Vs Tokyo Verdy (away) 9/8/26 J League match 1

Tokyo Verdy 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale 

So begins a new season. It goes without saying that after the absolute mediocrity of the last half season, there’d definitely be something to work on and room for improvement in the break before the new season proper kicked off. We signed some players. Not many, but some. Two Brazilian strikers and one Brazilian centre back. Of course one of these stickers was presumably to replace Erison who perhaps felt dissatisfied with the situation at Frontale and left for JEF. The fact that we now have plenty of numbers up front and at centre back hinted that perhaps we might be seeing some kind of new approach. So naturally I anticipated the team announcement for the first game with some excitement. I only really have myself to blame for that I guess. Probably shouldn’t have been so optimistic. A couple of tiny changes to what was basically the starting line up from the start of last season. And exactly the same approach. Hip hip hooray.

Thankfully after seeing the starting line up I managed to temper any kind of anticipation I might have had so didn’t end up crushingly disappointed. And in a way, I could also say that our total tedium in this match was a useful thing for me as I was intending to trim down these blog posts a bit and if there’d been something exciting to write about I might have had to make a bit more effort. As I’m always the first to admit, I don’t really understand tactics so I’m going to try to steer away from talking about them so much. I will say though that I do understand utterly pointless tedium football as I’ve become so accustomed to it over the last year or so and that was very much on display in this match. 70% possession so lots of the ball. Almost absolutely zero attacking threat. Our late equaliser was in some ways deserved as Verdy looked as shit as us, but at the same time was utterly undeserved as we hadn’t troubled their keeper for the rest of the game. This is going to be a very long and extremely boring season. 

Maybe some positives are that the away kit looks nice. Pedro Romano looks decent. And… erm… that’s it. Unless you go to games looking forward to watching pointless passing in which case you have a lot to look forward to. Negatives, plenty. Fucking hell Hasebe, you had the first season where you didn’t want to rock the boat considering we were in the late stages of the ACL so didn’t change anything. Then we had the half season where we had a free hit and plenty of opportunity to change something and we didn’t change anything. And then the break between another eight place finish and this season where we once again we changed nothing. What’s he doing? Kengo on the bench next to him must feel a bit like his potential successor picking up some tips before he takes his job. I truly hope Kengo doesn’t take any tips from Hasebe though, as all he seems to be able to do is repeat the same thing eternally. Quite why we have five payers in the squad vying for the one striker spot, I don’t know. We’ve got seven players who can play centre back and we’ll seemingly only ever use two of them. I always imagined that the person who signs the players for the club communicates with the manager but I’m starting to think he’s making purchases according to email instructions he’s still getting from his last job or something. If we’re not doing at all well in a game Hasebe’s response is some good old like for like subs, bringing on the players he thought weren’t good enough to start the match. To give him credit he did make a tactical change in the 85th minute with his final sub. To take all the credit back, pretty much everyone in the stadium apart from him must have been able to see how badly we were playing, how much we needed to change something and how insane it was to wait until the game was almost over to do it. I know he’s a nice guy and everything but his eternal optimism when it comes to post match thoughts where he pretty much says we did well but need to score more is absolutely grating on me and it’s only the first game of what will almost certainly feel like a very long season. Fucking hell. Hasebe the baker is constantly praising his assistant bakers for measuring and combining the ingredients perfectly and doesn’t seem worried that no one in the bakery ever thinks of putting the cake in the oven. Hasebe the fashion expert has put together, through wonderful use of layering, a sensational outfit and has accessorised perfectly. Oh, but he didn’t think he’d need to go as far as dress the bottom half, so the model is walking around half naked. Hasebe the hobbyist has built a magnificent train set in his loft but isn’t going to bother with buying any trains. Hasebe the musician has rehearsed for weeks with his band and is now in perfect condition to not bother turning up to play the gig. But in all of these cases he’s reasonably pleased with how the half finished job has turned out. 

A few words on the ref as it would be remiss of me to not slag him off. After watching a World Cup with plenty of dubious decisions it was delightful to get back to the J League and see that the refs are just as shit as they have always been. Even among J League ref apologists, I think the name Mikuriya is one that fills people with dread and so it proved to be again. I came up with a very NSFW nickname for him that doesn’t really work that well. but does absolutely suit him down to the ground. If you’re interested in knowing what it is, please ask. The rules saying you need to take throw ins, goal kicks and make subs quickly from the World Cup are now in evidence in the J League, which I’m not sure is a great idea as the poor refs aren’t even really up to actually refereeing to the old rules so to put more on their plate is a bit unfair. Obviously Mikuriya thought we were delaying on one of our throw ins and gave it to them, even though we were trailing at the time so wouldn’t have made much sense to time waste. Making keepers not waste time on goal kicks is an interesting rule. And one which seems like it’s a bit pointless if you only start counting after the keeper has crawled on his hands and knees to retrieve the ball, dropped it a few times, had a couple of drinks, and possibly a light meal before putting the ball on the spot. The fact that the Verdy keeper was wasting so much time in the second half without any kind of censure made it all the more enjoyable that he conceded extremely late on. Also, I think we need some kind of paranormal investigator to have a look at the game, as every time a Verdy player was about to be changed they were suddenly struck down by a phantom condition that meant they needed lengthy treatment. However you feel about these new rules’ implementation at the World Cup, it was always going to be just one more thing for the useless bastards in charge of the J League to mess up. Oh, and finally, Ito's yellow card was a joke, but that's to be expected with Mikuriya. There truly is nothing to look forward to. Apart from the 2027/28 season if we manage to be able to start that one in J1.

Such a pointless game. Such a boring game. Such a predictable game. The finger clearly has to be pointing at Hasebe at the moment. On this showing we’ll be extremely lucky to finish in our usual 8th. Probably much closer to 18th. And for the final crucial game of the season where we’re battling to avoid relegation Hasebe will probably still be going with the same formation, players and tactics and will afterwards comment that we did really well passing the ball sideways back and forth in our own half and that we’ll have to work on actually shooting before the next match. Fucking hell. At least we’ll have some fun away games this time round! 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 68')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for TACHIBANADA 76')
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC (on for MOCHIYAMA 61')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MIURA 76')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 23. MARCINHO (on for KONNO 61')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for YAMAMOTO 86')
FW 34. OSA Ryuki


Man of the match

You’ve got to be kidding me.

 

Goals

MIZOGUCHI (Verdy) 46' 1-0
ROMANIC (Frontale) 90+6' 1-1

Highlights

 

Vs Urawa Reds (away) 29/4/26 J League East match 13

Urawa Reds 2 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale 

As predicted in the last post we followed up two wins in a row with a defeat against a team who had lost seven games in a row. Good old Frontale! Always there to help out a team who are in hopeless form by giving them an easy three points! It was a bit sneaky of them to invoke the new manager bounce by sacking their old guy a few days before this match. I’m starting to think that I wouldn’t mind us giving the new manager bounce a go too. Two wins in a row covered up two pretty mediocre-at-best performances, both of which swung our way through late goals. I know it’s tedious to hear people moaning about their team being shit when they’ve won, so I apologise for doing that in the last couple of posts, but I’m sure you’ll forgive me as clearly the shitness that was there in those match in the form of a little tickle in the back of throat and occasional cough has now developed into a full blown flu of cackiness. Golden week has started with possibly our worst performance of the season (so far). And don’t forget this was a season which included us losing 5-0 to YFM. As I have now nice plans for Golden Week, (which are presumably going to be interrupted by a couple more shitty games), I have no desire to prolong this any more than I have to. The next two posts will probably appear in a very rough and unadorned way as I’ll be traveling. I’ll post the moaning but I’ll add all the details at a later date. The thought of this is already pretty off-putting.

Atrocious Frontale -

Seven shots in the whole match! Only one save necessary from their keeper. And we started quite brightly. But it was our old friend ‘attack and pass till you get close to their goal and then don’t bother shooting’ who was very much in evidence again. I should have know the match was going to go badly when our first shot was blocked by one of our own players. That was probably about as close as we came to scoring. Right from the start the ref was awful, and was clearly not going to book anyone unless he really had to, basically clearing the way for a full on Urawa assault on our players. But don’t get me wrong, although the ref was absolutely awful, (equally the linesman, who forgot to do the part of his job that related to watching the line and seeing if the ball crosses it), it wasn’t him that cost us the game. It was Hasebe. 

In the past I’ve said Hasebe hasn’t come up with anything new to stake his claim on the team. I now realise this was incorrect. I was wondering why Romanic was starting every game over Erison. Sure, he scored so deserved to keep his spot. But then he didn’t score and still kept his spot. In this game it all became clear to me. Hasebe is actually a tactical innovator extraordinaire. He’s come up with a wild and refreshing plan, (which I incorrectly described as moving the ball forward more quickly in the last post), which involves us hoofing the ball forward to Romanic at every opportunity as quickly as possible. He usually wins the ball, sometimes manages to keep it, sometimes manages to pass it to a team mate, but more often than not, perhaps due to the speed and distance of the hoofing, is unable to do anything with the ball as it’s only him who’s past the half way line, and he’s surround by defenders. This would account for us having only 29% possession and two shots, both off target, in the first half. And don’t forget this was a half we started quite brightly! So a terrible first half when you looked at the 35 minutes that preceded half time. So what did our great leader do at half time? Apparently fuck all other than further demotivate our players. Once again we got nothing going at all until we we’d used most of our subs, had thrown Hasebe’s tactics away and the players were just doing what they wanted. His subs were weird again, Hasebe, as ever, being totally committed to keeping Wakizaka on the pitch, even if it meant playing him on the right wing where he’s not very good or in defensive midfield, where he’s not very good. To be fair to Hasebe though, Wakizaka has also been not very good in his preferred and normal position this year. Hasebe’s response to us going 2-0 down was to bring on Kawahara for Ito. Don’t worry, Wakizaka will cover it! Miyagi didn’t make it onto the pitch till the 83rd minute. Kanda sat on the bench again. 

 

But Hasebe would probably point to the massive improvement in our stats in the second half, right? We had five shots in the second compared to two in the first. Bravo! We had one shot on target compared to none in the first. Bravo! We had 54% possession compared to 26% in the first. Bravo! We conceded two goals compared to one in the first…. oh. But don’t for a moment think that this defensive frailty was anything to do with us going all out attack. This is just the awful football that is Hasebe Frontale. Occasionally we squeak a result to paper over the cracks. But sooner or later those cracks are gaping again, and Hasebe probably would also think that Wakizaka would be the man for the job if you had an issue with your interior decorating. Every game starts with us having a dodgy half with Hasebe’s first choice players, formation and tactics. Sometimes we scrabble together a result by just flinging everything at the wall late on and hoping something sticks. And then Hasebe takes any positive result as confirmation that he should start the next game in exactly the same way, ignoring the fact that nothing normally happens till he abandons his plans. 

 

Poor old Hasebe. I’m sure he doesn’t want to be this terrible at his job. I’m sure he can’t feel great about being tactically outsmarted by someone who has never managed a professional game before. I’m sure he much rather still be somewhere where people thought he was doing a good job. To be honest I’d much rather he was somewhere where people thought he was doing a good job. Because presumably that would mean he was no longer our manager. It seems pretty clear to me that he’s not going to change anything. Every slight ray of hope where he slightly changes something is immediately extinguished by reverting to the same old shit as soon as possible. Maybe we should experiment in the next game by playing the game in reverse, starting the match with the players and lack of tactics that we finish games with. It would certainly be more interesting and would probably be more effective. Hopefully by half time we might have scored and then he could suck the life and enjoyment out of the match through one of his half time team talks and us reverting to utter dullness in the second half with him bringing on his subs to build his usual starting line up might result in us not conceding so many. Then after the match he can give his pre match motivational team talk which hopefully the players will have forget by the time the next match comes around. Some might say that if we fire him we have no one to replace him with. I’d suggest that right now his influence is purely a negative one and that without him, we’d be doing a lot better. Sorry, Hasebe, but I think your time is up.

Despicable opposition - 

It wouldn’t be right for me to post about an Urawa game without taking at least a few potshots at them. Their fans were it seemed VERY VERY UPSET with the club before the game. No big flags, no banners with increasingly weird ways of describing the male youthfulness of their fan groups, (Zut alors, pas de garçons! Bof!), the briefest of chanting when their players came out. They weren’t a happy bunch because they definitely believe they deserve to be at the top of the league and winning every game 15-0. (Sorry guys, you can’t play us every week. Other teams will put up a bit more resistance). So not happy at all, but they were still very happy to boo us. This is because they are oh so very fearsome and a really naughty bunch. As I work in Urawa and speak to a lot of …Urawans (?), I take issue with their ‘Pride of Urawa’ flag. Their team is absolutely not the pride of Urawa. I can guarantee that if I survey my classes the overwhelming winner of the pride of Urawa contest will be Urawa Parco. I reckon there were probably more people in Parco than were in the stadium too. I reckon I might join them when this fixture comes round next time. It’s certainly a lot easier to get to and even if I just emptied the contents of my wallet down the toilet in Parco I think I’d probably have a more satisfying and enjoyable experience than I would going to the Saitama Stadium. At least in a normal season where we’re playing awfully we get to go to some interesting places. This year I’ve spent way too many hours I’ll never get back in stadiums having a horrible time and then only being able to return home through those horrible wastelands that surround those horrible teams stadiums, rather than go out and see something interesting. This year, the trips are shit, the football’s shit, the experience is shit and most of all we are shit. 

WOW!

I’ll keep this brief and ever so slightly cryptic. Mikuriya is a turd of a referee so he definitely gets a share of this. He’s not corrupt or crooked or anything, he’s just useless. The other person who takes this is perhaps a lot closer to home. I don’t think there can be any doubt as to why we were so awful, so the person who orchestrated that has to get a share of the spoils.


Next up, who gives a shit? (It’s FC Tokyo away on Saturday). Maybe in that game we might be able to have more than one shot on target if we’re really lucky. I never want us to lose a game, but with Kashima losing on this match day, (whenever they lose we always lose it seems, regardless of whether we are challenging them in any way or are nowhere near them. To be fair though, we are losing quite often recently, so maybe that skews things a little), it’s not going to upset me in the slightest if they wallop us. It might be one step closer to Kashima not coming first in this shitty competition, and it could also move us one step closer to perhaps a managerial change. I will be there, but will be deep in holiday mode. Nothing will be able to bring me down. Well, perhaps apart from another useless ref. But I’m determined not to let another inevitably rotten performance ruin the rest of my Golden Week. This seems to be a much healthier way to approach all of these kind of things. Phew. 

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for UREMOVIC 61')
FW 9. ERISON (on for ROMANIC 61')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for ITO 74')

MF 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for TACHIBANADA 83')
DF 30. NODA Hiroto
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke

MF 34. OSA Ryuki (on for MARCINHO 61')

FW 38. KANDA Soma

Man of the match

Not a fucking chance of anyone getting this. 

 

Goals

MATHEUS SAVIO (Urawa) 54' 1-0
KOMORI (Urawa) 71' 2-0

Highlights

Vs Urawa Reds (away) 3/9/25 Levain Cup Quarter Final 1st Leg

Urawa Reds 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale  

This week is horrendously busy for me so this is going to be a flying blog post, tossed out on the train home from work the day after the game. That kind of makes sense when you consider we’re only at the halfway point of the tie so anything that happened in this first leg can easily be overturned on Sunday. That was the one bit of positivity I was holding on to with about 20 minutes to go when I thought I’d probably take a 1-0 defeat. It seemed like some of our players were thinking the same way too. When Jesiel left the pitch injured ten minutes later, I was really up for getting away with the 1-0. But somehow we scored and now head in to the second leg with a bizarre and slightly unjustified upper hand. Anyway don’t worry Urawa fans, we’ve done our best to undercut any home advantage we might have by giving Urawa pretty much all of one end of the stadium. It’s not completely out of character though is it? After all we’re a nice guy club and will do our best to be nice to the opposition. I’m not going to follow the usual headings this time because there’s not much to write about under any of them that couldn’t really be summed up in probably one or two words. But as brevity is not my speciality that’s clearly going to be stretched out a bit. So this is not too long, but nowhere near as short as it should be given how bad most of the game was.

Firstly, we were utterly shit in the first half. Recent games might have given us some confidence but if we dwell even a moment on that first half we’ll crash back down into complete depression. Going one step further than in recent games when the midfield was totally absent, on this occasion the midfield and defence had disappeared. I’ll put this down to tiredness and perhaps some lingering effects of the recent ‘illness’ that was going through the squad. I don’t know if the players weren’t up for this game, but it certainly looked like they weren’t. Miyagi, after earning Hasebe’s praise for being available to fill in on the right and then going on to score a goal, did exactly what Miyagi does every time he makes an impression as a sub, ie. massively disappoint as a starter. And it wasn’t just because he was on the right as he had a go on the left after half time and didn’t do anything there either. His main contribution was ballooning a shot high and wide when there maybe three of his teammates in good positions during a rare first half attack. Maybe he could do a job up front, but he certainly didn’t do his chances of playing on either the left or right much good in this game. Was Wakizaka plying this match? He was quite underwhelming against Machida but somehow did even less in thiis match. Well apart from hit every corner at the first defender. Miura has still not recovered from…. something. I don’t know what it is but he’s been pretty bad for most of this season. I’ve been told to not express out loud my opinions about Yamaguchi anymore. Maybe that’s for the best. I’m not disagreeing that he’s our best option right now, but I am strongly disagreeing with the insane amount of adulation he’s getting for, as one auto translated YouTube notification put it ‘making a two-handed save’. Wow! The same notifications refer to Erison as Ellison though, which surely is something the proof readers should have spotted. Presumably there aren’t any. Looks pretty shonky. Anyway, the first half was appalling, we got a bit better in the second until the fatigue really set in. We couldn’t pass for shit and gave the ball away an unbelievable amount of times. Blame the grass! We looked much better when Ito, Yamamoto and Romanic came on, but it’s a bit worrying that without Ito and Erison starting, we’re absolute cack and look like we’ll never score. (Just realised that I should probably mention in case you didn't see the match that Jesiel left the pitch injured. Not sure how serious it is, but it does seem that even when we have plenty of centre backs in the squad, we still are constantly suffering from a lack of options in that area. Fingers crossed he's ok for Sunday).

This was a no alcohol match for me. Not for any other reason than that I have no desire to drink the cack they serve in the stadium and aside from the little UBP stall outside the station, there is absolutely nothing within miles of SaiSta. Thankfully the rain held off and thankfully it was a massively reduced crowd due to it being a Levain Cup game. So the walk back to the station wasn’t the usual stop start snail-paced trudge and unlike last time it wasn’t mostly underwater. There you go! Some positives! Urawa rotated quite a lot I think and maybe because of this looked pretty poor. Admittedly they cut through us with ease, but that’s easy to do when there’s nothing to cut through. And the fact that they only scored once against a defence and keeper that lets goals in for fun should be seriously concerning for them. Lovely! They too seemed to be playing for the 1-0 towards the end of the match, which of course makes more sense for them to go for rather than us, but really showed a lack of ambition, I thought. It was utterly delightful that they fucked it up. Their fans must be bewildered that their booing every time we had the ball didn’t mortally wound us in the way they seemed to think it would. I suspect both teams will play a bit better in the second leg, but I really hope they’ve fucked themselves by conceding late on.

A quick sentence on the ref. He was a bit crap and as the game went on, seemed determined to give them everything. So kind of negative. But when you take into account the fact that it was Mikuriya, ‘a bit crap’ is a massive thumbs up. When your normal level is insanely bad, being even slightly annoying is a real step up. Congratulations!

Next up the second leg. Reading this back before I post it, I’m starting to wonder if there is any point me moaning about players not doing well. I’m fully aware that I am a fat old bastard sitting in the stands with zero talent who somehow thinks he can criticise others who are infinitely better than him. I might try to give the negativity a miss at the next match on Sunday. But it’s a bit tricky when one of our players messes up something so mind-numbingly easy. Repeatedly. Also, if you took out the negativity from these posts there wouldn’t be much left. It’s kind of strange, as the previous two games had some great positives in them, but I still somehow let myself get frustrated by the mistakes we made. Presumably the players are doing their best, (sometimes this is not particularly evident, but I think we have to presume they are), so I should shut up. The thing is though, football is a very emotional thing. Of course we watch it for the great highs, but also sometimes it is good to let out some frustration. I wonder sometimes if some people at the club don’t really like football that much and have instead been hired for their social media skills or something like that. Surely I can’t be the only one who wants to throw my phone at the wall when after a horrific performance we get a Youtube short of a ‘great save’ or of the one shot we had on target apparently oblivious to the fact that the rest of the game was a steaming pile of crap. I suppose though this could just be positivity taken to the max and perhaps should be praised. But I think people who really care about the results of the games might find some of these things as irritating as I do. ‘Happy Birthday! Here’s your birthday cake. I made it from stuff from the compost heap and covered it with shaving foam so it’s completely inedible. But just look at the candles! They’re great!’ Anyway, I’ve gone on too long and have gone so far off-piste now that this post is becoming even more irrelevant than usual. Let’s just hope that all those many Urawa fans who come to the game on Sunday boo themselves inside-out as their side mess up horrifically! There you go, I found some more positivity at the end!

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
DF 4. JESIEL

DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 24. MIYAGI Ten
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 38. KANDA Soma

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for KANDA 73')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for MARCINHO 46')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota (on for JESIEL 81')

FW 29. MYOGAN Toya
DF 30. NODA Hiroto 
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai (on for UREMOVIC 73')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for MIYAGI 61')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match 

Definitely not anyone who started the match.

 

Goals

NAKAJIMA (Urawa) 22' 1-0
ITO (Frontale) 90+5' 1-1

Highlights

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (home) 9/4/25 J League match 5

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 3 Yokohama F Marinos

Aaahhhhh. Definitely some mixed emotions after this game. The fact that a two goal win for us would have put us top and put them bottom seemed too good to be true and so it proved to be. This was a game that swung back and forth so many times that it was a bit difficult to keep up with it at times. It was far from our best performance but almost ended being a good result. Then threatened to become a disaster, before turning out… maybe well. Put it this way, it definitely felt better to have scored a last gasp equaliser rather than have conceded one. I guess the elation of that partly came from the relief that a few minutes before it had looked like we’d turned three points into no points. It’s never nice to not beat YFM, but on this occasion, I think there are a few things we can be pleased about and a few mitigating factors. Which I’ll go into in the usual sections. Here we go.

Us -

How good would it have been to have won this game with the starting line up Hasebe picked? I think even getting a draw is a decent enough snubbing of our nose to YFM considering we played only a couple of regular starters, mostly players who are usually subs, and some who rarely even get a look in to even the bench. There were only two players who started both this game and the previous game against Machida and one of them, Marcinho, only started because Miyagi got injured in the warm up. Five of the starters in this match didn’t even make the bench against Machida. And still right up until the 89th minute it looked like we were going to win. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a great performance by any means. But that’s to be expected when you consider many of these players have never started a match together and there were new partnerships all over the pitch. And still it was almost enough to win… But yeah, we didn’t play particularly well for most of the game. I’m fully in favour of Hasebe rotating though. After the Machida game the treatment room has filled up once again, partly due to Machida’s skillful booting of our players all over the pitch. There was an injury update today from the club and it was announced that in addition to Tachibanada and Jesiel being injured, which we pretty much knew, Oshima is also injured again. It’s perhaps a bit of a worry that our only loss of the season so far was the game against Kyoto where we also rotated a lot. So we definitely need to do a bit more work to get the guys who Hasebe doesn’t favour the most up to speed with the regular starters. But at the same time, I think that the upcoming ACL game, (fingers crossed, games), in Saudi Arabia is something that is on everyone’s mind at the moment and not knackering any of our players before then is quite important. It’s a bit of shame that our preparation for that trip is filled with a relentless schedule of Wednesday and weekend games. But the fact is that even with a new manager, with new ideas (maybe), we’re still doing alright in the league at the moment. So I don’t think there are any reasons to complain right now. But blimey, it would have been nice to win this game, wouldn’t it? 

So anything notable from this match? It was nice to see Ozeki get his first start and then his first goal.  It was kind of unbelievable to see Haydar score, and what a lovely goal that was. Kobayashi is back from injury, and Kanda had his first decent involvement in the league. It’s a bit of a shame that neither Kobayashi or Kanda really had much impact though. I don’t think Segawa in the Wakizaka position was a great success, and I thought he did better when moved to the wing in the second half. And I was very happy to see Tsuchiya get his first minutes. It’s unfortunate that his introduction coincided with us conceding twice, but I don’t think he was to blame, even if the look on his face at the end pf the match suggested that he thought he was. Don’t worry Tsuchiya, we were pretty unlucky with those goals. Probably for their first goal we weren’t so unlucky, unless it is bad luck to let in an absolute pea-roller of a shot. Perhaps Sung-Ryong was unsighted by the ball coming through a few players and there was a hint of a deflection too. A very soft goal to concede. We didn’t do much aside from score our first goal in the first half. The second half was a bit better. Well, up until the 89th minute anyway. But it’s no big deal. I think YFM will be much more upset about the way the game finished than we did, and them getting one point instead of the zero I’d hoped for won’t help their relegation fight that much. So in conclusion, fair enough to rotate heavily with big games coming up especially when playing a team so low down in the table 😉. We weren’t that good, but we didn’t lose. But we could do with a couple of wins in the next few games to get us back on track again, I reckon.

Them -

YFM were rubbish for most of this match and hopefully they will continue with that form for the rest of the season and go to J2. They had plenty of possession but for the most part did nothing with it. It was delightful. Tono seems to have settled in at YFM quickly as he appears to have turned into a cheating, diving, moaning wanker. Normally I feel a kind of residual warmth towards ex-players but Tono seems to have undergone a severe character change. I guess it’s because he’s now spending a lot of time in Yokohama. As a quick aside, it’s easy to tell that someone lives in Yokohama, because they incessantly bore on about how great Yokohama is. In a way, it was crushingly inevitable that they’d end up fluking a couple of late goals. These matches do tend to more often than not leave everyone slightly disappointed. At the time, I was obviously gutted that we’d conceded so late. Looking back at the replays, I feel like we were pretty unlucky. For their second goal they somehow managed to turn a totally off-target over head kick attempt into a goal via two point blank deflections off our defenders. For their third, the ref seemed to be not bothered by a handball by them in the build up and then they managed to set up the tap in by having the ball boing off their player’s shoulder. It’s clear that luck wasn’t on our side. But perhaps it generally is, given that our neighbours look so utterly crap this year. Whilst it would obviously be hilarious if they soon fired the new manager that they thought would be so good, it might actually be funnier if they held on to him for a bit longer so they can put themselves in genuine relegation danger. Hopefully Holland can go one better than Postecoglou did when he almost got them relegated. Wonder how Postecolgou is doing now? I guess that given how many players he signs and how great a manager he thinks he is, he’s probably won everything there is to win in England by now. I don’t know where this new thing of me doing a conclusion for every paragraph has come from but, in conclusion, they are shite, so it’s bad of us that we didn’t beat them, but at the same time, it’s delightful that we could deny them the win they thought they’d got so late on in the game, and it will be even better if come the end of the season they get relegated because they conceded that late Takai goal.

Ref and VAR -

Mikuriya is still a name that fills me with dread, but I didn’t have that much to moan about in this game. Aside from the usual petty little biased whinges that come as easily to me as breathing, I could probably only complain about one of our attacks that he decided to stop for a foul after he seemed initially to have played the advantage for but then changed his mind once the advantage started becoming advantageous. I guess I should probably moan about him potentially missing a handball in the lead up to their third, but I might be clutching at straws a little with that. Can’t really complain about the VAR either I guess, although I still hate it for the same old reasons. I did start thinking during this game though that I don’t think we’ve had VAR overturn anything in our favour this year. On the occasions it has gone our way it has been to back up what the ref had given on the pitch. We’ve definitely had some goals ruled out by it though. In spite of there being plenty of overly lengthy checks in this match, again, we didn’t seem to get the luck of VAR. So this year I can hate it for both its very existence and the way the decisions are going for us. People will say these things even themselves out over the course of a year. If that’s true, I’m looking forward to the times when we start getting some decisions going our way. I’m a bit sick of that red screen right now and those long delays are losing me valuable post-game drinking time.


Next up Shimizu away on Saturday. I reckon we need a win to get back on track after a couple of disappointing draws where we’ve thrown away leads. There were definitely mitigating circumstances in both of those matches though. After that it’s Vissel Kobe away on Wednesday as the relentless churn of fixtures continues. I won’t be able to either go to or watch that match, so the blog post will be a breeze for me to write and for you to read. Hopefully that game on Wednesday against a cellar-dweller will go better than this one did against a different cellar-dweller. And hopefully both of them will be in the relegation zone as the final whistle blows on the final match of the season. Go Frontale! And Go (YFM and Vissel) to J2! 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (Yellow card 76')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 18. SEGAWA Yusuke
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for TANABE 82')
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for KAWAHARA 46')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (on for MARCINHO 46')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin

FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 28. PATRICK VERHON
FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for KOBAYASHI 62')
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito (on for CESAR HAYDAR 88')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Honestly speaking, we weren’t that great and as much as I’d like to give it out to someone for some spurious reason, it probably might make me look more deluded than I already am, so let’s skip it on this occasion.

Goals

OZEKI (Frontale) 7' 1-0
YAN MATEUS (Yokohama) 41' 1-1
CESAR HAYDAR (Frontale) 66' 2-1
AMANO (Yokohama) 89' 2-2
YAN MATEUS (Yokohama) 90+2' 2-3
TAKAI (Frontale) 90+9' 3-3


Highlights

Vs Jubilo Iwata (away) 6/7/24 J League match 22

Jubilo Iwata 2 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

Another wonderful draw! Another lead thrown away! Another day at the football where the most fun things happened when we were not in the stadium! Perhaps the big development in this match was the fact that the booing was back again, along with quite a lot of shouting at the players when they came over to us after the match. As it’s quite difficult to come up with new ways to describe us being alright for a little while but countering that with at least one truly awful half of football, I’m not going to bother writing too much about it. It’s marvelous that Oniki is persevering in coming up with ever new ways to draw a match. We’ve gone with all the possible variations now surely? Have a terrible first half or have a terrible second half. Take the lead and give it up, or go behind, then somehow come back to take the lead but ultimately throw it away. Perhaps the new innovation in this game was the fact that we were really unlucky with both of the goals. The second one looked pretty bad, but I’d put it down to bad luck. Sung-Ryong seemed to be ready to save the shot, but Sasaki’s touch meant that he probably couldn’t handle the ball, and it looked like he half got caught between two decisions and half was undone by the horrible condition of the pitch. (If you saw my tweet before the game you’ll know I got my excuse in early on this topic). I wonder if he’d handled the ball the ref might have let it go. Or equally, even having given away an indirect free kick we probably would have a decent chance of stopping it. I think though, perhaps it was more that he tripped over that was the main cause. Either way, it was a bit of a kick in the guts. Not going to blame Sung-Ryong though, as although it looked horrible, he’s saved us on numerous occasions in the last couple of months. As much as Kamifukumoto seems to be a nice guy, I really hope Oniki doesn’t use this ONE mistake as a justification to get his favourite keeper back between the sticks. We’ll see I guess.

So, basically, some variables are changing but there are also plenty of things that stay the same. Firstly, the results. Drawing four games in a row gets you as many points as winning one, drawing one and losing the other two. Drawing four games in a row gets you a lot less satisfaction and a lot less excitement though. One other thing that remains the same, aside from the nominal at best switch between one and two defensive midfielders, is the formation. It’s a common saying that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. I think that Oniki has this on a magnet board in his living room and follows this mantra every day, but hasn’t noticed yet that the ‘ain’t’ part has fallen off. Some might say that our run of poor results has been bad luck, and whilst as I said above, I feel like that was the case in this match, I think on pretty much every other occasion, our poor results have come from poor tactics and an absolute refusal to try anything new or even anything old. Unlike Oniki, the Jubilo manager had clearly done his homework before this match. They didn’t bother pressing us at all. Definitely not in our own half, and quite often, not even in their half. Clearly they realised that it made more sense to just let us have the ball, so we’d fart around with it, making almost no progress up the pitch and would eventually lose it under no pressure. In the past at least we’ve had the excitement of our sideways and backwards passing making the opposition run around a bit. In this match they just stood back and watched us, waiting for the inevitable cock up. For their first goal, they used this ‘don’t worry, they’ll cock it up’ approach attempting a somewhat tame shot from quite a way out which was perfectly deflected by a block from our defender directly to the feet of their striker who was absolutely unmarked, pretty much on the penalty spot. Definitely unlucky, but the truth is that our play was so bad and pointless in the first half that even Jubilo being pretty shit, meant that they deserved to be winning, because pretty shit is much better than totally shit.

Even with the option of using five subs, still nothing changes. Oniki’s subs, (aside from when we’re trying to chase the game in the last five minutes - throw on a tall defender and play him up front), are always either like-for-like or become like-for-like as he shifts midfielders and forwards from one spot to another, never with any notion of changing the shape. Using Kobayashi and Yamada he’s not even changing the type of player in the forward position. I don’t know if Gomis is injured, I suspect he’s just been dropped in favour of some Oniki favourites. Likewise in the midfield, it’s just changing one player for a very similar player. I guess it helps us maintain some consistency and it works. We are consistently predictable and bad. Why would you try to give the opposition something to think about and a problem to solve when you could just change one player for a very similar player and give everyone an easy afternoon? No need for the opposition to get worried. At the same time, plenty of reason for our players to get worried as every time they try to play the ball forward in a way that doesn’t involve 25 preparatory passes beforehand, the first thing the passing player sees is Oniki taking out his notebook and presumably putting an ‘x’ against their name. It’s no wonder we keep throwing away leads. The atmosphere seems to be awful. And this awful atmosphere has now spread to the stands and even got some of our fans, who let’s be honest are way too happy clappy most of the time, a little frustrated. At the end of this game, I didn’t boo. I don’t think I have booed the players after the game ever to be honest. (At this point I think I should add here, before anyone else might say it, that I did shout ‘fucking shit!’ at the end of the Tosu game, but not to the players, and more in a screaming-into-the-night-sky way). I’m not sure what I’d do if Oniki ever graced us with his presence after a game. I think he’s to blame. I think pretty much anyone could do a better job than him right now. But as the situation with Oniki in charge is extremely unlikely to change, I’m not getting annoyed and freaking out at the end of the game. Just going with the ‘I’m not angry with you, I’m just disappointed’ kind of thing. Of course, the players aren’t trying to play badly. Of course, Oniki thinks what he’s doing is the right approach. And of course he seems to be totally wrong in that respect, buy hey ho! I wish there was someone in his management team who could suggest to him that doing the same thing over and over might not be the route to a different result. I don’t know if there is, but I suspect there isn’t. Maybe it’s because he’s built up a reputation and some goodwill from his past successes. At this stage it feels a bit like Vanilla Ice, after having had a big hit with Ice Ice Baby, coming into the studio to record his second album and thinking it should be called ‘Ice Ice Baby ’91’ and the singles should all be based on the same sampled bassline, but be called ‘Ice Baby’, ‘Ice Ice Ice Baby’, Ice Toddler’, and ‘Ice Adolescent’ and then being surprised when people don’t want to hear these ‘different’ songs and have also got a bit sick of the original song too.

With the European Championship on at the moment, I’ve started to notice some things. I’ve been only vaguely following it. I’m not a big national team supporter, and the kick off times don’t help either. But what I am fully aware of is the stick that Gareth Southgate is getting. On the Guardian podcast there have been plenty of references to utterly dull and pointless sideways passing, possession for the sake of it, a complete lack of cutting edge, conservatism to the end, unwillingness to change anything and individually good players turning into a shitty sodden mess once combined. Does this sound familiar at all? I think pretty much all of it also could be said about Frontale at the moment. To me, as a relatively uniformed observer, the criticism of Southgate seems a bit harsh. He’s by far the most successful England manager of my lifetime, but it seems that people are happy to pile on after a dodgy performance. This lead me to think that maybe I shouldn’t criticise Oniki so much as he is the most successful manager of Frontale’s lifetime. Maybe all those people who only watch highlights and check statistics were right all along, they know best and I am totally ignorant. Well, the last part is certainly true, but I reckon the causal Frontale / J League observer is pretty ill-informed when it comes to our current travails. It certainly gave me something to think about anyway. Oh, but there’s one difference isn’t there? Southgate has taken England to another semi-final and Oniki looks like he might be taking us to another season in J2. It’s far from ideal, but dull stuff is a lot more bearable when it actually is effective, no matter how ugly or dissatisfying the method. Right now we have a stick with two shitty ends. Not only do we get simultaneously bored to death and frustrated almost to the point of spontaneous combustion, but we also get crap results, with us steadily slipping closer and close to the relegation zone. There are only five teams below us in the league. On this match day, three of them won and we drew with one of the others. Coming up in the next three matches we have two of the top five. We could be seriously fucked quite soon. But you know, still better stick with that same formation, eh? Something will work out soon, won’t it?

A quick word on the opposition and the ref. Germain’s headgear was pretty weird. Looked like a pair of cuboid sideburns attached to an Alice band. Interesting… I quite enjoyed the Jubilo centre back Graca moaning at their substitute keeper after the goalie rolled him the ball quickly and under a little pressure he proceeded to boot the ball off the pitch. He gave him the well known ‘calm down’ double hand signal, clearly informing all that it was the keeper’s fault. About five minutes later the same centre back almost identically booted the ball off the pitch under no pressure. I would have loved it if the keeper had done the same gesture back to him. The ref was… alright. Mikuriya has a reputation for being crap but I can’t complain about anything he did. Our struggles are always of our own making, but usually the ref piles a bit of extra on, but on this occasion, it was entirely down to us.

Next up in the league, Cerezo at home next Sunday. Not a team we play particularly well against… Expect the same formation, almost the same players, the same lack of ideas, and well, actually, I wouldn’t mind another draw as I think we probably could easily lose. Whether next week’s game sees up drop down the league table a bit more, well, we’ll see. Before that on Wednesday we travel to Oita in the Emperor’s Cup. It will be interesting to see who Oniki plays. Hahahahahahahha. Who am I kidding? It will be pretty much the same players won’t it? If he ever rotated, Oniki could have had a bit of a quandary though, as in previous seasons after he’s wrecked out chances in the league he’s slightly prioritised the cup where he still has a chance to avoid complete failure. This year, well, I’d say it’s probably more important to focus on not getting relegated. But we’ve seen how effective his first choice selection and tactics are, haven’t we, so maybe his second string might be better. I’m not going to that game and won’t even have the chance to watch it. I. The last, this would be a disappointment for me, but right now, avoiding it seems like it could be an act of self care. Oniki used to be a slightly limited but quite lucky manager. Now, the luck has totally gone and somehow he has developed into a more limited manager. If you asked every J League manager how we will play in any match, they’d all say the same thing. If you asked them how that would work, you’d have 19 who’d say it will probably fail as the opposition always know how to stop us, and on the other side you’d have Oniki who’d say that there’s no doubt the same thing will have a different effect in the next match. I wish I had his confidence. And I wish almost anyone else had his job right now.

 

 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 17. TONO Daiya
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 23. MARCINHO

 

Subs

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for OSHIMA 46')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for KOBAYASHI 68')

FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for MARCINHO 68')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for TONO 75')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for SEKO 81')
 
Goals

GERMAIN (Jubilo) 20' 1-0
TONO (Frontale) 51' 1-1
TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 80' 1-2
YAMADA (Jubilo) 90+2' 2-2

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

No

Highlights

Vs Nagoya Grampus (home) 25/5/24 J League match 17

Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 1 Nagoya Grampus

This blog post is almost a week late. Praise the lord for international breaks! But don’t think my slowness is all down to laziness. Sure, there’s an element of that, but we’ve also just moved house. How many weeks do you think I’ll be able to use the ‘moving house’ excuse for the poor quality and tardiness of these posts? And as a follow up question, what excuse will I use after the moving house excuse doesn’t work anymore? Anyway, you don’t come here to read about my personal life, do you? (In case you were wondering, the move is finished but the new place is still a bit of a tip). So, on to Nagoya at home then. Our first win in five! A marginally shorter winless run than the one that was killed off by us beating Urawa. Not exactly a thing to rejoice, but perhaps a sign that we’re heading in the right direction. If we’re really lucky perhaps the next winless run will only be three games long! Before the game we were promised big changes at the back. The team line up seemed to suggest nothing of the sort. Although there was a slight chance that we might be seeing three at the back and the club were being tricky with the team line up announcement graphic. But naturally nothing of the sort. It was the same old stuff with Tachibanada moving back into defence, but this time on the left hand side. Not sure what happened to Sasaki, who I thought was the only one of our defenders who hadn’t made a horrendous cock up in recent games. Perhaps he’s injured. Or maybe Oniki sees his lack of mistakes as a weakness, or something that is causing him to be isolated from his teammates who are sharing the cock ups around. So in spite of the teaser of big changes the only change was moving Ominami to right back and bringing Takai in. And given that Ominami has played at right back on previous occasions it was hardly a change. There was no sign of Segawa in the squad, so maybe he’s injured. I guess the surprise if there was one was Marcinho being dropped to the bench. Can’t say it’s a big shock as he hasn’t been at his best recently. Although we were going with the same formation and broadly speaking the same tactics, there did seem to be a bit more confidence flowing through the team than there has been recently. Perhaps the rain delay at the start of the match helped with that. By the time the players finally made it onto the pitch, perhaps Oniki’s team talk had drifted out of their minds and that’s why we started a bit better than we normally do. Hang on, a bit better? What am I saying? We scored after six minutes! And we didn’t concede immediately afterwards! This was a lot better! Should probably say here that I am not surprised we scored from a corner as in this match Seko was taking all of the ones from the right. A nice start anyway, and one which got even nicer after 18 minutes when we were absolutely gifted a goal from a Nagoya defensive cock up. The crucial thing was that on this occasion we didn’t snatch at the chance and actually scored. Perhaps this was because it was Ienaga who had the opportunity. Were we going to get another Ienaga hat-trick game? It seems that he definitely thought so as he was trying to shoot with every half chance he had. His best chance to get to take home the match ball was early in the second half but it went just wide. Well maybe a little wider than just wide, but it was kind of close. It’s a bit of luck that he had his scoring boots on in the first half though (actually one goal was a header, so should I say scoring boots and head?), as we were pretty blunt in the second half. 

Of course we weren’t as blunt in the second half as we had been against Kashiwa (one shot, off target), as it would be extremely difficult to get blunter than that, but we did only have four shots (none on target) in the second half of this match. I guess these stats don’t include the two goals Gomis had ruled out for offside though, which changed the feel of the second half, but strictly speaking, probably shouldn’t as the fact remains we didn’t hit the target. After the second one was ruled out I thought that we were in a hat-trick race, Would it be Ienaga scoring a hat-trick of goals first or Gomis having a hat-trick of VAR denied goals? Certainly something to get excited about, eh? As it was, neither happened and the second half was instead dominated by us hanging on for dear life. Jesiel was taken off at half time after once again looking like he was half-injured for the whole of the first half. Credit to Oniki for (hopefully) taking him off before he injured himself further. This saw Takai and Ominami reunited in central defence, (remember, the pairing that conceded five against both Sagan Tosu and Jubilo Iwata), with Tanabe at left back and Tqchibanada being moved to the right. Maruyama was back on the bench, so maybe it was a bit of a surprise that Oniki didn’t bring him on instead. Perhaps he’s not really fit enough. (As it is so long between writing this and posting it, I can now say that Maruyama got injured whilst warming up… we never tire of coming up with new ways to get our players injured). Our bench certainly looked a bit weird. I wonder if we’re going through another injury crisis at the moment. Don’t expect that we’ll hear anything about it. I thought Tanabe did a decent job and avoided getting booked almost immediately on entering the field like he has done in previous appearances. According to the player scores on Flashscore, which I usually think are absolute nonsense but will sometimes use to back up what I think if they agree with me, Tanabe did much better than Tachibanada. The same scores have Gomis as our second worst player though, which I think shows just how ridiculous they are as he had a really good game winning and keeping the ball. Somewhat amusingly the same scores have Langerak as Nagoya’s worst player by a mile. Can’t imagine he’ll agree as the defender who tripped over the ball giving us our second goal got a much better score. It’s almost… as if… these scores… are given by someone who’s just had a quick glance at the highlights and the match data. Or as I believe they sometimes call themselves an ‘analyst’ or an ‘expert’. Who needs to watch the game with any kind of enthusiasm or excitement when you can count passes instead. (In case you were wondering, this is all a thinly veiled bitch at someone I had a row with on Twitter a few months ago). I would urge any Frontale fans who are reading this and haven’t seen the game to not get too excited about this win. Once again Sung-Ryong saved us on quite a few occasions, once with yet another amazing save with his feet. We looked a bit of a mess at the back for long periods of the game and when you combine this with our second half lack of a cutting edge, it all suggested that we were probably going to concede and then concede two more times in quick succession. Somehow we managed to avoid doing so though! I will point out that once again we conceded whilst preparing a sub. Does this happen to all teams? I think it happens with every goal we let in. Any swagger that we built up in the first half was long gone by the end of the second and we were lucky to hang on. But hang on we did, and on the final whistle there was quite some emotional outpouring, both in the stands and on the pitch. Of course, it’s only one win, but given how bad things have been recently, it’s hopefully an important one. Fingers crossed we don’t take two steps backwards in our next game.

As I’d like to finish this blog post quickly so I can get back to sorting out the new apartment and finding places to stash all the ridiculous things I have accumulated over the years, I’ll lump Nagoya and the ref into one section. Nagoya had a rotten start to the year despite some people thinking they’d do well. They didn’t beat us which I guess means that they had a pretty rotten game here. I feel like they think they are better and more skillful than they actually are which resulted in them cocking up a few times and one of those occasions giving us a goal for free. Junker is an unbelievable moaner. Nothing much else to say about that. It was quite delightful to beat them as we haven’t had a great relationship with them in recent years. Probably even nicer given that their fans were very annoyed that they lost to us and I can quite understand that as I’ve watched all but one of our games this year and we have been for the most part, utterly crap. Apparently their fans left a lot of litter in the stands according to Twitter. 

Even with the ball in the net and the linesman flagging for offside,
Nagoya still find something to moan about to the officials.

On to the ref, who was Mikuriya, perhaps one of the referees in the league who is accepted by most people to be one of the worst. In this game he was wildly inconsistent, particularly when it came to what constituted a yellow card offence. He seemed to want to give them only to us and ignored a few situations where Nagoya should have definitely had one for cynically breaking up a promising attack of ours. At the same time, it’s utterly insane that Tachibanada didn’t get booked till the 85th minute as he definitely should have got one earlier. So, just a regular Mikuriya performance I guess. I know some refs don’t like to give cards, but if the law says they should, they probably should give them, shouldn’t they? I think they’re probably supposed to follow the established rules rather than make their own. Card shy refs are common, but I’d say Mikuriya went well past being card shy, perhaps even as far as card-incel level. Anyway, his name is quite close to ‘micturate’, at least in my mind, and I think this goes some way towards explaining why he is a bit of a pissy ref. A pretty unsophisticated way for me to finish this paragraph I’m sure you’ll agree.

So, basically a very welcome win, but not the most comfortable. The result looks a lot better than a lot of the game did. And this win is probably just enough to take the pressure off Oniki which I think was starting to build a little. Hopefully he can follow it up with another one. Our next game is in the Emperor’s Cup against Sony Sendai, another team we’ve played before. I wish we’d get some more interesting opposition in this competition. It seems like we get the same few teams all the time. I also wish we could have an away game in Sendai. It’s been a while. This game has banana skin written all over it. Whether Oniki will change the side much, I’m not sure, We have a weekend off before then, which I think he might take as a reason to keep mainly the same side. But I really would like to see Erison back in the line up, hopefully to get him a bit of confidence and form back, which is not going to happen if he plays only ten or twenty minutes at the most (or as was the case in this game, zero minutes in a game when we didn’t even use all of our subs…). After that it’s Vissel Kobe again, at the national stadium again, although this time it’s their home fixture instead of being a cup final. A home game, just around 500km from their city. Hopefully some of the new fans they picked up when they signed Iniesta are still interested otherwise it’s going to be a low attendance in a stadium that is pretty dull even when it’s quite full. The fact that a friend of mine who doesn’t have a massive interest in football has managed to win free tickets for the game makes me think they might be employing some other tactics to get the attendance to acceptable levels. To be honest though, it makes sense, as hiring a showpiece stadium hours away from their hometown and giving away loads of free tickets is probably way cheaper than paying Iniesta’s salary for a week. Fingers crossed we can get a similar result to Super Cup final.

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma

DF 4. JESIEL
DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 53')
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 85')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 17. TONO Daiya

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata

Subs

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
FW 9. ERISON
DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for JESIEL 46')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for GOMIS 90')
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for YAMAUCHI 66')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for TONO 81')

Goals

IENAGA (Frontale) 6' 1-0
IENAGA (Frontale) 18' 2-0
HA (Nagoya) 89' 2-1


My Frontale Man Of The Match

Sorry, I am so late with this post that I can't really remember much about the game apart from the parade of cars and vans at half time, so let's give it to whoever came up with that idea.

Highlights