Let’s not beat about the bush here. I didn’t see this game due to work, so I’m not going to waste anyone’s time by commenting on some dodgy highlights I saw. The fact is, we’re still just about alive in the competition but need to beat Sydney in the final game to progress whilst relying on Ulsan not losing to Shanghai. Ulsan are already through as group winners so have absolutely nothing to play for. And Sydney haven’t lost at home in the ACL this year. So not exactly full of hope. I’ll save the dissection of the failures of this campaign for the next ACL post (if we don’t qualify for the next round). It was nice to Leandro Damiao get a chance and score. It wasn’t nice to see us concede two pretty poor goals, both of which seemed to pit Nobori against Hulk, which doesn’t exactly seem like a fair fight. The stats say that we had 13 shots but only got three on target which doesn’t really seem good enough and as it turned out, wasn’t good enough for us to take three points. Onwards and hopefully upwards to Shimizu away on Sunday.
A disappointing night away in Shanghai for us. I didn’t go to the game and only saw it on a tiny, blurry screen so I’m not going to go into any kind of detail about this. Hasegawa starting was a surprise, but perhaps Oniki had done his homework as he caused them all kinds of problems in the first half. Not sure why our ACL challenge special signing Leandro Damiao wasn’t on the pitch until the final two minutes though. Presumably some will use this as a stick to beat us with about not putting out our strongest team. This accusation would be quite frankly ridiculous. It was an unfortunate way to lose a game that we’d dominated possession in. You can’t blame Morita and you can’t blame the ref. It was the right decision. Just all a bit of a shame. One other dark cloud is the injury to Mawatari. Hopefully it's not serious. The necessary tactical shuffle due to his removal didn't help, but wasn't why we lost so let's not dwell on it. Looking on the bright side, that’s probably our toughest group game out of the way and Ulsan and Sydney drew. Looking on the dark side, neither team really deserved to win, and Shanghai didn't look that good, but we managed to lose. Discounting the Super Cup, that’s three games, two draws and one loss. One goal scored, two conceded. Not the most thrilling of openings to the season, it has to be said. Hopefully, sooner of later, we might remember how to score from open play. Fingers crossed it’s Sunday, which now is looking like, (and I know it’s ridiculously early in the season to say this), a must win game. Forget this match, it wasn’t to be, and let’s concentrate on paying a bit better and getting a better result against Yokohama.
So, we were out of the ACL before a ball had even been kicked in our fifth game. Whilst the ACL was not my top priority this season, it’s still hugely disappointing to go out in such a limp way. Given that he had to name his line-up before we knew we were out, I was unsure how Oniki would treat this game, given the tiny chance of us being able to go through to the knockout stage. Should we throw in the towel and name a second-string side? Or would we give it a go with a full strength team, pretending that we still had a chance? The team selection reflected the former but the performance suggested the latter. As I watched the game in the Hub Harajuku I’m not going to write much about it. There are clearly advantages to watching on TV, for example, you can be sure about terrible refereeing decisions and notice when players leave the field due to injury (apparently Nobori did last game and I decided to concentrate instead on bashing Oniki for the sub). However you definitely don’t get a real feel for the match. Therefore, I won’t waste words telling you what you’ve probably already seen with your own eyes. I’ll stick to the few observations I have and of course a few digs at our manager.
Firstly, credit to him, Oniki gave a lot of recently unfamiliar names a run out. Nara and Edu were both back from the wilderness and into the centre back positions, Takeoka made his first start in ages, Tasaka was back and was captain, (presumably now forgiven for his Super Cup missed tackle), Hasegawa and Chinen made rare starts. There were also some interesting names on the bench. Suzuki and Akasaki made it there for the first time. I can understand Kurumaya being played if Nobori is injured as we don't really have any other options there. It also made sense to play Okubo as I think he'll be back on the bench on Sunday. Moriya probably had to play given the lack of options in the defensive midfield position and of course Morita was going to be involved somewhere, this time alongside Moriya, and he did a good job too. It was a bit weird though to see Sung-Ryong in goal. If he’d got injured in what was pretty much a dead rubber it would have been a disgraceful selection. Thankfully he didn’t. As has become all too familiar recently, the subs were weird. Why bother bringing on Neto and Elsinho and risk them getting injured. I can understand why they were on the bench, as there was an albeit slim chance of us needing a result. But 15 minutes from the end with us already out of the competition, why risk them? Suzuki would have been a natural replacement for Tasaka so if he was good enough to be on the bench, why wasn’t he used? It does seem sometimes that we have players on the bench only to make up the numbers, who have no chance of actually getting on the pitch. It was great to see Akasaki get a go, even if it was probably too late for him to be able to have any impact. Probably should have put him on earlier, although it would have been tough on Chinen who’d done a creditable job up front.
It was a weird game, we totally bossed Shanghai in the first half but almost went in a goal down after they were awarded a dubious penalty. It looked like a dive to me, but I can understand why the ref gave it. Thankfully, Frontale old boy Hulk decided to blaze it over the bar. I believe the ball is still rising actually. Shanghai once again looked pretty normal, in spite of the huge amount of money they spend on wages for their world superstar foreigners, (well, Hulk and Oscar anyway. Elkeson spent the majority of the game looking like a peeved hamster and not doing much else, so hopefully they don’t pay him so much. Although obviously, he did score…). If we hadn’t spent the first couple of group games sitting back and waiting for something to happen, rather than playing our usual game, we could have done a lot better in this group. Ulsan’s hammering of Melbourne shows just how poor our results against our Australian opponents were. Shanghai came into the game a bit more in the second half, but we still had the lion’s share of possession, if not chances (how familiar a story that is). Their goal was unfortunate and a few players could have done better. Our goal was a nice finish from Chinen, but too little too late, especially considering the chances we had squandered earlier. I also don’t understand why, at the end, we weren’t trying a little harder to win the game. We literally had nothing to lose.
To briefly sum up positives and negatives, we had some decent performances from Morita, who almost made us a goal with a lovely driving run into the box, and Edu and Nara at the back, who for the most part dealt with a moneybags attack pretty comfortably. Kurumaya was a little less prominent than usual, as maybe he has been recently, but of course it’s hard to tell when he was being played out of position. Okubo didn’t really make a case for him filling the Kengo role in his absence. Was nice to see Takeoka back and Akasaki get his first game time. Negatively speaking, I don’t understand what we were trying to do with our game plan and our subs were kind of pointless given the situation we were in. On the whole though, it probably has to go down as a decent enough result, given that this is our second string playing what I guess must have been our toughest game in the group and they got our best result so far. I think this says more about the low level of the other performances than any good points about this one though. Who knows what Oniki will do against Yokohama on Sunday? Oh, actually, we probably all know what he’ll do. Revert to the starting line up that did so well against Hiroshima... Please excuse my sarcasm. I’d probably do the same to be honest, but we really need to step the performance up a few notches otherwise we’re going to have another derby disappointment. I also reckon we should sneak Saito on to the bench, just for a laugh. We always have at least a couple of players on there who stand about half a percent’s chance of getting on the pitch, so why not make one of them Saito for Sunday for the sake of mind games.
As mentioned above, we’re away at Yokohama in the league on Sunday and this is followed up quickly by a home league game against our recent times nemesis Cerezo next Wednesday. The games are coming thick and fast so hopefully we can get into our groove sooner rather than later. Hopefully, right from the start of the game on Sunday actually. Come on Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 17. TAKEOKA Yuto
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 23. EDUARDO
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro
MF 25. MORITA Hidemasa
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
MF
4. OKUBO Yoshito (Yellow card 71')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
Subs GK 30. ARAI Shota
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
FW 9. AKASAKI Shuhei (on for CHINEN86')
DF 18. ELSINHO (on for TASAKA77')
MF 21. EDUARDO NETO (on for MORITA74') MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
My Frontale Man Of The Match
I’ll leave this again for this match. As I mentioned above, there were some solid performances, but no-one really did enough to earn the huge honour that is my man of the match award. I promise I’ll get this going again soon, with some ‘hilarious’ and ‘amazing’ photos too.
I’ll keep this brief. The ACL game days and kick off times have been very unkind to me this year. Due to work, I couldn’t go to this match and I probably won’t even be able to watch the away game next Tuesday, let alone travel to the match. Looks like I didn’t miss much though as we sank to a second consecutive defeat at the earliest possible stage of our 2018 campaign, (something that didn’t happen at all last year). It hasn’t been the most encouraging of openings and against Shanghai, it seems we again looked out of form and off the pace. We had chances but only two of them were on target which is a little worrying. Certainly this happened at times last year, but we need a good result soon to stop these defeats becoming a habit. There are still some questions regarding what our first choice starting eleven is. Elsinho was back which suggests that this was our favoured line up, but I’m a bit worried if we think that Okubo is our best option on the left. All the talk of us having two complete teams so we could compete on all fronts this year is looking a bit shallow.
From the limited highlights I’ve seen of the match, it looked like Shanghai weren’t as formidable as we might have expected, but we’ve still left ourselves with a mountain to climb by getting off to such a bad start. It’s really not clicking at the moment and whilst this happened in a few games last season, there’s a slight worry that perhaps our tactics have been found out. It’s not a problem if we’re playing well as it’s difficult to stop us when we’re in our groove, whatever tactics you employ. But when we stutter, we look very wooden. So, some work to be done before next Tuesday or we might find ourselves ‘concentrating on the league’ earlier than we hoped.
Next up, Ulsan away in the ACL and then after that a tricky league opener away at Jubilo on Sunday, thankfully not at their usual stadium! GO (sort things out, please) FRONTALE!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 18. ELSINHO
DF 3. NARA Tatsuki
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 21. EDUARDO NETO
MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. NAKAMURA Kengo
FW 4. OKUBO Yoshito
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
Subs GK 30. ARAI Shota
MF 8. ABE Hiroyuki (on for NAKAMURA 71')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for IENAGA81')
MF 19. MORIYA Kentaro
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
DF 23. EDUARDO MF 25. MORITA Hidemasa (on for NETO 86')
Goals ELKESON (Shanghai) 23’ 0-1
Highlights
There's a longer unofficial video here if you like to see chance after chance being missed.
