From the dizzy heights of our second half demolition of Kobe, we’re back into the depths with another totally limp cup exit. It’s fair to say that this hasn’t been our year cup-wise, and it’s also true that we’d scraped our way to this stage with a comeback against Sony Sendai and only managing to defeat Mito on penalties. Sadly, on this occasion we weren’t able to muster the kind of comeback that we’ve relied on heavily in some of our games this season. Whilst recently when we’ve gone behind it has seemed likely that we’ll eventually get back into the game, for most of the first half on this occasion it looked like we’d not even be able to score even one, let alone three or four. Chinen gave us a lifeline bringing the score back to 3-1 but it looked like the red card would finish us off. Surprisingly, it actually seemed to spur us on, and in the end we could probably feel that we were unlucky to not take it to extra time. But for every opportunity to score we had, we gifted one to Montedio, and we can’t have any complaints about exiting the competition at this stage.
So, what went wrong? I don’t want to point the finger solely at one player, but Taniguchi had a nightmare. He was probably at least partly at fault for all three goals. I’ve referred to him before as one of Oniki’s undroppables, and I know I’m biased in this respect, but he’s been saved by Nara time after time recently. I don’t know if something’s on his mind, but he appears to have lost all form and confidence. It’s something of a mystery as to how a J2 side can so completely outsmart us at set pieces and yet we’re top of J1. You've got to hope that this was a blip, but if you want to be pessimistic, our best eleven has conceded six goals in the last two games. Hopefully none of our upcoming league opponents were watching and taking tips from this game. Aside from Taniguchi, our left side in the first half was awful. Nobori and Saito looked like they’d never met, let alone played together before. Hasegawa was a big improvement in the second half but the damage had already been done. Kobayashi again didn’t have the best of nights, Ienaga was pretty quiet. Sung-Ryong can’t be blamed too much for the goals, but the red card was a bit rash. He gave the forward an opportunity to drag his leg and go down. Apparently he’ll now be banned for our next league game. Since when does it work like that? Seems a bit stupid to me, but those are apparently the rules. Basically, too many players had off days at the same time. Perhaps they underestimated the opposition after getting a lot of praise for the second half performance against Kobe. Full credit to Montedio though. They came with a game plan to put men behind the ball and hit us on counter attacks and from set pieces and that’s exactly what they did. And they did it better than a lot of J1 teams have. Also, they didn’t seem to time-waste at all, which is almost unheard of recently. I wish them the best of luck for the rest of the season. Also, in the past rarer than a J League ref having a good game, but becoming something of a common Frontale Rabbit trope recently is the fact that I think Oniki made all the right decisions in this game. Can’t blame him, certainly from a tactical point of view. You’ve just got to put it at the feet of the players. Yamagata was a fun trip, aside from the football, and seems like a nice place. Just a shame that the result and game were so rotten.
We now have a week and a half off till our next league game, home against Kashiwa next Saturday. Easier said than done, but we’ve got to try and put this out of our minds and get back to the second half against Kobe form. It would be nice if we didn’t give the opposition a couple of goals head start in our remaining games. Now we’re top and have a lead, we’ve got to avoid doing a Hiroshima, and letting Hiroshima back in. Hopefully, Hiroshima will continue doing a Hiroshima for the next four games, but I’d rather it was us taking some strides towards winning the title, rather than wishing the games away and clinging on. Fingers crossed, eh?
Subs
GK 30. ARAI Shota (on for OSHIMA 67')
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for SAITO 56')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for MORITA 46')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
My Frontale Man Of The Match
In situations like this I normally would sulkily give it to no-one but instead I’m going to split it three ways between the three people who did a decent job when all around them were doing less than mediocre jobs. So, step forward for your rosettes...
CHINEN Kei, HASEGAWA Tatsuya and ONIKI Toru - Chinen put the ball in the net. The goals weren’t the most beautiful but he was in the right position more often than not and gave us a lifeline. Hasegawa shook things up on the left and that was where all of our opportunities were coming from in the second half. He clicked much better with Nobori than Manabu had and you couldn’t argue with him starting the next game if Abe is still absent. And Oniki, as I said above seemed to do the right things but was let down by the players. I’ve given him plenty of stick recently so it only seems fair that I give him some praise when he seems to make what are in my opinion the right calls. Probably criticised him too much then and am praising him too much now, but you know, aiming for some balance.
Wednesday night saw us back at the Todoroki for our last 16 Emperor’s Cup game against local rivals Shonan Bellmare. We’ve toiled through our previous games in this competition this year and a pretty weird team selection with numerous players out of position contributed to a first half full of more toil. This was effectively a reserve team from front to back. Nara was involved again after his ‘injury’. I use the inverted commas as I suspect it could have been more a case of Oniki flexing his pettiness muscles again. His last appearance was in our loss against Urawa, where I thought he was the only one of our defence who came out of the game with any credit. He always seems to be Oniki’s scapegoat though. Sure there were rumours about him being injured, but none of the sites who talk about these things seemed to think he was. He didn’t look particularly happy last night, cutting a real dejected figure before, during and after the game. The same can be said about Edu, another popular Oniki target, who has probably recently forgotten that he is a footballer, being so far from any match day involvement.
Tasaka was also back, another person who was hung out to dry after one mistake in Super Cup. He was put on the bench against his hometown team Hiroshima last week and then jumped right into the defensive midfield position and the captain’s armband. Not sure if he’s had his position switched again (previously from attacking midfield to right back, now perhaps to defensive midfield), and whilst he certainly didn’t look very comfortable in the middle he did his best. Aside from Tasaka out of position in the middle, we had Hasegawa on the right on his significantly less favoured foot and Suzuki at left back (ditto). It will come as no surprise to find that this apparently random team selection had some problems getting anything going in the first half. We attacked quite a bit, had some half-chances and a lot of possession, but were undermined by confusion over positions and roles. Also, the fact that we were playing with two strikers (Chinen and Akasaki), two wide players and two deep sitting midfielders meant that there was a big area in the middle of the field which nobody really seemed to be sure if they were supposed to be covering or not. Naturally we gave away a weak goal to ramp up the pressure a bit. Shonan weren’t offering much, but a fast break with a ball down the channel past Takeoka who was probably caught a little too far forward left them with an easy cross to the middle of the box, where they had loads of players and our two centre backs were static, leaving them with a simple headed finish. We weren’t passing well and looked wobbly at the back and non existent in the middle of the pitch. Put simply, the first half was total rubbish for us.
Thankfully, the second half brought some hints of normality back to the game. Takeoka was replaced by Morita with Tasaka going to right back. This definitely calmed things down a bit and we took control of the game. Almost immediately we were level and it looked like it might have been through Michael James. It was an own goal, but Michael James was definitely involved stretching out a leg and missing, whilst the player who was clearly fouling him headed into his own net with his eyes closed. Nice delivery from Shimoda! This transformed Michael James as a player. He started to look comfortable on the ball and strong in the tackle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him play so well as he did in the second half. But to be honest, I guess we haven’t seen him play much at all really. Tasaka was also a lot more at home and had a decent second half. Manabu was a constant threat running at their defence and poor Hasegawa was doing the best he could, way out of position, running loads and not quite getting that little bit of luck he needed. He’s another player who can’t be too delighted with the pitch time he’s getting recently. There’s probably a few around in the squad at the moment, and whilst it’s hard to keep everyone happy, I can’t help think that a little bit of rotation might help. Although of course we know that Oniki is not exactly a rotation expert. It wasn’t long till we were ahead and much to the delight of most of the crowd it was through Saito. After missing a total sitter against Tosu it was nice to see him get off the mark, squeezing a powerful shot home from a tight angle off the keeper.
It wasn’t all one way traffic though and Arai had a make a great triple save from some Shonan pressure with the ball ricocheting around the box and Shonan having a shot bounce over off the bar. It’s weird, as probably everyone who’d struggled in the first half redeemed themself in the second, (apart from Takeoka, who’d been taken off). We rounded off the victory with a penalty won and put away by Chinen. Shonan we’re pushing forward for an equaliser so we were finding plenty of space going forward. We probably could have scored more, with Suzuki in particular really looking dangerous after the introduction of Nobori for Hasegawa saw him moved to his preferred right wing position. At this stage I don’t think we had any players playing out of position. What a surprise that we did a bit better! All in all, it was a decent win in a game of two halves. I don’t know how strong Shonan’s starting line up was, but it was more than a match for our random first half selection. When Oniki used our subs to unwind the huge tangled knot of players out of position we did pretty well. You just have to question why he decided to jumble things up in the first place. It points in some way to the unbalanced nature of our squad and you can’t really say anything much has been done to remedy what has looked like a problem since pre-season. We’re still woefully short of cover at the back, particularly given that Oniki’s grudges normally involve defenders. Let’s just hope that we can make it through to the end of the season with no major injuries. In his ‘hero interview’ Saito said something good about us pushing on to win in three competitions now. It was great to hear him say it, but you've got to think that our lack of options in defensive areas will come back to bite us if we do keep progressing on three fronts. Oniki has a lot of thinking to do, as his opening plan for this match was a bit of a disaster. I always bemoan the fact that we have no plan B. This was an attempt at a plan B, but a failed one and I think we’d be better off sticking with plan A and rotating some players if we can manage it. I fear for our squad next year if Oniki just ploughs on as he is. There are a lot of players who don’t look too happy, have reason to be so and must be considering their futures with us. Whilst it’s great to be at the club that are reigning champions, if the extent of your involvement is high-fiving the players leaving the changing room at the start of the match, you might start to wonder if you actually are a footballer at all. And if the whims of your manager are such that the smallest slip-up could propel you miles away from the first team whilst some of your colleagues could kick him up the backside and blast the ball into their own net without fear of any kind of censure it can’t help the relationship between the manager and some of the players.
In the interests of introducing a little variety on here, I’ll skip the usual positives and negatives this time. I actually quite enjoyed the much shorter blog posts I was doing when I wasn't able to go to matches so I'll try to keep things briefer in the future. Probably shorter posts are a lot more readable too! I think I’ve gone a little overboard with the moaning this time, and nobody wants to hear me keep banging on about the same things every week. Although in my defence, we’re having the same issues come up quite often. Instead, I’ll skip straight to saying that next up we have Vegalta Sendai at home in the league on Saturday and after that Gamba away next weekend. Let’s hope we can keep the pressure on Hiroshima who have Cerezo and Kashima (those games sound like a riot of exciting attacking football, eh?). Our next cup action comes the Wednesday after the Gamba game and is away to Kashima in the Levain. Fingers crossed we can pick up some more wins! Go Frontale!
Team
GK 30. ARAI Shota
DF 17. TAKEOKA Yuto
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke (Yellow card 73')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
MF 37. SAITO Manabu
FW 9. AKASAKI Shuhei
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
Subs
GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for HASEGAWA 77')
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for SHIMODA 88')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
DF 23. EDUARDO
MF 25. MORITA Hidemasa (on for TAKEOKA 46')
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
My Frontale Man Of The Match
It’s hard to say anyone really came out of the first half with any credit, apart perhaps from Manabu who was giving it a go. The second half gives me a few options though. Morita coming on changed the game, and whilst he did well as usual, I think the positional reshuffle was more responsible. Tasaka had a good second half, Michael James looked solid and Shimoda’s set pieces gave us real cause for optimism. However, I think I’m going to split it between...
SAITO Manabu & SUZUKI Yuto - Manabu was a constant danger and it was great to see him get his first goal. He offers something we don't really have in our regular starting line up too. And Suzuki did an admirable job at left back, and then was very dangerous going forward when moved to his favoured position. He’s maybe still a little raw, but his forward momentum is a great asset!
We’re back to playing football again. This is a bit of a blessing as I was getting fed up with writing posts about players leaving and I think people were probably getting fed up with me expressing my opinions (mainly negative, naturally!), on the bizarre goings-on at the club. On the other hand it seems that it’s a bit of a shame that the season is lurching back into action as judging on this performance we’re very rusty and only just managed to progress in the Emperor’s Cup against lower league opposition for the second game in a row. It’s certain that this game and the 3-2 against Sony Sendai which bookended the World Cup break were far from our best performances of the season. In fact they probably are vying with the majority of the ACL games and a few clangers in the league for the worst performances of 2018. At least we managed to get the win in these games though, even if it did take a very unwelcome extra time and then penalties in this match. Sorry for taking so long to get this post done. I’m sure plenty of people are having their schedules messed with by the World Cup at the moment and that’s partly my excuse here. The journey back from Mito followed by the World Cup semi final on TV looked a bit challenging even before we went to extra time and penalties. After that, plenty of us were left waiting on Akatsuka station platform for 50 minutes as a huge storm prowled around us, waiting for the optimum time to strike and cause the maximum disruption. It hit as we reached Sanuki station, where we were told that we were not going to be going any further with the station lights going off and on as lightning seemed to be striking very close by and some higher force seemed to be using a giant jet washer to try to dismantle the platform. We made it home just before 2am, my plan of having a nice nap before the England game in tatters, and my Thursday at work looking a bit tricky. Sadly for me, England couldn’t get the extra time and penalties result that Frontale had grasped. I can now say that a second helping of extra time in one 24 hour period is a bit of an ordeal for the spectator, particularly if they are sleep deprived and have a banging headache. This banging headache kept me subdued for the majority of the game. In spite of going through what I think was around eight PET bottles of water and Pocari Sweat, it seems that I still managed to get dehydrated. Because I’m a pasty Brit I guess. Anyway, this is all just an excuse to explain why this post is a little lacking on detail. The terrible performance also contributed to this, but I’m prepared to shoulder some of the blame. I also apologise in advance for the moaning that’s coming up quite soon.
The team for this game was a surprisingly strong one. Particularly given that Mito, who were playing a league game a few days later, put out the reserves. Even though Oshima didn’t get on the pitch during the World Cup, it was no surprise to see him absent. Of course Neto (and Okubo) were also absent, having departed the club in the break. So we started with Morita and Moriya in the defensive midfield positions. Most of the rest of the team was our preferred starting eleven. However, Saito made another start in place of Abe, after disappearing from the matchday squad for a while. And Michael James started alongside Taniguchi which was a bit of a surprise. I’m not aware of any injuries to Nara or Edu, but they weren’t even on the bench. Perhaps they’ve got themselves into Oniki’s bad books again. The sole defender on the bench was Noborizato, if you consider him a defender. Shimoda also appeared on the bench again alongside some more familiar names. It seemed a bit of a weird bench and I think demonstrates how stretched we are in the middle at the back at the moment. A couple of injuries to a centre back and a defensive midfielder would put us in a very difficult situation with regards to cover. No sign of any new players coming though, and presumably they'd be short attacking midfielders if they do appear. We did start the game fairly well though, scoring an early goal through Taniguchi, which seemed to suggest that maybe we’d overdone it a bit with the first teamers. No worries though about us going on to comfortably sew the game up with a Mito morale sapping high goalscoring first half. We were mediocre at best, making more chances than them, but not really threatening to actually put them away, aside from Ienaga hitting the bar. It was quite comfortable though. Mito weren’t causing us many problems and apart from a bit of sloppiness in possession at times, things looked fairly safe. Elsinho was having a good game in defence and attack, but no-one else was really standing out. Well, actually Taniguchi was, as he was a lot less composed than usual and was having a bit of a mare, but somehow getting away with it. Saito didn’t seem to be getting much of the ball and still seems to be struggling to find his way into the Frontale system at the moment. Guess the limited pitch time isn’t helping, but you’d have to say that his first brief substitute appearance against Yokohama is still the best he’s played for us so far. Michael James was doing alright, but still looks a bit like he has an error in him waiting to happen at any time. His limited pitch time presumably also contributes to this. You probably wouldn’t have picked it as being J1 versus J2 though as it looked more like two similarly sloppy teams playing out a meaningless end of season game with nothing at stake. So far, so mediocre.
I’m not going to write much about the second half as it was abysmal. We didn’t appear to have much desire to try to score again, which inevitably would come back to haunt us in the 93rd minute when we conceded and plenty of people’s journey home was thrown into turmoil. The main thing that was clear from the second half and extra time was the mess that the bench was. Hasegawa replaced Saito. Fair enough, Hasegawa deserves a chance, but Saito was getting no service and is unlikely to be able to find some form if he is constantly being hauled off or not even put on the bench. He is after all our big signing this year, but is another one who is suffering from 90% of our squad wanting to play in the same few positions on the pitch. Chinen on for Kobayashi was fair enough too, but once again Chinen is getting the ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ thing from Oniki, who apparently thinks he will solve all of our problems from the bench, but doesn’t give him a chance to do so for more than 45 minutes as a starter. The next sub was Shimoda on for Moriya. All of the changes in this game were like for likes, which makes a change from the usual way Oniki does subs. And I suppose it’s better than the somewhat random changes he makes sometimes, but you couldn’t really say any of them had much effect on the game. And I wonder if once again we could do with a plan B which consists of more than just making subs apparently decided on before the match. We were a lot less effective going forward in the second half with Mito having three times as many chances as us and Sung-Ryong had to make quite a few saves from decent Mito chances. Maybe the writing was on the wall, but it was a bit harsh on them leaving it until the 93rd minute to get their equaliser. It was nothing less than we deserved though. We looked a bit shaky at the back and kind of clueless going forward. I don’t want to suggest there is a morale problem in the squad, but they didn’t really seem up for it. The recent departures can’t have failed to cause some kind of upheaval though.
So, on to extra time, which turned out to be even worse than the second half. It was also a little weird as the drums and megaphones were put away by both teams’ fans. I guess this was perhaps something to do with the circling thunderstorms, but it certainly made for a disjointed lot of singing with the spread of fans meaning that songs quickly degenerating into chaos, out of time and sounding like they were being run through a big reverb unit. We had a few chances, one very nice one which Elsinho unfortunately put just wide. But they did too. Mito were being a bit more physical and we couldn’t cope with it. Our extra time extra sub showed up the crazy bench selection with Nobori coming on for Morita who seemed to have taken a knock. Our centre back pairing became Kurumaya and Michael James and Taniguchi pushed up alongside Shimoda. How we had gone from almost the regular starting eleven to this line up, with a couple of totally unfamiliar pairings at the back seemed almost impossible using only four subs. So it’s no surprise that we looked hopeless to be honest and at stages looked like we wanted to hang on and take it to penalties. Maybe we did, as we proved pretty good at them, scoring four out of four. Penalties are taken in the ABBA format in this competition, which makes it slightly confusing to work out what’s going on, but fortunately they sent one over the bar and hit the bar with another whilst we put ours away fairly comfortably, so it was pretty clear we’d won. But we’d been taken to penalties by a J2 team’s reserves. Yeah, maybe we’re rusty, but it’d be a shame if we have used the World Cup break to reset to our usual crappy start of the season form. Remember, it was supposed to be FC Tokyo and Sanfrecce who were disrupted out of their good form by this break and ACL teams were supposed to get back into the groove of things. Let’s hope this was a blip, but 120 minutes in pretty sticky conditions isn’t exactly what you’d want to kick off the second half of the season.
I’m not going to talk about positives and negatives in this game as it’s hard to find anything particularly positive. Sure, we’re though to the next round, but we look a mess and this was for the most part the regular starting eleven playing. I’ve been losing my mind a bit recently criticising Oniki and I don’t think it’s doing anyone any good, least of all me. I am deeply worried about him as our manager, particularly from a team morale point of view. I don’t think he’s a nasty person, but he doesn’t seem to have any awareness of the consequences of his actions on the players’ morale. I have no idea why we didn’t have Nara or Edu on the bench. We’re leaving ourselves very short in important areas and it’s almost impossible to understand the thinking behind it. We were lucky in a way that we had this game, as if our first game back was the away game against Consadole, I think we might have got smashed. I’m not sure we won’t do when we go there next Wednesday. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a real sense of impending doom at the moment. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the fan event and thought that going to games again would pull me out of my malaise, but this isn’t exactly what I was hoping for. I get the sense that people are getting fed up with me moaning about Oniki so I’m going to try to stop doing that so much, but I’m really worried. I feel like we’re in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean and our leader has just decided to start a fire with the oars in the bottom of the boat. This is stressing me out!
Next up we return to league action away against Consadole Sapporo on Wednesday. Miyoshi won’t be playing as he’s not allowed to, but maybe he’ll come out and give us a little bow like Itakura did. Let’s hope we can be a bit more convincing than we were in this game. After that we’re back at Todoroki the following Sunday against V-Varen Nagasaki. Six points please from those two games and then you can all call me a complete idiot.
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro
MF 25. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
MF 37. SAITO Manabu
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
Subs
GK 30. ARAI Shota
MF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for MORITA 98')
FW 8. ABE Hiroyuki
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for SAITO 58')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
(on for KOBAYASHI 70')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
(on for MORIYA 83')
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Let's not beat about the bush on this, plenty of players were pretty ordinary and anonymous at best. In spite of him missing a good chance for us to avoid penalties and maybe get home at a more reasonable time it has to probably go to...
Firstly, apologies for the lateness of this post. I’ve managed to fill the World Cup break with a few too many time-consuming non-football events and last week was a particularly bad but enjoyable cluster of them. The lateness of this post also has contributed a little to its vagueness. Usually I make do with a few notes, replays of the goals and significant events and my memories. Sadly this time due to the extra time between the game and me writing this, the memory part has faded a little. So, this will probably be a bit more general than usual. Oh, and there's a distinct lack of photos. Blame the rain maybe.
So, our first Emperor’s Cup game of 2018 and it was against Sony Sendai who it seemed wouldn’t put up too much of a fight, but actually gave us a bit of a scare, taking a two goal lead before we managed to grab a victory late on in the game. It was a rainy evening in Kawasaki and we named another slightly bizarre team. Given the long break and the apparent quality of the opposition you would have thought we’d go with a second string selection and send the first teamers away on holiday, but once again Oniki surprised, with quite a few first team regulars, whilst at the same time handing the crucial Kengo role to Wakizaka, who’s previously only had a brief appearance as a substitute. Once again, Neto was nowhere to be seen. There are rumours about him going to Nagoya which would be a huge loss for us. He apparently has a good relationship with Kazama and you’ve got to imagine doesn’t get on quite so well with Oniki, who seems to only begrudgingly include him and often leaves him out for the hugely promising but still pretty green Morita. If you’re reading this Neto, (as if...), please don’t leave! I would also have thought this would have been a good chance to give Saito some more pitch time. Perhaps he was rushed back a bit too soon, but you’d have to say that this would have been a decent opportunity for him to get more into the swing of things and perhaps even get his first Frontale goal. It’s good though for Sony Sendai that they were able to line up against some big names, as I’m sure that’s what they would have been hoping for. Looking back it’s easy to say, but I did question Oniki’s thinking at the time. It looked a bit like a hint of continuity with just enough unfamiliarity to make things a bit of a mess. Presumably during regular training, a lot of these players are on opposing teams, as whenever I’ve been to watch it, we usually seem to pretty much play the next game's starting eleven against the rest of the players. This weird selection also looked like it might be a mistake when Taniguchi went down with an early injury. This is exactly the kind of game where we don’t need to be losing an important player to a stupid injury. Especially at centre back where we’ve been short since the start of the season. Oniki always seems to have a grudge against at least one of the four we have, freezing them out for the smallest mistake whilst leaving the bigger names in the squad alone whatever they do.
Anyway enough about the selection and a little about the game. Right from the start it was clear to see that unsurprisingly, we were technically quite a bit better than them. We were moving the ball around nicely and had a couple of decent early chances, one from Wakizaka which went agonisingly just wide. Sony Sendai seemed pretty up for giving us a real game, running all over the pitch and closing us down. They were playing in a way that we’ve rarely seen recently, trying to play attacking football with a lot of energy, rather than sitting back and hitting the ball long for quick counter attacks. And they took the lead. It was pretty sloppy stuff from us with Edu missing a tackle and Kurumaya absolutely nowhere and then the cross missed by Taniguchi. Unsurprisingly, this goal seemed to shake us quite a bit. It was certainly unexpected. Equally unexpected was the fact that they didn’t sit back after scoring and were still coming at us. 15 minutes later they scored again and this threw us into a real mess. This time a long Taniguchi cross-field ball was seized on by a Sony Sendai player who Kurumaya seemed completely unaware of. Arai could have done better with the shot too. We’d been struggling a little at the back, Kurumaya was having a dodgy evening, along with the rest of the back four to be honest. Oniki responded to these defensive problems by subbing Wakizaka. Way to give him some confidence on his first start, Oniki! Not sure why he couldn’t wait till half time, especially to change something up front, given that the problems were mainly at the back. To be honest, it was just baffling and another example of Oniki apparently being completely unaware of any kind of mental effect this kind of substitution might have. Someone who is probably all too aware of that is Chinen, who was the player who came on. He’s really experienced Oniki’s fickle moods recently, going from starting member to dropping out right of the squad on a weekly basis. The change moved Ienaga into the Kengo role and Abe out on to the right, out of position again, (great work again Oniki). I really have started to wonder if he actually thinks these substitutions through or just picks the names he fancies swapping. We were a bit of a mess after the first goal but more of a mess after the weird sub. There was some booing at half time which is pretty unusual for us, and whilst I don’t agree with booing your own team, particularly during the match, I can totally understand why people felt the way they did. I was still fairly confident we’d be ok, but the substitution made me wonder if we were on some kind of self sabotaging mission in the cups this year. Could probably have said the same about our performances in a few of the league games too though.
The second half started much the way the first had finished. Sony Sendai still seemed to have more players than us, being all over the pitch, pressuring us everywhere. Presumably they’d tire at some stage, but we really needed to get back into the game quickly if we wanted to not be on the end of a giant killing. Thankfully Hasegawa put us back on track fairly early in the second half. It was the second decent headed chance he’d had in the game and this one he put away. Another lovely cross from Ienaga. We were on the road back to some kind of respectability. Presumably not wanting to let any momentum build, Oniki made another substitution shortly afterwards. Nobori was the one coming on, which made sense as Kurumaya was really not at the races. Perhaps after his last storming appearance showing Nishino what he was missing, he’d now retreated into disappointment about not going to the World Cup and consequently lethargy. I joked that he’d probably instead remove Edu and put Kurumaya in the middle. I was astounded to see him do exactly that. Clearly Oniki has a big problem with Edu. After the game he commented he was frustrated that all of our attacks were breaking down at Edu and he couldn’t stand watching it anymore. Perhaps he had seen something I had not noticed in the slightest but I’m not even sure our centre back is really supposed to be building attacks. I thought they were supposed to do the defending. We did start to get something going though, but I think this was mainly due to Nobori being on the pitch rather than Edu being off it. Nobori and Hasegawa we’re combining well down the left and we were making good chances. Our second goal was a well placed shot from Elsinho after Ienaga had a shot blocked. We had 25 minutes to try to complete the turnaround. They were reduced to trying long shots but to be honest, they’d scored from one of them in the first half, so we couldn’t be too complacent. Chinen was having a good game. He definitely gives us a bit of clout up front and had a lovely overhead attempt which unfortunately didn’t go in. Abe also slammed a shot off the post. The winner came worryingly close to the end for us and heart-breakingly close to the end for them. It was another well placed finish from Ienaga after some nice work from Suzuki who had replaced Abe in what was the only rational substitution we’d made all evening. While I celebrated it wildly as if we’d just staged a cracking comeback in the cup final, I did feel for Sony Sendai. They’d done a great job against us but just ran out of steam at the end. They’d played much better football than some of our J1 rivals (not necessarily technically, but certainly aesthetically). We were through to the next round where we’ll play Mito Hollyhock away. I’m looking forward to a trip out there to tick off a new ground.
I’ll speed through some brief positives and negatives. Positives, we’re through and scored some nice goals. Negatives, we made really hard work of it. Some of our big name players seemed to have their mind elsewhere and put in limp performances. But the big one has to be Oniki again. The first two substitutions seemed a bit illogical, changing an attacker when the defence was all over the place and a defender when we were trying to push on a bit. Hopefully he hasn’t done any lasting psychological damage to Wakizaka, who by no means deserved to be subbed after 38 minutes. And it doesn’t seem very professional to so directly point the finger at Edu, particularly when it relates to an attacking problem. With substitutions, he seems to get an idea in his head and go ahead with it without any really thought as to how it might affect the team as a whole and seems happy to persist with playing players out of position in order to make some kind of change that only he feels is necessary. I don’t know if it’s just me who feels like this, but he just doesn’t seem like he completely knows what he’s doing and seems keen to point the finger at individuals whilst being oblivious to any of his own mistakes. As I said on twitter after this game, we won this game in spite of our manager, rather than because of him. I think you could say the same about quite a few of our results this year too.
Next up we have the next round of the cup away to Mito Hollyhock on July 11th. After that we’re back in league action, away to Consadole Sapporo the following Wednesday. In between now and then we have the World Cup. I have to admit I’m finding it a bit hard to get as excited as I usually do about it though. Oh, and I’ll put up some mid-season posts soon.
Team
GK 30. ARAI Shota
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 23. EDUARDO
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro
MF 25. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 28. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
FW 8. ABE Hiroyuki
Subs
GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke
MF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for EDUARDO 59')
FW 9. AKASAKI
DF 17. TAKEOKA Yuto
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
(on for WAKIZAKA 38')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
(on for ABE 86')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Many more average and bad performances than good ones in this game to be honest. Morita did a decent job, Ienaga was his usual excellent self, Chinen is regaining some confidence and Abe toiled away out of position for a large portion of the match. Just feel like it should go to…
HASEGAWA Tatsuya - Nice finish for his goal, and showed what problems he can cause the opposition when he’s involved in a game. Keep up the good work!
