Vs Kashima Antlers (home) 19/9/26 J League match 8

 

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 3 Ashima Kantlers

Damn I hate Kashima. I won’t say that my Silver Week is ruined, but this definitely felt more like a loss, even though some people might have been elated by the late equaliser. Of course after they lost three league games in a row, it always looked like playing us was the perfect opportunity for Kashima to bounce back. So I suppose we can be happy that we at least ruined that for them. But goddam it, they are shit. And goddam it, they seem to keep getting away with being shit. With over a week off, (and quite a bit longer than that if you only consider league games), I’ve got the perfect opportunity to spend a long time writing a carefully crafted blog post. At the same time, I want to forget this match as quickly as possible so you’ll have to make do with the usual thrown together crap, which this time will be chock full of moaning about scummy Kashima and the useless referee and will only briefly talk about us.

Us - 

We threw away a lead again. I guess it goes without saying really as it seems like it’s something that we do so often that you might imagine it’s a contractual obligation. When the chairman was shopping around the club’s soul, he really should have held out for better terms. I was astonished to see that Yamamoto was the Man of the Match on Flashscore. Perhaps it was recency bias, but I thought he’d had a bit of a dodgy game, misplacing pass after pass, until he put in the admittedly great cross for our 90+7 minute goal. (Amusingly the match stats make him our best passer, so there is a high likeliness that I am talking out of my backside here. But Yamamoto did make one particular poor attempt at scoring which like the Mochiyama swing and a miss is lingering in my memory…). At the back, Miura, perhaps because he knew Sasaki was on the right so was less likely to take his spot, put in a classically shit Miura performance, going missing for most of Kashima’s good chances. The fact is though, that we totally dominated this game and should have won easily. I could probably list all the easy chances we missed, (sometimes actually missing the ball completely), but as that would require me watching the game back again, I won’t do it. If you score three times in a match and don’t win, it’s a bit of a problem. But then if you look at the bench it becomes clear that we’re just about hanging in there when it comes to putting together match day squads. Maybe we thought it would be useful to have two centre backs on the bench in case we decided to go to a back six at some stage of the match. Just the one striker because… we don’t have anyone else. And we didn’t even use all of our subs. And three out of four of them were made with less than ten minutes of the game left. (As an aside, Derik looked a lot fitter and lasted 84 minutes. Probably could have been changed a bit earlier though as he looked cooked midway through the second half). How can we have so few options so early in the season? So, considering all of this, I probably should be happy with the result. But I’m not, as it pissed me off something rotten. Talking of rottenness, let’s move on to the opposition and the ref.

Them and the ref - 

It’s not my usual way to lump these two together but on this occasion I think it makes perfect sense as they seemed to be working in tandem, in perfect harmony. If the ref Nakamura wasn’t wearing his YUMA shirt under his ref’s shirt he definitely had put it out ready for hm to sign after the game. His affection for Kashima’s be-nappied whinger in chief was clear from the start of the game and he even went as far as to display this affection publicly when he gave him a little bit of a massage after Suzuki had filled his diaper and was having a little cry on the floor after an assault on Brodersen didn’t get what he thought was in order, the dissolution of Kawasaki Frontale and Kawasaki city as a whole. Everyone knows Suzuki is a moaner, a fouler, a cheat and a diver, which makes it all the more surprising that refs are happy with letting him do what he wants, including screaming in the officials’ faces. I’m not sure if Suzuki’s bright pink hue was a result of him spending too long on the sun bed or whether he’s just become a full on gammon now. He certainly likes to whinge like a gammon. There is no doubt in my mind that Suzuki did enough to get at least a couple of yellow cards but, surprise surprise, he didn’t get booked at all. And instead was basically given free rein to go around kicking people all over the pitch. It was on one of these ridiculous occasions, where a clear piece of Suzuki fouling didn’t get even half the punishment that it deserved, that Oniki lost his rag and got booked. There must be something in the water in Kashima as they all seem so aggro. Maybe there’s a meth lab at the reservoir that supplies the drinking water for the area where the players and staff live. (Yes, I’ve just googled chemicals that make people angry). Although I guess they probably don’t live in Kashima, right? Why would you if you had any kind of other option? At the end of the match when Ito got booked, (for what, who knows. Perhaps being a Frontale player?), some bearded twat on the Kashima bench seemed to be attempting to start a fight. Obviously no point in punishing him though, right? Because he’s one of the guys in red. The only meaningful yellow he gave one of their team was for Kunto Misao. And let’s be honest, he should, (and normally does), get an automatic red just for being his usual dickhead self. None of the other horrendous fouls they committed was deemed worthy of a card. But at the same time Nakamura was flinging them around to our players for anything. I didn’t make that many notes during the game but looking back at them the descriptor ‘atrocious’ is used for the ref on multiple occasions. So let’s just say it one more time here. NAKAMURA IS ATROCIOUS. The yellow card for Derik was a joke and the free kick the twat gave Kashima lead directly to their first gaol. Nakamura, do one.

The Kashima twattery was not just confined to the team and the staff though. As you’d expect, their fans are also idiots. Before the match the mere mention of ‘Kawasaki Frontale supporters’ was enough to send them into a chorus of boos. Much like the apparently ‘great’ fans of Urawa, they love a boo. I think it might say something about how they’re feeling at the moment. Triggered by a mention of the opposition? Feeling maybe a bit insecure? Three losses in a row and then a draw against a team whose results are basically randomly assigned from week to week? They are right to feel worried. Their team is awful and hopefully their bad run of results will continue for the rest of the year. Actually the rest of the century. They’ve been getting away with being shit and still somehow winning for too long. I think we’d all enjoy seeing some chickens coming home to roost. To everyone involved in the club from the first team through the reserves and youth set up, to the staff, board and right up to the supporters, fuck off the lot of you. 


Hmmm. A draw. The late equaliser was fun at the time, but sitting in the pub made me pretty miserable as once again we’d messed up. We had so many chances to win the game. And we had plenty of chances to stop them scoring. Certainly we weren’t helped by the ref, but ultimately we shit the bed again. After the final whistle as the Kashima players got a bit of a booing from their fans (of course they did. Kashima fans probably boo their children’s first steps), for some reason our fans kept singing. They were still singing as I left the stadium after the players had come to the supporters section and done their little bow. Whilst I don’t think we should be booing our team, being so delighted by a late equaliser in a game we should have clearly won does make us look a bit simple. You could say we appreciate the effort the players put in. But such a joyous response at the end of the game feels a bit like being delighted you shat all over the toilet floor. Some feeling like, ok, you didn’t do it in the actual toilet, but at least you managed to not soil yourself in the living room. When the only satisfaction you can draw from a result is the slight pleasure of knowing that the opposition fans are disappointed, there’s probably not that much to celebrate in reality. But I suppose it could have been worse. Next up, Kumamoto away in the Levain Cup on the 29th. This will be the first game I miss this season. To be honest, maybe the break might be good for me. I don’t think we’re shit, but I am getting a bit fed up with our relentless pursuit of randomness and inconsistency.

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO (Yellow card 90+1') 
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (Yellow card 37') 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 90+8') 
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 97. DERIK LACERDA (Yellow card 43') 

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 86')  
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke (on for DERIK LACERDA 84')
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto 
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
FW 34. OSA Ryuki (on for MARCINHO 67')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for ITO 86')

Man of the match

 

It’s a bit weird, considering the result, but I’m actually going to give this out today. One player did a great job after a few dodgy performances earlier in the season, and the other really got involved. So I’m giving it to…

SASAKI Asahi & ITO Tatsuya - The former kept Yuma Suzuki quiet (well, in footballing terms, of course he didn’t shut up moaning for the whole game), and the latter scored a lovely goal, gave 100% effort and was involved in most of the good things we did. Also, if Ito's mystery yellow card was for winding up the Kashima bench, extra kudos to him!

Goals

LEO CEARA (Kashima) 44' 0-1
MARCINHO (Frontale) 45+4' 1-1
ITO (Frontale) 54' 2-1
LEO CEARA (Kashima) 67' 2-2
MATSUMURA (Kashima) 83' 2-3
PEDRO ROMANO (Frontale) 90+7' 3-3

 

Highlights

  
 

Vs Shimizu S Pulse (kind of home) 6/9/26 J League match 6

 

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 1 Shimizu S Pulse

This game saw us back at the (mostly) cursed (for us) National Stadium. It’s never a particularly fun experience to watch Frontale there, particularly from behind the goal, about 3km from the pitch.  Add to this our results there in league games and you have a perfect misery cocktail. But somehow on this occasion we managed to actually get the job done. Although let’s be honest, there were numerous times in the match and plenty of occasions where it looked like we were going to mess it up again, exactly like we tend to do most weeks this season. There is really something a bit shitty about having games at the National Stadium. And it’s not just for the reasons I mentioned above. Unlike with clubs like Kashima, the majority of whose fans almost certainly live closer to the National Stadium than they do to Kashima, it seems a bit stupid for clubs to make the fans who go to their home games basically do an away trip. Admittedly, it’s closer to where I live than Todoroki is, (before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, Todoroki is the nearest home stadium to where I live so I do support my local team), but I still can’t really get on board with the whole “exciting experience” thing that it seems to be sold as. But all of this is basically a preamble to me saying that I understand that National Stadium games are probably a prerequisite for us at the moment. With the redevelopment of Todoroki happening next season we need somewhere to play, and I believe that using the stadium a few times is part of us showing good will and therefore being able to use it when we can’t use Todoroki. Perhaps people looking at the attendance for this match will think it was a disaster as we only got a bit over 37000 in. I should say though that the weather was horrible, and I presume that this knocked out a significant number of the free ticket crowd whose presence usually pads out the Kokuristu attendance figures. Anyway, last time we played a league game here we got absolutely hammered by YFM. Thankfully we managed to avoid a similar fate on this occasion and blimey, we actually won at the Kokuritsu in J1! As I don’t really know what to say about this match, I won’t use the semi-regular headings and will just lump everything together in a stream of consciousness splurge, perfect to make it as unreadable as possible, right?

Hasebe rotated for this match! I don’t know why he did this. And I don’t know why he changed the defence and strikers so much but left the midfield entirely intact. Of course, up front we don’t really have many options as I mentioned in the last post. On this occasion we went with Mochiyama which I think makes sense as Derik seems to get knackered quite quickly after he enters the pitch, so it probably makes more sense to use him as a sub rather than as a starter. Honma has been knocking in goals for fun for his university team, but unfortunately for us, this means he has been unavailable for us. Hopefully he’ll be able to provide us with another option soon. But you can’t really argue with Mochiyama starting, particularly as he scored after 23 seconds. It was a lovely goal and for the majority of the game it looked like it might be our only successful attack. I was a bit surprised when Hasebe took him off at half time, but I suppose when you’ve only got two (semi) fit strikers it might make sense to not overstretch either of them. At the back he went with a centre back pairing of Maruyama and Uremovic, which was a bit of a surprise. I think they did pretty well though. Well, apart from the one occasion where they both went for the same header and took each other out. I’ve never noticed Uremovic doing this before and maybe it was a tactic for this match, but I quite liked the fact that for every Shimizu long goal kick he would come charging out of defence towards the ball and more often than not bonk it forward with a high speed header. Konno more than justified his spot on the right I think. He was fouled for the red card, and also for the other red card that probably should have been given. (More on that later). He also got changed at half time but I wonder if it was more to do with the fact that he’d been absolutely smashed to pieces by Shimizu clogging. So that’s the non-regular-§starter business, I guess. So on to our play… I dunno, the same as usual really. Lots of possession, not many actual attacks, or at least attacks that were in any way likely to lead to an actual goal. But it did feel like we were very much on top… and would probably throw away another lead and regret not scoring more.

And we did. At least the first part. And at least for a while. You can’t argue with the penalty. And shockingly, I don’t think I even did argue about the penalty in the stadium, and I make it a matter of principle to argue with pretty much every decision these awful referees give. It was a shame as, you know, it would be nice to get a clean sheet sooner or later, right? We can only dream. Aside from the penalty, we dealt pretty well with everything Shimizu threw at us. Brodersen made some good saves. We hit the post, again. Before we managed to take the lead for the second time there was a really worrying panic that looked to be spreading through the team. You could see a lot of people getting frustrated and moaning at each other. Clearly and understandably confidence amongst the players is around the same level as it is amongst the fans. (I’m presuming everyone feels the same way as I do, which is a massive reach given how happy clappy a lot of our fans are, but definitely some people seem to feel the same way as I do). But thankfully, in spite of the efforts of the referee, we managed to score a second and then miraculously a third, making it a somewhat comfortable win in the end. We shouldn’t forget though that we played for about an hour against 10 men and even then managed to concede before we could extend our lead. One final point in this section before I go on to absolutely bitch about another predictably atrocious referee. Our second goal was absolutely amazing and everyone should watch a replay of it as it had everything. I could try to explain it but I think it’s just easier to watch the replay, but make sure you see the bit where Uremovic gets kicked in the face by a tumbling Shimizu player, fallsl to the floor clutching his face and as he does, kicks the ball (intentionally or not, who knows…) perfectly to Derik. It’s been referred to online as an ‘Ita ita through pass’ which I think is just perfect. Shimizu complained about the goal. I’ve got no idea what they were complaining about as it was clearly not offside. But even so we had a lengthy VAR delay, and then the goal was given. Then back for some more VAR to check for a possible red card. For whom, well it seems that no-one knew. And even the commentary when I watched it back didn’t know either. The kick in the face? The annoyed reaction from someone who got kicked in the face? Brodersen appearing and absolutely losing his shit? All in all, completely confusing and a perfect encapsulation of a useless officiating performance. 

Ah Jumpei Iida. As I never tire of shouting from the stands when he’s in charge of one of our games ‘FUCK OFF JUMPEI!”.  I wasn’t sure whether I should be pleased to see him in charge as at least we could be sure that we’d be having a J League refereeing performance, instead of the random factor of a guest ref that we had for our previous two league games. And thankfully it wasn’t the awful Sutani or Mikuriya (I could name plenty more, but those two are in my recent memory). But don’t get excited it was the eternally hopeless Jumpei whose position as one of the more senior refs in the league can only be related to his age, and absolutely not to his abilities. I think part of the reason this season is so wild for us is that you never know what kind of ref you’re going to get from week to week. Well apart from it being a crap one. You just can’t be sure about the way in which they will be crap. But one things for sure, with Jumpei you always know you’re going to get all round incompetence. And we got it in spades. Add to this a guy on VAR who we’ve never had for a match, (so clearly a less ‘experienced’ ref), and you know you’re in for a shocker. I reckon Shimizu could have had three players sent off, so I suppose we should be grateful that they got at least one of the red cards. The first challenge on Konno that only warranted a yellow according to Iida looked bad to me. The red card was so blatant so it was a surprise that we needed a VAR review. But it seemed to be that VAR in this match was used like a new toy or a paid service that they were determined to make sure they got their money’s worth to cover the monthly subscription. One time I was very happy we had VAR, (and that’s something I VERY rarely say), was when Iida gave a horrendously clear and obvious corner / goal kick decision the wrong way, much to the disbelief of the players and the crowd. He was overruled by VAR, and fair to him put his hands up to apologise, but then that appeared to send him spiraling, giving each subsequent decision to make up for the previous one. “Oh, I made a stupid mistake here, I’ll even things up with this one. Oh that was a bit stupid, I’ll even things up with the next one…” etc. The first half ended with another insane decision when Ryo Germaine, Frontale tormenter when he was at Iwata, went down, apparently being taken out by a sniper in the third tier and ever un reliable Iida gave a free kick against Maruyama. Seriously, there were so many bad decisions in this game that I think people close to Iida might be considering staging an intervention. “Put down the whistle and slowly step away from it. It’s ok, you’re safe here. Don’t worry about that last clearly incorrect decision you made. No one’s going to shout “FUCK OFF JUMPEI!” at you. Well apart from Neil maybe, but he’s clearly an idiot”. In the second half he wasn’t bothered about a clear backpass, waving it away. But he was bothered about booking Marcinho either for a dive in the box, which he immediately got up after so clearly wasn’t claiming anything, (I believe the commentator said it couldn’t be simulation if there is any contact, but maybe I misunderstood  him or misunderstand the rule) or for a fair tackle immediately afterwards. He also gave a nonsense free kick against Derik who took the ball cleanly and clearly later on. I’m sure it’s not intentional, but plenty of J League refs do seem to give more decisions against foreign players. Is it just me who thinks this? Anyway, all of this is to say that Iida was hopeless in the way that Iida is always hopeless. I was delighted to get some back up for once from other people in the crowd who also were pretty disgusted by both his announcement before the game and his general uselessness. 

I’ve realised I’ve got to the end here and haven’t even mentioned Shimizu really. It was always going to be tough for them after going down to ten. They brought a decent amount of fans on a horrible rainy day to a not very good stadium for football. Regular readers will know that I don’t have anything against Shimizu really, so I have no interest in saying nasty things about them. So this paragraph is kind of pointless.

Next up Mito away next weekend. No midweek game makes it a bit confusing why Hasebe rotated so much, but given that we won, I don’t think anyone can say it was a mistake. After that we’ve got Kashima at home the following weekend. So an Ibaraki double header, one home and one away, and thankfully the Kashima game is at home. I’m not going to Kashima away this year because I’ve decided to stop doing things that are basically masochism. If you offered me three points from these next two games I’d bite your hand off for a loss at Mito and a win at home against Kashima, but I guess things don’t really work out that the way they would if there was any kind of justice in the world. As evidenced by us losing to scummy Machida. Although I suppose if you look at the form table for the last two games, Mito is by far the tougher game. 😉 Fingers crossed for six points, but I’d definitely take none and then three!

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya 
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for SASAKI 82')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for TACHIBANADA 73')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So 
MF 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 72') (on for KONNO 46')
MF 25. YAMAICHI Shuto (on for ITO 90+3')
FW 97. DERIK LACERDA (on for MOCHIYAMA 46')

Man of the match

Not sure who to give this to. Konno did well in the first half but got taken off. Plenty of people were alright, but I’m not the kind of person who wants to give this out to the least bad player. If no-one stands out as better than the rest, no-one feels fairer. But we did win, and one player played an important part in making this happen, so I’ll give it to…

MARCINHO - only played a half, but got more goals than anyone else in the stadium and if you don’t put even the simple chances in, you don’t win games. As we are well aware of this season. Also I like his Val La dance.

Goals

MOCHIYAMA (Frontale) 1' 1-0
OH (Shimizu) 68' PEN 1-1
MARCINHO (Frontale) 77' 2-1
MARCINHO (Frontale) 90' 3-1

 

Highlights

 

Vs JEF United (home) 29/8/26 J League match 4

 

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 2 JEF United

Still undefeated! And by god we’ve only gone and won a match! This was a fun game to watch. Well the first half was anyway. The second was a bit of a snooze fest. It’s great to finally get a win and hopefully this will give everyone a bit more confidence. We’ve got another game fast approaching so I’ll keep this relatively brief.

It’s interesting to see that once again we have Yahiro Hasebe in charge of the team. Much like when Hasebe joined, in this match we seemed to be playing with the goal of scoring as many as possible and not worrying too much about conceding as long as we kept scoring. Of course this all changed in the second half but I guess that was to be expected. The early injury to Romanic was a bit of a weird one. I didn’t know what had happened at the time and checking the coverage hasn’t helped me get any closer to knowing. Also there doesn’t seem to have been anything mentioned in any post match comments. But then again, I haven’t read everything. So on came Derik. I wondered if I had ruined his Frontale career before it had started by buying his towel on Wednesday. I can’t really explain why I chose him, I do these kind of things on vibes mainly. On Wednesday he assisted, (admittedly after missing a sitter), and when he was called on unexpectedly early, I wondered if he’d be able to do the business again, this time in a league game. One goal and two assists suggests that he can. He did have to be subbed later on which suggests that maybe he’s not completely up to speed yet. But he did a good job so well done to him. Sasaki had a bit of a mare, particularly with their first goal. He’s maybe not totally fit either but you can’t really use that to explain the first goal which was just totally unbelievable for such a usually reliable player. It was interesting to see Hasebe switch Yamahara and Sasaki around after their second goal. I thought it worked pretty well. After the switch Yamahara looked like he’d just removed a pair of really tight shoes that he’d been wearing since his transfer. Absolute relief and a new found freedom! Hasebe said that both of them can play on either side, but I wonder if we might see Yamahara spending more time on the left in the future. After all, that is where he’s played for most of his career. That does cause a problem as we have Miura in that spot. But then again when Miura came on in this game he was played on the left wing, which might work I guess, particularly as Miyagi is injured for six months (I think it was six months…). Some things for Hasebe to think about, I guess.

I don’t have much to say about JEF. They brought lots of fans so credit to them for that. Erison was back at Todoroki and surprisingly didn’t score. Normally ex-players always seem to do that. (Issaka Zain last time, I think. He wasn’t in the matchday squad this time round). I hope they can sort themselves out a bit as I’d like to see them survive. The fact that we scored four times against them suggests that they have quite a bit to fix at the moment. The ref was from Germany and I don’t have much to say about him either. I was pleased he dished out a yellow card for a dive though. Definitely would like to see more J League refs do that. Maybe they aren’t aware of the law. So this seems to be a blog post very low on whinges. Which really makes a change.

So we won! But let’s not get carried away. Three of our four games have been against teams who have looked like they might be relegation contenders. And we’ve only managed to beat one of them. I wonder if the reason we’ve drawn so many games is because we were denied the… thrill… of draws in the half season so wanted to get that feeling back again. I definitely prefer winning though. Whether that will continue on Wednesday is another matter. I feel like we definitely owe Machida a beating. But to be honest this feeling is based mainly on the fact that I really don’t like them. It will be interesting to see if the Machida wannabe bad boy fans will be allowed to attend on a school night. Also I wonder if those shirtless medieval style centre circle flag wavers will be there. The whole Machida away experience has been quite weird in recent years. I suspect the crowd will be quite small which will be a very welcome thing as it might make the shuttle bus situation better. I don’t particularly want to be stuck up the mini mountain till midnight, waiting for all the people who’ve paid money to jump queue for the shuttle bus. Fingers crossed we’ll have something to enjoy and celebrate whilst we wait. 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 13') 
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for MARCINHO 57')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for ITO 59')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAHARA 83')
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi (on for PEDRO ROMANO 83')
FW 36. HONMA Rin (Yellow card 87')  (on for DERIK LACERDA 57')
FW 97. DERIK LACERDA (on for ROMANIC 6')

Man of the match

I don’t particularly like to go with the same person as they do in the stadium but on this occasion I also think it has to go to…



DERIK LACERDA - One goal and two assists. Nothing else to say really.

Goals

DERIK LACERDA (Frontale) 10' 1-0
TANAKA (JEF) 26' 1-1
ITO (Frontale) 37' 2-1
TANAKA (JEF) 38' 2-2
MARCINHO (Frontale) 42' 3-2
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 45+3' 4-2

 

Highlights

 

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

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 1 Tochigi SC

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

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

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

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

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

Team 

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

Subs

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



Man of the match

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

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

 

Goals

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

Highlights

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

 

Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 2 Kyoto Sanga

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

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

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

 

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

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



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

Team 

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

Subs

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


Man of the match

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

 

Goals

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

Highlights

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (home) 6/6/26 J League enthralling 7th place play off second leg

Kawsaki Frontale 0 - 1 Sanfrecce Hiroshima (1-3 on aggregate)

After 20 games and a few penalty shoot outs we’ve ended our league campaign in magnificent style with a pair of defeats and a final league position of eighth. Exactly where we finished last year. And the year before. And the year before. If you want to go back as far as when we troubled the top third of the league you need to rewind to 2022. A lot has happened since then, but clearly not when it comes to where we finish in the league. To be honest, I think it’s a miracle we even cracked the top half this year. We’ve had some truly awful games. (Im actually considering running my end of season poll but with just one question, ‘Worst game of the season?’). I can’t remember a year when we’ve had so many stinkers. But surely there must have been some exciting games too, right? Ermmm, maybe the first game of the year. Since then, not really. Of course there have been extenuating circumstances. We’re always unlucky with injuries, (maybe every team thinks this…), but this year things seem to have gone to a whole new level in that respect. I don’t think Hasebe has ever been able to pick from a squad with less than five long term injuries to important players. Whether he knows who his best eleven is, is another question. Regardless of this, and perhaps in order to reward him for not finishing in a lower position than in the last the four years he was given a new contract a few days before the game. I remain utterly confused by him. I don’t know if he’s absurdly unlucky or infuriatingly clueless. I really can’t tell if either is true. Without a doubt though, I’m in no hurry for the next season to start. About the only thing of any interest for me is seeing if the new kit is an improvement on this year’s one. (It wouldn’t be that hard for it to be). There are a few talking points on the external kind of things that were going on around this game. I’ll mention them later but I guess I need to at least say something about this absolute turd of a match, which perfectly matches the numerous other absolute turds of matches we’ve been forced to endure this year.

The first leg provided us with a Hiroshima born and based ref who, well I never, gave almost everything to Hiroshima. This time we had Kasahara, who although he doesn’t seem  to have any geographical ties to or bias towards Hiroshima, does absolutely hate us, so I didn’t hold out much hope. Add to this the always discouraging spectacle of us not being able to fill the bench without including multiple goalkeepers. The squad is in bits again. When you consider that this bullshit half season had been created to fill the gap whilst we transition to a season that fits in better with the international football calendar, it’s pretty annoying that for our final game of the season we had numerous players absent due to them going to add some numbers to the National Team’s pre World Cup training. It’s nice that even though the National Team manager, (who, I’m sure I’ve said this before, is a dead ringer for Pob, as far as I’m concerned. I bet Pob doesn’t burst into tears every time he hears the national anthem though…), absolutely has no interest in picking players from the J league as there are plenty of another awesome Japanese players who are making regular five minute cameos from the bench in the second tier of Maltese football, the league has still found a way to fuck up what they were trying to build up as a massively exciting climax to this season. After all, the tension of not knowing whether we’d finish seventh of eighth was absolutely gripping me in the run up to this match. There were some other absences too. There are rumours that Romanic was slightly injured. With Erison the rumours are that he’s leaving, so presumably the chairman wanted him left out in case he got injured and any financial benefits of a potential transfer disappeared.   Not sure what happened to Kanda, but it probably was also one of the two previously mentioned scenarios. So basically we had an awful ref and a real patched together match day squad, so we were probably never going to score twice. Would have been nice if we’d tried though. The first half saw us have one shot and concede. The second half was better. Well, in that we had more shots and didn’t concede. But to be honest the whole game was immensely frustrating. Wakizaka was a disgrace again, perfectly summed up by some early ‘contributions’ where he (maybe) dummied the ball (probably just didn’t notice it), leaving it for a player who was absolutely nowhere near where the ball was going. Maybe he’s got his eye on the all star game that’s coming up which he was unbelievably selected for. (I think if people weren’t judging him on his reputation and instead looked at how he’s played for most of this year, he might struggle to get in a Frontale 2026 half season all star 11 selection. Of course we again went with the same fucking shitty formation and tactics. When it came to shaking things up from the bench we obviously didn’t have many options, so only made three single player changes. They didn’t change much. But how could they be expected to when most of their colleagues were already on the beach. Miura had a stinker. Tachibanada, as has been the case recently, looked tired and a bit off the pace. Marcinho did his recent usual Maricinho things. Mochiyama was constantly coming back into defensive midfield to try to get involved, perhaps because Wakizaka had left a fucking massive hole in the middle whilst he ambled away from any kind of action. Here’s what I wrote at half time:

Only thing worse than this thick as shit ref is our ability to get the ball out of our own box without fucking up. Shocking first half with absolutely nothing from us and lots of peril at the back. Plenty of players on the beach already. Wakizaka strolling around the pitch trying to avoid the ball. Yamaguchi made some saves but then let the ball go straight through him for the goal. Did that thing he always does of starting to dive only after the ball has already passed him. Three goals needed, pretty much no options from the bench and pretty much no threat so far. One shot to their 16! If every shot we took in the first half went in, we’d still be trailing in the tie.

We were absolutely terrible. Hiroshima were awful and if they had even a little bit of shooting ability we could have lost by double figures. 

To slightly detract from the Frontale criticism, Sasaki Sho is just an arsehole isn’t he? Probably don’t need to write anything more about that as it’s totally evident. No wonder he gets on so well with Moriyasu! Let’s turn our attention to the ref. Absolutely useless. Both of our yellow cards were a joke. Maruyama’s was probably for his reaction to the ref giving a free kick for a foul that simply didn’t exist, the honourable Sanfrecce player only getting contact after he’d already started throwing himself towards Maruyama and ultimately to the floor. Ito’s yellow just absolutely wasn’t one. At the same time, nothing for their time wasting, and for kicking the ball away or throwing an extra ball onto the pitch to waste more time, or for injury feigning, or delaying free kicks from being taken, or dithering over every little thing they had to do when the ball wasn’t in play. And the there’s the no penalty decision at the end of the match. Kasahara didn’t give it initially because he seemed to not even notice it. Not a massive surprise because he’s useless. When it got referred to VAR it was clear that it was a penalty. I don’t think you’re allowed to step on another players foot, are you? The prick got called to the monitor, had to watch it numerous times and unbelievably still didn’t give it. I mean, it didn’t matter, but we were basically robbed of a goal in both games by awful VAR decisions. If both had been given correctly we would have had extra time. Oh fuck that, carry on with your shitness Kasahara, extra time was the last thing I wanted. But actually Kasahara, I’ve changed my mind, don’t carry on. Do the league a favour and get yourself a new job as far away from football as possible you utterly clueless shithead.

Ahhhh, and relax. Which is exactly what I’m going to do for the next couple of months. Enjoy life without having to watch our awful matches with the unluckiest man in the world in charge of the team and the most football ignorant and business loving man in the world in charge of the club as a whole. At the final whistle we didn’t hang around for the end of season ceremony. I have no desire to even be present when the chairman opens his mouth. The rumours about Erison leaving for JEF or Nagasaki were a bit of a surprise but certainly explained where he’s gone recently. Considering he was our star striker and top scorer this season and we’re happy to get rid of him, presumably to save some money, you’ve got to worry about where the club is going. Certainly things haven’t been great up front but this is almost certainly more to do with our horrible tactics than anything else. The recent emergence of Mochiyama presumably presented a much cheaper option for Mr. Money at the top of the club. His understanding of football is so deep that he thinks if someone scores three goals in one match, (against the second bottom team in the league), he will continue to do so in every consequent game. I suspect Marcinho will go too as he’s our biggest earner. Miyagi will step in in that position, although he’s never played as well there as he did in the 65 minutes he played in his preferred position. On one occasion, apparently never to be repeated. But yet again, another bargain option! Think of all the money we’re saving! I’m quite concerned where Sasaki has gone recently, and I’m sure there are some other players who I’ve forgotten who might not be up for signing on for another year of the crap we’ve just had. Yoshida is probably coming up with another genius idea as we speak. One in the vein of the Chanathip or Gomis signings, to create a buzz and sell shirts and not really have a chance to do anything on the pitch. Keep that lovely cash rolling in. How about we make a bold bid to sign Taylor Swift? I hear she has a big following. She doesn’t need to get on the pitch so it doesn’t matter if she can’t play football. As long as she’s in the squad we can make the merch and we’ll be able to cash on on the shirt sales! Lovely! Yoshida probably is a big fan of Elon Musk and has decided he is on a mission to Doge Frontale to oblivion, cutting things all over the shop without even an inkling of what might happen. He’ll probably be really surprised when attendances drop if we keep getting progressively shitter. He had no idea people could choose not to buy tickets and come. He thought it was an obligation. To be fair, it has definitely felt like something like that this year. A duty or a compulsion. Definitely a chore. It’s quite good for me that I have so much antipathy towards our chairman. That way I can remain reasonably balanced about Hasebe. I’m not particularly sure he’s very good, but it’s great to have someone else to blame for everything that goes wrong at the club. Sadly as he’s the guy at the top I guess he’s quite hard to get rid of. I wonder if he was useless at Fujitsu too and that was why he got fobbed off onto us. It seems insane that we have someone in charge who knows nothing about football and seemingly has no interest in football. If he resigned that would be the exact thing that is needed to put a spring in the step of everyone at the club. Go on, we’ve suffered a lot this year. Give us just one little thing to get excited about. 

So that’s it for this cursed half season. At least when the proper season starts we’ll have some fun away trips to do. I’m thinking of cutting out some of the more mind numbingly dull Kanto away games too. There are definitely better things for me to do than to go to the absolute shithole wastelands of Kashima and Urawa away. As I said above, I’m toying with the idea of doing an end of season survey. I’m absolutely not going to do the player round up or the season round up posts or the stats. There’s just nothing to say that I haven’t already said. This was a disastrous season where it seems no lessons were learnt because every time we were in an absolute hole we somehow fluked a result and got out of it. We could have used the season to experiment and try new things, but the only thing we really tried was how to plumb new depths. I suppose we saw a few new players, but I'd say this was more because of the lack of options due to the massive and perennial injury crisis rather than for any interesting or progressive purposes. The league seemed very weak this time round. This probably explains how we managed to finish in fourth in the East section. What a joke! We’ve been woeful! And that seems like exactly the right word to sum up this year and end this post, so let’s write it one more time and leave it at that. Woeful.

Team 

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi (Yellow card 24')
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 65')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO 
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
FW 15. MYOGAN Toya (on for ITO 82')
FW 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for MOCHIYAMA 74')
DF 22. UREMOVIC Filip
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 64')
MF 26. YUI Kota
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 30. NODA Hiroto

 

Goals

NAKAMURA (Sanfrecce) 44' 0-1

Highlights
 

Vs Machida Zelvia (home) 17/5/26 J League East match 17

 

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 Machida Zelvia

(Frontale win 5 - 4 on penalties) 

As I mentioned in the last post, I had quite extensive plans to lessen the pain of watching another awful match. As it turned out, both the plan and the awfulness of the match didn’t turn out as I might have expected. I over indulged to the extreme on Saturday night so my carefully planned route for walking to the stadium via a few beer places and thereby getting exercise and refreshment was an absolute non-starter as soon as I woke up, very much hungover. And even more shockingly, this was actually a pretty good game for us. We absolutely destroyed Machida and looked like we were actually playing some good football. Naturally though, with six minutes of normal time remaining, we were trailing. I don’t know what kind of curse or bad luck we’ve managed to pick up but it was in full effect in this match. That is until something  finally went our way. I think we probably only got the penalty because there were two absolute nailed on penalties that could have been given in the same move. If there was any way of the always useless ref Araki not giving us a decision he surely would have gone with that option. But the weight of evidence from two absolutely clear penalties meant that even Frontale-phobe Araki, who spent a while at the monitor looking at replays which were absolutely crystal clear on first viewing, had to cave in and give just the one decision our way. More on him later. A quick spoiler for that section, he still is absolutely shite. But yeah, we played well, we should have scored more and were kind of robbed for their goal. What strange unknown feeling is this? Is it… positivity? 

Us -

Was pleased to see Mochiyama finally make the bench and have one blaster of a shot (which unfortunately didn’t go in). Maybe Hasebe read my last blog post. Whilst it was disappointing to see us once again hoping that the 4-2-3-1 might pay off, there did seem to be some kind of slight morale boost within the camp. I don’t know what happened to Erison, but Romanic did a good job I thought. Of course as is the case when Frontale play a team with three centre backs, we went with a lone striker. It doesn’t matter who the manager is, some things never change. Perhaps someone with some kind of tactical knowledge can tell me why this might be a good idea, but as far as I could see, it just meant that every time Romanic won the ball up front there was no one for him to give it to. But we still made chances! We hit the post twice and whilst a lot of our shots were going straight at their keeper, we were, whisper it, shooting, and shooting on target! Wakizaka had what I think was his best game of the season. Perhaps this was as a reaction to him being called up for the all-star team or whatever they are calling that absolutely joke of a fixture. Before this match, Wakizaka being named in the side was also a joke as far as I was concerned. I don’t think any of our squad should have been in contention, let alone a player who has been markedly under performing all year. But maybe this was what Wakizaka needed to get back on track. He did really well. Yamaguchi was in goal against his old team. His double save in the shoot out was great. He only had two other shots to deal with in the whole game and unfortunately one of them went in. I’m not sure if Hasebe was giving him a chance to show his worth or was just rotating things for the sake of it, but thumbs up to Yamaguchi for making that save in the shoot out and for psyching out Sento to make him think he should attempt to put his penalty out of the stadium rather than into the goal. A delightfully shocking miss. And well done to Mochiyama for having the guts to step up and put the winning penalty away. 

As usual, (depending somewhat on our result but not always, we won against Verdy and that game was AWFUL), I’m vacillating on Hasebe again. I don’t know what he did but he seems to have restored a bit of faith in the squad. This was a much improved performance. I still have my doubts as to whether Hasebe has the ideas to actually turn our talented squad into a team that remembers how to win again, but you’ve got to feel sorry for him as he seems to be just unbelievably unlucky. But let's give him credit for giving some youngsters a go. Perhaps this is something to do with us having nothing to play for, but it’s definitely not something Oniki would have done. And Hasebe, (or one of his staff), has come up with a nice new corner routine where we leave two players out wide near the corner taker which basically gives us three different types of potential cross from each corner. It didn’t quite pay off in this match, but I think there’s something in it. And definitely better than us just hitting it to the first defender. So basically, a massive improvement on recent matches. It’s an unfortunate time to possibly come into some form, but maybe if we can finish the season well, it might put us in a good place for next year. Fingers crossed.

Them -

It was a very poor attendance considering that Machida is pretty local. It’s unsurprising though given that they don’t have many fans even at their home games. Or should I say ‘blokes’ rather than fans? Clearly someone went to the UK at some stage and is trying to inject a bit of original colour to their support. 'Blokes'. So weird. Almost certainly not what they were hoping to conjure up when they chose that word for a couple of their big flags. 'Some bloke down the pub'. 'One of those blokes who voted for Brexit'. Definitely not the camaraderie kind of feeling that I’m guessing they were aiming for. ‘Don’t mess with us. We’re the blokes!’ said no one ever. In a way, perfectly fitting that a pretty plastic club has gone with a inapporpriate choice of word. Machida were shit in this game and it was delightful. Everything about the club makes them unlikeable. The clogging, the long throws, the petulance, the... blokes. And of course ‘power hara Go’ on the sidelines. I noticed when checking some things on Dazn that he is now accessorising his usual outfit, (which come to think of it is absolutely something a ‘bloke’ would wear down the pub in the commuter belt, so maybe that explains it), with a couple of weird bracelets. I can’t imagine they are friendship bracelets given the character of the man who is wearing them, (unless he gave them to himself. I guess that Kuroda’s biggest admirer is Go Kuroda). So maybe they are some kind of weird cult membership sign or some kind of anger management crystals thing. Or maybe Machida are starting some kind of pyramid scheme to attract new fans and once you’ve signed up 25 people you get the kind of bracelet that a tie-dye-clad, Lennon-specs-wearing fifteen year old who’s desperately trying to express their individuality through their alternative fashion and music choices might reject for looking a bit tacky. Anyway, Machida lost on penalties which is also amusing as on the Odakyu line they keep showing these adverts of Tani saving penalties. Didn't stop so many on this occasion, eh? I’m still sore about his diving and whining when he was playing for Shonan. So Machida probably is the perfect fit for him! And Erik. He can still fuck off. Irksome little man. There are plenty more, but given that we won, I feel we should just focus on the most scummy of them in order not to appear to be bad winners. Hehehe. We won. Machida lost. 

Ref -

Araki is going to the World Cup! It was announced before the match and I was astonished to see people applauding him. He is always one of the worst refs for us. I don’t know if he hates us, but it certainly seems like he does. And maybe in this match it seemed even more like he did, given that he gave us almost nothing. He gave Romanic a yellow which I thought was a bit harsh and then moments later didn’t even give us a free kick when a Machida player kicked him in the head. So Araki at the World Cup. There isn’t much competition, but surely he can’t be the best Japan has to offer. At least as there are no Frontale players at the World Cup he might be able to be a bit more impartial rather than automatically giving the decision against anyone associated with our club. Araki always seems to me to be the kind of person who when wanting to express his most deeply thought through beliefs would start with the phrase ‘I’m a reasonable guy and in no way are a racist or a bigot, but…’. Or maybe that should say ‘a reasonable bloke’. Two absolutely nailed on penalties that both him and his linesman both missed until the relatively unknown VAR guy plucked up enough courage to say he should have a look. And still he dithered in the face of obvious evidence. And their goal came from something that wasn’t a foul and then was offside. He did his best to screw us in this match, but even his best efforts couldn't stop up from claiming a wonderful two points. The glory! Hopefully Araki will decide he loves the US so much that he decides to stay there. Let's start the campaign here. MTJLGA - Make the J League Great Again, keep Araki in the US whether he likes it or not.


So kind of weird. We beat Verdy in 90 minutes and it was truly terrible and I moaned. In this match we just about scraped a draw and managed to win on penalties, but I'm happy. The games were so different though. This was the first match for a while where there were some signs of positivity. Maybe we were a bit unlucky, but there was actually something worth cheering for. Long may that continue! Next up Mito away on Sunday. Then we have the ultra exciting play off games. If I am correct it will be against either Gamba, Cerezo, Sanfrecce, Okayama or Shimizu. Hopefully I’ll be able to go. I can’t imagine there will be a lot of interest in a game to decide which utterly mid-table position we’ll finish in. But maybe people will be delighted to get the opportunity to watch a game outside of Kanto. I’m still baffled every time I hear people saying how much fun this mini league has been. Even if we weren’t so bad I still think I’d be pretty bored with these dull away days. As I think I said before, perhaps this season has made it clear to me that I like travel more than I like football! In any case, would he nice if we could see a few more goals before the end of the year. And hopefully use some more youngsters. And maybe even get a clean sheet!

 

Team 

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (Yellow card 28')

Subs

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 72')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke (on for ROMANIC 72')
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 23. MARCINHO (on for MIYAGI 65')
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
FW 34. OSA Ryuki (on for ITO 72')
FW 38. KANDA Soma

Man of the match

Feel like as I’ve been slagging him off, (justificably so in my opinion), for most of the year, I should acknowledge him when he does well so it goes to…

WAKIZAKA Yasuto - was at the heart of a lot of our good moments. Really pleased he's finally got back to some of his old form as this year has been pretty tough for him.

 

Goals

YENGI (Machida) 40' 0-1
WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 89' PEN 1-1

Highlights