Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 19/8/23 J League match 24

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 3 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

As this is another game I have been unable to watch in person, (honestly, this is nothing to do with our form this year, that’s just a happy coincidence), and I never really bother writing much when I’m not at the game, I’m going to try something a little different for this post. I’m writing about the first half at half time and will do the second half at the final whistle, getting the post up quickly and allowing me to get on with my weekend without the dark cloud of having to write a blog post hanging over me. So here we go.

The first half -

Well, it wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst. Once again, our starting line up was slightly bizarre as you’d expect from Oniki 2023. Although to be fair to him, I don’t think he’s had a single game this year when he had his whole squad to select from, being denied every week by multiple bans and injuries. Still confused how Ienaga, Wakizaka and Noborizato are starting every game. And just as I was writing something about Wakizaka in my notes, he scored the goal. I won’t write that bit now. I think it’s only fair. Once again our build ups are totally ponderous, the few decent chances we’ve had coming from us going just a little bit more direct. I think on occasions our forwards have been caught out by this kind of try-to-score-a-goal-without-necessarily-completing-100-consecutive-passes tactics. It was a lovely ball from Joao and somehow we got a bit of luck with the blocked and deflected cross falling perfectly for Wakizaka. He had another decent chance too, so clearly my typing of a whinge really motivated him. Yamane has looked a bit dodgy in this game again I think. He left their goalscorer go for the goal. In fact I think he might even have nudged him slightly towards a better position, as if he were coaching him on the best possble way to score. Sanfrecce haven’t been particularly easy on the eye. Plenty of whinging and they’ve basically been refereeing the game as whatever they call for, the useless ref Matsuo gives. His linesman isn’t much better, perfectly pitching his style halfway between the delayed flag thing and the flag immediately thing, ensuring that we get the worst of both worlds, very slightly delaying his incorrect offside flag and then putting up whilst we still had the ball in their box. Sanfrecce are very physical and seem to be targeting Seko in particular for the foul treatment. Sasaki should have been booked twice I reckon. On one of those occasions, Sanfrecce got the decision. Equally unpleasant is watching on DAZN. Every time Takai touches the ball we hear about the fact that he came from our academy and get info on his height and age. The cameramen fail to get the actual ball in the frame sometimes. And the director doesn’t seem to be bother showing replays of anything we might want to see and instead replays other stuff or just shows close ups of players walking. Second half starting now.

 

The second half -

Well, that went about as well as we deserved. Another last minute winner conceded. Hardly anything of note from us in the second half and every time the great master Oniki intervened, we became worse. The first ten minutes after his half time team talk we were crap. As soon as he made the subs we were crap. He’s really truly out of his depth. He tried a few different things in this game. Once he was doing his magnet board on his lap and on another occasion he put the magnet board on the floor. So don’t anyone say he is out of ideas, eh? It’s probably quite notable that one time he was pictured moving his beloved magnets around was immediately after he’d made a sub. Perhaps he is such a visionary that he’s always thinking several minutes ahead of us mere mortals, or perhaps he’s just throwing random shit around and hoping something will work. Thankfully we’ve signed Gomis, as that should cheer up the supporters a bit and perhaps take the heat off the culprit for this season’s poor performances. It’s something of a miracle that we managed to come so close to getting a point in this game as we were totally disorganised at the back, (don’t worry about signing any defenders though, eh?), and couldn’t keep hold of the ball at all. Perhaps the pitch was bad, or perhaps this was another Oniki instruction. Don’t pass or control the ball properly. Instead mess it up slightly and we’ll bamboozle the opposition. Around 85 minutes it seemed like both teams were time wasting and hoping to hang on for a point, but at the same time somehow hadn’t noticed their opponents were doing the same thing. The only person who seemed to be able to control the ball and pass it accurately was Sung-Ryong. Tachibanada came on and was only noticeable for his mistakes. Marcinho came on and really didn’t do anything. But I don’t blame the players, I blame Oniki. But I’m getting fed up of saying this and fed up of writing this blog post. I will finally say that the ref was absolutely useless again in the second half. I’m pretty sure Matsuo has a reputation for being crap and he didn’t let us down in this respect. Within a couple of minutes Sanfrecce got away with what could have been a red for a foul on Nobori and a penalty call that I think should have at least been referred to VAR. But the shocking thing is that even I, ref watcher extraordinaire, had never heard of the VAR guy, so I guess they really scraped the barrel to find him. And when you have an unknown on VAR it’s probably very unlikely that they are going to overrule a ref or even ask him to check anything. Not sure we had any VAR at all, did we? Perhaps I’ve forgotten something. Hopefully I will be able to forget this game quite soon!

Next up, a defeat to Consadole Sapporo at home next Saturday. Also next up, Oniki takes us one step closer to absolute rock bottom disaster form, playing some of the most horrible football ever seen, whilst at the same time somehow being immune from criticism from most people. Lucky him!

 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 29. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 54')

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (Yellow card 68')

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin

FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

Subs

 

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for NOBORIZATO 86')

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 65')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for SEKO 73')

FW 23. MARCINHO (on for IENAGA 65')

FW 33. MIYASHIRO Taisei (on for YAMADA 65')

 

Goals

 

SOTIRIOU (Sanfrecce) 15' 1-0

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 24' 1-1

MARCOS JUNIOR (Sanfrecce) 60' 2-1

YAMANE (Frontale) 71' 2-2

MITSUTA (Sanfrecce) 90+7' 3-2

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

I never do these when I haven’t been at the match, but one player was so far ahead of everyone else in this match that it would be unfair not to award it. So it goes to…

JUNG Sung-Ryong - Kind of strange to give it to the goalie when we’ve conceded three and lost. Numerous important saves, good distribution. I don’t think any of the goals were his fault and if it hadn’t been for him, we could have conceded six or seven. Hmmmm, maybe we should have, and then we might be able to rid ourselves of Oniki.

 

Highlights

Vs Yokohama FC (home) 8/7/23 J League match 20

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 0 Yokohama FC

Perhaps it was somewhat convenient that the 2023 version of my new calm persona, a persona which it seems I always try to adopt halfway through a horrible season, didn’t need to be tested on this occasion, as we won fairly comfortably against YFC. I say fairly comfortably, as aside from the first ten minutes of the game, they didn’t really do much. At the same time we suffered from the usual issues of not being able to score very often from the numerous opportunities that we had. This is something of a common theme in 2023. It was nice for once to come away from a game with some kind of good feeling though. Many people in our usual post home game pub said the same thing. The atmosphere was a lot better! There might have also been some extra good feeling to get some ‘revenge’ after YFC ‘pumped’ us in the away fixture. I think it’s unfair to talk about revenge though when the reason for your problems is completely your own doing. You can’t hold that against the opposition. We were for the most part terrible in that game. In this game we were a bit better. 

 

 

I was delighted to see Oniki make some long overdue changes. I would have liked to have seen a few more, but the fact that he made some was a good start. I feel bad about constantly mentioning it, but Kamifukumoto hasn’t really had the best of starts with us. People continue to mention his distribution, but as far as I can remember, it’s only been useful on the one occasion so far and his mistakes whilst trying to unnecessarily get involved when he doesn’t have to are a lot more numerous. Sung-Ryong is not blameless in this respect either, the clanger against YFM still lingering in the memory, but as he got dropped for apparently making errors, it was only fair that the same thing happened to Kamifukumoto after he had given the opposition a goal head start in consecutive games. I saw someone on Twitter saying that Sung-Ryong better suited the style we were going to play against YFC. I’ve also seen people on Twitter saying that COVID never existed and that the earth is flat. I think that Twitter user is also massively overstating Oniki’s willingness to actually change anything tactically. As I’ve said in the past, I’m not sure he ever really considers who we’re playing. Well, ok. he did once against Consadole, when to counter their style he played our strikers on the wing and put Ienaga up front. Although, perhaps that was as a result of the magnet board getting knocked on to the floor by an intern who hastily put the attacking magnets back, but accidentally put them in the wrong place and didn’t want to tell anyone what they’d done. We’ll see who starts the next game, I guess. It’s a cup game away at Mito, so normally you might expect the reserves to play. But given that we’re out of the Levain Cup and effectively out of the title race already, maybe Oniki will target the Emperor’s Cup. (Uh oh, knockout competitions aren’t exactly his speciality. I guess they’re not as bad as the group stages of cups though). I’m also in agreement with Oshima being dropped. Sorry to the Oshima lovers, but I think the midfield of Oshima and Wakizaka in front of Joao really didn’t work, so at least one of them had to go, and there’s no way we should ever consider dropping Joao. 

 

 

It was nice to see Yamada start and he scored, so that’s got to go down as a good decision. Feel a bit sorry for Tono though as he seems to always do the business but never seems to get that many starts. Likewise, Ominami who has played really well when he came on at right back recently. And as for Sasaki, I’m not sure what’s happened to him this year. Nobori seems to be veering between playing really well and then not so well but seems to be someone Oniki is unwilling to drop. And of course we still have the Ienaga conundrum. Like Nobori he seems to oscillate between two extremes, not really looking that bothered until something goes against us and it gets him worked up and he becomes a beast for a bit. But playing him on the right up front makes us really unbalanced, as of course he doesn’t stay in that position. In this game we had Miyashiro sticking resolutely to the left, Yamada in the middle and absolutely no-one on the right. I don’t know, but maybe we could play Miyashiro and Yamada as a front two and put Ienaga in behind them in a free role or something? I don’t think he should be starting every game in that front right position though. But maybe Oniki is scared to rest him and risk upsetting him. And I guess we have been losing attacking midfielders and  potential replacements for him on a weekly basis recently. Will anyone be coming in the other direction or are we going to stick with what we’ve got? I was thinking during this game, that there can’t be that many members of the entire squad who aren’t involved in the match day squad at the moment. Not including those who are injured and goalkeepers, I think it’s only Sasaki, Myogan, Matsunagane and Ozeki who weren’t involved yesterday. Anyway, that’s a lot of writing about starting members I guess. So let’s talk a bit about the game. 

Like I said, we made a pretty bad start with YFC having most of their chances in the first ten minutes. I don’t know why we always start so badly. I wish we didn’t always start so badly. I guess this year we will always start so badly. But then we settled and I thought it was mostly one way traffic for the rest of the game, with us making some wonderful opportunities… Note that change from my normal blog posts where I usually say we made lots of chances. In this game I don’t think we really made that many chances. We’d break dangerously but fail to make the pass that would usually lead to the inevitably missed shot. Against Nagoya we had chances galore and failed to take any of them. In this game, we moved one step further back and instead focused on making opportunities to make chances that we wouldn’t take. And as we failed to make many chances, we really needed to take the ones we did. Thankfully, we scored from a corner and then got a penalty which many people are saying was not a penalty. I’ve had a look at the replay loads of times with my Frontale glasses on and I really can’t work out what happened. Perhaps DAZN didn’t slow it down enough for what happened to be clearly be seen, but the fact that the decision was referred to VAR and upheld must count for something, right? Because VAR never gets anything wrong in the J League. In the second half, the YFC defence was really creaking, looking really fragile, but it wasn’t until quite late on that we managed to get a third, and it was the nicest goal of the lot. At the start of the game, it looked like both teams were quite scared of losing the game and I was worried that we’d be playing out a dull 0-0, or probably most likely losing late on to a YFC hoofed clearance and one of their players totally leaving our defence for dead and scoring a winner. Thankfully that didn’t happen. But most of he second half was really dull stuff. Maybe that’s not completely fair. Maybe I should say it was exciting from an attacking point of view until we left the middle third of the pitch when whoever was breaking with the ball just stopped and looked for the backwards pass to break up their own attack. Whilst I’ve praised Oniki for changing the starting line up earlier in this post, you could see that he was quite scared to change anything in the second half, with the first sub not coming till the 67th minute and even then only being a single change, and after that only three more other changes, all of which came very late on. When the final two changes were made you could really see a difference though. Around the 80th minute it looked like pretty much everyone was knackered, but still Oniki clung on to what we had, hoping we wouldn’t concede. Bringing Ominami on for Wakizaka in the 82nd minute meant that we changed to a back three, presumably to strengthen the defence. Can’t help but feel that maybe we should have tried to be a bit more positive. But what do I know? We scored seven minutes after that, so I probably know not much at all. The slightly amusing thing was that after Segawa had scored our third, Oniki was still trying to explain the tactics to Kurumaya on the touchline as other players celebrated. When Ominami came on there was a lot of gesturing between players after play had restarted and no-one really seemed completely sure what was going on. I said before that we just need a little run of results to get things ticking over again. I think shortly after that we lost to FC Tokyo and then YFC with two truly horrible performances. Hopefully the same thing won’t happen this time. But even if it does, we’re already done for the season really. It would be nice to have a bit more of a feel good factor though.

A few words about the ref. Matsuo’s name rung some ominous bells with me. But that seems to be the case with pretty much every ref. I thought his VAR performance was fantastic. As we endured the interminable wait for a decision to be made Matsuo trotted around the pitch keeping away from all the players perhaps to keep his conversation private, perhaps to keep his focus. He seemed like a man on a mission to exceed his daily step count record. I’m pretty sure in the few minutes it took for the VAR decision to come through he covered more ground than many of the players on the pitch did in the whole game, his loops getting bigger and bigger and then shrinking back, changing the angle and starting again, like he trying to do some kind of spirograph style GPS illustration. I think perhaps someone had a word with him at half time about his penalty decision being contentious as in the second half he seemed to be on a mission to book as many Frontale players as possible, in short little bursts of card waving. The cards seemed to anger Oniki who was really having a go at the fourth official. They definitely seemed to only be going one way, but of course I’m biased. Kurumaya was probably a bit lucky to not add to this season’s list of red cards though with a truly terrible challenge. Not necessarily from the point of view of it being a bad foul, but definitely from the point of view of it looking absolutely agricultural. Perhaps something like you’d expect if a goalkeeper was required to fill in at centre back and stepped into their new role with a bit too much gusto. Inconsistency is something about refs that really annoys fans and players and I thought Matsuo had an extremely inconsistent game. He wasn’t the worst we’ve had this year though, which is somehow both a relief and depressing at the same time. Oh, and I've just realised I didn't mention that we had a racing car driving round the pitch before the game and YMCA at half time, just to add an extra element of surreality. In the past the team we play when we have (the slightly cringey but very popular and enjoyed by most people so who am I to be snobbish about it) YMCA sing and dance-along have in the past gone on to be relegated. This hasn't been the case in recent years but it was consistently true for a while. Thankfully this time they didn't bother with getting the weird impersonator to sing the song and just played it instead, significantly reducing the cringe factor. It probably helped that we were winning at half time, but I think our fans are so positive that they probably would have been equally up for it even if the scoreline had been reversed.

Next up Mito away, a game that even if it finishes without extra time will still prove difficult to return home from on the same day. Last time we were there it went all the way to penalties and our train was stopped half way home due to an electrical storm and a power cut. We finally got home around 3am and I decided to stay up and watch England take an early lead against Croatia in the World Cup semi final and then end up losing in extra time just as most people in the country were getting up. Not sure what drama might follow this next game but it would be nice if we managed to get home the same day. After that we head to the Nissan Stadium the following weekend to attempt to string two league wins in a row together and avoid a 2023 double defeat against our local rivals. Even though we’re out of the title race, it would be nice to disrupt our neighbours’ chances of winning the league. I don’t think it’s very likely though, but we can dream, I guess.

 

Team 

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 29. TAKAI Kota

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (Yellow card 69')

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 61')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 20. YAMADA Shin

FW 33. MIYASHIRO Taisei (Yellow card 55')
 

Subs

 

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto

DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (on for WAKIZAKA 82')

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for SEKO 87')

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for YAMADA 87')

FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (Yellow card 71') (on for MIYASHIRO 67')

MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

Lots of dullness where nothing much was happening in this game with the mediocrity occasionally being broken by an extremely brief moment of excitement. Once again, for the umpteenth time this year, one player who seemed to be doing well for the whole 90 minutes, was…

JOAO SCHMIDT - absolutely undroppable now. Feel for Tachibanada, but there’s no way Joao shouldn’t play a game if he’s available and we’re looking to play our best eleven. He’s having a great season!

 

Goals

 

YAMADA (Frontale) 13' 1-0

MIYASHIRO (Frontale) PEN 36' 2-0

SEGAWA (Frontale) 89' 3-0

 

Highlights

 

Vs Urawa Reds (away) 30/7/22 J League match 23

Urawa Reds 3 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Urawa away is always a bit of a mess of contradictions. The journey’s not that far but that walk from the station is right pain in the arse. Away games are fun as we get to visit some places, but the area around the Saitama Stadium remains something of a wasteland. Which in a way, makes it all the more bizarre that given that there’s nothing much there, that the stadium had to be so far from the station. If you’ve never been to Urawa’s ground you might think that it would be pretty easy to get to. Urawa is on plenty of train lines and it’s still very much in the greater Tokyo urban area (or whatever it’s called). However the Saitama stadium is on an handsomely overpriced train line which seems to have been constructed only to serve the stadium and some residential areas that you probably aren’t going to be visiting unless you live there. It’s also a stadium where we have some mixed memories. In recent years, we’ve got knocked out of the ACL there after totally collapsing after a red card and have lost a few cup finals there before we broke our jinx. But there are some good memories too… probably… I can’t really remember many off-hand. Checking our recent games there it seems I wasn’t able to go to the last three league games, all of which we won (COVID stopped away fans attending on two occasions and the previous time we had a game rescheduled to a Tuesday and having to work put the mockers on that for me). In fact the last time I saw a league game there was in 2018, the day after my birthday and we lost, giving me a wholly unwanted late birthday present. This year the game was the day before my birthday and whilst I still got the same present, this time it came with a resigned shrug. I was expecting this game to be called off as COVID cases in our camp grew day by day. Even on the day of the game at lunchtime in Higashi Jujo in a brewery with one shoe having recently self-destructed I was still expecting us to have to turn round and go home as a complete lack of players would probably make it impossible for the fixture to go ahead. I guess I was half right. There was absolutely a complete lack of players, but the game went ahead anyway. I’m sure you’re aware that we had three goalkeepers on the bench, two of whom were wearing outfield shirts, and even then we had two empty spots. So basically 16 players available, four of whom were keepers. If you only looked at the starting line up though, you might not have noticed anything much up. Whilst Oniki hasn’t yet tried out the ‘midfielder at both left AND right back’ thing, I don’t think anyone would have been that surprised to see him give it a go. If we hadn’t loaned out Tanabe (who can play at either left or right back) to JEF the previous week I’m not even sure that he would have made it any further than the bench. You would presume that anyone who wasn’t in the squad must be either COVID positive or injured. However I wouldn’t put it past Oniki leaving Igarashi out of the squad. After all, he was the only player apart from Tanno who didn’t make it on to the pitch against PSG (apparently we played them. I am denying the existence of that game). We had another player test positive the day after the game, so who knows what position we will be in on Wednesday (Cerezo away in the Levain Cup) or next Sunday (YFM at home, when we to all intents and purposes, might hand them the title)? Apparently Chanathip doesn’t have COVID and had a slight injury instead. So maybe he will be back… but then again we have one more COVID case so we’re effectively in the same position, and to be honest, given that the player must have been with the match day squad, I can’t imagine they will be the last person to get infected. Oh joy! But apparently the show must go on…

 

COVID issues are probably the big talking point about the game. We’ve had two games postponed already due to COVID. On both occasions it was the opposition with the cases and who asked for it to be called off. The Nagoya game is the contentious one. There is some kind of scandal about them lying/getting confused (delete as to your preference) about whether they had been told to cease club activities by the local health authorities. They said that they had been told to shut down the club due to it being a cluster but apparently weren’t. (Don’t quote me on any of this, it’s all second hand information and something may have been lost in translation). So it was a convenient misunderstanding which worked in their favour which was either accidental or intentional. They had a squad of 39 registered players and only nine cases. We have a smaller squad and more cases but still went ahead. Plenty of Oniki’s post match comments have focused on us doing the right thing and following the rules. It’s obvious that Nagoya didn’t do this but you can kind of understand why they didn’t. I’m unsure how I feel about this all. Of course we never would have known if we did end up manufacturing a few extra close contacts and having sufficiently few players to get the game called off. I think it’s a good thing that we didn’t cheat, but at the same time, if we don’t cheat and other teams do, we’re making a great statement and sacrifice but are definitely shooting ourselves in the foot. I’ve said the league is gone plenty of times but YFM stumbling recently has given us a little hope. Us playing and losing this game has destroyed any remaining hopes I’d say. Three games in nine days with not enough fit players to fill up the bench doesn’t exactly suggest that we will be at our best when it comes to the last of those three games against YFM. If you want to moan a bit more, add in the fact that the weather is pretty extreme right now too, so not enough players, and hardly any chance of subs to give anyone a rest. During the game, obviously the lack of subs means we lack the ability to change things round when things aren't working. But I think another big issue is that the fact that with effectively only two subs, you can't use them too early on in case you get an injury and end up having to play a goalie out field for a long time. But of course, if you leave it too late people are going to get even more knackered and the time a sub has to change things is going to be limited. So basically it's an impossible situation, and one which we knew we'd be in from the start. If we’re in the same position on Wednesday and next weekend and go ahead and play the game again, well, I hope everyone appreciates the stance we’ve taken. Certainly YFM and Kevin Muscats will appreciate it. Lots of people have said that us having three keepers on the bench and going ahead with the match will raise questions as to how these things are considered in the future. So even though we’ve shot ourselves in the foot by playing we are apparently doing the right thing and perhaps changing things for the better. Not sure how many bonus points this will get us and whether they’ll just award us a third consecutive league title as a reward for doing the right thing. Most likely there will be a rule change which benefits all of our rivals when they are in a similar situation which will come about thanks to our sacrifice. At least we’ll have the moral high ground to hang on to. Maybe we could put that in the trophy cabinet this year as I’m pretty sure nothing else will be going in there.

In this game though, we looked predictably out of sorts and we started really badly. I guess this is what happens when you play midfielders as full backs and have a centre back pairing that hasn’t spent any time together for almost a year. It showed. Without a doubt Taniguchi and Jesiel are our best options at centre back, but they were all over the place in this game. I’m not going to blame them though. I’m not going to blame anyone as we were up against it from the start. And then conceding two goals early put us even more up against it (if that makes any kind of sense). This wouldn’t be a post about an Urawa game if I didn’t slag them off a bit would it? Ridiculous time wasting after they went a goal up after four minutes and hoofball for most of the game. Typically my new hate figure Ito scored but didn’t seem to spend the whole game diving and feigning injury like he did in the super cup which is frustrating as that means I can only dislike him for things he’s done in the past. Irritating… It’s interesting to compare this game to the Super Cup actually. In that game we were atrocious and came into the game with one player absent due to COVID which seemed to totally dispirit and destroy our team. In this game we had hardly anyone available but managed to play a bit better. We had plenty of chances but couldn’t put them away, (as admittedly has been the case for most of this year). When you look at how we dominated the stats you’d imagine that the scoreline would have been the other way round. But when you consider one team was ravaged by COVID the scoreline makes sense the way it was. Since that Super Cup game, after which everyone said Urawa would storm the league, (and I said they weren’t that good, it was just that we were crap) they have been pretty poor up until recently. We have continued on in the same crappy way all year, getting a bit of good fortune with results at some stages but never really playing at all well. Attitudes to COVID seem to have changed a bit too! At that stage it was a bit of a shock for us to have a player absent due to COVID. Now it’s par for the course and the prevailing attitude seems to be that we need to get back to normal as soon as possible and just not really think about the effect that kind of thing might have. One of my recent pet hates is people on Twitter, (actually maybe I could stop this sentence here…), outside of Japan telling us all how Japan should be doing things. I’m not saying Japan is doing everything right (or indeed anything right) but what I do know is there are plenty of people who seem obsessed with displaying their ‘knowledge’ on matters that they don’t really know anything about and have no context for. 

A few quick brief observations to maybe lighten things up a little at the end here. Urawa, in addition to their normal disco heavy and perhaps inadvertently camp music selections which always make me think the stadium DJ went on a year abroad to the UK sometime in the 90’s, went with the previously unheard at their ground Beastie Boys track ‘You’ve Got To Fight For Your Right To Party’. There’s no way that this was a coincidence is there? After an element of their fanbases recent run in with the J League over their right to sing and generally be wannabe hooligans they seem to be a bit sulky and are sticking it to the man with this sly dig. Ooooooohhhh, those cheeky rebels. The ball boys in this game seemed to all have come in fancy dress and had all chosen to go with the same costume theme, which was match day Ricardo Rodriguez. They also seemed to get word, perhaps from the man himself, halfway through the second half, to not go so crazy and exert themselves and instead just take their time when it came to returning the ball. To be honest though, the ref wasn’t worried about the Urawa players’ time wasting though, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t notice the ball boys doing it. Oh and finally, we now know which kind of players are most serious about COVID prevention and are perhaps therefore the most responsible figures our squad. All the Brazilians and all the goalies were COVID free. Draw your own conclusions about this.

That’ll do. Not much talk about the game again, but you’ve probably come to expect that. This was a match in which we were doomed from the start and then got even more doomed shortly after the start. As I said above, I don’t know what I think about the whole COVID postponement thing. Instead I’m just letting the whole issue just hang around somewhere in my periphery like the fog of something I don’t want to deal with and am hoping will just go away before I get round to having to think about. I’d like to think that the issue won’t come up again, but I’m pretty sure that we’ll be in pretty much the same position on Wednesday and next weekend and also that other clubs will be in similar positions with perhaps different outcomes. So basically, we’ll all have something to moan about forever. I hope no-one uses it as an excuse for why we won’t win the league as the title was already long gone before this match. It’s a bit of a bummer to have any lingering hopes killed quite so dead by matters out of our control though. Oh well! Next up Cerezo Osaka, (who recently beat is when we had almost a full squad to choose from), away in the Levain Cup. The blog post for that hame will be perfunctory at best. I’m away in Tohoku so probably won’t even be able to watch the game. Probably for the best! Hopefully the next week of games won’t be quite as disheartening as this match was, but I suspect it will be. 

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 16. SEKO Tatsuki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo (Yellow card 51')

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 19. TONO Daiya

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke

GK 22. HAYASAKA Yuki

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 73')

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for TONO 78')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

EVERYONE IN THE MATCH DAY SQUAD - There's no way you could fault the effort of anyone involved. I probably haven't praised the players enough, so consider this some effort to do that.

 

Goals

 

ITO (Urawa) 4' 1-0

MATSUO (Urawa) 17' 2-0

IENAGA (Frontale) PEN 82' 2-1

IWAO (Urawa) 85' 3-1

 

Highlights  

 

Vs Jubilo Iwata (home) 25/6/22 J League match 18

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 Jubilo Iwata

Oh jeez I don’t know anymore. I’m getting a bit sick of being so negative but I am also quite sick of watching us recently. After a semi-meltdown on Twitter after this game, I woke up the following morning with a Twitter hangover, feeling quite sick when I thought of either our game or having tweet battles with strangers who probably became J League experts from watching YouTube highlights videos and reading the official J League EN Twitter account. Opinions are like arseholes it is said. Either we all have one, or the internet is full of them. Actually both are true and I’m a bit fed up with contributing to the online arsehole count. Not saying I don’t want to hear anyone’s opinion. I have been in contact with some people whose opinion I respect and found those interactions a lot more rewarding that the usual ‘he’s shit’ vs ‘no, you’re shit’ level of debate that I regrettably fell into last night. With that in mind, I think I’ll stop ranting so much on these blog posts. Either you already agree with me and therefore my moaning is pointless, or you probably disagree with me and my perspective won’t change your mind, so… my moaning is pointless. I am also aware that Oniki is actually a human being too. I don’t think I’ve ever got so rude that I have ignored this fact, but clearly there are a lot of people who know what is going on a lot more than I do who think that he’s doing a reasonable job. So, I’ll tone it down a bit, and in what will be a big break from tradition on this blog, I might stick more to the facts. I preferred it when I could avoid facts and just make jokes but there’s not much to laugh about recently. And with news coming out today that there was someone who is apparently not Japanese behind the goal who was drunk and shouting and singing whilst maskless, I think there’s not much off the field to have a laugh about either. So basically you might want to skip the next few blog posts or the next however many posts it takes till we get out of this slump. In my opinion it might be quite a while, but there are other opinions available, and those opinions are held by a lot more people than mine is. So, coming up, a few comments on the game, a Frontale Rabbit first table and then we’ll be done.

So some comments. Oniki again went with Tachibanada at left back and Chanathip on the left. I don’t think that has worked in the past and I don’t think it worked again. But others disagree. Bringing on Tsukagawa at left back seemed another way for Oniki to indirectly give him a boot in the nuts and of course people are blaming him for us conceding, given that he gave away the corner they scored from. It definitely wasn’t his fault from the corner kick though and it looked like we might have got undone by what I think looks like our zonal marking but I’m not an expert. Seems to have happened a few times recently though. I should also say that I don’t think we can be upset when a midfielder doesn’t play well at left back. Oniki’s subs meant a reorganisation, with us changing to what I thought was a more likely to succeed shape with Chanathip in the middle. I’m not sure why we couldn’t have gone with him there and Tono on the left from the start. Not sure I would have played Oshima in the anchor role either, but then Tachibanada was being used elsewhere so maybe our left back selection caused lots of other players to be moved around all over the pitch. Ho hum. We are still employing the usual recent slowly slowly slowly build ups with thousands of passes before we even leave our half and then attacks petering out before they get to the opposition’s box. It’s noticeable that our goal came from a more direct pass. Given that we didn’t do that much I guess it was not a tactic but maybe came from someone veering off the script. After we scored, we looked like we were happy enough to sit on the 1-0 lead. Of course that makes some sense, but it hasn’t worked that well in recent times has it? By the end of the match Jubilo looked far more like they wanted to win the game. We were still persevering with the slow build up. Maybe we’ll finally manage to score a second when we manage to put the perfect selection of passes together some time early next week. It was a far from engaging game. In the first half I found my eyes being drawn much more to the Rubik’s cube that the little girl in the row in front of me was doing rather than anything that was happening on the pitch. And here a wonderful comparison sails into view, as she would complete one colour, proudly show her dad and then try to complete a different colour messing up the first complete side in the process. Likewise on the pitch, we had some nice triangles passing around the back, but when it came to combining those triangles with anything else meaningful it all fell apart. Anyway, here’s a table for you:

I dunno, we don’t do very well against teams near the bottom, do we? Obviously the fact that it’s the bottom seven teams should show you that I chose that cut off to best prove my somewhat random point. We always struggle against teams who sit back and who were are ‘supposed’ to beat easily. But this year this seems to be happening more than ever. And don’t forget that the Gamba and Jubilo draws and the Vissel win were really last minute jobs without which we would be in a lot more trouble.

Next up Cerezo Osaka away on Saturday. Non-reserved visitor seating returning means that we’ll be back to the old horrific lengthy two-stage queueing process. We never do that well against Cerezo so maybe they are the kind of opponent we need to shake us up a bit. But most likely it will be another dull draw or a defeat. At least we have a nice day out planned on Sunday so I have something to look forward to!

 

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 19. TONO Daiya

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 18. CHANATHIP

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for CHANATHIP 71')

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (on for YAMANE 82')

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for KOBAYASHI 82')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for WAKIZAKA 71')

FW 23. MARCINHO (on for TONO 61')

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

No

Goals

 

YAMANE (Frontale) 33' 1-0

ITO (Jubilo) 85' 1-1

Highlights  

Vs Oita Trinita (home) 12/12/21 Emperor's Cup semi-final

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 Oita Trinita (AET) (4-5 on penalties)

Presumably much to the delight of all followers of J League football aside from Frontale and Kashima fans, our season is over. And it’s a bit of a shame that the end came in such a disappointing way, but that’s football I guess. After all, if every game went as people expected it to and how the stats or the relative strengths of the teams suggested, it would be a very boring sport. Not going as far to suggest that I’m in any way pleased by us losing providing a welcome cup upset though. In fact, I’ll go nowhere near that far. But at least if we were going to lose, we can’t really feel too upset about doing so on penalties in a game that we played reasonably well in, and in which we can’t blame the defeat on anyone or anything. Which all makes it sound like this could be a relatively moan free blog post! So I’ll start with a bit of a moan about the tournament to make up for it. I felt like there was a bit of mixed messaging going on in this game. In the way the the JFA always likes to stamp its authority and individuality on to Emperor’s Cup games, they decided that this would be the first full capacity game of the season. To be honest, it kind of makes sense as even the most optimistic of people would probably find it hard to say that this isn’t probably the best situation with regards to Corona that we have been in for a long time and probably will be in for a long time. Maybe to counter this increased attendance from an ‘optics’ point of view, there was no alcohol for sale in the stadium. Perhaps the JFA gets a cut of gate receipts but not alcohol sales. If that’s true I guess we know why the attendance was increased. So it was our biggest attendance of the season but it was nowhere near a sell out, probably because in this competition the seating allowance is always split 50/50 between the two sets of fans. And Oita isn’t very geographically close to Kawasaki. It also now seems to be an Emperor’s Cup tradition that the two teams come out separately, again I guess with COVID in mind. Which is kind of ridiculous when you consider they will be getting very close to each other and breathing a lot heavier during the game. Guess it was mainly for show though. But it did seem slightly bizarre when at the same time you are seating people right next to each other in the whole stadium for the first time in the season. You’ll be disappointed, I’m sure, that it has been more questioning rather than moaning so far so I’ll get the proper moans going. The music is still utterly awful for this competition. Which is no surprise as it’s still the same awful songs. Please check my last Emperor’s Cup blog post for detailed whinging. The other moan is that they sell the tickets for the final before the semi-finals have been played. After our defeat, this has created a massive rush of people tweeting, trying to sell tickets for the final now. Considering that the prices for these games are higher than for regular games it does some like something of a cash grab. But I have been told that it is a kind of a tradition for fans of all teams to want to go to the game, regardless of who is playing. Perhaps they wouldn’t be buying tickets behind the goal in the main supporter section though. Given the previously mentioned distance from Oita, I’m not sure many people will be able to sell their tickets. I guess I’m going to go still, but it’s kind of weird to attend and sit in the section with the fans of the team who have knocked you out in the last match. Perhaps Oita’s opposition in the final, pantomime villains Urawa, will make it a bit easier for people to build up some enthusiasm to support the team who they don’t support but in whose section they are sitting. But to be honest, I’m not exactly that excited about going. I probably wouldn’t even bother watching it on TV if we didn’t have tickets. There is an element of sour grapes in this, but also the realisation that usually lightning doesn’t strike twice and that Oita’s dogged resistance in this game might not be so successful in the final. Hmmm, skirting dangerously close to actually talking about the game here so maybe I’d better move on to that section.

 

What can I say really? We totally bossed normal time in this game. Normally I would moan about us not being able to get shots on target but in this game that wasn’t the case. We shot a lot and frustratingly ex-Frontale keeper Takagi was having the game of a lifetime and was almost unbeatable. Of the two occasions where we did manage to beat him, we scored one and the post saved him on the other occasion. Absolutely typical really, particularly given that he’s had some dubious reviews of less than stellar performances this year. But as often seems to happen in football, someone playing against their old team seems to find just that little bit extra to put in an amazing performance. Full credit to Takagi, he was amazing and stopped things which looked impossible. It was pretty much totally one way traffic for the regular 90 minutes yet we failed to score. But I’m not going to moan about it. It clearly wasn’t meant to be. And the game was a lot more even in injury time with both sides giving it a go. When we finally managed to get one past Takagi it came from a Kozuka cross (who is he again? It’s been quite a while. Once again the curse of the former player!) and a Kobayashi finish. But we could only get one goal from the 41 shots we had, half of which were in extra time and around 75% of which were on target. It REALLY wasn’t meant to be! And then we conceded when we were down to ten men as we got struck with another serious looking injury. This time it was Tono who hadn’t been on for long when he somehow got involved in a tackle that another one of our players was making. He tried to continue but really couldn’t. Whether us being down to 10 men contributed to us conceding, I don’t know really, but it can’t have helped. It wasn’t very nice to concede in the 121st minute (somewhat similar to our Levain exit to Urawa), but the massive feeling of it just not being our day should have prepared us somewhat for the goal going in. Oniki’s reluctance to make too many changes till he really had to probably speaks volumes about his confidence in the players he had put on the bench. I wrote previously about the starting line up being obvious but he actually changed things slightly with Oshima starting and Marcinho dropping to the bench. I wonder if Marcinho’s honeymoon period is over now, being withdrawn at half time against YFM, somewhat bafflingly as far as I was concerned, and now dropping to the bench. With Oniki and Brazilians, things seem to go one of two ways. Either they are straight in the team as a big money or big name signing as Damiao was, or they are made to very, very patiently wait for their opportunity, which only comes when every other option is exhausted as Jesiel had to. (Remember Oniki preferred playing Kurumaya at centre back before Jesiel made the spot his own). Players in the former category do tend to get dropped at some stage and then never get their place back. I’d put Neto and Joao Schmidt in that category. Whether Marcinho will join that group too, a long way ahead of schedule, who knows? I’ve often said it, but Oniki does tend to have an approach to man management that verges slightly on the psychopathic looking from the outside. But at the same time lots of people say that the players love him, so perhaps he is honest with them, saying to Neto and Joao Schmidt, you’re only going to get in the team if my preferred Japanese youngster gets horribly broken and they take it well. If we continue to be reluctant to rotate a bit more we will inevitably end up in the situation again where a serious injury could totally derail us. Or where we have two players who have hardly played at all this season stepping up to take penalties in a cup semi-final, presumably desperate to do something to prove their worth. Poor Tsukagawa! You probably know I really like him and it was horrible to see his penalty hit the post. He really didn’t deserve to be one of the fall guys. Yamane’s decisive penalty was saved and his situation is probably the opposite of Tsukagawa. He has nothing to prove but probably can barely even move his leg to kick the ball after playing almost every minute of the season for us. He’s not even going to get much of a break as Japan has a totally stupidly timed international friendly in January. Yamamura’s situation is probably somewhere between the two others. He hasn’t been used much, but at least he’s been involved, mainly sitting on the bench. You could say that Yamamura will have bad memories of this game as he missed his penalty and he was the player who was beaten for the Oita goal (the goalscorer having more than a handful of Yamamura’s shirt but I’m not going to whinge). Kozuka had possibly the opposite kind of game, assisting for the goal and scoring a penalty in the shoot out against his old team. But let’s be honest, no-one involved with Frontale will want to remember this game, in spite of there being nothing particularly wrong with the performance. If you concede a penalty in a shoot out with the ball bouncing off the post and then in off the back of your keeper's head you've just got to accept that you were destined not to get to the final. And we just came up against a keeper with something to prove, who did exactly that, so hats off to Takagi and good luck to Oita in the final. They have had a disappointing season and I’m sure they’d love to combine a J2 promotion push with a crack at the ACL next year.

So, yes, it’s over for 2021. Losing to a relegated team in the cup would usually prompt me to say that we don’t play very well against teams near the bottom. I was prepared to say this but a bit of research has shown that it’s not really the case this year where against the five bottom teams in the league we have won all of our games aside from a draw away at Shonan and a draw at home against Vegalta Sendai. So what can I blame then? THE KYUSHU CURSE! Also probably previously referred to at length in this blog, it doesn’t really make sense, particularly when the game is at home as this one was, but teams from Kyushu do seem to have a habit of kicking us in the nuts. Last year Trinita prevented us taking the title by beating us in Oita, a result that was something of a surprise. This year in the league we dealt with them more comfortably, winning 2-0 home and away. And then they knocked us out on penalties in the semi-final of the cup… So what about the other two Kyushu teams? Yep, those games were our two league defeats this year, both happening on the island that provides great away game adventures but bad results for us. Thankfully we couldn’t go to Avispa away as I am still a bit annoyed about the winning goal being scored by someone who should have been sent off on a couple of occasions in the match before he stepped up and scored an annoyingly good goal. Would probably have been difficult to keep a COVID mandated lid on my irritation if I had been watching it in the stadium. The loss to Sagan Tosu was a similarly disappointing performance but was made up for by being able to attend the game and enjoy the alcoholic delights of Kyushu. That game came after the title was sealed so there was perhaps something of a hangover to the performance. Perhaps the same could be said about this loss as it came after Damiao got the MVP and Golden Boot, Yamane got the fair play award and our players filled seven out of the 11 places in the team of the year. I dunno, perhaps clutching at straws a bit here, but let’s add the congratulations you won something hangover to the Kyushu curse and I think we’re really on to something. You can’t really say that we’ve pulled up many trees in this tournament this year really though as we’ve struggled through on penalties against both Nagano of J3 and JEF of J2 before we finally fell to Oita of J1 on the dreaded kicks. (Damn, we’ve gone to penalties fours times in one season and lost twice if you include the ACL game). Admittedly, we did beat two J1 teams in this competition in between the JEF and Oita games though. And somewhat bizarrely, in spite of us by no means putting out the reserves in any of these games, we played a lot better in the game we lost against the J1 team than we did in the games we won against lower league opposition. It clearly is ‘a funny old game’. Now we have to start thinking about 2022 I guess. It seems inevitable that Hasegawa and Joao Schmidt will be leaving from their complete disappearance from the match day squads after missing penalties in the ACL. It seems very weird that Schmidt had made only one appearance and hasn’t made the bench for any other game considering he was a regular at the start of the season. Hasegawa was also usually involved in some way till he missed his penalty and since then has not been seen since. The same fate didn’t befall Ienaga though. When you look at who missed penalties in this match, I’ve got to day I’m worried for Tsukagawa. Yamane is clearly undroppable for Oniki and Yamamura is probably too versatile to be frozen out. Talking of Yamane, there was a slight strangeness to his answer to a question in the J League awards that suggested to me that he wouldn’t be against an overseas transfer if someone came knocking. And given that he has been in the team of the year in the last two years and is one of our internationals it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Whether he will want to extend what has already been a very intense season by transferring to Europe and completely obliterating his end of season break, who knows? Hatate looks set to leave. Please let it not be Celtic. It inevitably will be, but given the horrible manager of that team, it will be hard for me to enjoy him doing well if he does go. He was once again in floods of tears after this game so I think he knows it was his last game for us. By the way, another amazing 1-0 win for Celtic yesterday. Sadly for them, they are still bottom of what is effectively their two team league trailing Rangers by four points. The seriousness of Jesiel’s injury would suggest that we need some back-up in defence but then again, that’s been the case for the last four or five years and it never seems to come. Tanabe probably is the most favoured out of the three young defenders we have who never play, but I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t just a case of play Yamamura or Kurumaya there instead. No news about Kurumaya’s injury and I guess we won’t get it now the season is over. You can probably add Tono to that potentially serious injury list too now. Whether any of the other bright talents get picked off I don’t know. You’ve got to imagine Tachibanada will be catching some teams’ eyes. In 2022 we’ll be going for the three-peat in the league for the second time whilst trying to prioritise the ACL again. It didn’t work very well in 2019, did it? I dread another season like that. So definitely some work to be done.

 

Next up, nothing for the team apart from a big rest and they deserve it. I don’t think we can be too upset about how we’ve done in any of the competitions this year. We were totally dead on our feet and suffering from a defensive injury crisis when we flopped out of the Levain and the ACL, and in the Emperor’s Cup, well you know, as this blog post is about that. Next up for this blog, some end of season posts going into more detail about all the end of season things and the usual end of season survey. As we’ve finished a little earlier this year, there’s still plenty of time to do those I guess. Right now though, I’m going to have a little break from blogging and try to enjoy the festive period as much as I can. Not sure I particularly deserve it, but I’ll give it a go anyway. Cheers and Merry Frontale Christmas and hopefully a Happy Frontale New Year to you all.

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 47. HATATE Reo

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for WAKIZAKA 109')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 82')

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for TACHIBANADA 109')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for HATATE 82')
FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for IENAGA 109')

FW 23. MARCINHO (on for OSHIMA 65')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Let's skip this on this occasion.

 

Goals

 

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 114' 1-10

HENRIQUE (Oita) 120+1' 1-1

 

Penalties

SHIMODA (Oita) 0-1


CHINEN (Frontale) 1-1
NAGASAWA (Oita) 1-1 (missed)
YAMAMURA (Frontale) 1-1
 (saved)

MATSUMOTO (Oita) 1-2
KOZUKA (Frontale) 2-2


HENRIQUE (Oita) 2-3


TSUKAGAWA (Frontale) 2-3
 (missed)

KOBAYASHI (Oita) 2-3 (saved)


KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 3-3


MISAO (Oita) 3-4


TANIGUCHI (Frontale) 4-4


MACHIDA (Oita) 4-5


YAMANE (Frontale) 4-5 (saved)
 

Highlights

 

Vs Kashiwa Reysol (home) 13/3/21 - J League match 4

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 0 Kashiwa Reysol 

So, five wins out of five so far! Lovely! What was not lovely was this game. But I guess sooner or later we were going to have a crappy 90 minutes. Actually, maybe that was Wednesday, so this one makes it two in a row. The encouraging thing is that we came away from two pretty poor performances with six points. Can’t get any better than that points wise. We could get a lot better entertainment wise though. But lets not be too picky. Given that I have four days till the next match this could be a detailed and interesting blog post. But there wasn’t really much to work with. So, for consecutive wins with poor performances I present consecutive slapdash poor blog posts. どうぞ, as I heard the ref say on numerous occasions in this game. I’ve never heard that before. Perhaps it was the fact that we were back in the main stand again so perhaps nearer the pitch. Or perhaps it was the fact that there was absolutely nothing exciting to distract me from the joy of listening to the ref. Did I mention this was an awful game? Perhaps I did. Probably will again. Here we go with some bullet points, which will pretty much be the same as the last post’s bullet points, with perhaps the same things said too. But maybe this time a bit more negative.

Line up -

Bit of a surprise with Oniki’s selection this time. Although let's not get too carried away, as it was the same 19 players in the squad as it has been for all but one of our 2021 fixtures. (Yamamura coming in when we switch the centre backs and Chinen coming in briefly when Tsukagawa was injured).DF Previously it seemed like we had an A team and a B team with the former doing most of the heavy lifting and the latter giving the former a rest occasionally. Well kind of, as some players were in both the A and B teams, but you get my drift. In this game Oniki mixed things up creating a C team. Actually, I shouldn't make it sound like a third choice team though, so maybe it would be more accurate to call it an AB team. The A midfield remained intact, the B centre backs came in and the front three was an AB mix. I thought this was kind of exciting before the game, but after watching the match and writing these words it has become clear that it wasn’t actually that much of an exciting experiment. Perhaps more just a snub to Tono. Left back and right back are still the problem positions from the point of view of rotation. Both Yamane and Hatate have started every game and played most of the minutes. When Nobori comes back from injury I guess we have an option at left back but we still are no closer to knowing what might happen at right back in the event of an emergency (or rotation. Emergency probably more likely). And Oniki no longer has Morita to play there either. I would have thought that it would have made sense to start with Damiao in this game, given that the Kashiwa keeper has a reputation for going wandering and making clangers. Super presser Damiao would probably have given him plenty to think about. Also, I would have thought that it might have made more sense to rotate a bit more on Wednesday against newly promoted Tokushima and save the preferred players for Kashiwa. But we didn’t. But we won both games. I’ve got to moan about something though, right?

 

Opposition and game -

Not much to say about Kashiwa in this game. They still seem to like a long ball in spite of the fact that they don’t have Olunga anymore. They had no shots on target, as with Tokushima on Wednesday. Kind of takes the shine off two consecutive clean sheets a bit but they are very welcome all the same. It’s not that surprising seeing as most the game was made up of both teams bringing the ball forward and then losing it. We had our first shot around the 30 minute mark I think. The crowd tried their best to inject a bit of excitement into things by doing that building an attack clapping thing, but more often than not it started as we were due to move out of defence and then we just played the ball along the back line and that was about it. Delightful stuff for those who love pass completion, but not so exciting for those who prefer actual football matches rather than training exercises. It came to my attention that I had been missing the contributions of Wakizaka recently so I made a special effort to watch the game with a focus in him. Wakizaka fans will probably not be so pleased that I chose this game to do so, as it definitely wasn’t his best. I can say that with some confidence even though in previous games I haven’t really noticed him. Definitely not his day. Similarly, Joao Schmidt had game to forget. I’d love to blame the conditions, as we’d had a hell of a lot of rain in they afternoon leading up to the game, but I can’t say it particularly affected things. At least not as far as I was aware. We were just not at the races. The front three were pretty ineffectual too. And Yamane had a below par game too. Perhaps people are getting tired. Which is a bit worrying as we’ve only played 6 games so far this year. The schedule has been relentless though, as it was last year. The weird thing is that we have started the season on time without any major corona virus delays yet. Guess the packed schedule will ease off at some stage, and I fully realise that every team has the same issue, so I'm not trying to moan about it. But we probably need to give some players a bit of a rest. To be honest, both teams in this match were so ‘below average’ that I feel the league should introduce a new scoring system. Three points for a win, one point for a draw, no points for a loss or a draw where both teams are shit. No points for anyone would have been a fair outcome probably. But we did at least score. Thank you to Mitoma for the impact from the bench and the lovely run and to Ienaga for putting the ball in the net. Plenty of payers (including Ienaga himself) have missed easier chances already this year, so it was a relief when this one went in.

Ref and VAR watch -

No VAR again in this game as far as I could tell. And no late flagging from linesmen! I guess it’s no surprise that there was no VAR as VAR is only used for notable incidents and there was nothing notable in this game. I thought the ref was rubbish again though. No bookings in this game for Kashiwa (although of course we got one... Our first of the season surprisingly), and there were definitely some fouls that deserved it. It’s a real shock when not even Kashiwa’s one man card machine Richardson doesn’t get one. The Kashiwa manager was losing his rag over Hatate's throw ins. They did look a bit weird, but they were right in front of the linesman and after Nelsinho had moaned once about them you would have thought the officials would have paid a bit more attention to them so I can only presume they were ok. Perhaps the ref’s performance is best summed by the occasion when the corner flag got knocked out, a player from both teams united to put it back in and then the ref decided to go and check it himself to kill a few seconds and get the camera on him. Maybe Matsuo is looking to take over from Nishimura as the number one attention seeking ref when he retires. I guess his flag checking might have been the reason he added six minutes injury time in a game where nothing had happened. Nice work ref!

Other bits -

No brace in this game. But we still got the dodgy half. Although much like against Tokushima, it was once again two dodgy halves. Great work from the stadium staff to get the pitch sorted as it seemed like the game might be called off after so much rain in the hours before kick off. Jeez, that’s all I’ve got. The game was so dull that there wasn’t even anything for me to make a stupid joke about. Blimey. Oh! There was a rainbow.

Next up, Vissel Kobe away on Wednesday. They messed up a good run for us last year when we played them away in the league. Hope they don’t do that again. After that, Urawa away next weekend. So two away games after a home game heavy start to the season. Perhaps the change of scenery will shake us up a bit. Hope so! Go Frontale!
 

Team

 

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG 

DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 47. HATATE Reo

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT
MF 25. TANAKA Ao

MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 37')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta 

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 46')

DF 4. JESIEL

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for KOBAYASHI 64')

FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru (on for HASEGAWA 46')

FW 19. TONO Daiya

MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for WAKIZAKA 46')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

There’s only one person I can think of to give this to and that’s…

HATATE Reo - the only starting player who did anything with the ball when he played it forward. Actually, maybe he was the only player who actually played it forward. Also, felt like he was targeted a bit by Kashiwa but for the most part stood firm.

Goals

IENAGA (Frontale) 80' 1-0

Highlights