Vs Kashiwa Reysol (away) 10/5/26 J League East match 16

 

Kashiwa Reysol 1 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

Oh well, another shit and utterly predictable game. Any team on a long run of defeats should definitely want to play us as we’ll always offer up the three points. We were in reserved standing behind the goal. There was no way to choose your spot when buying tickets and we ended up being right next to the drums. This was probably the highlight actually. If we’d had been in a different area it would have been just another awful 2026 game, but given the location it was instead an unusually noisy awful 2026 game. Of course our games have long ago become meaningless. This meaninglessness is a huge relief as we are truly terrible right now. We should be on a run of four defeats in a row. We completely robbed Verdy and deserved nothing out of that game. The less said about the other matches the better. Not only was our position in the stand quite noisy, it was at the perfect height and angle for a lot of the match to be obscured by the crossbar. Perhaps this was a blessed relief. At one stage it looked like the ref and a couple of players were looking for a dropped contact lens. It was only when I stood on tiptoes that I noticed they were looking down at an injured player. So basically, I couldn’t see much, and maybe there wasn’t much to see, so it seems like a good idea to just rush through this post as quickly as possible and get on with not thinking about football for a delightful six days! Sounds blissful!

It felt like we dominated the first half. Of course we didn’t score. We’re operating on an entirely different plane to those teams that try to shoot and score goals. Instead we’re more interested in taking the route of passing it between the keeper and centre backs until things get dicey and then hoofing the ball up the pitch directly to the opposition. Sooner or later the football world will catch up with us and realise that goals are an outdated concept and the number of completed passes at the back before a hoof is how matches should be scored in the future. There was a really encouraging period in the second half where I think we had a shot that could have gone in but let’s not be greedy though and instead keep waiting for that scoring rule change. Actually, we really overindulged in this match by having four shots on target, more than in our previous three games combined. It’s a shame as we were scoring for fun in the warm up but somehow it seems like we’re not as good when there is someone trying to get in the way and stop the ball. If we could remove the opposition from the pitch completely I think we might even have a chance of scoring even two or three!

Hasebe finally went with a back three in this match. I can’t really say what was going on further up the pitch though. Even though we had Miura and Yamahara as wing backs Hasebe seemed to also play Wakizaka and OSA wide too with only Erison up front. Like I said, I couldn’t really see and have no intention of watching even a minute of this match again. Maybe it tightened things up at the back a bit, (we did still concede obviously), but unsurprisingly didn’t help with us being shit at making chances. In the second half Hasebe threw a few things at the wall but even though we had Romanic, Wakizaka, Kanda, Ito and Marcinho up front we still looked light on numbers and absolutely idea free. Marcinho’s having a bad year. He’s not played particularly well when he’s started, (of course this is not in any way limited only to him), so Hasebe hoping he’ll be the magical solution from the bench is a bit optimistic. As soon as they made changes they started looking dangerous. And when you have a dangerous looking opposition and your own team is flapping around doing not much at all, I guess it’s inevitable which way the game will go. Was quite irritating though. But utterly deserved. So what’s the reason behind us being so relentlessly awful week after week, dropping us slowly down the table? Is Hasebe trying to engineer a play off game against Avispa? Or is he thinking he’ll try to get a third consecutive eighth place finish without realising we’re in a league with ten and not twenty teams this time round? Whichever way you look at it, the season really can’t finish soon enough as far as I and I guess many others are concerned.

Hey ho, there’s always next year, right? At the end of the game there was no booing but there was a bit of shouting from the supporters to the players, which I always think is pretty stupid. I don’t think this was particularly deserved. Equally, I don’t think the large amount of fans singing the players off the pitch was deserved either. I think everyone collectively doing a big tut, shrugging the shoulders and then leaving the stadium would have had quite a dramatic effect. I know the players don’t want to be shit, but supporters telling them how to play or that they should care more must be quite irritating for them. Much better for us all to have a huff I think. This was for the most part a game where both teams seemed to be trying to fail to score but eventually one team failed to fail to score. With a tiny change of fortunes it could easily have been 1-0 to us and people would be celebrating. Would be nice if we could somehow have just a little bit of excitement in our football though, wouldn’t it? Maybe Hasebe will try four centre backs and two wing backs next time. Eventually one of those panicked hoofs will go in and we’ll be keeping things so tight through our eight at the back that we will win a game. In conclusion, this was our fourth shit game in a row. And the one before them wasn’t that good either. I don’t know if it’s the meaninglessness of the fixtures or something else, but I am really getting to the stage where I really don’t give a shit. The thought of going to this match this morning just seemed like a chore. There was clearly not going to be anything fun about it. It’s now basically a strange kind of job where you have to pay to do it and it manages to combine frustration with making you sad. Yet you keep on paying and doing it. Only two games left. Thank fuck for that!

Next up Machida at home next Sunday. In the same way that this shitty match was made more interesting by standing in an unfamiliar area, I intend to liven up the next match by walking there from home, stopping at a couple of breweries on the way. You know, have got to try to keep things interesting, right? Maybe I’ll be able to get either so drunk or so tried that I may be able to sleep through part of the game. I suspect that if I do, I won’t be missing much.

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
MF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 13. MIURA Sota
FW 34. OSA Ryuki
FW 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for OSA 46')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 85')

DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
MF 23. MARCINHO (on for YAMAMOTO 80')
DF 30. NODA Hiroto
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke

FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for MARUYAMA 85')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 64')

Man of the match

Man of the match section is on strike. I demand something even slightly interesting to give me more clarity in who I should give it to and will refuse to announce it till they bow to my demands.

 

Goals

HOSOYA (Kashiwa) 73' 1-0

Highlights
 

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (away) 13/9/25 J League match 29

Yokohama F Marinos 0 - 3 Kawasaki Frontale  

Surely this run can’t go on much longer. Recently, we’ve faced a scummy team every week and dispatched them with relative ease. Perhaps this was the easiest of all the dispatchings though. And maybe until this game any thoughts that YFM were actually going to end up getting relegated were just wishful thinking. But on this evidence, they are in real trouble! It’s quite annoying that none of the teams below them really managed to take full advantage of another delightful YFM defeat. I think the only thing that could save them now is the deficiencies of those teams below them. I guess it’s just going to be a matter of who is least bad over the rest of the season. YFM have games remaining against four of the top six. For Shonan it’s two, YFC three and Albirex two. Seven of YFM’s remaining nine games are against top half teams. They have no six pointers left. Oooooh, not looking good is it? Apparently some YFM fans online are already worrying that going to J2 would mean that a lot of their fans would transfer their ‘loyalties’ to Frontale. This is quite a bizarre point of view but I guess they must have some reason for saying it. All very intriguing going into the last stretch of the season, isn’t it? Anyway, please excuse me for apparently enjoying the potential demise of YFM more than us winning. It’s not really that way. Of course I want us to win more than anything, but having that win topped with a potentially dangerous defeat for your irritating neighbours is lovely! I was trying to think of a food related comparison but as my taste is quite pedestrian the best I could think of was the fact that chips are great, and cheese is great, but cheesy chips are really great. Doesn’t quite work, but hopefully you can see what I’m going for here. 

Us -

Unsurprising starting line up again apart from the usual shuffling in the midfield. And why would you fix something that isn’t broke? Our schedule isn’t so busy at the moment so we even have a bit of recovery time in between matches. Erison and Ito both have seven goals in six games. Amazing! In this match we even managed to get a clean sheet. This was probably mostly due to the opposition though. (One shot on target, hehehehehe). Hasebe has reinvented Tanabe as a marauding substitute winger. It’s insane! He had two good opportunities to score in this match and was unlucky with both. It would be wrong of me to not mention that we are kind of hanging in there at the back with not many options when it comes to defenders. Hopefully the current guys can stay fit as if one of them gets injured it will either be Kamihashi, Tsuchiya, Tanabe or Noda coming in, most of whom have hardly any experience. Yamaguchi had almost nothing to do in this game but I was very happy to see him have a right moan at the ref after he let a bad tackle on one of our defenders go. I have nothing much else to say. Nothing to moan about. Just hope we can keep this run going.

Them -

Aaahhhhh. Lovely! ‘Be a Stunner’ is YFM’s slogan for this season. It’s a strange choice, as I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to mean. The only use of stunner when referring to people I know of is the kind of thing a tabloid newspaper would use to describe a very attractive person. Might have made more sense in the passive voice. ‘Be Stunned’. And that’s probably true but not in the way that they might have hoped. I was stunned how bad YFM were in this game. Normally even in terrible seasons for them they somehow raise their game when they play us, presumably because they hate us. On this occasion they definitely had the amount of fouls and cards you might expect from a team playing a grudge match, but when it came to football, they were horrendous. I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t take more advantage of the upper hand we had in this match and give both their goal difference and morale a massive pasting. But it’s always tricky when we have to play against 10 men. Talking of the red card, it’s baffling that their players thought that it shouldn’t have been a penalty. Their fans probably were delighted when they got the potential lifeline of a VAR check, imagining that they were about to get away with no penalty. In the stadium the screen said they were checking whether it was a penalty or not. When the ref came back and canceled the yellow and brought out the red it was delightful! Why they thought that Yamamoto with the goal gaping and the ball right in front of him would dive rather than score is hard to believe. But then again the stadium did seem to be full, (or should I say half full), of their fans wearing the same giveaway replica shirt, so perhaps there were more than a few people there who don’t usually go to games and maybe were only introduced to the sport of football earlier in the day. With the rules changing every few months or so I had to google to check the details. The penalty and a red card thing is now ok. It would have been a yellow if the defender had at least tried to get the ball, but as he just hauled Yamamoto to the ground it’s a red. Cheerio! 41000 is a decent attendance, but probably at least a third were Frontale fans and maybe another third were people there on freebies. There certainly didn’t seem to be much atmosphere coming from the other end of the stadium. They recently had some kind of ban though didn’t they? There were no big flags, (lucky them, not having to spend most of the game ducking and weaving to try and see what’s going on). Not sure if their drums were banned too. It sounded like it. But you can’t really be surprised the atmosphere was a bit flat. They’re having a shocker of a season (about as bad as Postecoglou’s first season, but hopefully they’ll go one… better… this time), their team are awful bunch of cloggers and the stadium announcer tried to build up the vibes by playing a Coldplay ballad. Blimey. I did quite enjoy singing along to the Black Eyed Peas… classic, ‘I gotta feeling’ with my own lyrics, ‘I gotta feeling, that you’re going to J2, going to J2, going to J J 2’. Yes, I’m immature, but I would expect them to do exactly the same if the situation was reversed. They were very, very poor. We won. Lovely.

Ref and VAR -

As mentioned above, I enjoyed that VAR intervention a lot. I also enjoyed the fact that the ref was very tall. Ohashi isn’t a famous ref, and the one previous time we had him I said ‘I don’t have anything to say about him’ which I’d echo for this match and which is the absolute highest of high praise. 


Next up, FC Tokyo at home which, contrary to some people’s opinions, for me means the end of the run of us playing against scummy teams. Hopefully it won’t be the end of us winning games though. The ACL clubs will now be having midweek games which should hopefully cause them some problems. Bravo to Oniki for giving us a rest from that competition this time around. I still don’t think we’re going to win the league, but I am very much enjoying this run and hope that soon we can be the league’s top scorers on our own, rather than having to share that title with Kyoto. Which all seems destined to set up a 0-0 or defeat where we fail to score. Hopefully not. Fingers crossed!

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC

DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for ITO 90+4')

MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 81')

MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 81')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 72')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 39. TSUCHIYA Kaito
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 72')

 

Goals

ITO (Frontale) 4' 0-1
ERISON (Frontale) 62' PEN 0-2
MIYAGI (Frontale) 90+8' 0-3

Highlights

Vs Cerezo Osaka (home) 18/5/25 J League match 17

Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 0 Cerezo Osaka

I’m pleased to say that our winning run continues. But for most of this match it looked that it was probably going to come to an end at the earliest possible opportunity. This was far from vintage Frontale. After a bright start where both teams seemed determined to run as fast as possible to the other end of the pitch before wasting chances even before they had been properly made, it soon degenerated into a borefest. In my notes I wrote ‘end to end pointlessness’, but for large periods of the game it was more like middle third of the pitch pointlessness. Neither team had a shot on target until the 42nd minute and the half time relay race provided a lot more entertainment than the first 45 minutes had. With such a poor first half it was a bit of a surprise that we didn’t make any changes at half time. When all of our changes had been made we did finally break the deadlock in very enjoyable style. When we followed that goal up with a second shortly afterwards from an absolute hoof from Maruyama it was delightful. Perhaps Cerezo could feel a little hard done by, but when you consider they failed to have a shot on target in 90 minutes, they definitely didn’t deserve to win.

Us -

Some rotation again, but taking injuries into consideration, I think some people would say this was us rotating back to our best starting line-up. I don’t really agree with this and you’ll probably see why in my upcoming mild moaning. The defence did pretty well I think. If you keep the opposition from getting any shots on target you’ve probably done a good job. Admittedly, there was a hint of luck in some of their shots being so wayward, but you can’t deny that after being separated in recent games, it was good to see Takai and Maruyama back together. My doubts as to this being our best available line-up come a bit further forward. It’s not a good look to moan when we won 2-0, but the truth is that Wakizaka and Yamada are still not doing the business. Ozeki and Erison did much better when they came on. I’m all in favour of Hasebe trying to get them to play themselves into some kind of form, but I think this game might have been a bit more comfortable if our changes had been made earlier. I’ve long written about Yamada’s toils this year, but Wakizaka was playing well earlier in the season but seems to have been destroyed by the ACL. I don’t know if it’s due to fatigue, but he’s really having a bit of a dodgy period at the moment. I don’t think Ienaga had a particularly good game either on this occasion. I don’t think he should be an automatic selection anymore. Maybe he disagrees, but I think we look much more dangerous with Ito in that position. We looked a lot less dangerous with Wakizaka there after the first round of subs in this match, but I think that’s more to do with with Wakizaka’s current travails rather than his inability to play out wide. We’ve seen him do well there in the past, even if it has always been for just a few minutes between batches of subs. I still don’t understand why managers do that kind of thing, but I’m sure there must be some logic to it that is evading me. Ozeki, Ito and Erison all had an impact when they came on. As did Segawa who took only five minutes to help us break the deadlock, right around the period where I lamenting the fact that I thought we were going to end up with a 0-0. It was a lovely pass from him to give Erison his first goal. In the past Hasebe has experimented with Segawa in the Wakizaka role and I don’t think it suited him, so I hope we can see him do well on the wings in the future. There’s probably not much else for me to say in this part. I must admit I was starting to form my first ever Hasebe moan when we were huffing and puffing with absolutely no end product, but the changes did come and they were effective. So shut up Neil, and keep the faith!

Them -

After a bright start Cerezo didn’t do that much and reverted to what we might have expected from them in previous seasons. In the past we have tended to struggle a bit against them at times, so it was nice to finish this game with a 2-0 win, even if they scoreline didn’t completely reflect the whole reality of the match. I’m kind of shocked that I have no notes moaning about any of their players or actions so I don’t really know what else there is to write here. It seems that they can beat or lose to anyone in the league, so they’re clearly a bit of a mystery team. And that mystery seems to have rendered me opinonless.

Ref -

This game brought a new ref to one of our games. I’ve never even heard of Ohashi, but apparently he was the fourth official for our game against YFM. He’s young, (only 30), and… I don’t have anything to say about him. Once again an unknown ref has had a decent game while the more experienced ones continue to fuck up. Of course I didn’t agree with everything he did, but I wouldn’t, would I, as I am obviously biased? But definitely there was nothing that lingers in the memory which in these blog posts is the highest possible form of praise. Bravo!

Next up Urawa at home on Wednesday. After going on a long run of wins their last three results, (from oldest to most recent), have been a loss, a draw and a win. Given that they seem to hate Nagoya (let’s be honest, plenty of people do now), and they are playing them in the game after they play is, why don’t we just agree that on Wednesday we give them an absolute thumping so they can get charged up and smash Nagoya next weekend. Sounds fair, right? After that we’ve got Gamba at home next Sunday. Hopefully we can turn two wins into three, and then three into four. Fingers crossed!

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 53')
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. YAMADA Shin

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for KAWAHARA 80')
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 67')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MARCINHO 61')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya (on for IENAGA 61')
FW 18. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for WAKIZAKA 80')
FW 38. KANDA Soma
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Plenty of mediocrity for most of this game so whilst it’s not very original, for the undeniable impact he had in turning one point into three, it’s got to go to…

ERISON - he scored. Twice. No-one else had really got that close so it’s kind of important he managed to do so.

Goals

ERISON (Frontale) 85' 1-0
ERISON (Frontale) 88' 2-0

Highlights