Vs Albirex Niigata (away) 16/8/25 J League match 26

 

Albirex Niigata 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

 How utterly predictable! Of course we were never going to win an away game in Niigata. We hardly ever do. And this time, in addition to the usual we-play-awfully curse that seems to be on us at the Big Swan, we also had to deal with some (more) bad luck and some self inflicted chickens coming home to roost. Hmmm, that mixed metaphor doesn’t really work, but hopefully you’ll get what I mean later on. A 1-1 draw wasn’t something that either team wanted. As I say every week, any faint hopes of us getting anything from this season are surely now gone. (Although the teams who actually have a chance to do so keep cocking up). For Albirex, perhaps one point is better than no points, but considering the position they are in, the start they made in this match, and the condition our team was in, not getting three is a massive missed opportunity. In the section about us, there will be more talk about what happened around the game than what happened in the game. Basically because the background to the match dictated a lot of how we played. Anyway, let’s get on with this.

Us - 

So after the Fukuoka game referee-created debacle we had two players missing due to suspensions. Could have been tricky, but surely we’d have enough players in the squad to deal with this, right? And then the starting line up was announced and we had three goalies in the match day squad. I wonder if Lee had been fit it might even have been four. Kobayashi, Miyagi, Tanabe and Romanic were all nowhere to be seen. So three goalies on the bench. Oh and Kamihashi and Tsuchiya, two centre backs who have hardly played at all. There must be others on there though, right? Yeah! Noda. Hmmm, another hardly used defender. But we had Kawahara, Kanda, Ozeki and Ienaga, so all good, right? Well, Ienaga wasn’t brought on, even though we only used four subs and instead of him we played a 19 year old right back with five minutes of professional football experience in the Emperor’s Cup against a J3 team. Either this was an extremely left field selection from a manager who loves taking chances and doing wild things, or Ienaga was also unable to take part. Before the game after seeing the lineup I could only suspect that there must be an illness running through the squad and in his post match comments Hasebe said some players were unwell. Watching highlights I noticed that there were no high fives when the players arrived at the stadium with fist bumping instead. Don’t know if this is significant. So basically, I don’t think Hasebe had any choice with either the squad, or even the starting lineup. Well perhaps apart from Tachibanada or Kawahara. 

 

So many goalies on the bench that one of them 
has to warm up by the side of the pitch

With thoughts of sickness in mind, the first 20 minutes of the game further emphasised this as we were absolutely awful. For the majority of the first half the midfield was completely absent, but for the first 20 minutes, most of the defence were too. We really could have been 4-0 down in the first quarter of the game, but thanks to Albirex’s appalling shooting we escaped relatively unscathed. Time after time they swept through the midfield and defence, which basically ran out of their way to make room for them (more illness echoes here. Perhaps we were trying to social distance. Very noble of us, but not a great idea when playing football). In a similar way, our shots mostly seemed to be applying a policy of social distancing, keeping very far away from the goal. Marcinho’s basically open goal miss was horrendous. He’s not having his best period at the moment. And likewise most of his teammates, who seemed like they wouldn’t be able to hit a barn door even if they were inches away from touching it. Only Erison seemed to be able to shoot on target. Well actually not on target I guess as he hit the bar twice. But he had shots blocked too. Thankfully Ito managed to score at the end of what must have been one of our worst first halves of the year. (How many times have I said that now?!). We were much better in the second half. Well, apart from when it came to shooting sadly. And at the end of the day, if you can’t hit the fucking target, you’re not going to score are you? Strangely enough though, I felt like this was a decent performance even though we were actually pretty shit. I say decent because clearly there was more going on behind the scenes than we know about. It will be interesting to see where we stand next week away at Nagoya. Sai will be back but now Marcinho is banned for accumulated yellow cards. One in and one out. Hopefully some of the ‘sick’ players will have recovered. Hopefully the ones who aren’t sick will have practiced shooting a bit. As much as I am being positive about a semi-decent result considering the circumstances, (as I perceive them), you’ve got to ask some questions about the club’s transfer dealings. In this window we have had six players leave us and only replaced them with two. Some might say our squad was a bit bloated but the reason teams have big squads is to deal with situations like this. And when we needed those extra players, we’d already shipped them out. I don’t know if we’ll get any more players in. I don’t even know if the window has closed. It seems that our run of bad luck is continuing, but the bad luck was partially self-inflicted. Still, it’s a shame we decided to use the smashing of mirrors as a training exercise. Given how bad our shooting is, perhaps the aim of the training exercise was to hit the ball between two mirrors and instead every time we cannoned the shots off the first mirror onto the second, ensuring the absolute maximum of bad luck from every single shot. You would have thought someone might have heard of the superstition and said maybe it wasn’t a good idea. At least we’re trying new things, eh? I’d say though that the club should probably send someone down to Kawasaki Daishi pretty quickly to pick up a box of Omamori to break this horrible run.

Them -

Albirex showed in this game why they are in so much trouble. They attacked beautifully at times but couldn’t shoot for shit. And their keeper is very dodgy, (still not dodgy enough to deflect one of our miles-off-target shots into his own net sadly). Probably the most worrying thing for them though is that they spent most of the match time-wasting. One goal up, maybe do it, but when you’re a goal up after six minutes, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work for the rest of the game. When we finally got a goal back, it seemed like they were still time wasting, now playing for the draw. I suspect if we’d gone ahead they would have continued time wasting looking to hang on to the one goal defeat. This was somewhat undermined by their fans booing Yamaguchi every time he got the ball, apparently not having noticed that their players were trying to run the clock down at every opportunity. Their fans though wanted our keeper to hurry up with his kicks and for us not to play it around aimlessly at the back for some reason. I think in the past I have made comments on their fans on here so I won’t say any more but they seemed to be a bit… confused on this occasion. The general feeling in the city seems to be that they’re going down from the people we spoke to. It will be a shame as it’s a nice away trip and they have a big, (if somewhat confused), fan base. Also, the shuttle buses on this occasion were very smooth and efficient and you don’t often get me saying that. I will say though that they could do with their local breweries upping their game a bit. But that’s just my pint of view. (I’ll leave that typo there as it seems quite appropriate).

Ref and VAR -

Hmmmm. The ref was a relative unknown and I thought on the whole he did a decent job. Would have been nice if he’d given their goalie a second yellow card for time wasting but of course no one is going to do this apart from either a very strict ref who has full command of the rules of the game, (don’t think this person exists in the J League), or is a total attention seeker. (Hmmm, definitely some of those refs around). Kamimura doesn’t fit in the latter category as a relatively unknown ref, and it seems like he doesn’t fit the first category either as he let their keeper claim the ball, dither for a bit, put the ball down, and then pick it up again when we pressed him, much to the shock and disgust of our players, Hasebe and at least me in the stand. (I suspect I shouted quite a lot when this happened so anyone else complaining got drowned out). I wanted to check the replay to see what had really happened and it seems it was exactly what I thought had happened. You can see the ref put his finger on his ear, presumably to ask the linesman or VAR, but presumably VAR can’t get involved in this and the linesman at that end was absolutely useless. But basically, aside from this major clanger, I thought the ref had a decent game. The linesman can do one though. Neither of them affected the outcome of the game though, which is a very welcome thing to be able to say!

This was a game where my general feelings seemed to be a bit at odds with other people’s. Yeah, we were quite shit, but I think there were extenuating circumstances. With so many players absent it was actually a surprise that we could start with a pretty decent lineup. Yeah, they were pretty bad, particularly in the first half, but I think they weren’t all in perfect condition maybe. Apparently the pitch didn’t suit us, (it never does, we’re delicate young flowers when we don’t play at home, aren’t we?), but I was quite pleased to see that Hasebe didn’t use this as an excuse. Our current form is pretty shit, but I’m still not getting angry with Hasebe or our players. I’m not too pleased with the club though for our transfer activity or for the people who seem to think it’s necessary to post up Instagram videos of ‘great’ play when we labour to a 1-1 draw against the team who are bottom of the league or get smashed 5-2 at home. But maybe other fans don’t feel the same way as I do. I think the general quality of this game could be guessed from the highlight video of Yamaguchi making two absolutely regulation saves which was greeted with the usual adoration and adulation from our fans. Quite strange! I’m hoping my boss posts a video of me on the school’s social media doing something equally run of the mill like maybe handing out some print outs, or writing down what page of the text book we’re doing next on my spreadsheet. Exhilarating stuff! And maybe that one commenter I saw on Instagram might suggest that I should represent the national team like they thought Yamaguchi should. Next up Nagoya away, another game that recently we always do terribly in. Since we had that COVID-times beef with them cancelling and rescheduling a game for less than honest reasons I think we’ve failed to beat them in Nagoya. Actually we’ve been unable to beat them in Nagoya since the Mizuho stadium closed as the Toyota stadium is very much not in, or anywhere near Nagoya, but you get my point, I’m sure. I remember in recent years turning up to Nagoya away extremely refreshed and that game was horrific as far as I can remember. Hopefully I can arrive only slightly refreshed this time and we can buck the trend and get a result. But we’ll probably have to have some youth team players and coaches in the squad and will have at least a couple of goalies in the starting lineup. I guess at least we have a week till the game, so hopefully some players can recover. Much like with this game, I’m not very confident, but also like with this game, we have some fun things to do lined up either side of the game, so at least we’ll be able to get some enjoyment out of the weekend. After 26 games last year we were in 11th with 34 points and a +6 goal difference. This year we’re in 8th with 39 points and a +9 goal difference. So Hasebe is definitely an improvement on 2024 Oniki. But the one thing Oniki always had was good luck and it seems that he’s taken that with him to Kashima. If it’s somehow possible for Hasebe to get rid of this terrible luck we have right now, we might be able to win a match. In the last five games we’ve taken four points from a possible 15, which is pretty bad and during this run also got knocked out of the Emperor’s Cup at home against a J3 team. Clearly this is not all down to bad luck, but jeez, it would be nice if we got a break sooner or later. Maybe a penalty, perhaps? We’ve still only had one in 26 games. Some teams get one every 26 minutes. But yeah, I guess I was surprisingly positive about this game, which might make a nice change for people reading this. Lovely! But please, by some small chance, could we actually have a game next week where I don't have to write about shocking refs and lack of options? It would be lovely to be able to get back to moaning about our football rather than all these other things. 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 85')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 45+4')

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MARCINHO 63')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 77')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota

DF 30. NODA Hiroto (on for ITO 87')

FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for ERISON 87')

DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito 
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match 

Not sure anyone particularly deserves this. Maybe Ito was the player who did the most best things and the least bad things. Or maybe Erison who seemed quite unlucky. But I’m going to leave it unawarded again. 

 

Goals

SHIRAI (Albirex) 6' 1-0
ITO (Frontale) 45+1' 1-1

Highlights

Vs Albirex Niigata (home) 25/6/25 J League match 15

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 1 Albirex Niigata 

Perhaps I was being excessively dramatic after the last match. Certainly I was in an appalling mood after an appalling performance. But judging from the starting line up of this game it seems that Hasebe also thought that we were pretty bad against Vissel Kobe. In that match we basically started like we were on fire, scored and then turned off for most of the rest of the game. Yeah, we had some chances late on, but most of those chances didn’t actually make it to the actually-having-a-shot stage and it never really looked like we were going to get anything from the game. There were a few similarities in this match. Again we started pretty well and scored fairly early. And once again we spent most of the second half not threatening to do anything. But I guess the big difference in this match was that we were two goals up instead of one goal down. And we even managed to stretch the lead late on after Ozeki came on apparently determined to score. Conceding the late consolation goal was a bit of a bummer and it looked absolutely miles offside in the stadium. (On DAZN they only seemed to have one angle that included both the keeper and the recipient and it was a far from ideal angle. If VAR only had the same one, I can understand why they didn’t have the confidence to overturn the decision). The win takes us up to fifth and now we’ve played all of our games in hand. If we hadn’t fucked up so massively against Vissel, we would have been in second, three points behind Kashima. I think I said after our game against them that I thought Kashima weren’t very good, so hopefully that turns out to be true and they plummet to mid table where they deserve to be. A quick aside, delightfully, and allowing me to fully enjoy my post-game beers, YFM got spanked and remain rock bottom. Winning a game is great. Your enemies losing badly is great. Having both happen on the same evening is wonderful. 

Us -

Ito started this game and I thought he was great again, with so much energy and a desire to go forward instead of pass backwards. I don’t think Ienaga is past it, but I am certain he is past starting every game. Perhaps similarly with Maruyama. He’s played well this year, but at his age I would hope he gets a rest from time to time. While he was by no means the worst performer in the last game, he didn’t have a great match and probably needed a bit of a rest. So Jesiel was back and played almost all of the 90 minutes! When he did leave the field it looked initially a bit of a worry as it seemed like he might be injured again. But I think it was mainly cramp, possibly brought on by a shocker of a foul from an Albirex forward. We are clearly going to need Jesiel going forward as it seems that Takai will be leaving soon. I wonder if we might see Sasaki back at centre back alternating with Jesiel and Maruyama. I’d rather have him at full back, but perhaps feel that if we keep injury free we have more cover in those positions than we do in the middle. Another person I slagged off a little in the last post was Yamamoto who had a bit of a dodgy game. But he was back to his best in this match. I think the schedule has been catching up with a lot of people recently. Yamada dropped to the bench, and I don’t think anyone could really argue with that. Kanda made his first start which is something plenty of people have been calling for and he managed to get his first league goal. I feel a bit sorry for Yamada as it would probably have been a goal he would have also scored, but at the same time with the slump he’s been going through, maybe he wouldn’t have been in the right place. I feel like none of our (fit) strikers have shown themselves to be an undroppable definite first choice so that’s clearly an area where we have some questions to answer. I suspect either Kobayashi or more likely Yamada will start on Sunday against Verdy. But anyway, Kanda did what he was supposed to do and that’s something that can't be said about plenty of our players in recent matches, so well done to him. I also criticised Yamaguchi, probably quite unfairly in that last post. This is a tricky one for me, because I started the year a bit suspicious of him, have been won round on a few occasions by great performances, and then have reverted to my original point of view after some horrible performances. Presumably this is why when we concede a soft goal it’s my instinct to blame Yamaguchi, even though others are equally culpable. That’s not really fair of me so I apologise to him and his fans. I guess the problem is that as a goalkeeper, when you make a big mistake it more than likely ends up in a goal, so it’s very visible. In his match he made one very good save and other than that didn’t have a massive amount to do so I’ll just concentrate on praising the good save. It’s always a lot easier to be reasonable when we’ve won!

Miura back in the starting line up made a difference I think. And it was good to see Sai back from injury (probably... I don’t think anything was ever announced). Oshima was absent but I hope this is because Hasebe is just doing a better job of managing the fragile often injured players. If he can keep Oshima and Jesiel available for most of the rest of the season he will have achieved miracles. Maybe… maybe…. the injury situation is clearing up a little. Maybe. Of course we still have Erison injured who is the only striker who has really properly staked a claim for the position this year and that's clearly a blow. But maybe elsewhere, Hasebe finally has some options. Just in time for us getting the rug pulled out from under us by Takai leaving. Yamada is also rumoured to be going (to Celtic), but I’m not sure how likely that is or how much of an effect it would have on us. Hopefully we will sign some replacements and/or reinforcements in the transfer window. The season actually looks like it is delicately balanced right now. So it would be good if we tried to at least slightly push it in a favourable direction.

Them -

Not a great deal to say about Albirex really. They dominated possession in the match and had 50% more shots than us. I think these stats are partly coloured by our dodgy second half though. However, I didn’t ever really feel like we were in much danger. Before the game I would have been happy to wish them well for the rest of the season, but they didn’t give us the ball back after we put it out for an injury and that peed me off a bit. But at the same time, they brought loads of passionate fans, (more fans and more passion than Vissel and that game was on a Saturday not a Wednesday evening!),  and I enjoy the away fixture, so I would quite like them to stay up. They’re in the muck at the moment though, so they’ll need a bit of a change in fortune. 

Ref -

When I saw the ref was Kawamata I was cautiously optimistic. He definitely seems to be one of the better refs and I thought he did well in this match. What a rare thing to say! I thought he let a few things go for the good of the game and I’m all in favour of that. There was one situation where if he’d given a marginal foul against a Niigata defender he probably would have had to send him off for a second yellow card as it would have been one of those promising attack things. I’m fine with him not giving it. A referee employing some common sense is a very welcome thing. Good for him!

So that's about it rather than a quick mention for the one massive disappointment for me about this match which was the fact that the semi-secret toilet that is always much quieter than the others now has someone standing with a sign pointing to it. I’m gutted about the potentially disastrous effect this will have on my half times in the future. I’m sure you feel my pain and totally understand why I’ve mentioned it. Next up Tokyo Verdy away on Sunday early evening. Another team who aren’t in great form and are languishing at the wrong end of the table. Usually this would mean that we’d lose but that didn’t happen in this match so fingers crossed it won’t in the next one either. After that, Kashima at home the following weekend. That's going to be an interesting one…

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 90+10')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 38. KANDA Soma
FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KAWAHARA 79')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for KANDA 68')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 88') 
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 68') 
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for JESIEL 79')
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro

My Frontale Man Of The Match

I’ve been convinced to award this to this player because on Flashscore he was awarded the second lowest score on our team which I thought was absolutely idiotic. So it goes to…

ITO Tatsuya - genuinely forward looking, energetic and consistently one of our best players when he starts. If Ienaga comes back on Sunday as I suspect he will, hopefully Ito can start on the left and let Marcinho have a rest.

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 12' 1-0
KANDA (Frontale) 35' 2-0
OZEKI (Frontale) 90+1' 3-0
OKUMURA (Albirex) 90+5' 3-1

Highlights  

Vs Albirex Niigata (home) 13/10/24 Levain Cup Semi Final 2nd Leg

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 2 Albirex Niigata (1-6 on agg.)

With us needing to do a bit of work after a terrible first leg, one thing was certain before this game. It was going to be a GOAL RUSH! Plenty of attacking football. GOAL RUSH! Lots of shots and lots of goals. GOAL RUSH! Of course all of our attacking might mean that we gave away a few chances at the back, but we’d more than compensate for that by the amount of great goals we’d score. GOAL RUSH! Oh, unfortunately in a game where scoring three times to take it to extra time was the bare minimum required, we failed to score. And not only did we fail to score, we also conceded twice. So in the end we were just the six goals short of making the final. It says a lot that in all of the photos I took of the game, all of our players just seem to be hanging around doing nothing. I've only included one, as much like the game, the photos were even worse than they usually are. I’m totally fed up with wasting time writing these posts as there’s nothing left to say. It’s always the same old shit from Oniki. The opposition always know what to do. Even if Oniki nominally changes the formation, still the approach is the same. In the first leg we needed over 500 passes for one shot on target. In this game the stats were marginally better, but still the important one was the same. Zero goals. In a game we needed to win and they just needed to not concede four times, we ended up having significantly less shots than the opposition. Right from the start, aside from the immediate time wasting from Albirex, (not a criticism, a legitimate tactic which the ref seemed to notice and moan at them about but of course did nothing to prevent it happening again), you would really have thought that we were the team with the big first leg lead. The usual ridiculous amount of passing amongst the defence and then… nothing. As soon as we got the ball out of our half we gave it away. Even players who’ve stood out a bit recently for not being shit had a bad day. The only possible justification for our slowly slowly patient build up could be if the intention was to bore Niigata sufficiently that they fell asleep and then we’d be able to perhaps score a couple of goals past their prone snoozing bodies. Judging by our finishing though, I wouldn’t even say that would have been a given anyway.

I don’t think there’s much else for me to say. I don’t have anything amusing to write as there is nothing amusing about our games at the moment. It’s all shit. The end of the game was greeted with what was perhaps the most booing I think I have ever heard at Todoroki. As I always say, I’m not a booer myself, but I think it was totally justified. Although it might be a bit unfair as the target of the booing should clearly be the manager rather than the players. And he has very rarely come out after a game and, surprise surprise, that was a game we won. Usually he weasels away and lets everyone else take the criticism. Maybe the chairman could do with getting a bit of stick too. After all it’s him who clearly thought Oniki was the answer at the end of last season, (well actually, quite a bit before the end of last season but that new contract was particularly galling), and who still presumably thinks things are going well. It reminds me of his astonishment when Chanathip left, being surprised that he didn’t want to sit in the stands and wait for his chance (which clearly would only really come if all of Oniki’s favourites were either injured or got sold). Perhaps the chairman like Oniki, believes that we should all wait patiently for Oniki’s tactics to start working again. At the same time, try to dilute the home advantage as much as possible by allowing Niigata fans to take over almost half of the stadium. MONEY! MONEY! MONEY! However, this does explain how this game managed to almost be a sell out even though we are not only shit, but utterly dull right now. Why would anyone apart from the most masochistic of Frontale fans think that this would be a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The pre-game motivational video showing previous times we’ve come back from deficits and scored goals, (they had to dig quite a way back into the past to find some of that footage as recently we’ve been more often than not, throwing away points at the end of matches rather than gaining them), did a good job of getting the fans going and there seemed to be some kind of (clearly delusional) belief that we might be able to get the job done. This was all smashed to pieces as soon as the match started though. The video stated that statistically we had close to zero chance of winning the tie. I don’t know if it’s possible to have a minus % chance of something happening, but clearly that was going to be the only way our chance of winning would be going right from the kick off. Maybe some of the fans believed, but it didn’t seem like the players did. And who can blame them? They probably don’t know how to react when they hear an Oniki team talk now. ‘Really? That’s what you think we should do? Have you watched any of our games this year? Is your magnet board broken?’ And still the clown is in charge. Of course I don’t expect him to be fired, but at least give us the slight morale boost of announcing that he’ll leave at the end of the year. Please, I’m begging you. Please… won’t somebody think of the poor children!

Next up, who gives a shit? Well actually it’s Gamba Osaka for another Friday Night J League. As the game is kind of meaningless, maybe we’ll get something from it. Nothing to play for means that we now have the oppotunity to give some other players a chance. But of course we probably won’t because of the clown who is picking the team. Maybe it’s important for him to try to not get his worst ever league finish when he’s thinking of future employment. But to be honest, I think most of us don’t really care if we finish 11th or 16th. We’ve been so bad in 2024 that we deserved to get nothing. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get. 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 52')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (Yellow card 40')
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for MIURA 46')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 57')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 67')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for YAMAMOTO 67')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 90+1') (on for ERISON 57')
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

Goals

KOMI (Niigata) 31' 0-1
OTA (Niigata) 89' 0-2

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

A somewhat surprising return of this section, particularly because this game was so bad. But it has to go to...

JUNG Sung-Ryong - If we hadn't had him in goal we would have been humiliated in both the home and away legs of this tie.


Highlights

Vs Albirex Niigata (away) 9/10/24 Levain Cup Semi Final 1st Leg

Albirex Niigata 4 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

With a two legged-tie, the first leg can sometimes be a tough sell. We never do particularly well away at Niigata and this fairly hastily arranged game on a Wednesday evening, with us having a shit year definitely fitted that bill. So instead I went to work, feeling confident that we might do the business as recently my absence from our games has meant that we play well and my attendance meant that we just pass the ball endlessly. And as this is basically only the first half nothing would really be decided and all the excitement would come in the second leg on Sunday, right?  Well, unless we got so utterly battered to the point of almost making the second leg irrelevant. It’s a bit of a shame that happened, particularly after we smashed Machida last weekend. But somehow utterly predictable. You might imagine I would have run out of original ways to get irritated by Oniki but perhaps I’ve found another relatively new one after this match. We’ve done well in a few games recently where Oniki has finally given in to the calls to play 442 with an approach that puts a bit more emphasis on trying to score than trying to rack up passes. Yamamoto and Erison were back in the team together, (admittedly due to Oniki running out of options so definitely more by luck than judgement), and were playing well. Quite why Oniki decided to break up that partnership for every game that followed a good performance, I don’t know. All the years he’s been sticking with the same formation and the same line up in spite of us playing awfully. Finally he perhaps accidentally came up with something that did work and suddenly he wants to rotate and change the formation between every match. It’s almost as if he got a win to take the pressure off and then decided to immediately revert to working on his plan of getting his favoured formation and players back and blasting regardless of the fact that it is a terrible idea and there’s any evidence it will ever happen. Even when he’s won some games doing something different he still thinks that his original way is the best. It’s infuriating, but utterly predictable.

As I have only seen the highlights of his match, I’m not going to write anything about it apart from the moan above. Actually highlights isn’t really the right name for them. From our point of view It was more like a blooper reel. I think I can only remember two shots of ours being in there and the rest was Yamaguchi looking frustrated whilst picking the ball out of the back of the net. 568 passes for just the one shot on target. Really awful stuff, real Oniki stuff. Barring an insane comeback, Oniki’s fucked another competition at almost the first time of asking. I am really looking forward to the end of the season. Well, as long as it brings the end of his time with us. If it doesn’t, I might look into the possibility of somehow hibernating for the whole of 2025. I think we’ve reached the stage now where all of the success that he brought us has been undermined by his utter uselessness for the last three or four years. If we somehow managed to win this tournament it would be kind of undeserved as we were parachuted in to the quarter finals against a J2 team and barely scraped through. And to be honest, as petty as it sounds, I don’t really want Oniki to finish his time with us with any kind of success. He should have gone a long time ago. We shouldn’t have offered him at least the last two contract extensions, but equally he shouldn’t have accepted them. I think he’s going to be really shown up in his next job, particularly if it’s at a big money basket case team.

To make a very clumsy cooking comparison, when he took over from Kazama, he basically had to only make the change of putting the deliciously cooked meal on a plate and serving it, rather than employing the risky but admittedly more exciting route of flinging it across the room, forkful by forkful directly into the diner’s mouth. As the years have passed Oniki has used up all the pasta, run down the spice rack, gone through everything in the freezer and is now wondering why no one has done the shopping. At the same time, the kitchen is now about to properly catch on fire. Although he accidentally avoided a massive inferno on a few previous occasions by accidentally turning the gas off whilst trying to switch the lights on, he’s made sure to go back and set things on fire again immediately afterwards as he was worried that going straight from building catching fire to safety was a bit too much of an adventurous step. He’s still trying to make that original meal without realising he’s put all his new ingredients into the wrong containers. And let’s be honest, after we’ve been made to eat the same meal for eight years, even if the cooking had improved it would still be quite boring. As it is, it’s now an almost inedible mess and the best we can hope for is that we don’t get food poisoning from it. On a couple of occasions he had a go at using the rice and curry sauce he found to make a curry and it was nice! But a bit too spicy for his taste, so afterwards immediately went back to attempting to use the rice and curry sauce to make an omelet instead and was shocked when it didn’t seem to work. I know this lengthy analogy doesn’t really work, but writing it was marginally more fun than watching us play football right now.

Next up, our almost certain elimination from another competition due to our manager completely fucking things up. As I didn’t see this game, some of you might think it’s a bit unfair to criticise Oniki so much. But don’t worry, I’ve seen plenty of his uselessness already, so even from a distance feel I can spot an Oniki dog’s dinner when I see one. After that, we have Gamba at home next Friday for yet another Friday Night J League. Let the joy overflow!

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (Yellow card 81')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 17. TONO Daiya
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 46')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MARCINHO 54')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for CESAR HAYDAR 54')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for TONO 46')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for TACHIBANADA 69')

Goals

TANIGUCHI (Niigata) 25' 1-0
OTA (Niigata) 45' 2-0
HASEGAWA (Niigata) 50' 3-0
HOSHI (Niigata) 53' 4-0
SEGAWA (Frontale) 71' 4-1

Highlights

Vs Albirex Niigata (home) 27/9/24 J League match 32

Kawasaki Frontale 5 - 1 Albirex Niigata

This result was quite a surprise, particularly as it came after one of our worst performances of the season. A shocking game in a normal season would be a big kick up the backside and maybe could be expected to be followed by a bounce back. But we’ve had so many shocking games this year that if we’d had the resulting kicks up the backside I think we would have a terminally damaged arse by now.  I couldn’t go to this game due to work, so I guess I have to face facts. All the bad stuff this year is all my fault, it seems. My relentless negativity in the stadium has been bringing the team down. If we get pasted on Tuesday in the ACL that will be the confirmation. As I don’t write much about games I watched online this should be short. As I was working for most of the match and aside from the first 20 minutes I have only seen DAZN’s extended highlights this should be even shorter.

5-1 seems like it might have flattered us. Lots of our shots went in. Most of theirs didn’t. The penalty that set us on our way looked extremely soft and even after we were awarded it we did our best to not score, with the ball only squirming under the keeper. The highlights made it look like Erison had a cracker of a game. If only he’d been played a bit more this season, eh? Our website said that we played 442 but the bit of the game I saw didn’t look massively different from our usual 433. And whilst Wakizaka was nominally on the right wing, it seemed that he and Yamada were swapping spots quite often. It’s great to score some goals though and we’re now eight points clear of the relegation zone, which is considerably more reassuring. BUT, let’s not get carried away. We’ve had brief renaissances before this year and sooner rather than later it turns back into shit. And these new tactics probably surprised the opposition. They certainly surprised me given Oniki’s usual reluctance to change anything. Whether the next opposition are equally surprised will be another thing. Don’t forget that as recently as the ACL game against Ulsan we thought that we had a slightly new approach and that got totally dismantled by Nagoya. I reckon after we’ve given Albirex this pasting they will 100% knock us out of the Levain Cup now.

Next up, Gwangju at home in the ACL on Tuesday, which will make a nice change from our usual way of following up a game against Ulsan with a game against Guangzhou. (Guess that works better when spoken rather than written down, and also I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing the teams’ names properly….). They spanked YFM so hopefully we can avoid the same outcome. To be honest though, most people spank YFM right now. Thanks to them for keeping our spirits up during these difficult times. After the ACL game we are away at Machida next weekend. Would love a win in that game, once again more to upset other people than please myself. It seems that I am quite a petty person. Anyway, we’ll soon see if this was another false dawn. I hope not, but with almost zero evidence to go on as I only watched a tiny bit of this game, I already feel like I’m taking the piss a bit even writing this much so probably should hold back on exclaiming or predicting too much.

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi

DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 54')
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR
DF 13. MIURA Sota

MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 9. ERISON
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 40')

Subs

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for ERISON 74')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for SASAKI 85')

MF 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 65')

FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for YAMADA 74')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for WAKIZAKA 85')

 
Goals

ERISON (Frontale) 14' PEN 1-0

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 18' 2-0
ERISON (Frontale) 63' 3-0
YAMADA (Frontale) 65' 4-0
YAMADA (Frontale) 73' 5-0
OTA (Niigata) 86' 5-1

Highlights