Vs Gamba Osaka (away) 6/3/22 J League match 3

Gamba Osaka 2 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

Apologies for the late arrival of this blog post. I’ve been luxuriating in the fact that we don’t have a game for six days after this one so have slacked off a little. Also, work has been busy but I’m sure you’re not interested in that. Our weird 2022 season continued in this game at Gamba. This was the first time we’ve actually been able to attend this fixture for a few years and perhaps to celebrate us being there again the two teams served up a repeat scoreline of the last time we visited the Suita stadium, (although the order of the goals was a bit different on this occasion). The game will almost certainly be remembered for the cheeky equaliser that Kobayashi made for Damiao by stealing the ball off an unaware Gamba keeper. I say almost certainly, as it’s  unlikely that Frontale fans will particularly want to remember much else about the game. And Gamba fans will want to forget it because of the late equaliser but presumably won’t be able to erase the memory particularly easily. To get my main point out of the way quite early here, I think a draw was probably the right result. Again we weren’t great and it would be difficult to argue that we deserved to win… But the second Gamba goal was a bit of a freak one… And Damiao missed a very good chance perhaps trying to overcomplicate things in the first half… And we hit the post and totally dominated the second half (when we weren’t conceding from one of the two shots Gamba had in that second half…). So things probably evened out in the end. Slightly worryingly the last time we were able to go to Suita (when it also finished 2-2) was in our disaster 2019 season. There are probably already a few too many similarities to that season which are cropping up for any Frontale fan to be particularly comfortable or satisfied with our start to 2022. But if you are looking for some reason to be positive, perhaps you can find it in the fact that our 95th minute cheap equaliser prevented us from equaling our total season defeats last year. In 2021 we lost twice. In 2022 we’ve come very close to losing twice within the first five games. Hang on, this was supposed to be talking about some reason to be positive and I seem to have undermined it… Oh well. Let’s get on with this post and excuse me if it’s a bit detail free. I got to the game with a slight hangover from the evening before, was distracted by being pretty cold during the game as I had dressed inappropriately for the weather and had my hoodie break on arrival at the stadium and then have left this too late to remember things particularly well. Plenty of disclaimers already so this post is bound to be a banger…

 

Let’s talk about Gamba first. The pre-game announcement of a Gamba old boy guest for the ‘HEAT UP TIME’ (personally could have done with some of that heat), was perhaps met with some confusion by some Gamba fans who might not remember Shohei Otsuka ever really playing for them. We definitely remember him though and it was great to see him back. He was a somewhat random signing for us when he joined but I remember how excited I was when he scored and he had a nice song too. Also he looked pretty cool rocking the baseball cap look as, as many men of a certain age (admittedly a bit older than he was, but it happens to plenty of people) he always seemed to be slightly at war with his hair. I think I am suffering from a similar problem recently to be honest. A quick word of praise for the Gamba big screens which seemed to show some genuinely interesting information during the game. This is all a bit too positive so far… We never seem to have things our way at Suita and this was no exception. In spite of them having plenty of absences and a few makeshift partnerships on the pitch we by no means did well in this game in the first half. Gamba didn’t do much better with both teams only having a couple of shots on target in the first 45 minutes, but Gamba did manage to put one away with a nice finish. I suspect I could single out some individuals to moan about if I rigorously rewatched the goal but I think it’s better for everyone if we just move on. I hope our management team might pay a bit more attention to us conceding another goal though as it’s becoming worryingly common this year. Last year we conceded 28 goals in 38 games. This year we’ve done seven in our first five games, so basically are conceding around as twice as many as last year. But this is supposed to be the Gamba section. Gamba fans have got a few things to be annoyed/upset about regarding this game. Of course the late goal was an absolute howler. But I guess this happens once in every keeper’s career. Once and then every single time for the next however many years they always check over their shoulder before dropping the ball. If I were a Gamba fan, I probably would be a bit upset that the keeper wasn’t warned by any of his defenders. And then wasn’t even consoled by any of his defenders until Damiao had taken the lead. But it was a freak goal. It’s a shame that it had to happen to their third choice goalkeeper who is clearly going to be thinking about that mistake for quite a long time. It’s impossible not to feel for him. At the same time though it was impossible for Frontale fans not to be excited about us once again getting off the hook. More Gamba frustration will come from the fact that Usami left the pitch with what has now turned out to be a ruptured Achilles. He rejected a move to us in the off-season so when fate took over the controls he was either going to have a great game and score a hat trick or have a nightmare and it turned out to be the latter. Once again,  it’s impossible not to feel sorry for him. One person who it isn’t impossible to feel sorry for, and this is something of a surprise given that he is an ex-Frontale player, got a ridiculous undeserved red a few weeks ago and seems like a genuine nice guy off the pitch in spite of apparently hating Frontale, is Patric. Once again he showed that he’s not afraid to dish out a but of physicality whilst at the same time having the incredible talent to find an elbow in an empty room. He spent a lot of time on the floor and gesturing for cards but I guess that this isn’t a massive surprise. He also seemed to have a shirt with ridiculously short sleeves. When plenty of players were wearing undershirts Patric seemed to be rolling his already short sleeves up even higher. I would say that it’s a risky game to play when you consider how much time he spent lying on the cold pitch. (Didn’t really have many disses for Gamba so have had to resort to some pretty petty stuff here, as you can see). To get a bit of ref talk in here, this week’s ref was Yamamoto and he is from the ‘give less’ school of reffing. This season has been dominated by the ‘give more’ school so far with loads of bookings and red cards handed out. I’m still not sure which approach I prefer, but I will say I really don’t like the refs that give us loads of cards and don’t give the opposition any. Perhaps along with our title hopes, our hopes of becoming the fair play team of 2022 are also disintegrating horribly quickly. Perhaps I could also mention the Gamba manager Katanosaka, who seemed to be putting in some wild moves on the touchline. In stark contrast to their previous boss who I guess had more success in coordinating his casual wardrobe than organising his team and projected a calm and cool persona (or perhaps one with zero shits given) mid game, the new guy was jumping and waving his arms like the bride’s father at his daughter’s wedding who after spending the day worrying has had a few too many glasses of booze during the meal, done his speech and has just heard his favourite song from his youth kick in at the reception disco. Oniki has a lot to learn from him in terms of entertainment. We don’t want to see magnet work and the occasional guts pose, we want to see arm-waving and punk scissor kicks. But maybe he hasn’t got much to be excited about at the moment….

 

Yes, we’re still a bit shit. Aside from Kashima we’re not starting games very well this year. And aside from this one we’re not doing too well at the end. And the middle part isn’t great either. So far this season we’ve been consistently pretty disappointing. I don’t know if this is because of players leaving. Certainly some serious damage was done when Tanaka and Mitoma left. After they went we looked pretty ordinary last year but somehow held things together. This season sees us also without Hatate and Chanathip, who is perhaps his replacement hasn’t quite settled in yet but seems to be an automatic pick regardless of his form. To be honest though, I think it’s more to do with a majority of players having poor starts to the season though. Wakizaka had another game to forget and Yamane, apart from scoring against Urawa (whilst having a not very good game I thought) is also struggling to get his form back. I’m not sure many others have done much better. Oshima has disappeared recently and whilst some have speculated that this might be due to injury, I wouldn’t say he’s had a great start either. We just need a bit of confidence probably. But as soon as we can build some up we destroy it for ourselves. Less than a minute after the restart after we equalised we’d conceded again, and it wasn’t a surprise really as we’d dithered and faffed around for all of those fifty seconds. Admittedly what looked like a wonder goal at the time was (probably) a deflected cross. Probably a cross, definitely deflected. But much like against YFM we had got back in the game only to get ourselves back out of the game pretty quickly. Perhaps this contributed to Oniki not being very happy at the end of the game, but I feel he has to start taking a bit of responsibility for things too. The triple sub in the second half totally changed the game and we looked a lot better after Ienaga, Kozuka, Kobayashi and then a little afterwards Miyagi came on.  So perhaps we shouldn’t have started with the eleven we did. I realise I have been saying that Ienaga hasn’t been playing great recently so I am somewhat contradicting myself here, but that’s par for the course for internet ‘experts’ so I’m going to roll with it. All four of these subs contributed greatly. Ienaga and Kozuka tore up Gamba and made loads of opportunities for us and Kozuka’s assist for the first goal was lovely! Sadly no one wanted to shoot, until Miyagi came on, who pretty much only wants to shoot, but as I’m sure he would tell you, you don’t score if you don’t shoot. And then Kobayashi was very smart for the late equaliser. I feel like Oniki is still trying to fit square pegs in round holes though. I love Chinen and Kobayashi, but can’t help but feel that it makes more sense to play a left sided attacker in the left sided attacker role. In recent years we’ve been overflowing with these kind of players but now we only seem to have Miyagi and Marcinho (who I guess might have had COVID given his absence but is now apparently in training. So if he hasn’t had it that’s even more of a mystery…) and perhaps Tono. But then again Tono rarely gets played there anyway and is more often in midfield. Our formation leaves us one main striker spot and Damiao, Kobayashi and Chinen have all showed that they have a decent shout at getting that, but perhaps this has contributed to Oniki trying to play them elsewhere instead. I just wish we’d shoot a bit more. We don’t get extra points for exceeding 60% possession as we did in this game (bit of luck considering our low possession in previous games this year, I guess), so I wish we’d try and be a bit more direct before we concede and end up chasing the game. But maybe this is just a sticky patch. But the end of last season was a similarly sticky patch… At least now we are the ones scoring the late goals unlike late last season (although those late goals from Urawa and Oita won them the tie instead of grabbing a draw from the jaws of defeat as we did here). It’s great that we’ve got subs to bring on a change the game, but it would be nice if we didn’t start so shittily.  One quick last mention for Damiao again, as aside from being a great guy consoling the distraught Gamba keeper also celebrated his goal with what we think is a dove of peace celebration. It’s so nice to have a player who is both a great footballer and a great human being. Is this where I should mention Yuma Suzuki again? Actually forget him.

So, on we trot, wobbling from one shaky victory to a defeat, to a couple of games with decent spells where we just about got over the line and then this game where our positive aspects were met with a similarly sized serving of self sabotage. Or maybe this is all bad luck… I don’t really think that’s what’s happening before anyone gets annoyed about THE ARROGANCE. I wish people would get the jokes a bit more in these posts. Perhaps the ‘jokes’ should be a bit better. We definitely need to buck up our ideas though as those sailors from down the road are having similarly flaky results but crucially scoring a few more goals so are top. And most of the league has played two fewer games than us. Aside from about 20 mins in the Kashima and Urawa games this season has been a bit of a grind so far. It would be lovely if we could shoot a bit more and then we might actually score a bit more often. But maybe we’ve played five difficult games so far and things will get easier… Maybe. Next up is Nagoya at home at the weekend. We’ll have had a bit of a break, and we’ll get another couple of breaks between the following two games. All of which might suggest we might not have needed to squeeze so many games in at the start of the season but hey, what do I know? I’ll be pleased to not have to write a blog post every few days as while I theoretically enjoy doing these, it does become a bit of a pain in the neck when the games are coming thick and fast. Fingers crossed we can play a bit better against a Nagoya team who’ve had a pretty mixed start to 2022 under their new manager. I’m hoping Oniki can get us a decent win and a decent performance. If that’s not possible, I’ll just settle for a rotten performance and a massive win. Fingers crossed.

 

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo (Yellow card 45')

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 18. CHANATHIP

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 19. TONO Daiya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for SASAKI 81')

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for TONO 58')

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for CHANATHIP 58')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for CHINEN 75')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for WAKIZAKA 58')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

As ridiculous as it is to give this to multiple players, as mentioned above the subs changed this game and all contributed in their own way. Therefore, it’s going to…

IENAGA Akihiro, KOZUKA Kazuki, KOBAYASHI Yu and MIYAGI Ten - respectively for the following reasons, confidence, beautiful assist, smart assist, goal and hit the post.

 

Goals

 

YAMAMOTO (Gamba) 34' 1-0

MIYAGI (Frontale) 75' 1-1

ONOSE (Gamba) 77' 2-1

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 90+5' 2-2

Highlights

Vs Urawa Reds (home) 2/3/22 J League match 10

Kawasaki Frontale 2 - 1 Urawa Reds

Well that was a bit more fun than the Super Cup. Don’t forget everyone, Urawa are going to win the league this year (according to Twitter after that game, when we were absolutely awful). Clearly Kyoto, Kobe and Gamba didn’t get the memo about that. Urawa now find themselves second bottom, with one point from four games, ahead only of FC Tokyo who’ve played just the one league game. It’s never a particularly good look when someone enjoys the misfortune of a rival, but to be honest, I’m sure everyone does it at least secretly. Or not so secretly when we lost the Super Cup final. Obviously, I don’t expect that many other J League fans recently want us to ever win. We all have our underlying feelings about and impressions of other teams which adds to the excitement of getting one over on them. The latest reason for rival fans to dislike Urawa was proudly displayed at the start of the game when they unveiled a massive flag saying ‘男なら。。。’ (basically, ‘if you’re a man…’). In recent years stupid macho bullshit has caused misery all over the world and that was probably noticed by the ‘greatest fans in Japan’ who thought they too could run with the idiocy. At the end of the game they revealed one of the longer message flags that they do. It completed the phrase stating something along the lines of ‘if you’re an Urawa man you will fight to the death’. I’m not sure if they had a different message prepared in case they won or whether we were just supposed to interpret the message differently depending on the result. I’m not sure if ‘death’ means J2, but if they continue their current form that looks like the direction they’re heading, albeit proudly clutching the Super Cup. Of course it’s early in the season, but it isn’t looking good for them, but with that in mind, at the same time it’s looking good for plenty of people who don’t like them. Perhaps the masculinity is supposed to be expressed through surrounding the ref every time a decision doesn’t go your way. In which case, well done for being very manly, Urawa players. Not sure if it’s also macho to go down clutching your face when you’ve been touched on the shoulder. The manliness of the fans was shown by a section of them singing and booing (what a surprise!) even though that is still not allowed. Of course such a rule would never work in other countries but it seems to work for pretty much every other J League team’s fans. Urawa fans are especially manly though I guess, so it’s impossible to tame such passion. Sorry that should have said ‘childishness’ not ‘passion’. My mistake! And honestly it probably should come as any kind of surprise that Urawa’s fans would be in to machismo, as they must have a flag for an almost unlimited number of synonyms of man, ranging from the youthful ‘boys’ through the up for it ‘lads’ to the French restaurant waiter-ish ‘garçons’. (All genuine flags, I was going to make some funny ones up, but to be honest, I don't think I can top 'garçons'). Clearly they want to tell us something. Anyway, I’ve probably written enough here to make Urawa fans angry (which isn’t my intention but seems to be inevitable somehow), so I’ll move on to writing something about us.

I know it’s especially difficult at the moment to interpret starting line-ups and squads. Its usual practice for us to never get any information about injuries, and especially not before line-ups are announced. Kurumaya got injured about two weeks ago and we’ve only just heard it will be at least another month out for him (dislocated shoulder apparently, thanks to FC Tokyo’s foul machine SBO). Our game against Kashima was a lot of fun, mainly due to great performances and goals from Chinen and Sasaki. Naturally both dropped out of the squad for this game… Sasaki did leave the pitch on a stretcher after an amazing full debut but I felt that there was an element of running down the clock with that change as it almost seems that Nobori was ready to come on already. Whether he was unavailable for inclusion in this game or whether it was Oniki keeping his feet on the ground I don’t know. Hopefully the latter, as even if I don’t necessarily agree with doing it, we’ll now need him in the next game as Nobori got crocked in this match, seeming to pull up whilst trying to track back. Chinen seems to have been the preferred replacement for Damiao this season with Kobayashi having to fill in in other places when he gets the chance. So it was a bit surprised to see Chinen disappear too. Oniki’s rotation has always been a bit weird and if that’s what’s happening recently, it continues to be a bit weird. Although to be honest, he’s only rotating up front it seems, as we have zero other Oniki approved options at the back and since Tachibanada is back, the midfield always seems to stay the same. Oshima disappearing from squads recently has surprised and confused some, but I’d probably say that he hasn’t been on fire really this year. But the same could definitely be said about Wakizaka and he’s keeping his place. The bench on this occasion might suggest that we have some unmentioned problems behind the scenes. Joao Schmidt was back after it seemed like he was starting another period of exile. As was Seko who seemed to be being exiled for even less reason than Joao. But as I said, we never can tell what injuries or infections there might be that we don’t know about. Having a bench of five midfielders, (which didn’t include Oshima), Kobayashi and Tanno probably wasn’t anyone’s pre-match prediction. I wonder if Oniki is now approaching games in the same way that you can start a game of Tetris with half the board full already for an extra challenge. ‘Maybe it would be fun if we tried to counter Urawa’s probable 5-5 formation with a bench full of midfielders, most of whom I have no intention of using for more than 5 minutes.’ Was great to see Tsukagawa get some more pitch time. Well it was for me anyway. Not so delighted that he was asked to fill in at left back for over an hour. It was a wobbly start but I think he really grew into it. It was a bit of a wobbly start from everyone to be honest. We didn’t look particularly comfortable again, but at least this time we left it a bit later till we conceded. It was pretty awful defending for their goal with the scorer being able to evade both Ienaga and Tachibanada by running into the gap between them. Cue Urawa reverting to the second part of their 2022 game plan, sit back and look for counter attacks. But at least in this game we were creating a little more than we did in the Super Cup. We were made to wait though, and the bulk of the excitement for us came within a few minutes of the second half when Ienaga (who was having a bit of a dodgy game again) headed in from a corner and then Yamane (who was having a bit of a dodgy game again) smashed one in a couple of minutes later. This gave us something of a confidence boost and we started playing a bit better. Confidence does seem to be something of a rare commodity for us this year. I hope that we can start games with it in the future, rather than starting on an even keel, having some calamity knock us back and then have to slowly build up to something approaching positivity. If we are wracked with injuries at the moment we should take some confidence from the fact that we’re kind of surviving right now. We aren’t playing particularly fun football for most of our games but somehow we’ve won three games out of four so that should count for something. We went in at half time in this game with 50% possession but only three shots, none on target, two yellow cards, a goal behind and with a few major let-offs, and with a defensive midfielder in the bombing-on left back position. In a way it could only get better and thankfully it did. It didn’t particularly feel like we scraped through when we got to full time and took the win though, but we’d definitely not shown ourselves at our best. And it was lovely to get some revenge for the Super Cup. Although we didn’t really turn up on that occasion so perhaps revenge is a bit of an excessively emotional word. It’ll do though!

What Frontale rabbit post would be complete with a moan about the ref? This year has been a weird one for refs it seems. Quite a lot have been extremely card happy and perhaps we can put this down to some change in the the interpretation of the rules. However, against Kashima last week we had a ref who didn’t hand out any yellows at all. Perhaps this was the Yuma Suzuki effect though. Given that he’s been the recipient of some very generous decisions so far this year perhaps refs will now view any incident he’s involved in with a bit of cynicism. But not sure why that would work both ways for both teams though. But anyway, that was last week’s game. In this match we had Sato, in charge of his third match of the season. He seems to clearly be in the card happy group of refs, giving out 10 yellows and sending off two players in three games. Once again the shitness of a ref seems to be uniting both sets of fans. Urawa fans complained that Damiao wasn’t sent off. In my opinion, this is an absolutely bat shit crazy opinion but at the same time I’m not surprised that Urawa fans would hold it. I’m not going to complain about the Taniguchi or Chanathip bookings but the ones for Tsukagawa and Kobayashi seemed pretty insane. Tsukagawa fell over, the Urawa player then tripped over Tsukagwaa and won the free kick that they scored from and got Tsukagawa booked. Unless Tsukagawa has a previous reputation for attempting to tackle with his head or by throwing himself to the floor for the opposition to trip over, I can’t see why the foul was even given. Kobayashi’s was equally ridiculous. He also fell over and the ball hit his supporting arm, which as far as I know isn’t even supposed to count as a free kick, let alone a yellow card. I can to some extent understand the former, but the latter seems just stupid. But then again we are talking about a ref so if the cap fits… But never mind eh? The ref was again awful but we won, and if Urawa fans are going to get their knickers in a twist about how cheated they were when I feel that they were given pretty much everything, well, I’m just going to enjoy their irritation. But don’t cry guys. Real men don’t cry I’ve heard.

One last thing I wanted to ask, which I’m just going to stick to the top of this conclusion paragraph is whether the league wide font that the J League has introduced is absurdly difficult to read or is that just me? Answers on a postcard please. Next up we have a trip to Gamba on Sunday. Because of COVID, it’s been ages since we’ve been able to go to the Suita stadium so I’m really looking forward to it. Gamba beat Urawa 1-0 and we beat them 2-1, so I guess it’s going to be an even game. (Or is everyone going to beat Urawa this year?). It will be interesting to see what happens when the starting line up wheel gets spun again. I’m not going to predict anything because… well what’s the point really. There are way too many unknowns at the moment. Fingers crossed we can start the game well and retain some of the confidence we discovered in the second half of this game.

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo (Yellow card 45')

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 18. CHANATHIP (Yellow card 63')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 19. TONO Daiya

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (Yellow card 32') (on for NOBORIZATO 26')

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (on for WAKIZAKA 88')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (Yellow card 81') (on for TONO 76')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for CHANATHIP 76')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

I’m not picking this player because I’m biased. But I am biased, so if you want to interpret it that way please feel free to. It must go to…

TSUKAGAWA Koki - rarely starts and but always gives 100%. Apparently has never played left back even in training and after a slightly nervous start, really did a job there in difficult circumstances. Bravo!

 

Goals

 

IWANAMI (Urawa) 33' 0-1

IENAGA (Frontale) 62' 1-1

YAMANE (Frontale) 64' 2-1

Highlights

Vs Kashima Antlers (away) 26/2/22 J League match 2

Kashima Antlers 0 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

 Urawa beat us easily in the Super Cup - ‘they’ll win the league!’ - they lose to Kyoto. YFM beat us in an absolutely rotten game - ‘they’ll win the league!’ - they lose to Kashiwa. Kashima beat Gamba easily in their first match -  ‘they’ll win the league!’ - they lose to us. Admittedly I’ve messed slightly with the time line to present these results, but I can assure you that I have taken almost as much delight in the defeats of our rivals as in our own victories this year so far. Don’t forget the predictions. Kashiwa are the one nailed-on J1 relegation team this year. Oh, they’ve got a 100% record and are top of the league. Shimizu and Kyoto will be down there too. On they’re actually in third and fourth and have as many points as YFM who have played an extra game than them (and us). It’s definitely too early to draw any conclusions, but plenty of people have drawn conclusions about us from our three games so please forgive me for jokingly doing the same about our rivals. I’m not getting too confident though as we have Urawa up next and our first game against them was by far our worst game so far this season. Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a serious blog about the J League with unbiased and impartial analysis of various teams so let’s get on with some moaning and some piss taking.

No blog post about Kashima would be complete without a moan about the accessibility of the stadium. It’s not good. But I’ve moaned so much about this in this past that it’s probably not worth doing it again. That’s what Twitter is for I guess. So instead let’s moan about the team instead of the stadium. Yuma Suzuki… Do I even need to write anything here? People are on the whole complaining about his cheating but some are complimenting him for embracing ‘malicia’. I think this is giving him a bit too much credit though as I don’t think it’s a conscious decision. He just seems like a bit of a shit. But I’m not going to go on about it, as everyone thinks that already. I’ll just say that he kicked Taniguchi off the ball (what a surprise!), manhandled Sasaki after fouling him (what a surprise!), and was a general arsehole. I’m kind of pleased that we couldn’t boo him as I suspect it might have inspired him a bit. Instead, far better to applaud the Kashima team as they walked past us after losing the game whilst doing a lap of apology for their fans. To be fair, I found out about this from Twitter as I wasn’t clapping them, I was instead gathering my stuff together and probably having a good laugh about a fun game. Fair play to the fans who embraced sportsmanship though. I think it might actually be quite a good way to deal with undesirable opposition players and  perhaps I’ll try harder in the future to use these kind of reverse psychology mind games. Kashima looked a disaster at the back, and long may this continue! I felt slightly sorry for Sekigawa after he handed us an early goal but then again he did make the decision to sign for such an unlikeable team so perhaps I shouldn’t be too kind to him. He is still a kid though and being subbed at half time isn’t nice. But then again at least he has the consolation he isn’t Yuma Suzuki. The Kashima fans definitely seem to be fully in support of their ‘flawed’ ‘hero’ as he got hearty applause when the team line up was read out. I responded in kind with hearty applause when Yamane (I think), cleaned out Suzuki with a lovely foul which looked like it really upset him. It certainly looked like it had mortally injured him anyway. But he was able to continue to cheat his way through the rest of the 90 minutes, albeit with what looked like a pretty nasty wedgie for most of the second half. Maybe that’s why he’s always so angry. I’ll round out this section with a couple of brief points. There was a phantom whistler in the stadium again and this time neither Kevin Muscat nor any of his staff were anywhere to be seen (although I wouldn’t put it past him turning up undercover to try to mess us up). There were a couple of significant occasions when a loud whistle could be heard, I guess from the crowd. It’s such an easy way to disrupt a game that I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Oh, and a quick note here about the ref Fukushima, who perhaps in response to last week’s card happy Araki, decided to let pretty much everything go, often even without even a free kick. Which given that there had been hardly any stoppages, meant that six minutes injury time in the second half was pretty ridiculous I thought. But never mind, we held on!

On to some Frontale stuff. I’m pleased we started with Sasaki. I did say we should in the last blog post (check it if you don’t believe me), but I’m surprised that it actually happened. He started and he did really well again. I’m not sure what this means for Nobori, who has made some howlers so far this year and now finds himself on the bench, replaced by a very exciting and very able youngster. He did really well dealing with J League public enemy number one Yuma Suzuki, (who I’m doing a really good job of not mentioning much in this post, aren’t I?) and was great going forward. And what a goal! A great way to mark your first professional start. I just wish his first name wasn’t the absolute worst macro beer in Japan. Can’t we call him Suntory instead? There was an amusing flag for him with the Asahi Beer label. I thought it might be a better idea to use the Asahi Shimbun logo instead as I thought it would be better, but then discovered that it bears a bit of a resemblance to the old national flag that the more right wing fans of J League teams like to use. So, basically we have to make do with a flag with the logo of a tasteless beer. But I suppose it’s still quite funny. I wonder if it might get banned by the league though as they might consider it advertising. But he was great and it was a delight to watch him. Asahi on the pitch = marvelous. Asahi at the food and drink stands in the stadium = maybe I won’t bother having a drink after all. I’m pleased we have Suntory at Todoroki. Asahi is apparently a beer that pairs perfectly with the delicate nature of Japanese cuisine, ie. it’s wet and tastes of nothing, so doesn’t get in the way of the food. Next time I see Asahi at a stadium I will try to mentally pair it with the nature of the home team’s football. I have to admit, I was calling for more changes than just Sasaki starting. I wanted Ienaga, Wakizaka and Yamane all also dropped. Of course I was wrong. Ienaga and Wakizaka seemed to wake up from a pre-season slumber in this game. Both Oshima and Wakizaka seem to be players that I never notice unless I focus on them. I think this might be because they make everything look effortless. Therefore it came as a great relief in this game to not notice Wakizaka so much. Previously this season he has been all too noticeable for giving the ball away, but in this game I thought he was back to his anonymous best. Ienaga too seemed to really be up for the game and was much improved. Yamane was still bit wobbly, but to be honest, I’m not sure who else we might be able to play there anyway, particularly with Seko possibly feeling the cool blast of the Oniki cold shoulder right now. I also thought Chanathip had his best game for us. Definitely things are still a bit of a work in progress with him, but in the first half, you could definitely see things almost coming off. Once he’s totally in tune with the team, I think we’ll be flying. Would be nice though if refs didn’t let the opposition just boot him all over the pitch though. Much in the same way that if a big player, particularly a foreign one, jumps for a 50/50 challenge, more often than not, they’ll concede a free kick, Chanthip seems to suffer from the ‘he’s a small guy so probably just isn’t strong enough, rather than was fouled’ problem. I realise though that asking for refs not to be crap is probably a bit much though. A few more players to praise (this really is a weird 2022 season blog post. Long may these kind of posts continue!). Tachibanada back and firing seems to have instilled some confidence in the players in front of him. We played some really nice stuff in the first half of this game. It was actually fun to watch! And a shout out to Taniguchi and Yamamura, who I thought both did really well, particularly in the second half, when we ran out of steam and were up against it a bit. Kobayashi toiled away on the left wing, which is a great credit to him as I used to feel he didn’t want to play on the right instead of up front, but now seems happy to play even more out of position. His efforts should not go unnoticed. Chinen perhaps had his best game ever for us I thought. His awareness for his goal was great and he did a good job of doing the Damiao trouble-making pressure on the Kashima defence. And a brief mention for Damiao too, who came on late, mainly to provide some counter attacking muscle in the middle of the pitch and also to hassle the Kashima defence and keeper. Was great to see the massive screaming cheer back in full effect as he pressed and blocked a Kashima hoof out of defence. We love you Damiao!

So that will probably do for this post. We had a great first half which to be honest has helped me forget the slightly dodgy second half where we hung on. But the fact is, we managed to hang on, so maybe I shouldn’t be so negative. We can’t expect 90 minutes of sparkle. There has to be a bit of tidying up done to allow the sparkle to sparkle. If your house is always spotless you’ll never feel that rush of excitement and satisfaction that you get after you’ve spent hours doing housework. Although I suppose if I follow the analogy through properly that means in this game that we enjoyed the cleanliness sparkle first and then did the housework. To be honest, if it worked that way with housework, I’m not sure I’d have the strength of character to follow through with the actual hard work part. The truth is, we seem to have regained some confidence though, which I think is crucial after three very flat opening games. I hope we can build on this on Wednesday. The league is wide open, with plenty of ‘nailed on title contenders’ soiling themselves, some on a regular basis. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep this up and get some kind of revenge against Urawa at home on Wednesday. They’ve had a horrible league campaign so far though, so I suspect will be up for a form cracking good performance. Fingers crossed their misery will continue.

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 18. CHANATHIP

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for SASAKI 75')

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for WAKIZAKA 83')

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for CHINEN 83')

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for CHANATHIP 62')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

So many people to choose from today and delighted it’s not going to Sung-Ryong as when he gets it it always means it’s been a close match. Can’t pick between two players through so it’s going jointly to…

CHINEN Kei and SASAKI Asahi - real step up from the former and amazing step up from the latter. It seems way too easy to just give it to the goal scorers but on this occasion there was so much more to their games than their goals. Bravo!

 

Goals

 

CHINEN (Frontale) 2' 0-1

SASAKI (Frontale) 17' 0-2

Highlights

Vs Yokohama Fue Marinos (away) 23/2/22 J League match 9

Yokohama F Marinos 4 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

Before I start, welcome, fans of numerous J League teams who are here to enjoy my discomfort. ‘This evidently wasn’t a good result for us, but I think it could turn out to be a useful result if we pay attention to what the game taught us’. That was what I said after we messed up the Super Cup. We didn’t seem to have paid attention to what the game taught us against FC Tokyo and were supremely lucky to come away from that game with three points. We didn’t really pay much attention to what that game taught us either and were less lucky on this occasion, coming away with zero points and a probably humbling hammering by our local rivals. What do you think the chances are that we learn something from this defeat? I’d say pretty low. We’re still plugging away with the same old plan and the same old players where available. So it probably shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’ve lost again. Two losses out of three games so far this season. Of course, it’s still early days, but judging by some of the reactions on Twitter so far, the title has been sewn up by YFM. But then again, people were saying the same thing about Urawa after the Super Cup and look what happened to them after that game. If you think Urawa are great because they beat us, well then maybe Kyoto are better because they beat Urawa. YFM beat us, but drew with Cerezo, so I guess Cerezo, Kyoto and YFM will be fighting each other for the title. All this means that FC Tokyo are surely heading for relegation as we beat them and pretty much everyone else seems to be able to beat us. Or maybe the truth is that it’s too early to start jumping to conclusions after one or two games. But then again we’ve played three times, so I can definitely jump to conclusions about us. So let’s get jumping.

Predicting or even understanding starting line-ups recently has become like some kind of COVID Wordle spin off type experience. You guess who might start and find that those players are missing without explanation and put that down to COVID. But then they turn up anyway. We apparently had another case the day before this game, but your guess is as good as mine who that might be. Perhaps it’s Marcinho as he dropped out of the team and the squad. But then again Joao Schmidt and Seko did the same thing. If you go on the fact that the same players keep getting picked in spite of many of them playing terribly, you might be forgiven for thinking that our squad is riddled with COVID and that we only have the same 15 or 16 players to choose from. If this isn’t the case, I have no idea why Nobori, Yamane, Ienaga and Wakizaka are making it into every starting line up in spite of them looking like they’ve never even played football before. I don’t enjoy moaning at specific players but when you have four players who aren’t really doing very well and they all continue to start games you’ve got to wonder if perhaps the manager isn’t paying attention to what actually happens on the pitch and instead is picking on reputation instead. But then again, maybe Oniki is paying some attention as he subbed Nobori after he didn’t cover himself in glory for two goals we conceded within a couple of minutes. To be fair to Oniki, Sasaki coming on for his debut seemed to really make a difference and was one of the most exciting things to happen in this game. Late on in the game we were actually playing some exciting football, which if I’m being honest, I can’t really remember us doing for a very long time. So that was also a slight consolation. I guess we’ve got used to not dazzling and still winning in the last year or so. But now we’re not at all dazzling and losing which doesn’t really have any redeeming features at all. Good players don’t suddenly all turn awful at the same time so I guess there’s something going on behind the scenes. I’d love it if Oniki really shook things up in the next game and dropped Yamane, Nobori, Wakizaka and Ienaga, but I’m not going to hold my breath. I’m also not going to hold my breath for him having a re-think and changing what we’re doing tactically either but that might not be a bad idea either.

Let’s have a moan about something else and where better to start than with another absolutely hopeless ref. Araki, fresh from a monstrous blunder with the Patric red card in the Gamba Kashima game the previous weekend was rewarded with a match between last season’s top two. I kind of preferred it when refs who are ridiculed everywhere for a shocking decision get sent to J3 for the rest of the season (Hi Tojo!). I guess this would require some kind of acknowledgment from the league that a mistake had been made though, and they don’t seem to be willing to do that in the Patric case. I feel like he’d got a bit of a private telling off though for not listening to or checking VAR as in this game he seemed to be on a one man mission to sulkily refer as much as possible to VAR. The signs were there early on when after the pre-game coin toss he stopped, arm out-stretched with his palm facing out and the other hand on his ear, and then ran to the pitch side monitor to check that the coin had been tossed correctly. (For the benefit of readers who don’t understand when I am making a joke, that was a joke). I wouldn’t be surprised if he messed up the toss though, as he messed up most things in this match. YFM online moaners seemed to think they should have had all number of free kicks penalties and bonus goals awarded to them. I thought that he gave pretty much everything to them. It’s hard to recall any kind of tackle from us that didn’t result in a free kick for them. And usually a yellow card for us. Frontale old boy Edu though got away with a few yellow card offences before and a few after he actually got his yellow. I’m not going to pretend though that we would have won with them down to ten men. We started the match with only 7 players anyway so would have still been at a numerical disadvantage. People always say that if both sides are complaining about something or someone being against them, that thing or person is actually probably fair. On this occasion I think I’ll go more with the equation ‘we think he’s shit + they think he’s shit = he’s definitely shit’. I think this was most apparent when after one of his early rendezvous with VAR he then decided to trot over to the Marinos bench and explain why the decision hadn’t gone their way. Love it when some goes the extra mile to keep people happy whilst doing their job. Or was it just him sulking again and pre-empting any moans he might get. Certainly was a bit of a weird look though. My other grumbles about him are numerous, but I’ll spare you the majority and instead just pick a couple more. Not sure why he didn’t let Chanathip back on the pitch for their first goal. He’d had treatment so had to leave, but the action restarted nowhere near him but Araki didn’t let him back on the pitch till the ball was in the back of the net. Chanathip’s aerial dominance could definitely have helped us defend the chance. I’m pretty sure that our second disallowed goal being given was not a clear and obvious error, particularly when you compare it to the Patric red card on the clear and obvious error scale, but on this occasion he was happy to listen to VAR. I dunno, did our team bus cut him up on the way to the stadium or something? Or has a massive light blue block of flats just been built in front of his house blocking out his sunlight? Or has has neighbour Kawasaki-san made a noise complaint against him because he’s been playing J League Judge Replay back repeatedly and screaming responses to it and Twitter users’ comments? I think Araki was one of the refs who we did best with last year, but clearly that’s all gone to pot now.

But anyway, we shouldn’t moan too much, as we were utter rubbish. Somehow now we can’t pass, tackle or keep the ball. And all of our player have forgotten how to play. Our hero against FC Tokyo Sung-Ryong seemed to have used up all of his saves, as in that game, nothing could get past him and in this game they only had six shots on target and scored four times. I’m not blaming him though as he was let down time after time by his defence, particularly the full backs. It’s almost as if YFM had done their homework and seen how badly we’d been playing in those positions in our last two games and targeted them. I guested on the YFM podcast before the game and I was right in my prediction that this would be a game with a lot of goals as our defence is a mess at the moment. I was hoping though that things might have clicked a bit more going forward though. And while we did have some chances and even played some nice stuff when the game was basically lost, if you concede four goals in a game, it’s very difficult to draw, let alone win. I’d like to think that instead of a bogey team this year we instead have a bogey stadium as in games that we haven’t played at the Nissan stadium we have a 100% record! Pleased to not be going back there again this year. Hopefully anyway. Although next time the Meguro line extension will make the journey a lot easier. Good that I’ve found something positive to say! As I said, it’s still a bit early to start drawing too many conclusions, but there is definitely a bit of a 2019 three-peat choke and total disaster season feeling growing. So, maybe we’d better snap out of that with a nice easy game at the weekend away at Kashima, who had their game called off due to Oita’s COVID woes so have had a nice rest and were pretty free scoring in their opening game. Hmmmm. Could be that the horrendously long coach trip back seems even longer on Saturday. And there’s not even anything to do near the stadium. It truly is an unappealing away game. But we’ll be going, and juggling a new combination of lucky routines and jinx avoidances. Fingers crossed.

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (Yellow card 20')

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 18. CHANATHIP (Yellow card 3')

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryotai (on for CHANATHIP 62')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 81')

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi (on for NOBORIZATO 79')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 62')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for MIYAGI 62')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Not much to go on here again and normally when we lose heavily to a local rival I have a tendency to moodily not bother with this, but I’ll do it anyway on this occasion. I’m not going to mess around and explain it much though and will just give it to…

SASAKI Asahi - Extremely sad to see him bowing so deeply on his debut, presumably feeling that his standing in front of the YFM keeper got the goal disallowed (well, I guess it did, but it was pretty harsh I thought so he shouldn’t feel bad about it). But I hope he takes heart from the fact that when he came on we were actually quite fun to watch for a while and that the damage had been done before he appeared. I hope he starts the next game but it would be a bit of a surprise if he did.

 

Goals

 

IENAGA (Frontale) 32' 0-1
ELBER (YFM) 57' 1-1

NAKAGAWA (YFM) 58' 2-1

ELBER (YFM) 64' 3-1

CHINEN (Frontale) 73' 3-2

NAKAGAWA (YFM) 78' 4-2

 

Highlights 

Vs FC Chofu (home) 18/2/22 J League match 1

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 0 FC Chofu

Well that was a bit better than the Super Cup wasn’t it…? Wasn’t it…? Hmmm, maybe not really to be honest. In recent years we’ve got out of our old habit of starting seasons slowly but I suspect this year we’re right back with it again. And the opening set of fixtures isn’t going to help us in that respect. After this season opening derby, (notice I’m denying the existence of the Super Cup…), we have YFM, Kashima and Urawa to look forward to in the next three games. Although it’s difficult to say how these teams will do in 2022, none of these look like particularly easy games. After starting our campaign against a local rival with something to prove with their new manager and new style we have another local rival who really hate us, finished second last year and also have something to prove with a reasonably new manager and perhaps a new style. Then we face Kashima who it is said might be a bit of a disaster at the back this year but will probably go all out attack (not the best news when we’re struggling up front and once again have hardly any fit defenders). And then Urawa, who we’ve already faced, (although facing was about all we did, there wasn’t any actual competing or playing going on), and who we came up very short against. Oh joy! In spite of everything we actually managed to win this game. But definitely not in style. In fact as far opposite to that as possible. I’m no fashion expert but I’d guess you could say we managed to win in some grandad chinos and a beer-branded polo shirt. But then again maybe those clothes make the victory sound at least comfortable. Ok, we won in a beer-branded polo shirt that’s two sizes too small, scratchy artificial fabric slacks that were giving us a wedgie and a pair or ridiculously stacked ankle breaking high heels. Quite an image I’m sure you’ll agree. So, no style and no comfort. It’s still very early in the season so you probably can’t say this was a bullet dodged but this did feel like we got off the hook. But we had a great opening 10 minutes! And failed to take any of our chances…

I’m pleased to say I perfectly predicted Oniki’s starting line up. I was slightly aided in this by forgetting about Seko. You’ve got to think that maybe he could be our latest COIVD patient as I think otherwise he would have been on the bench. Certainly he didn’t seem like he’d had any worse a game than anyone else in the super cup. It seems that Joao Schmidt is now starting his second period of Oniki exile. Sure, he had some problems in the Super Cup but I don’t think he was helped by the rest of the team or the tactics on that occasion. And there were plenty of other players who are a bit more established in our team who had equally bad games, and also did in this game, who don’t get the same cold shoulder. But hell, we won this game so let’s keep the moaning to a minimum… maybe. To be more positive, let’s talk about who played a bit better in this game. Sung-Ryong. That’s about it. He was amazing and clearly showed his class as the best keeper in the J League. This line was added mainly to irritate Langerak worshippers but will hopefully also irk fans of FC Chofu’s new keeper Slowik, who had the kind of game that was 100% predicted by some of the J League pundits who pay a bit more attention than most do. It was said before that he’s a great keeper but one not suited to passing or kicking much, (so perhaps not a great fit for their rumored new play style), and so it proved. Unfortunately we weren’t able to take advantage of that particularly well, but I suspect it might be targeted a bit more by teams who’ve done their homework. Or maybe we had done our homework but after the first ten minutes just barely got near the FC Chofu goal. Actually, that was probably it. So, an opening 10 minutes of us looking bright and Slowik slicing the ball off the pitch under not much pressure but also saving our shots. And then 70 minutes of us not doing much at all, apart from Sung-Ryong, who had to make save after save, mainly from shots from distance, including some absolutely great ones. Oshima did a decent job in the defensive midfield role, but in doing so, we lost his possible impact further forward. Taniguchi and Kurumaya looked wobbly in defence. Yamane and Ienaga looked to be on a similar wavelength down the right, but sadly that wavelength was one which sounded mainly like static and definitely not one in tune with each other or the rest of the team. Nobori had another dodgy game. Wakizaka was again pretty anonymous. Damiao didn’t have anything to do until his goal, which admittedly was a lovely header, made even more lovely by the fact that he beat ex-Oita late equaliser scoring Trevisan to the ball. Plenty of Frontale ‘fans’ on the J league forum slagged off Tsukagawa when he came on, but in my eyes, and admittedly they are biased eyes, I think this slagging wasn’t really deserved as it wasn’t equally applied to the rest of our team. Some of them are sacred cows though it seems. We need a lot of players to play a bit closer to even their median let alone their best if we want to avoid having a shocking start to the season. But again this is all kind of ridiculous, as we won this game. But the truth is, we couldn’t really have had any complaints if we’d lost it. Well, apart from…

Another crap ref. It’s a beautiful thing that the shitness of referees can unite even those fans who have the strongest rivalry. FC Tokyo fans may cry that their disallowed goal was onside. It really wasn’t if you follow the lines on the pitch, but it was uncomfortably close. To counter this, I’d say that Trevisan after getting an early yellow had numerous occasions where he should have had his second yellow but Kimura, a ref who wasn’t great for us last year, bottled decision after decision. And of course it wouldn’t be an FC Chofu game blog post if I didn’t mention that Leandro is still a cheating player of the absolute fucking worst dirty kind. Perhaps my feelings towards him are amplified by his apparent amusement at getting away with assault after assault. His tackle on Damiao that got him his yellow card was a real trilogy, with the attack breaking yellow card foul somehow being followed up by a hacking kick at the legs and groin of Damiao whilst he was still in midair and some apparent playing acting that he had himself been punched in the face. Honestly, just totally gravity defying arseholery, but we’d expect nothing less I guess. And you’d expect nothing less than for me to moan about it. Not being satisfied with this he then went on to injure Kurumaya by apparently throwing him Judo style, rolling him over his shoulder whilst he was jumping for a header. I wonder how long it is before he gets his next red for some serious foul play and then falls out with the new Chofu manager. Whilst I’m back on Chofu bashing territory, I should also mention the debut of Matsuki who was unfortunately not as shit as I’d hoped he would be. I think the numerous compliments on Twitter might be being wheeled out a bit too early though. Admittedly I’m obviously biased, but let’s be honest, who wouldn’t be when they notice the pure mindless evil that lies behind those dead dead eyes. I thought all he did, aside from one decent shot was foul and moan. I watched a 4 minute highlight video of his game on YouTube to work out just how biased I was being. It seems that him losing the ball, making a horrible tackle to get a yellow card and being clattered by Tsukagawa (cheers to him!) counts as a Matsuki highlight. Generous perhaps, but I certainly would have been happier if I could have just written here that he was awful but I guess I can’t. Also, I should say that I expected Chofu to endlessly pass sideways given their new manager but they seem to be adopting a more attacking approach which quite surprised me. Dunno if this is going to be the same when they come up against teams who are more willing to sit back a bit. And also dunno how much of this was due to derby excitement, but they looked a very different team from both last season and what was apparently expected from them under Puig. Maybe this was perhaps in some ways a good result for both teams. We have the enjoyment of playing awfully and still beating our rivals, whilst they get the moral high ground and lots of fuel for moaning. But zero points, so I guess it worked out better for us! After the Urawa game, I said we needed to significantly improve. I second that emotion. However, although it is early in the season, some results in this first round of matches suggest that there might be some decent competition at the top of the table this year. After the Super Cup, according to certain parts of Twitter, Urawa were the greatest team ever and then they went and lost to Kyoto yesterday. Chofu were much better than expected, but they also lost. Kashima scored a few and won easily but were significantly helped by some arseholery of their own from, what a surprise, Yuma Suzuki. In brushing off any FC Chofu grumbles about the officiating in this match I would say that the big decisions were referred to VAR and as diabolical as it is, surely two refs can’t both get it wrong. But then the Yuma Suzuki incident shows that it doesn’t matter how many crappy refs you have to debate the issue, it’s a real possibility, indeed likelihood, that a horrendous and embarrassing blunder will be made. But not in our match, eh?

Finally, a few words on what we might expect in the next match. At the back, probably a Taniguchi/Yamamura partnership. Actually this is almost a 100% certainty, isn’t it? On the bench, probably no defenders as we don’t seem to have any that Oniki trusts. With COVID cases in the camp but no-one sure who they are, we don’t really know who we have available. We do however know that we once again didn’t strengthen in defence before the start of the season. I don’t know how many years I’ve been writing this, but it seems like we’ve come pretty close to disaster in the that area in recent times and still we haven’t learned our lesson. It’s particularly surprising given that we knew Jesiel was going to miss a significant part of the start of the season. The good news on that front is that he’s back in the country and was at the ground on Friday. However, not anywhere close to playing as far as I know. Would be a lovely surprise if he was though, wouldn’t it? Apparently Kurumaya went to hospital from the game so maybe he has a broken shoulder (fans of wonderful music, check out the musician by that name. I’ve heard he’s amazing). It’s been suggested that Seko or Tsukagawa might be able to play at centre back, but wouldn’t it be nice if we just played someone who’s a central defender there instead? And who knows what happened to Seko anyway? As I said above, I can’t imagine he would have been dropped from the squad for tactical reasons. Our midfield still looks a mess too. Definitely some things to work on. And we don’t have much time to do it as we’re away at YFM on Wednesday and then away at Kashima on Saturday. Those teams scored 2 and 3 goals respectively in their opening fixtures which might make the whole creaking defence thing a bit more of a worry. But maybe the second wake up call that we got in this game might give us the kick up the backside that the first wake up call seemingly didn’t. Our players probably haven’t all become rubbish over the winter, but maybe they’ve got a bit rusty. Perhaps a slightly squeaky win over our local rivals will spur us on to get another win on Wednesday. Any kind of win would be lovely, a squeaky one or a massive earth-shaking one are both fine by me. Fingers crossed we can come up with some kind of defensive cover and solve the midfield riddle before then.

 

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro (Yellow card 53')

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 18. CHANATHIP (Yellow card 58')

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for CHANATHIP 62')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 76')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for MARCINHO 62')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for KURUMAYA 87')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

Nice work from Tono for the delivery for the goal. He did more in his 15 minutes on the pitch that most have in the first two games. But to be honest it could only go to…

Sung-Ryong JUNG - Just awesome. Loads of saves from long shots close shots and one on ones. Saved our bacon and this win was 100% down to him. Best keeper in the J League! Bravo!

Goals

 

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 81' 1-0

 

Highlights

 

Kawasaki Frontale U18 vs Japan High School Selection

Kawasaki Frontale U18 1 - 0 Japan High School Selection

What a fantastic way to start football in 2022. Our U18 team took on a Japanese high school selection and came away with a 1-0 win, despite losing a couple of their best players to our first team squad. It was an interesting game with both teams having good chances but we came out on top and took the headlines with a well deserved win. I know the Winter Olympics are on at the moment, but certainly all football fans were much more interested in this game than any other matches that might also have coincidentally been taking place the same day...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, I suppose I can’t really continue with this hilarious joke any longer without actually having to write something about the other game that took place in the Nissan Stadium on the same day. Although I’m sure most Frontale fans won’t want to think or read about it much. The Levain Cup always has a reputation for being a competition that you care about if you win, but you write off if you don’t do well. I would say that the Super Cup is the same, but as as supporter of the losing team on this occasion, even that might be actually be overdoing it a bit. My Urawa supporter friend kept saying before the game that it’s just a glorified pre-season friendly, presumably expecting them to lose. Now that line of thinking has switched over to Frontale fans and the Urawa fans are probably giving the competition a lot more status. So yeah, just a pre-season game and ultimately meaningless blah blah... It may be telling that we last played Urawa in the Super Cup in 2019, when we were flying high and looking for a league three-peat and a successful ACL campaign. We won the Super Cup 1-0 at the Saitama Stadium and then… well nothing much went right after that and 2019 was a total disaster. Without thinking about it, I wore my 2019 shirt to this game. So maybe you can blame me. But for those who like to find patterns, perhaps we can take some consolation in the fact that we won that 2019 game and then had a bad season. Perhaps this year, the reverse will happen. To be honest though, there wasn’t much sign of that on the pitch in this match.

We started the game with a couple of notable absences. Of course Jesiel is still not available as he’s still recovering from his serious injury. Hopefully it won’t take too much longer… Once again we haven’t really signed any experienced defensive cover in the transfer window but at this stage of Oniki's reign I wasn’t really expecting anything else. Perhaps the more worrying thing is that it seems that the young defenders we sign or bring through our youth system don’t really seem to be considered as available either. In spite of numerous injuries in our defence last year, our next generation of defenders (Issaka, Kamiya, Tanabe) were only called on when absolutely necessary or when the opposition was very weak in the ACL group stages. Even when we played J3 and J2 teams in the Emperor’s Cup we went with the usual defenders. I’m not sure how they are supposed to develop as players if they never even make the bench. I will say though that we really struggled though the Emperor’s Cup games so maybe it’s a good thing we weren’t trying out the youngsters more. Now two of those three defenders have gone out on loan (Zain to YFC and Kamiya to Fujieda) so hopefully they’ll be playing some football. I’ve meandered massively off the plot here. Our other big absence was Tachibanada who was nowhere to be seen. The day before the game it was announced that we had two players who had caught COVID, and you have to think that Tachibanada might be one of them. It’s difficult to say who the other one might be, as most of the players who weren’t in the squad didn’t seem that likely to be in the squad anyway so it’s probably a waste of time speculating who it might be. Joao Schmidt came back into the Tachibanada spot. After being apparently exiled for missing a penalty in the ACL and seeming to be extremely likely to leave the club at the end of last season it was something of a surprise to see him starting yesterday. I don’t think he was treated very fairly by Oniki last season and I’m worried that he’s going to be scapegoated for this loss too and perhaps get exiled for another six months. I hope not as I don’t think he was to blame, but more on that later. Chanathip came in on the left up front and Oshima started in midfield. These were probably the only changes from last year’s peak starting line up apart from the enforced ones. Although I guess you could say Oshima in was an enforced change as someone has now left us to play under a thoroughly distasteful manager in a league which is apparently a much lower standard than the J League. So not many changes really. But this was a performance that looked like it was from a team of players who’d never met each other. We were very rusty. Our preparations for the season probably weren’t really helped by half of our back four playing international games whilst we were having our pre-season camp. I guess the World Cup is at a weird time of year this time round, but having international matches a few weeks before the start of the season probably isn’t going to help either the national team or the teams of the Japanese based selected players. On the Frontale forum it seems that no-one got away without being blamed. Everyone is past it or not good enough. Admittedly, if you based your analysis only on this game it might be easy to agree with this as I can’t really think of anyone who had anything near a good game. But I’m sure Schmidt will be blamed. He certainly was under a lot of pressure in the first half. I would have thought it might have made sense for either Oshima or Wakizaka to drop back and help him out a bit, but to be honest both of them were pretty anonymous anyway. It should come as no surprise though that Oniki didn’t really change the system. In previous years we’ve been able to get away with just sticking to the same system and the same plan, almost to the point of stubborn insanity and more often than not something works out for us. But it didn’t on this occasion and I think that was partly due to Oniki being out-thought by Rodriguez when it comes to tactics. 

 

Urawa came with a game plan that seemed to be go all out pressing and try to nick a goal. It paid off after only seven minutes but the writing was on the wall even before then. We had trouble getting out of our own half as we were being pressured constantly. After they got their goal they had something to hang on to and could start the time wasting, constantly repositioning goal kicks, rolling around on the floor from the slightest contact and waiting to see if they could take an opportunity if one turned up. It wasn’t nice to watch from a Frontale point of view but must have been very enjoyable for fans of other J League teams. If you have checked Twitter you could be mistaken for believing that Urawa are now the greatest football team in the world and will stroll to the title. I certainly think they will be a challenger this year, but I’d like to see what they do against teams who are happy to sit back in numbers against them. Of course I’m not going to praise Urawa, and instead will give the credit for their victory on the uselessness of our performance instead. In the past it has been too easy to slag off Urawa for the horrible racist and wannabe hooligan element of their fan base (plenty of whom left the stadium at the same time as I did, which is saying something as I really didn’t hang around once the whistle had been blown. Perhaps they didn’t realise there was silverware at stake). Now we might have to switch to disliking the team more. Ito is the prime candidate for me. I know heat maps are a popular part of football analysis recently. I’d like to see the horizontal heat map for Ito in this match. I’m pretty sure the majority of the 'heat' would be at a very low level, as he spent at least 15 minutes lying or writhing on the pitch. Seems like a bit of a wanker to me. But obviously this childishness on my part has been intensified by the rubbishness of our players on this occasion. So basically to sum up this Urawa paragraph, I’d say that they seem organized and have a plan, which might not be very nice to watch, but seems to be quite efficient. I’m hoping that this match was a freak game though. It would be nice if it were a false dawn for them and a false sunset for us, if that makes any kind of sense.

I’ll finish up with a few random observations. First a caveat. I know our last game was in the same stadium (albeit at the other end), but I don't remember the pitch being so far away last time. I know this is a problem at all stadiums with a running track, (even if they do cover it up), but it seemed particularly bad at this match. Perhaps that's because there was nothing much to watch anyway. It wasn't an engrossing or enjoyable 90 minutes in any way really. With our support being almost as lacklustre as the performance on the pitch. But you can't really blame the fans I guess. Many of them, (the newcomers I mean), are probably not used to watching us be rubbish. No fun to be had really. However, I thought it was quite amusing the way the two teams came out lead by their captains who were both holding the trophies they’d won to qualify for this game. It almost felt like the concept was that the silver be melted down, combined and forged into a new cup during the match, ready to be handed over at the end of the game. Kasahara was the ref and he was almost enough for me to wish that Iemoto would come back out of retirement. Almost… If Kasahara is the bright upcoming reffing talent in the J League we’re in for some trouble. I always think he’s rubbish but at least on this occasion he didn’t red card Taniguchi. Doubly surprising as he seemed to interpret most tackles as a foul on Urawa. Perhaps this was assisted a bit by Ito’s wonderful death scene auditions. Surely a role in a Japanese crime drama will be offered to him soon. So basically Kasahara was shit and Urawa had and executed a good game plan, but I’m not going to take the blame away from us. We didn’t deserve anything from this match and that was sadly evident pretty early on and for long periods of the game. We had four shots in 90 minutes. Only one was on target. Urawa had five, three on target and scored twice. So you can blame pretty much any of our players wherever they were on the pitch. Chanathip didn’t seem to work in the forward left position but looked a lot better in the second half when he was moved more central and a little bit backwards. Shortly after this he was subbed (insert shoulder shrug upturned palms emoji here). I’ve got no idea where anyone was playing towards the end of the game as our subs just seemed to be kind of random as they do often tend to be when we’re chasing matches recently. On this occasion though it didn’t work and our non-formation got caught out with a long ball over the top and we conceded our second. We probably should have tried the same thing a bit rather than then endless sideways and backwards passing trying to slowly edge out of our own half than made up the majority of this game. Only time will tell as to whether this is a sign of our strengths waning, or whether this was a very 'off' off-day from a rusty team. This evidently wasn’t a good result for us, but I think it could turn out to be a useful result if we pay attention to what the game taught us. We can’t just continue on as we have for the last few years without any other plan. And we can’t coast our way into a new season thinking we’re still better than everyone else. The league is probably going to be a lot more open this year with some new teams challenging. Whether that will include our first league opponents FC Chofu who we'll face at Todoroki on Friday, we’ll see. We definitely need to up our game against them even if they are a work in progress, as I think on the evidence of our performance yesterday, our U18 team would have given us a good run for our money. I thought this would be a quite short blog post as we were so lifeless there wasn’t really much to say, but instead it has meandered on. For that reason, I’ll knock it on the head here. Let’s be snooty and write this off as an unimportant pre-season game for us and use it to get up to speed for Friday when we’ll hopefully have a bit more fun and have a spring in our step again.

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 18. CHANATHIP

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for OSHIMA 82')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for CHANATHIP 77')

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for WAKIZAKA 71')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 71')

FW 23. MARCINHO (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 46')

MF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

 

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

If you expect there to be anything in this section you clearly haven't read the post or watched the game or highlights.

 

 

Goals

ESAKA (Urawa) 7' 0-1

ESAKA (Urawa) 81' 0-2

 

Highlights