rotten post on that note of bleakness!
Perhaps that first paragraph seemed a bit weird. Or perhaps it didn’t. It’s made up entirely of direct quotes from various blog posts over the last six seasons (see the footnotes at the bottom). I guess the point I’m making is that nothing changes, and we’re still dealing with the same problems we have been for years, which were only swept under the carpet by us fortunately having some very good players who mismanagement couldn’t stop from playing well. I’ve long said we have succeeded in spite of Oniki and not because of him, but unbelievably there still seems to be confidence in and good feeling towards him from the majority of our fans. It’s taken me four days to write this blog post. Not because I am so traumatised by our defeat but more because I’m just totally fed up with writing about Oniki Frontale and with arguing with people about it on Twitter. On paper this is probably a tie that we should have won. We stormed through the group but once again totally shat the bed when it came to the knockout stage. Funny that, eh? Oniki is a manager who in the past could deal with the league format reasonably well as more often than not his one tactic worked, as the players were good. In a one off game though, he can’t rely on being able to back up the bad performances with some good ones afterwards and instead has to think on the go and actually make some changes that might affect the game. I don’t know if it’s all his fault. There is clearly a malaise at the club at the moment, particularly since the new and apparently clueless chairman joined. After the game our main supporter group the Kazoku demanded to see him. Apparently, (and really don’t quote me on this as it’s only information I’m getting second hand), they were upset at the club’s failure to get more fans in the stadium for the game. I’ve got a couple of issues with this, as while the attendance of about 12000 was pretty low, the game was at 5pm so 12000 seemed kind of decent. I have my theories about why the kickoff might have been so early but have yet to have them confirmed, and instead have been told by people who don’t actually know anything about the J League or Frontale that my theory is almost certainly wrong. And in any case, like I said, our support was actually pretty good. Much better than the performance of most of the players. I don’t think an extra 5000 supporters in the stadium would have changed anything when it came to the three major cock ups that our players made that led to three of their four goals. Like I said in the introduction though, one player playing badly or making a horrendous error can be blamed on the player. The same thing happening with three different players in one game, well, you’ve probably got to look at the manager. So basically, I don’t know if the Kazoku’s complaint to the chairman was right, but I am totally with them when it comes to wanting to complain to him. The exodus of important back room staff speaks volumes about something not being right behind the scenes. Anyway, if I went into detail about every moan I had about this match, this post would extend to novella length and much in the way that I don’t think anyone wants to read that, I don’t want write it. So instead I’ll just whinge away in bullet point form.
- Shocking from Ominami for their first goal, dodgy from Maruyama giving the ball away for the late attack that lead to their fourth, but the one that made me the most angry was the ridiculous corner from Wakizaka that lead to their second. His corners have long been terrible, but this was really sinking to a new low. Please can someone else take them.
- Oniki’s lack of a clue is perhaps evident in the fact that the two games in which he’s played what he thinks is our strongest line up, we’ve played worse than in the game when he played what he considers to be the second team. Kind of weird that the only changes he made from the first Shandong game to this one were to drop Jesiel for Maruyama, (who was ok in the Super Cup but not immediate-elevation-to-starter level ok) and to change the left back. Quite concerned how little confidence Oniki seems to have in Jesiel now. At the same time, a bit confused that Takai had a great game in the Super Cup and wasn’t chosen to start this game if a change had to be made. Similarly, perhaps the one player who didn’t play that well at the Super Cup also jumped into the first team. In the case of Miura replacing Segawa, it was quite welcome to see a left back playing at left back instead of a striker. And to his credit, the things that looked a bit dodgy about Miura, (kept getting knocked off the ball very easily), in the Super Cup seemed to have been completely eradicated in this game. He had a decent game I thought and his goal was nice. So I guess I’m saying credit to Oniki here…
- By the way, the rumoured line up for the Shonan game only has two changes. Sai replacing Sasaki and Takai replacing Ominami. If this is the line up, I guess it shows that Oniki was on the whole quite pleased with how this game went…
- The above point is backed up by the fact that it took him till the 84th minute to make any changes in a game that we were losing and had looked generally clueless in. And even then the changes were pretty bad. The whole front three were replaced, but instead of removing a tiring Ienaga, he was instead moved into the midfield where his do-what—I-want style proved to be a lot more dangerous for us. So basically no change of approach, just ploughing on with the same formation and tactics. The change of approach came on 90+9 minutes, three minutes after the game should have ended, when he brought on Takai and Jesiel and sent them up front for one hoofed ball. 84th minute subs seemed to be the wrong changes, way too late, but par for the course for a manager whose only new idea is to grow a beard so that he looks less young for the benefit of the refs. So, actually I should apologise as I’ve long been saying he has no new ideas. He had one - grow a beard!
- I think the big aim for 2024 was to make the most of getting through to the knockout stages of the ACL and have a real good go at it. Our aim for 2024 has bitten the dust before our J League campaign has kicked off. Because we were in the ACL, we won’t be joining the more exciting looking than in previous seasons 2024 Levain cup till the later stages, so now we can ‘concentrate on the league’ with our squad that contains players who will almost certainly have almost no involvement. Poor Matsui, Yui, Kanda and probably more, whose season is now probably done before it began. But this is all a bit of a moot point anyway, as Oniki was never a great fan of rotating that much, was he? There is some irony in the fact that this year we probably have a decent amount of centre backs and now Oniki doesn’t appear to know who to play. We’ve had three games with three different combinations so far. The Paradox of Choice seems quite relevant in this situation. Still, never mind, we’ll probably start getting the injuries and red cards flowing soon and he’ll be back on more comfortable ground.
- The ref started the game pretty well I thought, playing a decent advantage and seemed to be in control. This didn’t last long though and he really should have sent off at least one Shandong player in the first half for a second yellow, (for his third of fourth bookable offense). In the second half he was all over the place and the game got quite physical, but by this stage he was only interested in booking numerous staff on the Shandong bench. He did also award Shandong the corner that they scored their winner from after the six minutes were already up. But obviously his performance wasn’t why we lost the game. That was down to us being useless and Shandong really wanting it. They were a different team in the second leg. Or perhaps I should say they were a different team after we gifted them their first goal in the first leg. After that, the gifts continued to flow, our manager watching as the tie slipped away from us, perhaps hoping that sooner or later the boost of him having grown a semi-beard would kick in. It didn’t. They were by far the better team on the day. The only aspect that we bettered them in was with the ‘giving the ball away in potentially fatal areas’. We were SO much better at that.
Anyway, let’s tie all this up with a suitably meandering last paragraph. As I’ve been stewing in my frustration for the last few days, dreading another whole season of this crap, the one image that keeps coming into my head is a strange one. It is of Oniki, whose job is to move some water from one bucket to another, and is trying to do it using only his hands. He keeps stopping halfway between the two buckets water pouring from his inadequately cupped hands whilst he looks at his magnet board and considers perhaps a slight change of the colour of the buckets, all the time not realising that he could have just carried the first bucket to the second one and poured it in to complete the job in an efficient way. There were many people in the stadium on Tuesday who’d taken time off work to watch what they hoped would be a solid performance, seeing out the tie in what was supposed to be the easier second leg. Little did they realise that Oniki and most of the players had also booked time off work and hadn’t showed up. If we agreed to or even didn’t protest the ridiculous early kick off, diluting the home advantage and inconveniencing ourselves, there really is something wrong with the club. I love that fact that we are a family club and welcoming and friendly to all. I don’t believe this should extend to changing kick off times for the benefit off the opposition, (if this is what happened). This was also displayed when Shandong scored their winner and one of their fans jumped the barrier, did a quick turn, leaving one of our security staff on their backside, ran to celebrate with the players and still eluded the security for a while before being ‘apprehended’ and gently ushered back to their seat. Even when we’re supposed to be throwing people out of the stadium we just let them go back and have a sit down. They probably got him some refreshments after his exertions. After these kind of disasters I usually try to be optimistic and say that hopefully this will give us a kick up the backside going forward. Whether that happens remains to be seen. Tomorrow we’ll be going to play Shonan away and kick off our league campaign. We have a pretty mixed record there. If, as it seems, we go with almost the same line up and get another shocking result, don’t expect the next blog post to be very long. Now we’re out of the ACL, (at the first time of asking), Oniki presumably has time to get going with his new tactics and approach that wouldn’t have been ready for the ACL game. Whether I did actually read this online and it’s true, or if it was just a dream I had where my subconscious was trolling me, I don’t know. I don’t believe he has any new tactics or a new approach and now we’ve seen that the grow a beard thing doesn’t work, I suspect we’ll just be stuck with the same old stuff for the whole of 2024. And what better way to finish this rotten post on that note of bleakness!
1 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/08/vs-gamba-osaka-home-6823-j-league-match.html
2 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2019/12/vs-yokohama-f-marinos-home-301119-j.html
3 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2018/09/vs-gamba-osaka-away-2918-j-league-match.html
4 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2022/05/vs-shonan-bellmare-home-25522-j-league.html
5 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/04/vs-gamba-osaka-away-9423-j-league-match.html
6 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/07/vs-nagoya-grampus-away-1723-j-league.html
7 https://frontalerabbit.blogspot.com/2023/05/vs-urawa-reds-away-24523-levain-cup.html
Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 71. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 89. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 69')
CRYZAN (Shandong) 8' 0-1
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 71. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 89. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 69')
Subs
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
DF 4. JESIEL (on for WAKIZAKA 90+9')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS (on for YAMAMOTO 84')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 84')
MF 25. MATSUI Renji
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
DF 29. TAKAI Kota (on for IENAGA 90+9')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MARCINHO 84')
DF 52. Sai VAN WERMESKERKEN
MF 55. ZE RICARDO
CRYZAN (Shandong) 8' 0-1
GAO ZHUNYI (Shandong) 25' 0-2
MIURA (Frontale) 30' 1-2
ERISON (Frontale) 59' 2-2
CRYZAN (Shandong) 73' 2-3
JADSON (Shandong) 90+7' 2-4
Highlights
ERISON (Frontale) 59' 2-2
CRYZAN (Shandong) 73' 2-3
JADSON (Shandong) 90+7' 2-4
Highlights
