Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 22/8/26 J League match 3

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Our 33.3% record is still intact! Sure, when it comes to consistency, you might be also be able to point at Machida, Kashiwa and  Kashima, (played three won three), but when we come to play them, you’ve got to be confident that we’ll bend things our way and keep our perfect drawing record going. At the same time, you could point to the perfect records of Urawa and JEF, (played three lost three). The weird thing is that our next league game is against JEF and I just imagine that our perfect draw record will more likely be smashed by a defeat to them, than by a defeat to Machida in the following game. We’re so weird this year. I can’t work out if we’re alright or terrible. I think a bit of both to be honest. Certainly our shooting remains awful. It was quite fun to come back from a goal down against Sanfrecce who previous to this match had been scoring for fun, and ruin the day of the majority of fans inside the Piss Swing stadium. With another game coming up soon, (Emperor’s Cup at home on Wednesday), let’s get this post done as quickly as possible.

Pretty much the same players again, pretty much the same approach again, pretty much the same outcome again. We’ve certainly play kind of well in periods of matches, but our inability to take the relatively rare good chances that we make is a real problem. When Marcinho was through on goal there was an inevitability that he was going to blast the ball over the bar and that’s exactly what he did. Ito too. As has been the case for the last few years, for some reason the actual shooting chances we make rarely fall to the guy who’s on the pitch whose main job it is to score. I can’t explain tactically why this happens and I really can’t understand why successive managers over successive seasons have either not noticed it or have been unable to do anything about it. I still stand by what I said about the apparently unnegotiable presence of Wakizaka on the pitch for every single minute of every game not helping us when it comes to tactual flexibility. In this match it was even more stupid than it has been in previous games. It seems inevitable that after a period where we can’t get much going, Hasebe will do his semi regular recent change of bringing in Ozeki and moving Wakizaka to the right. He can’t really play there, (I reckon even the Wakizaka lovers would agree with this), but he is just seems to be eternally unsubbable. Even in this match where he could barely walk towards the end of the game. Maybe Hasebe makes a plan and nothing will allow him to deviate from it. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for why an obviously injured and knackered Wakizaka, playing out of position to the extent of being more of a hinderance than a help, was overlooked and Tachibanada was taken off as our last change. Wakizaka was even on the side of the pitch where Hasebe was sitting so presumably it’s not a problem with his eyesight. He didn’t have a particularly good game, (again), but I can’t imagine he’ll ever get dropped. Unlike Miura who was on the bench for this match. It was definitely a good idea as much like in the half season, Miura hasn’t started at all well this year and last year it took him being benched to get him back to his normal ways. When he came on in the second half he started pretty brightly and I was delighted. But there was one horribly vivid memory I have of him strolling back after an attack which resulted in nothing, and as Sanfrecce attached, it was left to Osa and a midfielder to do their best to cover for Miura. So maybe he needs a little bit longer on the bench, eh? But anyway, as I said, I can’t really explain what’s going on. Apart from the obvious bit where if you can’t shoot for shit, you’re unlikely to be able to score. I felt like we were the team more likely to win it towards the end, even if we did have one injured player on the pitch. This match saw the debut from the bench of Rin Honma, a player who’s still at university but is with us on one of these special contracts. I’m a bit confused why Hasebe, after choosing Mochiyama for the first game of the season, now seems determined to not play him even from the bench. But in any case, Honma did look quite lively. Once again, it’s just a shame that all of these players, (plus plenty of others too), are all competing for the one striker spot. Us playing with one striker also seems to be something that’s unnegotiable.

A few words about Sanfrecce and the ref. Once again, when we play them in this stadium they came as a package. I don’t know why the J League persists in getting a local lad in for every game we play in this stadium and I also don’t know, (but I can guess), why the local ref seems to always bottle it when it comes to giving a red card to a Sanfrecce player. Local lad Takasaki completely ignored the high shin-level raised boot tackle on Ito in the play off game, not even giving a free kick as far as I remember, and in this game we had Sutani, not actually from Hiroshima this time, but from neighbouring Shimane prefecture instead, who didn’t spot a foul on Marcinho and gave a throw in instead. Then we had the joy of an over five minute VAR delay. Of course he finally came to the conclusion that he’d accidentally missed the foul but decided that in spite of Marcinho being about to shoot as he entered the box and with the covering defender having no chance of getting there on time, it wasn’t a DOGSO. Probably this was because it was early in the game, was one of Sanfrecce’s legendary grandad trio of centre backs and, because J League refs are FUCKING USELESS! I can’t understand how it could be a yellow card and a free kick. Surely if there was contact and it was a foul it should have been a red. But I guess Sutani didn’t want to upset his neighbours. And I suppose you could say that Marcinho being though on goal doesn’t actually really count as a goal scoring opportunity… By the way, is it just me or does Shiotani look a bit like a baby who’s been left alone with the felt tips and has drawn on a moustache and beard to his own face? Maybe that influenced the ref too. The look on Shiotani’s face after he got the yellow suggests that he knew he’d got away with one, I think. I thought the ref was horrendous, but expected nothing else. so it didn’t come as a great surprise. What did come as a great surprise was the fact that the Sanfrecce fans also thought he was terrible. I’d never realised they were the kind of fans who just want to see correct decisions being given, even if they go against their own team. It was very honorable of them to boo the ref for consistently ruling in their favour. Bravo Sanfrecce fans! That is what they were moaning about, right? The Sanfrecce keeper whose name I insist on mispronouncing as OUCH!-i seemed pretty angry too. After we scored he spent the rest of the match moaning to the ref apparently claiming that there was a handball for our goal. A quick look at the replay for that shows quite how baffling this opinion is. Even after the final whistle he was still going at it. Presumably he was hoping that the ref would take another look at the goal and replay the final 35 minutes of the match. Oh, and Romanic’s yellow card was a joke. As you’d expect from a local ref trying to help out his mates. (I’m constantly told that of course the refs aren’t corrupt, and I’m not saying they are. But they definitely aren’t accurate as far as I’m concerned. And when you give local refs games in their local stadium with presumably their local team, I think you’re not making it any easier for them as when they are utterly useless, (as Sutani is in every match to be fair), it’s way too easy for idiots on the internet (Hello! That’s me!) to moan that they local guy is doing local things).

Yeah, well, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on with us. As I’ve long been saying, at least we can enjoy these baffling performances with horrible shooting in some different cities this time round. Who knows, maybe we’ll win a game soon? I suspect we will probably lose before we win though. We can say that we’re still unbeaten but this result saw us drop down the table one spot. Three points from three games isn’t great and whilst even if we draw every match, we’ll probably get a lower mid-table finish and should probably see us safe, it would be an extremely irritating season if we failed to win even a single game. A winless JEF at home in the league next weekend would seem like the perfect opportunity to pick up our first three point haul, but as they’re in terrible form and the game will see Erison back at Todoroki, clearly they are going to beat us and he’s going to score. Before then, we have Tochigi SC at home in the Emperor’s Cup on Wednesday. I’m not sure what kind of team will play this game. Given that the U21 league has now started, (I watched it on a tiny screen whilst in the pub so am not going to make any comments on it), maybe some of the players we might in our wildest drams have expected to take part might be rested for the next U21 game instead. But I do like these kind of games, so am looking forward to it. Hopefully it won’t be a draw…

 

Team 

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 4. PEDRO ROMANO
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 9. Lazar ROMANIC (Yellow card 72') 

Subs

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 13. MIURA Sota (on for SASAKI 59')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for ITO 59')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for TACHIBANADA 81')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 34. OSA Ryuki (on for MARCINHO 59')
FW 36. HONMA Rin (on for ROMANIC 73')

Man of the match

No, I’m still not going to give this. 

Goals

KATO (Sanfrecce) 29' 1-0
YAMAMOTO (Frontale) 58' 1-1
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Team 

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

Subs

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

 

Goals

NAKAMURA (Sanfrecce) 44' 0-1

Highlights
 

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 30/5/26 J League enthralling 7th place play off first leg

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 2 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

It’s a shame that the first game I’ve missed this season is this absolutely crucial match. Oh, well actually this was just the first leg I guess. And actually thinking about it, it’s actually completely insignificant really, as the victors on this tie get the glory of finishing seventh whilst the defeated team have to put up with the humiliation of finishing eighth. 20 minutes into the match I was delighted we’d been unable to get tickets as we were completely shitting the bed, and 2-0 down. At the final whistle, well, it was still all a bit pointless, but was nice to at least get one goal back. As I never write much when I don’t actually attend a match, I’ll just use a couple of brief paragraphs to whinge and then get out of here. So here we go.

I was surprised to Yamaguchi in goal again. Maybe after the Machida game you could have said he deserved to keep his place. But he didn’t really do much against Mito and we were saved more by our opponents’ lack of composure in front of goal than by any skills from our keeper. After conceding twice in 20 minutes I was all ready to get back on the Yamaguchi moan train again, but to be honest, he did alright. I’m not completely sure he stopped anything that wasn’t fairly easy to stop and I’m not sure he was beaten by anything unsavable, but I think we’ve just got to accept that we’re going to concede goals for fun whoever is in goal. So basically no real moans here. To be honest, I thought we did alright in this match and there were definitely periods where we looked like we were significantly better than them. But we did lose though and the stats were largely in their favour. Was lovely to see evergreen cheat Sasaki Sho absolutely fuck up for our goal. Particularly after he’d cheated not too long before his brain fart. Perhaps in keeping with the general lack of meaning of this match, I didn’t get too upset about anything really. We weren’t great, neither were they. The score was reasonably reflective of the game, especially when you consider how many decent chances we wasted. If we’re on our game in the second leg I don’t think we’ll have any trouble dispatching them. That’s a big if though as times when we’ve been on our game have been quite rare this year and even when we are there’s a high chance well drop a five minute goal-conceding disaster into the middle of an otherwise solid performance. So all to play for. But whether we actually play for it is another matter.

Maybe the only thing I actually want to moan about, aside from the pitch which looked pretty bumpy on the TV screen is… have a guess… yes, you’re right, it’s the ref! Looking back through previous posts about games we’ve had with Takasaki has proved that him being shit in this match was absolutely par for the course. Even when we won 4-0 in one those previous games I still felt the need to mention the ref’s absolute lack of skills. He’s a young guy, only 33, so clearly is a bright young thing in the J League ref community. He’s also absolutely useless. The thing that pissed me off the most was him giving Marcinho a yellow for something that wasn’t even a foul and this pissedoffness was massively multiplied by the fact that before the yellow he’d totally ignored any intrusive thoughts about giving a card when some arsehole tried to break Ito’s ankle. To double down he also didn’t allow our physios on to the pitch. I think there was definitely a case to be made for it being a red but we should probably count ourselves lucky we even got the free kick. Oh, Takasaki, you’re so shit. And the fact that you stand out as being especially shit in a league where the normal level is shit, probably means that you’re are extraordinarily shit to a super level of incompetence. Watching the game in the pub I made a, (hilarious I’m sure you’ll agree), joke saying he’s probably either from Onomichi, Kure or Fukuyama or is a massive YFM fan because his decisions were so biased. I did a quick Google and discovered that he actually is from Hiroshima! Pretty unbelievable that he can ref a game with his local team playing. Maybe the J League is certain that any kind of bias is ultimately squashed by his general shitness. Maybe to return the favour we could have Kengo ref the next match. Although Kengo would probably do everything fairly anyway. Takasaki though can fuck off.

Next up, Sanfrecce at home next weekend. I think it’s quite hard to get excited about this game but maybe the biggest incentive for the players would be to try to win it to piss off Takasaki. He’d probably cry into his purple pillows if we overturned the deficit. After that, a sweet few months where we can rebuild some kind of excitement or enthusiasm or alternatively completely forget about football. Either sounds fine to me. 

 

Team 

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 35')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke

Subs

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 9')
FW 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for MARCINHO 69')
DF 22. UREMOVIC Filip
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
FW 34. OSA Ryuki (on for ITO 69')
FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for TACHIBANADA 88')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for MOCHIYAMA 69')

Wanker of the match

An absolute gimme. It has to go to...

TAKASAKI Koji - absolutely useless referee. Should be ashamed of himself.

 

Goals

NAKAMURA (Sanfrecce) 11' 1-0
KATO (Sanfrecce) 20' 2-0
ITO (Frontale) 43' 0-1

Highlights

 

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (home) 30/11/25 J League match 37

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 2 Sanfrecce Hiroshima

On this blog I generally try to steer clear of anything too informative and instead focus on the other more... interesting maybe... (maybe not) stuff. With this match that is something of a relief as this was for the most part a pretty tedious encounter with opponents who also had nothing to play for. They did seem to be a bit more up to the job though, as perhaps demonstrated by the relative league positions of the two teams. The most exciting thing from a Frontale point of view was maybe the starting line up. Well, perhaps exciting isn’t the right word. Given that since the previous game we’ve found out that plenty of players are leaving. They are Sung-Ryong, (his choice I believe), Jesiel (no new contract offered), Ando (no new contract offered, and will retire), and Kurumaya (think a new contract was possible but he felt he wasn’t up to it and is retiring). All of these departures are sad for me and I’ll deal with them later. But with this in mind it was nice to see Jesiel and Kurumaya start at centre back. Given that we have nothing to play for, it was great to see Hasebe give them an opportunity to say goodbye to the fans. Not sure why Sung-Ryong didn’t get the same opportunity and instead had to start on the bench. If he’d been able to start we could have brought on Ando for the last few minutes and given them all one last chance to play. I would have thought Hasebe would have been up for it, so maybe it was a decision driven by a player’s wishes perhaps. It’s nice to see Hasebe is an emotional human being. There’s no way Oniki would have done that. I remember countless end of season dead-as-a-doornail rubbers where he continued with exactly the same players as always. I was pleased to see Sung-Ryong get a clean sheet for the time he was on the pitch. Unfortunately we had conceded two really soft goals before he'd made it on to the pitch. I thought Jesiel really looked like he had a point to prove and I think he proved it. Kurumaya did well too, I thought. It was especially nice to see him finish the game playing at left back where I feel he really belongs, Well maybe it’s not so nice because that situation came about due to an injury to Sasaki. Hopefully it’s not serious. But it was satisfying to see Kurumaya’s career come to an end where it started. 

I felt we were kind of lucky to be drawing at half time. It’s a strange thing to say as we were leading up until the 48th minute. We hadn’t done much though and had looked in trouble on a few occasions. At the same time, I think we could have felt disappointed to be drawing at half time and indeed to lose the game, as the goals we conceded were very very soft. I still don’t have much confidence in Yamaguchi. I feel like people think he’s great because he makes some dramatic saves, (perhaps with the drama turned up to transform a regulation save into a dramatic one. There was one occasion in the match when he did a high flying dive and palmed the ball off the pitch even though it was way off target and was going off anyway. It was kind of reminiscent of the goal he seems to concede once a match where he pats the ball to the unmarked attacker at the back post, but on this occasion there was no-one there so instead he put it out for a corner). The fact is though, that it looked like he dived way too late for the first one and for the second goal just sat down rather than trying to save it. Of course it’s not all his fault, but you could tell he felt at least slightly responsible because he didn’t scream and shout too much at his defenders like he usually does. There have been rumours about a possible new keeper coming in who would presumably be the number one for next year. Given that we only have two goalies on the books now, (or maybe three if Hayasaka comes back from his loan) and one of them is Lee, with absolutely zero experience, there will definitely be something happening in that area of the pitch. 

Maybe a quick mention of the ref here. The last time we had Takasaki we won 4-0 but I still said the ref had had a shocker. On this occasion it was amateur hour again I thought. Reckon we might have got a little lucky with Ito's yellow and the card probably contributed to him being subbed at half time. It was a shame as he was our only attacking threat really. Erison was trying his best but the ref seemed to give every challenge he was involved in as a foul against him. The thing that pissed me off the most was when the dozy bastard of a ref totally blocked Kawahara from getting the ball and then gave him a yellow afterwards for complaining. Reckon Sanfrecce could have had their keeper sent off for a handball outside the box in the first half. I thought it was handball and so did Erison, (who was quite a but closer), but maybe the fact that the ball didn’t go out of play for a few minutes afterwards diluted the possibility of it being reviewed. To be honest we'd had more than enough VAR in the match anyway. But it would have been fun to see Osako get sent off. 

What else do I need to say here before I get on to the players leaving? Maybe the fact that it’s pretty bad that we couldn’t really trouble Sanfrecce's creaking Grandads back three. To be honest though, I still don’t think we would have scored yet if we were still playing now. Can’t really blame our players for being on the beach already though. I don’t think they were slacking particularly, but definitely there was a feeling of a bit of pointlessness about our play. Sanfrecce’s long throws were gross, as any long throws are. I guess the occasional one could be excused and is maybe something we should try as I think Sai can do them, but the endless dithering over their stupid little fucking towels was really getting on my nerves. But at least it gave me something to get involved with, as the rest of the match was quite dull. The only thing that is in any way interesting about the one remaining match away at Urawa is the possibility that they will do their silent treatment thing again that they’ve been doing in the last few matches. Hopefully they will all stay after the game and continue the silence all through the end of season ceremony too as then the train will be a lot better. Would be lovely to beat them on the last day of the season.  Looking back, this year has been a mixed bag and I don't think we’ve really actually done the whole season of transition thing that people expected particularly. Maybe we’re saving that for next year, (god help us…). With one game to go, as long as we don’t get hammered and concede four goals in our next game we will have got more points, scored more goals, conceded less goals and finished higher than last year. So even though some points of this season have been deeply disappointing, not losing on the final day will mean that our hosts will be even more disappointed. Again. As they are pretty much every year. In a intensely amusing way. 

With four players leaving, and the end of season ceremony, we actually spent more time in the stadium after the match than we did when the actual game was taking place. I definitely wanted to stay though as I wanted to show my appreciation for the players who were on their way out. Regular readers will know I love Sung-Ryong so obviously I’m gutted about him going. However, perhaps the time has come. I don’t think he deserved to be demoted to second fiddle this year, but at the same time, I’m not sure he would have been the answer to play in every game. Definitely a department that needs attention in the off season. I suspected that Jesiel might go, but I thought he would want to go back to Brazil, given he’s just had a baby. Apparently though he wanted to stay with us and will remain in Japan. It’s still a massive frustration for me that he had his career slightly ruined by Oniki who played him straight back from injury in a totally pointless end of season game away at Sagan Tosu and then he got seriously injured again. Definitely he has been quite injury prone in recent years, but he also has consistently been one of our best defenders. I hope he can stay injury free and show us what we’re missing. Ando seems to have been unceremoniously dumped which is a shame more from an emotional point of view rather than a practical one. There is a certain irony in him not getting a new contract after a season in which he has played a lot more in than in the last five or six years put together. He’s been an amazing servant to the club, so I hope he can be offered a position in the club somewhere. I kind of admire Kurumaya’s decision to retire. He definitely could have continued playing at a lower level, but leaves us having been a one club man. I was never sure about him wanting to move to centre back, but I guess with Nobori, and then Sasaki, and then Miura at the club, he was probably going to get more of a chance in the middle. It would have been interesting if we’d tried him in a back three. I remember him playing there at times near the start of his career. I will always consider him as a left back though. Maybe if Sasaki is inured we might see him play left back away at Urawa! All of the farewell videos were of course tear jerking. I think Jesiel’s speech affected me the most as he was clearly gutted. I mentioned above Hasebe’s compassion in playing most of the players leaving one more time being a very welcome thing. This was in stark contrast to the kind of ruthlessness when it comes to moving people on that maybe people would say is essential for our club to progress. Maybe it is essential, but it’s also quite out of character for us, so it came as a bit of a shock. I don’t know if it was a business decision made by the chairman, who once again in the end of season ceremony made himself appear quite unlikeable. As Sung-Ryong started his farewell speech which he was making in Japanese with “Sung-Ryong desu” Hasebe giggled, apparently with real affection. At the same time the chairman stood stony-faced looking like he was scanning the crowd for dissenters who he could get thrown out of the stadium. 

 

There has been some criticism of him for his lack of understanding of football and some of his decisions and reactions. I still remember him not understanding why Chanathip wanted to play football rather than train and just sit in the stands. I wonder if that signing, and maybe also the signing of Gomis, were his idea, to extend our reach in Asia and raise our profile overseas, with the ultimate aim being to get more MONEY MONEY MONEY! And then there’s also the upheaval amongst the staff which also might have something to do with him. You can’t help feel that we’ve lost our way a bit recently and it just happens to have coincided with his tenure at the top of the club. Basically, I’m still quite suspicious of him. As I’ve probably made abundantly clear. 

Well that all went on a lot longer than you might have expected for such a boring and pointless game. As I said above, hopefully we can finish the season with a bit of excitement away at Urawa. It’s not too much to ask, is it? And then we get a nice break and all the fun of the off-season. There’s definitely some work to be done before we’re back playing again in early February. My regular pre-match drinking establishment is called Progress, and whilst I think that could be said in some ways about 2025, I remain cautiously hopeful that we could see some more forward steps in 2026. Nice to finish on something positive! 

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis 
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 84') 

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (Yellow card 72') 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 33') 
FW 9. ERISON

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG (on for YAMAGUCHI 81')
GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke

MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MARCINHO 72')
DF 22. Flip UREMOVIC (on for SASAKI 61')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 30. NODA Hiroto (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 81')
MF 34. YAMAICHI Shuto

FW 38. KANDA Soma
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for ITO 46')

Goals

ITO (Frontale) 12' 1-0
KAWABE (Sanfrecce) 45+4' 1-1
NAKAMURA (Sanfrecce) 56' 1-2

Highlights  

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 31/5/25 J League match 19

 

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 1 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

After a few games where I’ve said halfway through ‘I hope we don’t regret not taking more of these many chances’ and where we’ve gone on to regret taking more of those many chances, it looked once again like history was going to repeat itself in this match. To be honest, maybe I should just stop saying it as it seems to keep coming true. I mean, I know I’m a football genius but I don’t think even my excellent level of insight is enough to actually change the game. But, wonderfully on this occasion we did initially regret it but then went on to make Sanfrecce regret the same thing. This was a bit of a weird game, absolutely not helped by an overseas ref who seemed to have thought he was here on holiday rather than to actually work. With no Wednesday game and no game next weekend, this is perhaps an unfortunate time to get a momentum shift and turn the corner, (add several more cliches here), but I think we really needed the win. And it was really, really fun in the stadium. After we kept squandering leads and missing chances it was becoming a bit difficult to recall why we spend so much time going to matches, but a win like this in an away game in a city that’s fun to visit makes up for all the shittier games we’ve had to watch this year. The highs are apparently very much worth waiting for. Maybe if we could have another four months of similar results that would be lovely. 

Us -

I’ve been a bit disheartened recently by our repeated capitulations. To be honest though, perhaps I should have been a bit more upbeat given that we had a lot of players well out of form and we weren’t losing every game. I’m pleased to say that I think we’re getting ourselves in order a bit with this match. The win is obviously the most important thing, but I think large parts of this game also should hopefully have given our players a bit of confidence. Hopefully a late win away at Sanfrecce who were on a five game winning run will give us a more significant morale boost than a boring one-nil win at home against one of the league’s weaker teams. And boy did some of those players need the morale boost. I feel a bit sorry for Yamada who has been pretty bad for most of this season. In this match I thought he did much better. Clearly he still doesn’t seem to be able to play up front by himself this year, but he was passing in this match and quite often doing it well. So fingers crossed that’s going to be a significant step in the right direction for him. I even said that I thought he’d been a bit hard done by to get subbed when he did. Yamaguchi too has been flailing a bit recently, but this game should hopefully get his confidence up again. I don’t want to point the finger solely at him for recent results, but I guess if you remove the howlers from the last two matches we would have won both of them 2-1. So perhaps we normally should win every game 2-1 but occasionally turn the win into a draw by someone having a brain freeze and gift-wrapping a goal for the opposition. Wakizaka, another recent subject of my grumbles, didn’t quite get back to his old form in this match to the same extent that Yamada and Yamaguchi did, but I still feel that he did a bit better than in the last few weeks. His passing was noticeably off again in this match, but hopefully the win will cheer him up a bit. I guess I should bring the mood down slightly by referencing the fact that even though we battered them in the first half we still only had five shots. But who cares, eh? Well, who cares as long as we win? They definitely battered us a bit in the second half but when you consider how thin our squad is getting due to a constantly growing injury list, (latest one out injured seems to be Ito, presumably after the terrible tackle from Gamba’s horrible Yamashita that clown/ref Sendachi thought was only a yellow card. Add to this that Sai went off injured in this match. The injury gods clearly hate us), you’ve got to expect that we won’t have the upper hand when we’re bringing on players in important positions who have hardly played at all this year. There were long period of this game where we’d struggle to thwart one of their attacks, would hack the ball forward and it would come straight back to us. It was seat of the pants stuff at times. Which makes it all the more fun that we won! Wonderful! With all of these injuries in mind, a nice little break is very welcome. Even more so when you consider that the next game will be an Emperor’s Cup game so presumably there will be a lot of rotation for it, (I can say this with a bit more confidence than I would have under the previous guy). I’m not sure we deserved to win, but Sanfrecce didn’t either. And given that we’ve been a bit unlucky turning three points into one on a semi regular basis this year, well, I’ll enjoy the win and Sanfrecce can suck up the loss. 

Love having our celebrations with their annoying 
post-match huddle in the background

Them -

Much like I probably said last year, the stadium is quite nice. I think the away area is shockingly small though, but that might be part of the design I guess. I suppose they couldn’t get many people interested in schlepping out into the mountains to their old stadium, (we only did it once and that was enough for us), so perhaps have underdone the capacity a bit for the new stadium. The stadium WiFi was excellent though. And you can’t argue with the access. Thought it was lovely of their fans to start booing the first time one of our drummers hit his drum to warm up before the match. Pretty petty stuff which made the win all the more satisfying! They definitely have some irritating players, but of course I’m going to say that. Liked the fact that ‘Japan’s (sometime) number one’ was probably at least partially at fault for both goals, absolutely flapping at the ball. I think for the second he actually flicked the ball on to Sasaki with a bowl cut connection. Of course, one of the main points of these blog posts is to write snarky things about the opposition players who probably aren’t actually bad people. It’s a bit annoying though when they appear to be. When we gave Araki a clap before the game for his 200th appearance, he repaid our kindness by spending most of the game whinging to the ref about non-existent elbows. But I guess that behaviour did seem to run through the team who perhaps for some reason thought the ref should have been on their side. I think he absolutely was, but more on that in the next bit. One final comment about the stadium, and it’s that the music was next level cringy. Unlike other clubs who just play naff music, (we are not immune to this ourselves, when we play the original versions of the players’ songs), Sanfrecce seemed to have employed either a local dogshit rocker or a dogshit AI to record Sanfrecce specific versions of classic songs for ultimate cringability. Even these efforts paled into insignificance though when compared to the ‘gates are open, come on in’ Sanfrecce Hiroshima music where at least three over emoting singers apparently had all been told theirs was the lead vocal and to really finesse it up a bit. It was shocking, and sadly, as it took a while to get into the stadium, we were treated to what seemed like an infinite loop of the musical crime, perhaps intended to hype everyone up, but which instead had me looking for the source of the racket and seeing if I had anything sufficiently heavy and unwanted in my bag that I could chuck at the speakers to arrest the mental breakdown that was approaching. If the bosses at Guantanamo Bay are looking for someone to really level up their mental torture department, I highly recommend they employ the people who commissioned, wrote and performed that song. 

Ref -

Once again we were ‘treated to’ an overseas ref. For most of the game I thought he’d forgotten not only his cards but also his whistle as he seemed determined to give nothing at all. All my moaning about Sendachi giving everything one level too low seemed kind of petty in the face of this ref, who just didn’t give anything at all. All he did was wave his arms about in one of three ways. The first was the most common and was a side to side wave signifying that he was not going to give anything. He probably should have constantly done this gesture and things would have been a bit clearer. At the same time it became obvious quite quickly that he was going to do nothing, so maybe he didn’t even need to bother with the arm waving. The second was an up to down wave signifying that the players should calm down, otherwise he’d have to blow his whistle and give a free kick. I’m not sure quite why he was so averse to doing so, but I guess that’s just the way he does things. Or rather doesn’t do things. The third was the out to in wave telling someone to hurry up. There was some top level time wasting from us after we scored our first so perhaps this hand gesture was the most necessary. I haven’t seen it back yet, but I was absolutely furious and absolutely baffled when the ref with his whistle in his mouth pointed to the spot after Kobayashi was hacked down, but then just let the game continue. I think it was an extremely bad decision from where I was standing, but will add an update when I’ve seen it back. (I’ve watched it back and am still confused what he was doing. And unhelpfully, DAZN showed no replays of either this or the next decision I am about to moan about). I was also pretty annoyed with him booking Ienaga for handball after he got hacked down and handled the ball. Seems like the ref had a point to prove and that point was I AM IN CHARGE AND I’M DOING THINGS MY WAY! Will check this on the highlights too. (Yep, no replay here either. Had DAZN been told to not even question anything the ref did? Nice to add another conspiracy to all my others). I guess I can understand the thinking behind the referee exchange scheme. But there do seem to be some drawbacks. (Hmmm. That suggests that there are some benefits from the exchange. The only one I can think is that it means that we don’t have one of the useless refs we already know in charge of one of our games and considering what we get instead, I’m not sure it’s really a benefit). The first major drawback is probably exemplified in what many people say about foreign refs letting the game flow and letting players get away with more physicality than regular J League refs do. I can’t really see the point of having a ref come in and referee the game in a way that doesn’t match what every other ref in the league is doing. You don’t really see this in other kinds of situations. It wouldn’t make sense for a speed metal and a twee indie pop band to swap drummers as part of a percussionist exchange scheme. 

Ref getting ready to put in attack breaking tackle, 
for which he will book our player

Also, I can’t imagine the language barrier particularly helps matters. We didn’t have any VAR in this match. I suspect there’s a high chance that this was because the ref and the VAR probably couldn’t really communicate particularly clearly, so to avoid any embarrassment, you know, just don’t worry about it, eh? So a ref refereeing in a totally different style to that of the league and possibly not being able to communicate any of his extremely unusual to the J League decisions. Seems kind of pointless, doesn’t it? Guess it takes the focus off the useless bastards who normally are in charge of the matches though, right? I’m sure if there were any communication difficulties the Hiroshima manager would be happy to help via his translator. As there has been plenty of speculation already in this section, let me add to it by saying that I reckon Skibbe almost certainly had a good chat with the ref before the match and told him how grateful he was that a good German ref would be in charge because all these Japanese refs are useless, nicely buttering him up pre-game. As stupid as I think the whole scheme is, with a total of ten games to choose from, you couldn’t really do something more stupid than put a German ref in charge of the game of a team with a German manager, could you? Guess the logic behind this decision matches most of the decisions the J League usually makes, so we probably should’t have been that surprised. Looked a bit suss to me though.

A long ranty post on what was a delightful result. The celebration for the winner will live long in the memory. I almost fell into the row in front on me but was steadied by the guy standing next to me. Thank you sir! Maybe all this time we’ve been worried about trying to play well and sometimes all you need for complete satisfaction is to score a late winner rather than concede late on. As I said above, no games for about ten days, so hopefully the players can keep on enjoying this victory. There was definitely no shortage of big smiles from them at the end of the game. Our next league opponents are YFC. Hopefully we’ll do a bit better there than we did last time. That game was a shocker. Keep the good times rolling! 

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 75')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 23. MARCINHO
FW 20. YAMADA Shin

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for YAMAMOTO 79')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 64')

DF 15. TANABE Shuto (on for VAN WERMERSKERKEN 66')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for WAKIZAKA 79') 
FW 18. SEGAWA Yusuke  (Yellow card 85') (on for MARCINHO 79')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata
FW 38. KANDA Soma
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Somewhat unusually there are plenty of deserving players for this. Somewhat predictably, considering how much of a sentimentalist I am, I’m going to give it to…

THE WHOLE TEAM - yeah, I know not everybody was as good as the best players were, but the result was so important for the team, and it really did feel like they were acting like a real team, waiting a long time after the game for Sasaki to rejoin them before the end of game celebrations. Lovely stuff!

Goals

MARCINHO (Frontale) 50' 0-1
ARAKI (Sanfrecce) 86' 1-1
SASAKI (Frontale) 90+1' 1-2


Highlights 

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (home) 30/6/24 J League match 21

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 1 Sanfrecce Hiroshima

Fantastic! Entertaining! Enlightening! Really fun! Much better than things have been recently! But that’s enough about my day. I suppose you’re not reading this to hear how much fun I had taking one of my students to their first game, and rather to hear me moan about us once again being unable to win. The match itself, well, it wasn’t the best, but actually it wasn’t that bad either. Certainly not good enough to spend a lot of time writing a long blog post about though. It is now three draws in a row, and three leads thrown away in a row, and although the flaws have been consistent, there has been a little bit of variation in our performances and my feelings about the games. Away at Niigata started pretty well but we ended up running out of energy and almost fell to pieces completely. Shonan at home was just crap really but ended up with the same result. This game was more like the former, with us making a pretty good fist of it, but once again not being able to hold on to a lead and being quite lucky not to lose in the end. Perhaps the comparison falls down slightly when you consider that against Niigata we looked like we were on top and were bossing the game. In this match, we played more like we were coming up against a stronger opponent, (the last two years show this to be true, I guess). In the past we’d probably expect Sanfrecce to defend in numbers and then break quickly to snatch a goal. In this game we did that to Sanfrecce and it seemed to be working pretty well for about the first hour. Of course there were some dicey moments but I felt our lead wasn’t really that against the run of play. But naturally things fell to pieces. I don’t know if it’s completely Oniki’s fault, (I’m even boring myself with my consistent blaming of him recently), but you’ve got to say that after he brought on an extra centre back to, I guess, ‘shore things up’ we conceded shortly afterwards. I’d be hard pushed to tell you where anyone in front of the defence was playing after those changes too. It was a bit of a mess. But even so, when the inevitable equaliser came it was gutting, particularly as there was a big old deflection involved. To be fair, the initial shot that lead to our goal was similarly deflected so probably can’t moan that much, but it did feel like it was just the perfect way for us to concede to make it feel as disappointing as possible. Anyway, I can’t be bothered to write too much about this game so let’s get the ‘important’ points out of the way,

The team was pretty similar to the team that was pretty bad against Shonan. As he hasn’t been involved for a couple of games now, I think we can assume that Ienaga has been added to the injured list. Jesiel replaced Ominami which I guess shows that Jesiel is being strategically rested so probably isn’t really capable of playing that often anymore. He certainly looks like he’s half injured most of the time. I don’t know if this is age catching up with him or it’s a long term injury that’s plaguing him. I wonder if he’ll only be a bit part player in the future. If that’s the case, it’s quite sad. Yamamoto also has been absent for two games in a row. So maybe he’s inured again. Or maybe it’s just the return of Oshima that’s keeping him out. Tono on the right in the Ienaga spot wasn’t as good as him in the Wakizaka spot. With Wakizaka back, I can’t imagine Tono will get a go there again in a hurry. If Ienaga is injured, maybe Patrick Verhon could be an option up front on the right. Or Yamada. Or Kobayashi, Or maybe we could change the formation. No chance of that happening obviously! Marcinho continued his goal scoring run. Thankfully someone is scoring. I’d say Marcinho is now getting somewhere near to back to his best. Not quite there yet, he’s still hanging on to the ball for a bit too long, and some of his shots are not very good at all. But at least we have some kind of attacking threat there now. The main striker still isn’t scoring, but that’s been the case in most games for the last few years so that’s so expected that it’s probably not even worth mentioning. Sasaki had another good game. Seko too. We were alright! We definitely had chances at the end to get a winner, but there were some shocking decisions made that prevented us from doing so. Kobayashi will presumably really regret not passing to Miyagi. That one was particularly galling. Not sure we would have completely deserved to win, but it wouldn’t have been wholly unfair on how the game had gone. Bit of an Oniki moan, we definitely didn’t use our subs very well, but this is in part because we had to change Marcinho due to an injury. (Guess it’s natural that our only recent goal scorer should get injured too). I don’t know why his first change is always a single one though. On a few occasions recently we’ve been prevented from using all of our subs due to an early change of just one player. And pretty often the subs don’t really change anything. On this occasion, maybe they did, but not particularly for the better. I would have liked to have seen Gomis get the chance to knock the Sanfrecce back three about a bit. I dunno though, not particularly surprised we ended up drawing. Pleased that we didn’t lose. Gutted by the way we conceded. Oh, but there was one more emotion that was present in the stadium, wasn’t there?



 

Fury. Yes, once again we were blessed with an absolutely useless referee, Imamura, most famous recently for his out of control emotional explosion as he sent off Kozuka away at Urawa. Before the match I commented that Imamura is a classic example of short man syndrome. During the match I was surprised to see that he’s not actually that short, so he doesn’t even have insecurity about his height as an excuse for his horrendous attitude. There were SO MANY bad decisions in this game that at one stage the whole Frontale bench were standing at the side of the pitch shouting at him. Even in this situation he failed to do the right thing, which clearly would have been to book a translator or something to send the message that people should calm down. Once again I’ve got a rough voice the day after a match, not because of celebrating a goal but because of screaming at a ref. I know it’s not a very edifying thing to do but it certainly helps me express my frustration a little. Of course, we didn’t fail to win because of Imamura, but once again he made mistake after mistake in a game but presumably went home thinking he’d done a great job. To close this section, here are some words about Imamura from past blog posts that probably are still relevant:



 

‘Whilst I always moan about refs, I don’t think I have screamed so loudly at one for a long time. Let’s hope it’s a long time till we ever see him at one of our games again.’

‘Totally lost control of the game and of course was way out of his depth’

‘Clearly bottled some big decisions’

 



Good to see he’s at least consistent in his shitness.

Next up Jubilo Iwata away, a team who we conceded five goals to last time we played them. Our squad seems to be full of injuries. We haven’t won in our last four league games. Any bright sparks that our manager accidentally stumbles on are quickly extinguished before the next match. So, basically, I’m not particularly confident. But at least it will be a nice little day trip! And who knows, perhaps we could even avoid that whole massive capitulation thing that seems to be part of our game plan recently. Fingers crossed! 

 

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai
DF 4. JESIEL
DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 90+1')
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 67')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 35')
FW 17. TONO Daiya
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO

 

Subs

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (on for WAKIZAKA 82')
MF 6. ZE RICARDO
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for TONO 82')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 62')
FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 65')
 
Goals

MARCINHO (Frontale) 23' 1-0
MITSUTA (Sanfrecce) 88' 1-1

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

No messing around with this. And clearly I’m biased again but…

SASAKI Asahi and SEKO Tatsuki - just for the fact that they once again stood out.

Highlights