I normally say something about knocking these blog posts out due to lack of time and keeping things brief. Hopefully, I’ll manage to succeed in doing so this time. Two busy days between games means that I don’t have a lot of time to get this done. So here we go with some briefer than usual bullet points and without imaginative names this time. This is all totally half-arsed.
Line up -
Perhaps Oniki doesn’t like Shikoku and wanted to punish Tokushima but it was something of a shock when you consider that he put out his preferred eleven against Tokushima given the facts that the B team was out against Sendai and scored five and that we have Kashiwa Reysol at home on Saturday. Considering our lacklustre performance in this game, perhaps we should have stuck with the reserves. I’m still worried that we seem to oscillate between mass changes or no changes to the line-up without any apparent middle ground. I'm also concerned what might happen if Yamane were to get injured. Or Sung-Ryong. Players who would be stepping in would have pretty much no experience of playing for us. I could also moan about our subs being quite predictable ,(exactly the same in this game as the Cerezo game, albeit at different times), but I guess it’s not doing us any harm right now. However we have only scored one goal after making changes so it seems that regardless of whoever starts and whoever comes on, we are getting a similar drop in attacking threat after making subs. With the ACL being postponed till June/July, but still with very few details known about what might actually be happening with it, I’d say we have time to prepare a bit more for any misfortune we might encounter later on in the season. Not sure we will do so though.
Oppostion and game -
I was delighted to see Tokushima back in J1 as I’ve never been to their stadium. I was also delighted to see the away fixture is a bit later in the season so hopefully we’ll be able to travel by then. Please don’t let it get re-arranged to a horrible time. They had drawn their first two games and looked like being a classic kind of banana skin team that we usually struggle against at home. I’m still nor sure if they are or not to be honest. We totally dominated most of the game but only managed six shots on target (one third of our total shots). The fact that they had none of target seems to suggest that we could have got away with not playing Sung-Ryong in this game and giving him a rest. There was an element of good fortune for us or generosity from Tokushima for both of our goals. But that’s not taking anything away from Damiao’s brilliant pressing and nice finishes for both goals and Mitoma’s quick thinking pass for the first. Is it just me, or is Damiao looking a lot more dangerous in a conventional striker kind of way this season? He’s seems quite on it at the moment, and long may that continue. Tokushima definitely seemed to be coming to try and snuff us out with a back four and what seemed like a back three directly in front of them. Clearly this didn’t help them going forward. I’m not sure it particularly worked in stopping us either. It was more just that we weren’t quite on it in this game I felt. I'd like to think that if we were up against it a bit more we might have gone up a gear, but to be honest, it's not like we weren't trying too hard. More like we just weren't really clicking aside from some occasional nice passages of play which more often than not led to nothing. Perhaps I should avoid provoking the irritation of opposition fans too much by moaning about performances when we’ve won four out of four, scoring twelve goals and conceding three. Or perhaps I should do the opposite and stoke that opposition fan ire whilst it is possible as I’m sure they’ll delight in it when we lose our first game.
VAR and ref -
Actually, I don’t think I have anything to write about VAR this week as I don’t think it was used. No complaints about the ref either. I will moan about that stupid late flagging thing again though. One linesman seemed to be doing it and the other wasn’t. It was pleasantly refreshing when the one who wasn’t raised his flag to stop an offside Tokushima attack. It was crushingly inevitable when we finally managed to get a second half shot on target that we’d get a late flag and it would be ruled out. Haven’t seen this decision replayed so no idea if it was right or not but will still get irritated that even when VAR isn’t involved directly we can still have the disappointment of a delayed deflating decision ruining a celebration.
Other bits -
Joao Schmidt is everywhere, and always available for a pass. I think he’s growing into his new role game by game. Very happy! Hatate seems to be getting better and better too. I’d still rather see him up front but can understand how exciting it is to have him and Mitoma on the same side attacking together. And he’s a total legend for being up for playing there. Ao seemed to volley a drop ball in the second half. (DAZN is playing up so I can’t check and see for sure).That was a bit weird. You don’t often see them having to be retaken. There were a lot of backheels in this game. If only our shooting had been as good as our backheeling. Oh, and finally, the run continues of someone getting a brace in every game. And perhaps the other run also continues of us having one dodgy half in every game. But maybe this time it wasn’t quite so dodgy, and also perhaps it was actually two halves that were a bit dodgy rather than one that was more dodgy.
As mentioned above, we have Kashiwa Reysol at home on Saturday at the slightly irritating time of 17:00. From a boozing point of view it really couldn’t be worse timed. Will it be team A or B that appears for us? (A, I reckon). Who will get the two goals? (Dunno, but I really hope it’s one of our players and they are in the right net). How rubbish will we for one half of the game? (Hopefully not very rubbish and will be amazing for the other half). Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 64')
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu(on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 64')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MITOMA 80')
FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for IENAGA 80')
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento(on for WAKIZAKA 64')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Once again, I agree with the official verdict. It's got to go to...
LEANDRO DAMIAO - superb pressing creating both goals for himself with just a little help from a great Mitoma pass. Oh, and he tried another overhead kick,
Sendai away is probably my favourite away fixture but sadly this was another game that we had to watch at home. Given that this was the 10th anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake there was added significance to this fixture. We were Sendai’s first visitors after that tragedy and since then the two clubs and their fans seem to have a great relationship. Apparently they had made a video for our fans to mark the occasion. I hope we get the chance to see it sometime. They also displayed our big Frontale flag in front of their supporter section which was nice of them. It seems a little mean of us to hand them a tonking in return for this kind gesture but that’s what we did. As usual with games I watch on TV or DAZN, I find it a bit hard to get too excited. But the goal rush definitely helped in this game. I’m not going to mess around writing too much though as there are not really any unique insights I can provide from my sofa that anyone else couldn’t uncover on their own. I’ll do some bullet points but they’re doing to be short today. Hallelujah!
2/3 a new team
Oniki rotated quite a bit for this game. I wondered if he would, as it’s still early in the season and if there were ever a manager who likes to keep things as they are, it’s Oniki. But he completely changed the centre backs and the front three and tinkered a little with the midfield. Amusingly this meant that Hatate was still at left back which is the one change I have been suggesting. I thought Yamamura and Kurumaya looked pretty solid at the back. The front three were pretty good too I think. I’m delighted Tono got his first goal for us, and that Hatate scored, and that Kobayashi also got one (or two depending on who you ask). I was not delighted to see Oniki give Taniguchi ten minutes in the anchor role. Stop converting! Taniguchi started as a midfielder and converted to a centre back as it seems he’s much better there. Judging on this performance (and to be honest also every time he’s been tried there before), he really shouldn’t be playing in midfield. I don’t think his passing is good enough to play such an important position. Just my opinion. Tachibanada got a lot more minutes under his belt. I haven’t really noticed him much yet. Whether this is because he goes under my radar in the way that Oshima and Wakizaka sometimes do, I’m not sure. It’s great though that some of the new players are getting a look in. Hopefully some others will soon.
One brace and one bad half
The tradition continues. Whether this game’s brace was by Kobayashi or the Sendai captain and defender Hachisuka is up to the individual I guess. I’d lean towards the contentious goal being an own goal, but as the ball was going in anyway, why not give it to Kobayashi? I think both players would prefer it that way. Along with the usual two goals to one player thing we also had another go at playing one good half and having one slightly dodgy one. Although to be fair, the second half wasn’t a disaster, we just seemed to have taken our foot off the gas a bit. Can’t complain about their goal and they had maybe double the chances we had in the second half. But we stood semi-firm. I’m not sure if the dodginess was due to Oniki changing things at half time or more just down to us leading 4-0 and easing off. I will lean towards the latter as I am becoming a bit of a Tsukagawa fan already and I’m not going to say it was down to him. Perhaps there is some work to be done with working on some midfield combinations though as I don’t think we really have a plan B there yet and no-one is really staking a firm claim to change our starting line-up as far as I can see at the moment.
VAR
I’m going to keep saying I hate VAR in every post. I hate VAR. Nothing disastrous in this game though I thought. Definitely there was an unnecessarily long delay late in the match when the Sendai forward kicked the pitch and his teammates went crazy claiming for a penalty. Also the first/only own goal also had a long delay where they seemed to be deciding whether the ball had crossed the line or not. Maybe we should replace VAR with goal line technology? I thought they wouldn’t give it as the Sendai players were complaining about what they thought was a foul causing the own goal finish and given that it wasn't 100% clear if the ball had crossed the line. But it was. Still, let's bin VAR, eh? Hehe.
Any other rubbish, ... SNIFF
Kobayashi’s post match interview was pretty funny. In these days of heightened awareness of people sniffing or coughing it was amusing to see someone sniffing quite so much whilst being broadcast. Apparently it’s an allergy though, so hopefully no need to worry. It dominated the interview though. Much in the same way that if you notice someone’s verbal tick (‘you know’, ‘like’) it rapidly transforms into a meaning blocking monolith which is impossible to ignore. I probably have a writing tick that I constantly repeat in these posts, but I don’t know what it is. Let me know and I’ll try to iron it out. And one other thing, was it just me, or were there some of our fans there? There shouldn’t have beenav given the state of emergency but when we had a shot I really thought I could hear a crowd noise that suggested brief excitement followed by disappointment which doesn’t seem to fit with home fans reacting to an opposition chance. Also, when Hatate scored I think he gestured to the area of the stadium where we would normally be. I wonder if there were some fans allowed on the condition that they weren’t shown on TV and kept relatively quiet. I wouldn’t be too happy if this were the case. I would have loved to have gone but stuck to the rules. If they were secretly allowed to go, for example to deliver a massive flag, that would be a bit dodgy.
Next up we have Tokushima Vortis at home on Wednesday. They’ve got two draws from their first two games. Miyashiro won’t be able to play for them against us. After that it’s Kashiwa Reysol at home on Saturday. Quite a lot of home games to start the season with. But given that we’re not allowed to go to away games right now, that’s not such a bad thing. Whether Oniki will persevere will this kind of line-up or revert to the previous one who knows. Maybe he’ll even try a mix of both. Or maybe not. Amazing analysis as usual. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 28. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento
FW 19. TONO Daiya
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
Subs GK 27. TANNO Kenta MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 45')
It’s only five days since the season started and already we are on our eleventh league game. Well, round eleven anyway as this was a fixture between two ACL teams that was brought forward to give us something to do on a Levain Cup group stage night. We welcomed one of our old bogey teams Cerezo Osaka back to Todoroki. Cerezo unceremoniously dumped their most successful recent manager shortly before the end of last season. They lost a few of their most important players and replaced them with a 38 year old Yoshito Okubo who didn’t manage to trouble the scorers last year when he was with Tokyo Verdy. So we went into the game as favourites and consequently, from a jinx point of view would probably lose this match. After playing two games in both of which we had a good first half with a player getting a brace and then farted around for the second half not doing much, a match against our former bogey team would be a good way to see where we really are. Naturally we conceded a goal in the fifth minute scored by our former star striker and then after getting back on level terms, contrived to go behind again. Add to this the electric atmosphere of corona football and you have quite a first 45 minutes of high quality entertainment! Anyway, another game coming soon so let’s knock this post out quickly. Here we go.
Corona update -
The state of emergency in Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures has been extended for another couple of weeks. Those hoping that this would be our last game with a crowd of under 5000 will be disappointed. Those who enjoy atmosphere will also be disappointed. Although to be fair this game seemed a lot better than the last one from the point of view of noise from the crowd. I say noise, but I really mean clapping. For some reason our call leaders and drummers have decided that they will not be leading or drumming whilst the state of emergency is on. Which seems a bit weird to be honest as when we can’t sing, if they get involved everything is a bit more exciting and possibly motivating. Perhaps they are hoping some kind of demand from fans for them to come back and lead us to the promised land like they seemed to be doing when we messed up away at Oita and didn’t win the league. So here it is from me. Hopefully they’ll be back soon. We were able to warm up for the clapathon with that version of the Shishamo song that they used to play before every game last season. Which made me realise that on the whole Japanese people are pretty good at clapping in time. I don’t know what happened to it last game but there does seem to be a few problems with getting things played on the PA and the big screen this year. Perhaps this geed everyone up a bit as things were a bit more fun. That is until…
Return of Okubo -
Of course he scored against us. He always does. He didn’t have to do it twice though! Very unsporting of him! Okubo rolled back the years and smacked a pretty nice one in from distance (can’t imagine anyone expected him to shoot and perhaps this is why Sung-Ryong looked like he’d been caught out), and then tucked one in at the back post from a cross that Sung-Ryong flapped at. It’s fair to say that our keeper didn’t have his best half. At least from the point of view of the two goals we conceded. I know there is always a bit of a debate about whether returning players should celebrate scoring against their old team. I think I lean towards ‘maybe not’ but can understand when they do. I don’t see why Okubo always has to do it with some much enthusiasm though! I was delighted to see him score last weekend. Not so much in this game. Not sure our fans should really be clapping him scoring either. I guess it was a nice goal, but as far as I’m concerned, give him a clap when his name’s read out before the game, give him a clap at the end of the game but don’t clap him when he scores against your team. Especially not for the second goal which was essentially a tap in! We did manage to pull one goal back in the first half (more on that later... a little more...), but I thought we looked pretty ordinary, particularly down the right. We were putting in a classic 2021 second half performance but in the first half. The only redeeming thing that happened before the second half (apart from the goal), was the fact that I avoided a fairly long queue for the toilet by using this ‘new’, ’secret’ toilet that I’m pretty sure never used to be in use but perhaps is getting some use due to people being encouraged to social distance.
Half time rollocking and line ups -
Cometh the hour, cometh the rollicking! Oniki must have got out the hairdryer at half time as we were a lot better in the second half. In the past he’s been a fan of the freebie half time substitution but seems to have gone off this idea in 2021. Whatever he said seemed to work though and we were level quite quickly. From then on it seemed like it was only a matter of time before we took the lead as Cerezo didn’t offer much. It was nice to see Tsukagawa get some more time on the pitch again after his brief cameo in the Super Cup. There didn’t seem to be anyone who he needed to crack heads with in this game though. Tachibananda got some more minutes too. He’s clearly a favourite of Oniki’s. Our final and triple substitution saw a complete change of the front three who to be fair all looked knackered. No-one who came on really had time to make much of an impact, but Kobayashi did manage to put a decent chance straight at the Cerezo keeper. The game felt like it had been won by then anyway, barring any calamitous errors. Given that he's named the same starting line-up three times, it now seems clear that this is Oniki’s first choice eleven from the players we have fit at the moment. I can only imagine it would be Oshima and Noborizato who would make it into the team if everyone in the squad were fit. Maybe… I still don’t want Hatate playing at left back, but for some unknown reason Oniki isn’t aware of my opinion and doesn’t care what I think. I think that Oniki rotating in 2020 became a bit of a common misconception. We only used 22 different players last year and if it were in any way possible to name his favoured eleven that is exactly what Oniki would do. AND LOOK HOW LAST YEAR TURNED OUT!!! Oh…. It will be interesting to see when he breaks from this eleven and if that is an enforced change or not. I guess we can say though that Damiao is now favoured over Kobayashi which is a bit surprising for Oniki. Also that Kurumaya will not be played at left back unless it is absolutely necessary. I guess it makes sense to try to get as strong a start in the league as possible considering there could be some bumps in the road coming up later in the season so maybe this is why we are going full on right now. Hopefully Oniki has got an idea of what we can do to give some players a rest when they need it though. Will we see a change at the weekend and next week against 'weaker' opposition? I doubt it. But must things I predict don't happen, so maybe we will.
The usual VAR stuff -
We had a goal ruled out for offside by VAR. As would be expected there was not a lot of clarity in the stadium as to what was going on. We had the goal song playing but something didn’t seem right. The linesman’s flag had gone up but Sato seemed to be giving it until we got the feared hand on the ear and palm outstretched thing. I think the decision was right… I think. I had no idea at the time and checking on DAZN hasn’t made it much clearer as instead of the crucial moment being replayed they considered a few shots of some guys looking at TV screens proof enough of the validity of the decision. You can just about see something at the edge of the screen if you rewind the footage on DAZN but nothing crucial was replayed. The replays they showed were off a different passage of play to the one that the offside came in. I wonder if the people who control the TV pictures are under instructions to not show anything potentially contentious or just don’t really know what’s going on. I think this linesman flagging at the end of the passage of play thing though isn’t helping anyone understand what’s happening. I’d also say that we seem to be getting a lot less yellow cards in games this year. I think I said that last year too. Maybe that’s another rule change. Thankfully we haven’t had a nightmare VAR experience yet like they did at the Shonan / Tosu game yet. Or the one at the Cerezo / Kashima game. Guess the latter decision shows that even if you have some guys in a room watching loads of replays you can still get controversy and confusion. Maybe better to not bother with it at all, eh? And preserve some of the excitement of watching a game.
Sorry, this post wasn’t very entertaining. Seems that I can’t keep them funny and I can’t keep them short either. I’m doomed to provide my inaccurate and just plain wrong analysis. Or maybe it was just that nothing funny happened. It’s another win which is great, particularly as we seem to have had some wobbly moments already this year. One nineteenth of the season is done and we are unbeaten! And we’ve had a player score twice in every game. Long may both of those things continue! Next up we have Sendai away. It’s a real shame we can’t go there. For many reasons, but particularly given the fact that it’s the 10th anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and the game we played against them which seemed to create this nice relationship between the two sets of fans. Instead we’ll have to watch from our sofas. After that we’re at home again next Wednesday, this time against Tokushima Vortis. Hopefully we can continue in our first half against Gamba and YFM and second half against Cerezo vein. Or perhaps we might even get a whole 90 minutes of good stuff! Fingers crossed! Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 64')
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu(on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 90')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MITOMA 90')
FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for IENAGA 90')
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento(on for WAKIZAKA 79')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
Although Mitoma got to do the hero interview at the end of the game, the official man of the match and my choice were in accord for once. We’ve both given it to…
LEANDRO DAMIAO - two goals, (including one lovely volley!), and one backheeled assist is pretty good, but his whole performance was great I thought. The deputy captaincy seems to have lifted him to a new level of goalkeeper hassling and I have to say I’m really enjoying it!
We’re back at Todoroki, the best stadium in the J League according to a few of my Frontale survey responses. Personally, I disagree, but it is good to be back there and kick off our league campaign for 2021. And what better opposition to do it against our local rival Yokohama F Marinos, who for the purpose of brevity I will refer to as YFM from now on. Given that we always seem to start our league campaigns in slightly lacklustre fashion, perhaps YFM were not the best opposition to face on the opening day. But shock beyond shock, we actually managed to win an opening league game! It wasn’t completely plain sailing though and looking at the players’ faces at the end of the game it looked almost like we’d started the year in our usual crappy style. But thankfully we hadn’t. I think I said before I’m going to try to knock these posts out quite quickly this year and leave most of the technical talk to others who are more qualified or more able to do it. These posts will hopefully be a bit focussed on the experience and more hazy on the details, a bit moany, a bit bitchy and hopefully at least a bit amusing or entertaining. No pressure, here we go.
Corona football party time! -
Since us season ticket holders had our pre-purchasing privileges removed it seems that buying tickets in a state of emergency has become like Primark on Oxford Street at the start of the Boxing Day sales. (Bit niche that reference, and a bit risky, particularly as I have no experience of it other than seeing footage on the news). At the agreed time, the masses who are poised with their mouse fingers ready burst onto the website, elbows flailing and grab whatever they can, whether they want it or not. Everything is gone in seconds and then random tickets get slung back onto the rails as people get to the till and find that their basket is full of five of the same XXXL jumpers and a pack of 20 left foot socks and no right ones. My wife, the ‘ticketmaster’ couldn’t manage to get tickets for the Super Cup so we were spared having to trek all the way to the Saitama Stadium and instead were able to enjoy almost exactly the same atmosphere in a quiet living room. Same atmosphere but with comfier seats! For this game we were in the main stand. Normally, this is an extremely placid zone with an atmosphere akin to an old folks home when one of the staff gets the karaoke machine out and has a go on a Vera Lynn classic, ie. lots of soft and slightly out of time hand-clapping with the ‘residents’ occasionally turning to each other and benevolently smiling, safe in the knowledge that they are sharing QUITE AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE! Thankfully for us, the state of emergency capping attendances has blessed every area of the ground with the old folks home vibe, so we were able to enjoy the good views of the match without having to sacrifice any involvement in atmosphere. All of this is basically a long-winded, (on this blog, never!), way of saying that the lowest level of Corona football match attendance is still a very weird thing with not many advantages over watching the game on TV. IN fact maybe watching on TV is actually better, but at least we can say ‘WE WERE THERE!’ It was pretty cold though, so maybe home would have been better.
First half exciting -
But there’s no way I would have wanted to watch this first half from home! With a lot of parallels with the Super Cup match this was a quite exciting first half. We scored twice through the same player. We blazed a shot way over the bar when an open goal was gaping. We played some exciting stuff. And the opposition looked rubbish. I guess it’s not so much of a surprise that we’ve carried on where we left off last year as the starting line up hasn’t changed much at all. It’s nice that we have though. The two goals we scored were lovely. I don’t think I fully appreciated Yamane’s assist in the moment. But Ao’s lovely cross and Ienaga’s blasting finish and blasting header were 100% clearly wonderful at the time. We totally dominated the first half and YFM looked awful apart from their new youngster Kabayama who looked exciting but is thankfully still quite raw. Their keeper was annoyingly good again and sadly didn’t make any of the howlers he’s become slightly known for recently. If it hadn’t been for the two of them and some slightly dodgy finishing from us we could have been out of sight by half time.
Second half not exciting -
Maybe watching at home would have been better for the second half. And perhaps Oniki has started experimenting with demotivating half time team talks but we weren’t very good in the second half. Thankfully YFM decided to shake things up by withdrawing their only outfield player who’d done anything in the first half. The highly trumpeted visionary 3-3-1-3 formation (going to change the world and all that), that had been talked about pre-season and with which they started this game was abandoned and they went for something a bit more FC Tokyo-ish and plodding. I’m only saying this to attempt to annoy both of our local rivals. They more possession in the second half but it was traded off against shots on target. According to my stats they managed 11 shots in the whole game, and the only two which were on target were in the first half. But they had possession! Beautiful sideways passing possession! Perhaps reminiscent of 2019 Oniki Frontale, totally dominating the area between the two penalty boxes, with relentless passing and refusing to break up this passing with any shooting! We occasionally got the ball and had a shot but there wasn’t much to see in the second half. Thankfully we were sitting behind the subs so could watch them warming up without being distracted by the ‘action’ on the pitch. Perhaps this dull second half is why the players looked a bit down after the game. But to be honest, we should be pleased that our defence held firm and we protected our lead. Not as exciting as 2020 Frontale in this second half, but a win is a good way to start the season so let’s be positive for once. I was waiting for a last minute Kobayashi goal to complete the comparison with the Super Cup. Of course these comparisons are have let down by us not conceding twice, but I’ll use that as another opportunity to taunt YFM, who clearly were never going to get as close to scoring as Gamba did. (wink emoji)
Oniki's Eleven (not the first in a series of films...) -
It seems like this is Oniki’s preferred first 11 as he’s selected the same one for the first two games. On the whole I agree with it, but of course from my absolutely uninformed position I’m going to have some grumbles about it. I think this game showed that we really shouldn’t be playing Hatate at left back. He’s not a defender and whilst his combinations with Mitoma going forward are pretty exciting, I’d much rather have a left back playing there and Hatate playing elsewhere. Whether Oniki will agree, we’ll see on Wednesday I guess. I thought Damiao had a great game up front. Well, apart from the fact that he didn’t score. But I’ve never seen a striker enjoy hassling and chasing down keepers so much. Once again he punched the air in celebration of blocking a clearance. He also ‘almost’ deflected a YFM keeper clearance into the net. I say almost as I couldn’t see how close it was, but if you block a clearance from the keeper you’ve always got a chance. Bravo to Damaio who seems to be really up for it this year, perhaps due to him being given the vice captaincy. Would love to see him get the armband at some stage. He seems like a really nice guy and when you compare the attitude of our Brazilians with other teams Brazilians, (at least from a highly biased and uniformed point off view), it is very satisfying. Perhaps one small problem we had in this game is that none of the subs really did anything. I know Oniki last year liked to make a change at half time, freeing up some more flexibility for later changes, but I think in both games so far we were probably quite pleased with how things had been going at half time so didn’t feel the need to do this. I guess we were up against it a bit in the second half, but Tachibanada after almost being involved in a goal shortly after coming on seemed to drift out of the game. Kurumaya and Kobayashi were involved but didn’t exactly shift the momentum of the game and the Chinen and Hasegawa change was so late that they barely had time to do anything. I’m not blaming the players in any way, I just feel that we can use five subs to change the game and maybe in both games so far, we haven’t managed to really do that. Yes, aside from Kobayashi scoring the winner in the Super Cup, completely undermining this argument.
Official officials grumbles section -
If ever there was a referee who was completely made for VAR, it is our old friend Nishimura. I swear that sometimes he was just doing that left hand on the ear and right palm outstretched wait a minute pose without anything actually being said on his earpiece. He loves to be the centre of attention and VAR gives him a new way of doing this. I’m surprised he didn’t run over to the pitchside monitor to check on a throw in / play a quick game of solitaire / check #西村 on Twitter as this would have intensified the focus on him. We had no awkward VAR goal awarding delays in this game which was a very welcome thing, but that doesn’t mean VAR is not shit. One other new rule moan. What’s the point of this delayed offside flagging thing? YFM’s smallest midget was way offside in the first half and the linesman didn’t raise his flag till they’d lost the ball and we were moving out of defence. Perhaps the thinking is that an offside flag might distract the ref from an attack which might not be offside and might lead to a goal that VAR could allow? But if this is the case, what’s the point of raising it when the attack is over and the defending team is breaking? I don’t really understand it. But then I don’t really understand plenty of things.
Taunt your neighbour -
So, let’s finish us with a bit of teasing of the opposition. A quick look at Twitter saw the usual YFM fans complaining about Frontale cheating. Actually, I’m still waiting for an answer to the question I asked one of them last season when they moaned that they had been cheated by big decisions in the last game we played against them. Apparently they were going to get back to me when they had analysed the game a bit more. If they don’t do it soon they’re going to have a big old backlog of moans to try and justify. At the end of the game though, there seemed to be a consensus between fans of all teams that YFM had been pretty bad. The YFM manager always makes me think of that guy hanging around the town centre at closing time, hoping he can irritate someone sufficiently and get in one last fight before he has to go back home. He seemed to be quite angry at the end of the game, blaming the players. It probably said something though that his revolutionary new formation that had been employed in the first half had resulted in a rotten performance and when he switched to something else in the second half they were better. I know it’s a common theme that when teams lose it’s the manager’s fault and when team’s win it’s the players that did it. It seems with YFM though that it’s the reverse. I guess when your whole management style is constantly buying new players for every position a state of emergency preventing new overseas players entering the country is going to interfere with your strengthening. There can’t be many teams in the league who buy and discard so many players. Maybe it’s an infinite monkeys with typewriters / Shakespeare approach. Perhaps this was a good time to play them or perhaps this game is going to be representative of how the whole of their season is going to go. No ACL for them to use as an excuse this year, so we’ll really see where they are, I guess.
So another very welcome win, but again another second half which was quite difficult to get excited about. I’m not going to moan too much about us not taking chances in this game as starting the league with a win is a significant improvement on what we normally do. And starting YFM’s season with a defeat is pretty satisfying too! Next up, we have Cerezo Osaka at home on Wednesday. Historically a bogey team but one who we dispatched with ease last year. They look like they are all over the place this year so on paper you’d say we were the favourites. So, probably we’ll stink the place up and lose. Hopefully though we can keep up this tradition of one player blasting in a couple of goals in the first half. And hopefully we can boot into the stand this trend of us having a very disappointing second half. Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for WAKIZAKA 76')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu(on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 76')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MITOMA 88')
FW 19. TONO Daiya
FW 20. CHINEN Kei(on for IENAGA 88')
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento(on for JOAO SCHMIDT 64')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
My inclination is to start making these quite oblique to jazz up the end of season stats post a little. To begin that trend I'm going to give it to multiple players today in an attempt to make us the 2021 most man of the match awards in one season. Today...
IENAGA Akihiro & LEANDRO DAMIAO - Another
lazy decision to give it to the guy who scored twice but they were great goals. And Damiao was a total pain in the neck for the YFM keeper and perhaps I'll give it to him every time his celebrates a block as much as he did in this game and the last one. (And in this picture it looks like we are playing only Damiao vs the whole YFM team).
A new season starts, so off we go again on this blog. Feels like it’s only been a few weeks since I last had to write a blog post on here. But what a joyful few weeks that was! It’s good that I’ve made an early start to the whinging this season. I think as we’re going to be experiencing another quite hectic season, (although probably nowhere near as hectic as last year), I’m going to slightly adapt the format on here again. Also, it looks like it might be more difficult to get tickets to games this year as our season ticket holder privileges have been revoked. (Not just ours, but all season ticket holders. I didn’t do anything bad). Writing lengthy blog posts on games I’ve watched on the internet seems to be a bit of a waste of time as clearly the majority of my readers know what they are talking about more than I do. So, perhaps there will be a slight change in focus. But I always say that and then end up reverting back to the same old things. So, we’ll see I guess! For this game, I’m going to go with the tangential bullet points that occasionally seem to work. You are not going to get much in the way of useful information, but I guess you never really did. Hopefully there will be something worth reading though! Here we go…
The heady thrills of a silent stadium on TV -
Football is back and, due to the state of emergency, so are crowds limited to 5000. I’m sure that in the stadium there might have been a slight wash of excitement at various points, but watching this game on TV, I found it quite hard to focus at times. 5000 crowds means no drums but we do seem to be able to do some kind of rhythmic clapping so perhaps the latest research has proved that unlike soldiers marching in step over a bridge, people clapping at the same time isn’t a danger to everyone involved. We’ll find out whether it is as flat an atmosphere as it sounded on TV next Friday I guess. Although given that we only managed to get tickets in the main stand, it might be hard to tell. Let’s hope that the state of emergency is lifted on March 7th and we can get back to at least 10000 crowds and just a bit of atmsophere as soon as it is safe and possible.
MITOMA SHOOTING!!!! (said in the style of a Japanese TV commentator) -
We have been firing in goals galore in our preseason games. I’m never sure if this is a good thing or not as preseason form often bears little relation to how teams play when the real stuff starts. But we did start this game in kind of exciting fashion. Perhaps taking a cue from our Kanagawa neighbours YFM, who after winning the league in 2019 started the next season in pretty haphazard style, we started this game looking good going forward (up until it came to shooting) and looking pretty dodgy at the back (until it came to conceding). All of the excitement without any of the goals! After an absolute howler of a miss from Taniguchi after Joao Schmidt was unlucky to not open the scoring with a header from a corner, we did kind of get ourselves together a bit and managed to score twice. It will come as no surprise to discover that it was Mitoma with both goals, who seems to have not got too disheartened by not being able to move overseas yet. So far so good! Damiao even was trying to the overhead kicks again. However, judging by the second half, it seems that we are equally capable of conceding goals in quick succession as we are of scoring them. This was never a comfortable game for us, but I guess at least that makes things exciting. Anyway, this is getting dangerously close to talking seriously about the game so I’ll move on.
New year, new players -
This game gave us an opportunity to get a look at some of our new players. We had a new guy called Tanaka playing in the number 25 shirt… oh hang on, it’s just Ao, whose face seems to have changed again. Apparently he’s also growing still which isn’t something you can normally say about players who’ve spent a couple of years as an important member of the first team. Joao Schmidt was perhaps the biggest of the signings and it looks like he’ll be slotting into that Morita-shaped hole in the team. I thought he looked like he had settled in already which was nice, but he shouldn’t get complacent. There have been quite a few singings in recent years who went straight into the team only to gradually disappear from view, as if on one of those really long travelators at Haneda, slowly receding into the distance, only ever appearing in training ground videos and occasional autograph singing sessions. Three other new players played a part from the bench. Tsukagawa looked pretty exciting in the tackle I thought, giving back to the Gamba players as good as he got, getting VERY involved with some hard but fair challenges. A perfect person to take over Nara’s number 3 shirt. Was a shame to see him have to leave the pitch after a particularly hard challenge but he seemed ok and it did give us an opportunity to see the 6th sub rule come into effect for the first time. I’m not 100% sure of the details but it allows a team to replace a player who’s had a bang on the head rather than having them play on and risk their health. Tono got a bit of time on the pitch at the end in place of Ienaga. It seems that unlike Kobayashi, he is willing to play in that position on the right. And he did provide an assist for the very enjoyable last minute winner from Kobayashi. It’s nice that we have another option in that position as Hatate seems to be a left back now. Tachibanada had been touted as being ready for the first team and I’d say that seems to be true. He was also said to be a defensive midfielder but in his time on the pitch it seems that all the other midfielders had a go in that position apart from him. Whether this line up represents Oniki’s best eleven and subs, who knows. The game had a bit of a feel of a warm up fixture to it, (for me too, judging by my attention span). Guess we’ll find out next Friday.
CONVERT! -
Oniki is a religious zealot! Oniki is a fly-half after a try is scored! (Maybe… I know nothing about rugby and had to google this). Oniki is a bigoted parent of a LGBT child! What I’m trying to say is that he seems obsessed with converting. And I don’t mean converting Brazilian singings from athletes into people for the translators to take shopping. Who needs to sign defenders when you can covert players from all over the pitch into defenders! Hatate started this game at left back and it looks like it will be him playing there till Nobori is fit again. Yamamura who was a midfielder and was then converted in a defender seems to have been converted back into a midfielder again judging by the clubs grouping of players in Instagram posts. Oniki loves converting players into defenders so much that he even converts defenders into different position defenders. It seems that Kurumaya is now going to be playing centre back, (or probably covering for centre back), rather than left back. Which made it slightly amusing that with our emergency 6th sub Oniki had to put Kurumaya at left back. There was even a rumour pre-season that he was thinking of converting Taniguchi in a defensive midfielder to replace Morita. Which is also funny as that was where he used to play before he was converted into a centre back. If Claudio Ranieri was the tinker man, surely it’s only a matter of time before Oniki has to be referred to as the tweaker man. Hmmm, sure there is a better word for that but I’ve been searching for it for a while and can’t find it so that’ll have to do.
VAR -
VAR, it’s crap, isn’t it? It allowed our second goal, which looked offside but wasn’t, but I’d still love to see it launched into space or thrown overboard in the middle of the Pacific. In theory, decisions will now be correct. Although even some refs have said that there will still be an element of personal judgement involved. But whether it is worth ditching the exhilaration of scoring a goal for the sterile thrill of accuracy I’m not sure. In fact, I think I am kind of sure that it isn’t worth it. As I tweeted, ‘The VAR delay makes the celebration so much sweeter!’ said no-one, ever. The big VAR decision in this game for our second goal was particularly weird as on the TV coverage they didn’t even bother showing a replay until the decision had been given. Perhaps they were too worried that something said by a commentator or analyst might contradict the official verdict. I dunno. I’m sure there will be disasters with VAR this season and ridiculously marginal calls which cause uncomfortable vibe-killing delays. While at the same time decisions that aren’t covered by VAR will be totally bodged by the ref. I’m pretty sure that Gamba’s late free kick in this game came from one of their own players elbowing a teammate. Of course I wouldn’t have been too happy if they’d scored from that free kick, but at the same time there’s no way I’d be calling for VAR to run the rule over all the decisions in a game. Better for consistency’s sake to just bin it, right? Hehe.
So, this post seems to have just gone the same way that all the previous ones did. I guess it will take a while for my new blogging style to bed in. Unlike our new players who seem to have hit the ground running! The Super Cup is a competition that winner is delighted to win whilst at the same time every other team in the league says is meaningless. Certainly though, it was nice to get off to a winning start and irritate plenty of opposition fans with a last minute winner. Hopefully we can keep this going on Friday against YFM at home to kick off the league campaign. We’ll probably need to iron out a few of those dodgy crinkles at the back though and probably take our chances a bit more. We won’t always be able to rely on a last minute winner. Fingers crossed we won’t need one! Go Frontale!
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 4. JESIEL DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 47. HATATE Reo
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT MF 25. TANAKA Ao
MF 8. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 18. MITOMA Kaoru
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 64')
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (on for TSUKAGAWA 90+1')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu(on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 72')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for MITOMA 72')
FW 19. TONO Daiya(on for IENAGA 83')
MF 22. TACHIBANADA Kento(on for WAKIZAKA 64')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
I definitely could have paid a lot more attention to this game than I did, but the experience of watching a game played almost in silence on TV didn’t exactly grip me. (Still managed to write all of this crap on it though didn’t?). Going to give it to…
MITOMA Kaoru - Maybe a lazy decision to give it to the guy who scored twice but he really can shoot can’t he? While others fluff their lines he seems to more often than not do the business. Long may that continue!
