Vs Kashiwa Reysol (home) 9/4/22 J League match 8

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 0 Kashiwa Reysol

It’s probably a bit too early for me to claim that the return of my old ‘Go Frontale’ sign off on blog posts has caused a massive turn around in our fortunes. After all, we only have the evidence of one game to base this on. Also, if we’re being honest, this also wasn’t the greatest of performances from us. The fact that this felt a lot more encouraging than recent games highlights more quite how boring and bad we’ve been recently rather than how well we played on this occasion. However it was lovely to leave the ground and head for our favourite post-game pub with a spring in our step instead of the usual recent heads in our hands. Kashiwa came into this game in good form and near the top of the table, one point behind us with two games in hand. They’d shocked quite a lot of people who had them down as pre-season relegation contenders and had already dispatched YFM and our last two opponents. When you consider that both our and Kashiwa’s previous two games were against Cerezo Osaka and Jubilo Iwata and they’d won both, while we just about managed to come away with one point from those two games, you might think that they would be coming into the game as favourites. That would probably be true if it weren’t for the pre-season expectations people had about them. Perhaps people's opinion on our season so far is a bit skewed if they've just looked at our better results and highlights and don’t wade through the endless crappy passages of play that we’ve conjured up so far this year. I’ve said in numerous blog posts already this season that the results we’ve been getting have been not very reflective of the quality of the football we’ve been playing. We’ve got very lucky a lot more often than we could even start to claim we’ve been unlucky. In fact, even I, the ultimate one-eyed biased commentator, would struggle to find any moments this year when we felt like we’d been hard done by. Well, maybe until this game, but more on that later. There was a certain enjoyment to be taken in the fact that this game was an ‘Excite match’ sponsored by a proctology clinic. I say proctology with the caveat that it is perhaps not totally accurate but having to make do with that word as my google search for ‘what do you call an arse doctor?’ hasn’t yielded any better results. Man of the match in the stadium Marcinho was the lucky one who received a ¥50000 voucher from the clinic for his performance. I hope for his sake that it’s a voucher for somewhere else, and that he doesn’t need to hang on to it till he has some kind of bum problem. (I’m sure I don’t need to clarify this, but for those who don’t understand British English, substitute ass for arse and butt for bum). So far, quite a lot of sentences I could never have imagined I would ever type in this post. Guess I’d better get to the root of the matter. Hmmmm. Maybe that also wasn’t a great choice of words…

 

I’d long been moaning that changes need to be made and it seems that finally Oniki thought the same thing. Our starting formation for this match was perhaps the first change in formation we’ve seen in a starting line up for a very long time. I say perhaps as I’m not totally convinced it was that different. But according to the pre-game display we were going with two defensive midfielders. I guess most people thought so when both Tachibanada and Joao Schmidt were announced as starting. This left Tono to fill the ‘Kengo role’, in front of them, in the middle behind the strikers. Wakizaka consequently dropped to the bench. Kobayashi totally disappeared from the squad and there was again no sign of Chanathip. And once again we went with a bench made up almost entirely of midfielders, one of whom was the lesser spotted Seko! I realise this is my own little thing that I keep on saying and most people probably don’t agree, but I still have no idea why Yamane is playing, particularly when you think that we have the ACL coming up very soon and he’s been playing 90 minutes for some team or another every other day for the last 3 years. Our ‘new system’ which I think looked a lot like our old system but with Tachibanada playing a touch further forward than he normally would and Joao taking his usual spot, didn’t have the most comfortable of starts and we had a major let off just eight minutes into the game. Thankfully for our sake this was about the last thing Kashiwa did in the game and once we’d settled down it was mainly one way traffic. Admittedly the kind of one way traffic that is often turned on its head in the 94th minute when a win is turned into a draw by one of our recently all too common last minute calamitous mistakes. Thankfully for us, it didn’t happen on this occasion, but as long as the score remained at only 1-0, it was a constant worry for me. Aside from what you would normally expect from the defensive midfielder, Joao’s main instructions seemed to be to play lovely long passes forwards for people to run on to. Recently it has been weird to see us playing a pass which ends up further from our own goal than where it started. So it was lovely to see us trying to attack a bit more quickly. Against Cerezo at 4-0 down we were still doing the whole slowly slowly build up, looking like we were aiming to hold on to the -4 goal difference. Marcinho was great in this game. His pace is fantastic and the fact that he runs with the ball towards the opposition goal instead of looking backwards all the time is a real bonus. His assist for Damiao’s goal was great and it was a lovely finish too. In all of the Marcinho excitement though I think that maybe Tono’s contribution went a little under the radar. I thought he was even better. He had a few chances where he was unlucky not to score, his set pieces caused some real danger and his whole play was just exciting. Not wanting to get too positive as I know you’re not here for that, we still have a few issues. We totally dominated the game but when I checked the stats I couldn’t believe we’d only had eight shots in the whole game. Obviously, you don’t usually score if you don’t shoot, and in a game where we in total control for long periods we still couldn’t do much up front. I suppose we did have the ball in the net on a couple of other occasions but both of those ‘goals’ were ruled out by VAR and an offside flag. Not scoring has been something that has become a bit of an issue for us both this year and in the second half of last season. We used to shoot and score a lot but recently if we’re involved in a high scoring match it will be because we’ve conceded four rather than actually done anything positive. If you believe the formation was changed, and as I said, I feel like it was at most a little slip of one of the magnets on Oniki’s board rather than anything more substantial, it’s hard to know if making our midfield more defensive will lead to us scoring more goals. It doesn’t sound like it will. And we also might have the issue that there are loads of attacking midfielders in our squad and there seems to now be only one spot for them. Whether the change is a long term one or just a brief recalibration while we get back on track and regain a bit of confidence, I don’t know. Definitely we needed this win though so well done Oniki for managing to get it and at the same time making the game quite enjoyable for the first time in a while.

 

There’s probably not much else to say about this game… Oh! Hang on, I forgot the one person who was the centre of attention! Ikeuchi, a referee whose name didn’t have many associations with me. When I went back through previous blog posts I discovered that he is the ref who was famous for always being horrendously one sided in favour of the away team. Of course there’s nothing wrong with this if we’re not playing at Todoroki. But sadly this was a home game for us. And boy did Ikeuchi live up to his reputation! As I said above, I have no problem with him ruling out a couple of goals for us (so much so that I haven’t even gone back and checked them on DAZN). Damn he was card happy though. And horrendously inconsistent (if you’re wearing blue tinted spectacles, with blue frames and a blue glasses case and some blue contact lenses in just in case, as I was). Apparently we only committed 13 fouls in the game compared to Kashiwa’s 12 but managed to get an astonishing 5 yellow cards, mostly for completely incomprehensible reasons. Joao’s was wrong, he clearly took the ball (edit: Oops, this comment is 100% inaccurate as the tackle I thought he'd been booked for that I watched repeatedly wasn't actually what he got the yellow for. That came about 30 seconds later. I stand by the fact that the tackle before wasn't a foul though), Ienaga’s was fair enough (kicking the ball away, but that never seems to really get given recently), Yamane’s was another possibly fair tackle where he seemed to get the ball and followed Tachibanada getting crunched and not even getting a foul. It’s a shame as Yamane hardly ever tackles recently and this will perhaps discourage him from doing so in the future. Tono got booked in the same move, apparently for aggressively throwing the ball down if we are judging by the Ikeuchi's gesture, but the he missed it himself and he needed to consult on his earpiece to find out about it. Not sure who he was talking to about it but I’ve watched the replay many times now and if he did bounce the ball aggressively he must have done it very quickly and to himself as there’s only a second or so when you can’t see the ball either at his feet as he blows for the foul or in his hands as he protests the foul. And honestly, you can’t blame our players for getting a bit frustrated as the ref was just doing his own predictable Ikeuchi thing. The one that really did it for me though was Sasaki’s yellow which looked like shoulder to shoulder to me and came just nine minutes after a similar challenge on him which didn’t result in a card. Either both are a yellow or neither. This season we have refs who love cards and refs who won’t give any cards. I guess both approaches are fine as long as they are administered fairly. Ikeuchi didn’t seem to be doing that. Presumably his reputation for favouring the away team comes from him not wanting to be seen to favour the home team and overcompensating. A bit like Iemoto giving us nothing after some nutters in our fan base applauded his announcement once. A kind of ‘I’ll show how wrong you are to think I favour team A by giving everything to team B, and then you’ll know for sure I’m not unfair’. I mean, I’ve spent way too long moaning in this section, and too long looking at replays of yellow card and non yellow card challenges. All you need to know you can learn from the clip going round on Twitter of Kengo absolutely losing it at another ridiculous Ikeuchi decision in a match a few years ago. If you can make the usually cool Kengo angry, you’re clearly making a mess of things.

 

As I said above, this was a performance and a win that felt much better than it probably was in reality. It’s great that we dominated but we still aren’t scoring. But it definitely gave both the supporters and the players a lift. And that’s good timing as we’re now off to the ACL in Malaysia. I’m not sure what the Chinese clubs approach will be this year. Last year they sent the kids and weren’t bothered about it at all. Our group looks trickier this year compared to last. Even the ‘weaker’ team will end up being one of the few who gets a home advantage although I hope the game won’t be played in their home stadium. And of course we’ll play Ulsan again. After all, we always play Ulsan. And we usually don’t do very well against them. Last year we went into the ACL in good form, stormed the group and got a stinker of a second round draw. This year we’re a bit all over the place but at least we have the knowledge that if we get through the group we won’t have to play Ulsan. Presumably if that does happen we’ll lose to Vissel Kobe or someone like that in more unfortunate circumstances. I would have a lot more interest in the ACL if we could actually attend. But it clearly our lack of success in the competition is a monkey that we need to get off our back. And the fact that the schedule for it is so spread out this season means that even if we did get a decent run in the competition it probably wouldn’t disrupt our schedule that much. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We struggled to get a last minute equaliser against a recently promoted team from J2 on Wednesday and that game was totally dire. One last thing, it was great to meet Tokyo Fox before the game, after following and enjoying his tweets for a long time. I’d like to offer him the job of being my official photographer as in his selfie he made me look like I wasn’t about to drop dead soon, which recently seems to be really difficult. Hope to see him again some time! Oh, mustn’t forget the old sign off. Go Frontale!

 

Team 

 
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG
DF 13. YAMANE Miki (Yellow card 52')

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 83')

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (Yellow card 17')

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 19. TONO Daiya (Yellow card 53')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 49')

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for TONO 90+1')

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for IENAGA 57')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 67')

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

The stadium award went to Marcinho and that was a good call I think, but he’s just been really good most of the time recently so with that in mind I’ll give it to…

TONO Daiya - great game in a slightly different role. If his numerous shots (he must have had half of our total) had gone slightly closer he would have sewn this up easily but as it is, his whole contributions get him the prestigious Frontale Rabbit MOTM award. A ¥500 Quo card which he can use at the local invasive medicine clinic of his choice.

 

 

Goals

 

LEANDRO DAMIAO (Frontale) 45+2' 1-0

Highlights

  

Vs Jubilo Iwata (away) 6/4/22 J League match 7

Jubilo Iwata 1 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

As a rule, I quite like repetition. I really like repetitive music. The first release on my micro record label was a 45 minute one song album by a French hurdy-gurdy, bass and drums trio where they basically play the same riff for the entire duration. I like routines, and enjoy going to the same places repeatedly. My job has lot of repetition in it too. Even so, you can probably take repetition a bit too far sometimes and I think we’re really reaching that point with Frontale this season now. After bumbling through the second half of last season and somehow still managing to win the league at a canter we’ve started 2022 with the same kind of useless and pointless late 2021 performances, but results seem to be finally catching up with us. You can’t deny it’s been long overdue. Nobody likes to hear me moaning about how badly we’re playing, particularly when we were top of the league and winning it like we were last year, but it was more than clear that we were getting found out then and you can firmly change that to ‘have totally been found out’ when you talk about this year. I don’t like to blow my own trumpet particularly, (well, maybe I like to do it a little bit), but I did start this year cautioning fans of any teams that played well against us and thought they had made great strides in their progress. It’s clear that we have got much worse rather than other teams getting much better. Well, at least it seems clear to me. Our victory over Kashima looks a bit weird now as they seem to be flying and we had pretty much dispatched them within the first 20 minutes. But looking closer, they did give us a goal and then we scored from a set piece, and after that just hung on for 70 minutes. Aside from those first 20 minutes, I don’t think there have really been any positive moments this season. We’ve just about scraped through on more than a few occasions. Attendances for our matches are maybe reflecting this. Perhaps we had a lot of glory hunter fans who have now seen the light and can’t be bothered to put themselves through these 90 minute assemblages of crap. Personally, the parts of the games I’m looking forward to most at the moment are the things before and afterwards. This game away at Jubilo perfectly illustrates that. It was a great day of having some nice beers and doing some tourism that was only let down by the couple of hours of the football match that was the reason for the trip. As I said at the start, I like repetition, but am fully aware that my readers might not feel the same way so I’ll keep this brief as I really don’t have anything much new to say. Ok, here goes…

 

We saw a few changes in the starting line up but Oniki avoided the biggest issue again and again I can’t say Yamane did much to remember. Likewise Wakizaka. Ienaga dropped to the bench which I thought was probably the right idea but I can’t say I’m sold on Kobayashi on the right. I think he is wasted there. I’d love to see him get a chance in the middle but given that it seems to be forbidden for us to change our formation he’s always going to struggle to start there with both our current top scorer Chinen and last season’s MVP Damiao being ahead of him in the pecking order. Oniki doesn’t like to change things at the best of times so the thought that he might at some stage use his apparent third choice striker up front seems to be nigh on an impossibility. I’m not going to moan about Chinen getting the nod though as I think he’s doing really well. There was one moment in this game where he looked like he was about to score an amazing goal after a lovely drag back but the shot didn’t live up to the drag back. He did save us though as we pluckily snatched a point with a 94th minute equaliser against a team who’d conceded 11 times in six games and had an aged and immobile defence who were going to be the main reason for what people consider to be their inevitable relegation. The match stats are slightly misleading as the loads of shots we had mainly came in the last ten minutes after we’d conceded. The first half stats feel more accurate for the game as a whole. Six shots from us and none on target. Apparently after last weekend’s disaster Oniki said we would be focusing on being more aggressive in defence and attack. This seemed to only manifest itself through some perhaps ‘extremely aggressive’ sideways and backwards passing. So basically no change. This game would have seemed more likely to have occurred before the Cerezo game, showing the stage where the wheels were wobbling but hadn’t quite come off. Some might have expected a spirited response to that awful performance against Cerezo with us getting hammered at home but let’s be honest, we haven’t played in a spirited way for quite a while now. The big concern is that I don’t think Oniki is willing to or maybe not capable of doing anything rather than change a player or two and carry on with the same system and style (although calling it style seems to be aggrandising the manner in which we are treading water). There is a certain irony in the way that the day of the game had been one of us watching the clock, rushing to our next exciting plan feeling like time was racing, whereas the majority of the game felt more like being at work with nothing to do apart from a very unappealing and difficult mind-numbing task. Or maybe sitting at a station with almost no charge left on your phone trying to occupy yourself during a two hour wait for a connecting train. If only they’d had a selection of leaflets available advertising the local textile or pottery museum available in the stand at Jubilo. I might have at least been able to learn something. Watching this game taught me nothing I didn’t already know, We’re suffering the three-peat wobbles again, where Oniki just does the same few things over and over again and occasionally, very occasionally, something not completely negative happens. 

 

Quick bit of ref talk. Ueda is a ref that I thought we hadn’t had many encounters with but my blog seems to think otherwise. He’s clearly from the ‘give nothing’ group of refs. It would be nice if there were a few more who didn’t fall into the ‘give nothing’ or ‘give everything’ camp and instead just gave some stuff. To be honest though, the only complaint I have about Ueda in this game is that I reckon he could have sent off Jubilo’s Ito for a second yellow on at least two occasions in the second half. But that was it really, so this isn’t a big moan really. I can’t blame the ref for us starting slowly and remaining slow for the whole of the first half. When we finally did start to get something going at the start of the second half, Oniki made a double substitution and we were back to square one. I thought Tono did really well in this game. He was of course changed in this first lot of subs. I feel sorry for Kozuka who gave the ball away trying to run out of our own box as they scored from the chance. It seems a bit unfair that a sub should get the blame for a mistake which only highlighted the starters absolute failure to do anything in the first half. I don’t know if we have a lot of injuries or illnesses at the moment but the bench did seem a bit weird with Tsukagawa and Joao Schmidt on there. We probably wouldn’t have had to change the defensive midfielder position twice in the game. No sign of Oshima anywhere which is a bit weird. Chanathip was absent too. Many people seemed to think Matsui might be this year’s breakout star and he hasn’t even made the bench. As for Seko… Well actually I have a theory about Seko. I wonder if he is considered by Oniki to be this year’s right back cover. Oniki rarely likes to put a right or left back on the bench unless they are able to play somewhere else like Kurumaya is. So perhaps Seko is waiting for a chance to play right back when Yamane is away on international duty. After which he’ll recede into the shadows again. This point is slightly undermined by the fact that Seko clearly can play elsewhere… I wish Oniki would rest Yamane (more repetition from me here…). He looks tired and also more worryingly disinterested. If he were to get an offer from overseas I think he’d have no hesitation in going. I don’t know if Oniki is worried about upsetting him by not playing him. Or whether he just has no confidence in anyone else playing there. But to be honest, I can’t really see why anyone has much confidence in any of our team at the moment. And it also looks like the team have no confidence in themselves either. Things just really aren’t going for us right now and we need either some kind of stirring motivational words from Oniki to the team, or alternatively a change of ideas. I think the former is more likely but maybe wouldn’t be as effective as the latter. Certainly Oniki and the players have achieved so much in the last few seasons that they have earned the right to have a dodgy period. And perhaps the results we’ve got this year might have covered up the fact that we’ve have about 10 dodgy games so far this year. I just really hope we could not be quite so shit going forwards. Watching us has got very boring and it’s very frustrating considering the talent we have in the squad.

 

Next up, another pre-season relegation cert, Kashiwa Reysol, who have only one less point than us having played two games less. They have only conceded three times in their seven games. Combine this with the fact that we seem to be incapable of scoring at the moment, and it looks like it might not be too much fun again on Saturday. After that game we head off to the ACL, so who know what kind of trouble we might be in when we arrive back. Certainly this unrelenting misery isn’t ideal preparation for a competition that we do tend to cock up quite often. Oh, it’s all hearts and flowers and optimism from me, isn’t it? In an attempt to snatch back some lucky rituals, I’m going to go back to my old sign off on these blog posts and see if that works as most of my other pre-match customs seem to have failed now. So fingers crossed this will shift things back to being a bit more positive. Go Frontale! 

Team 

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

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 19. TONO Daiya

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 20. CHINEN Kei

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for TACHIBANADA 80')

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO (on for KOBAYASHI 77')

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for WAKIZAKA 66')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 77')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for TONO 66')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Nah

 

Goals

 

OMORI (Jubilo) 78' 1-0

CHINEN (Frontale) 90+4' 1-1

Highlights

 

Vs Cerezo Osaka (home) 2/4/22 J League match 6

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 4 Cerezo Osaka

Well, that wasn’t much fun. The shitty performances just keep on coming this year, and for once we actually got the beating we have probably deserved on a few occasions. Losing this game means that we have equalled our 2021 season total of defeats after having played only eight times. We’ve conceded four goals twice in these eight games, and our total goals conceded after eight games is two fifths of the total we conceded in thirty eight games last year. Plenty of people went to this game in their new 2022 season shirts which got delivered shortly after our last game. I imagine I can’t be alone in thinking that my new shirt is now unlucky. But we probably shouldn’t hold our shirts responsible. This was just a tired and unimaginative performance which is starting to become a bit of a feature of 2022. I feel quite sorry for half of the players who were on the pitch for the second half as they had nothing to do with the awful first half performance that had lost us the game. Weirdly though, most of the players who’d had the most to do with our poor first half performance had remained on the pitch after the quadruple half time change. But I’ll come on to that later (and probably bore on about it for quite a while). Cerezo are a bit of a bogey team for us. At least intermittently. We have hammered them a few times recently, but they normally seem to frustrate us when we play against them. I wouldn’t say that was the case in this game though. We basically gave them a goal which gave them something to hang on to and allowed them to move into what was more of a 9-0-1 formation. Then we gave them another goal. And another one. Then had a little break before giving them another. Before this game they’d only won once this season. And they’ve scored one third of their total season’s goals against us in this one game. I mean, I know it’s still a bit early in the season to be talking about these kind of stats. Particularly for Cerezo who have only played six games. Of course, we have played two more, and even after suffering another rotten defeat we still somehow remain ahead of YFM in the table (small consolation). However both Kashima and Kashiwa can both overtake us by taking something from their games in hand. Kashima, who everyone was saying this year would score a lot but struggle in defence have won all of their games apart from when we beat them and have only conceded five times in six games. Kashiwa who were most people’s favourites to go down and who lost the player who most people considered to be their best to Nagasaki before the season started have won four out of six and have only conceded three times! So you could say it’s a bit of a weird and surprising season so far. And although it seems slightly strange to say, it’s probably also surprising that our usual failure to have any defenders has finally caught up with us this year. It’s been a bit of miracle that we’ve dodged that bullet year after year but it’s definitely come home to roost now. Oh well, I’d better get on with the Frontale moaning.

As I said above we looked tired in this game. Which is a bit weird as all but two of the starting line up hadn’t played a match for two weeks. Perhaps the biggest issue is that the two who had played and had also traveled to Australia both started this game. Yamane, who hasn’t exactly been sparkling this year, played 180 minutes for Japan but still came back straight into the starting line up. Taniguchi played 90 minutes and sat on the bench for 90 minutes but also made the flight to Australia also started. But this isn’t really a surprise. We have been a little unlucky with injuries at the back. Maybe… I mean we knew that Jesiel wouldn’t be available for a while this year but we still didn’t sign any reinforcements (or try out any of the players we have in the squad that are actually defenders). Kurumaya coming back from injury and then getting injured again is unfortunate and has left us in the position where we have Yamamura, a midfielder, starting game after game at centre back. And with no cover on the bench. Well, maybe no cover, as it now seems that Tsukagawa is being groomed to be the new Yamamura in that he’ll be on the bench as someone who can be put anywhere on the pitch but with centre back high up on that list. Of course I would say this, but I thought he did ok at centre back in this game. Certainly better than his centre back partner. He made a few mistakes but more often than not made up for them by recovering and winning the ball back. In recent years we’ve have had a succession of players in our team who have been signed to cover the right back spot and none of them have ever really been given much of a chance. Diogo Mateus played only three games in his year with us, (playing 90 minutes each time with us not conceding and winning every game). He didn’t even make the bench for any other game. In the league, Zain made the bench and was an unused sub twice in two years and started one league game which we won and kept a clean sheet in. Yamane has played pretty much every other league game, basically 76 out of 80 games. Think Tachibanada was the other player who played right back for one game. This year we were perhaps encouraged that we’d have someone who could take some of the strain off Yamane as Seko was able to play there. I wonder what’s happened to him? I suppose the issue is that we have some players who could cover these spots but never get the chance to do so. For that, you’ve got to blame Oniki. There’s no way Yamane should have started this game given his exertions and his general flatness this year so far. You could say the same about Taniguchi, but I think that, unlike Yamane, until this game he’s had a pretty good season. And there is no-one who could take his place anyway. Blame Oniki for that again. It’s undeniable that Tanigchui didn’t do ‘pretty good’ in this game though. I tweeted during the match that Taniguchi had got a hat trick (of fuck ups leading to Cerezo goals). It was a bit unfair as the second one didn’t seem to be wholly his fault but I think it was a fair point anyway and he did mess up a bit for the fourth goal too so maybe I was being prescient. Yamane looked knackered every time he had to defend but somehow found a burst of energy when he could run forwards which is a little worrying. Please give him a rest for the next game.

So with us trailing 3-0 at half time and people having mares all over the pitch we knew changes were going to come. But wow, what changes they were. We’d named a bench with a keeper, three midfielders and three attackers on it, so immediately our options were somewhat hamstrung. Almost everyone had had a bit of a dodgy first half (one exception who’ll be mentioned later), but notably bad first halves were put in by the aforementioned Taniguchi and Yamane, along with the classic 2022 season ‘not-doing-much-ers’ Wakizaka and Ienaga. Astonishingly all of them remained on the pitch for the second half in spite of Oniki doing a quadruple substitution. Wakizaka still seems to be struggling to deal with the pressure of inheriting Kengo’s number 14 shirt. I feel like he needs to just relax a bit. He had some good touches and moves in this game but they were massively outnumbered by sloppy and costly mistakes. I think it’s a confidence thing. Ienaga got my goat a little in the last home game when he refused to be subbed in the last minute of the match. It wasn’t a good look. With us three goals down with 30 minutes left in this match his number went up, with us using our final sub, and he strolled off the pitch as if the scoreline were reversed and he was simultaneously soaking up his applause and running the clock down. This too was not a good look at all. So four early changes. But no possibility of really changing the centre backs as even though Taniguchi was having a mare, we had no-one on the bench. No, apparently we could change the centre backs as Oniki made the absolutely mind-blowing decision to take off Yamamura and leave Taniguchi on the pitch. Yamane also survived. We didn’t have anyone on the bench to play in his position, but I guess we could have moved Tachibanada there. Oh, no we couldn’t as he was also taken off and replaced with Kozuka, who seems to be one of our more attacking midfielders who was instead played in the anchor role. Tsukagawa went in at centre back, Tono came on for Chanathip and Chinen on for Damiao, who celebrated his 100th league game by being subbed off at half time. I know it’s all too easy to complain without having any suggestions so maybe I should suggest something with the big caveat that I don’t know anything. For the second half I’d have gone with a back four of Tachibanada, Yamamura, Taniguchi and Sasaki (I know Taniguchi was having a mare, but as I’ve said plenty of times, we didn’t have any other options), stick Tsukagawa in the anchor role, play Kozuka and Chanathip in front of him and then put Tono or Kobayashi in on the right, leave Damiao up front or put Chinen in, and leave Marcinho on the left. Maybe my team wouldn’t have done any better but I think it would have made more sense. But Oniki seems scared of changing Ienaga or Yamane or Taniguchi. It’s a bit of a worry. Honestly, Wakizaka, Yamane and Ienaga really shouldn’t start the next game. But I guess they probably all will. At least it will be a fun trip I suppose. Given that Iwata aren’t the strongest team we’ll be facing this year, we could probably change things around a bit. Equally though, Oniki might see this as an opportunity to get some confidence back with the same old starting lien up. If he does, I predict that confidence were be even further damaged by another horrible defeat. Don’t forget the fact that even with all these substitutions being made and with us really needing a goal we left Miyagi, probably the player most likely to actually fucking have a fucking shot on the bench as an unused sub. I guess he was somewhat scuppered by Marcinho playing in his spot and being the one player who was actually having a decent game though. I’m sure we could have accommodated both in the team somehow couldn’t we? Oh no, sorry, that would have required some kind of change of tactics or focus or even a plan B and that was never going to happen was it?

A few quick words about the ref. I’d never seen him in charge before I think. The only record of him taking charge of one of our games that I had was a game that I missed when I was on my summer holiday (call yourself a real fan etc…). I didn’t have much to moan about with him to be honest. I thought we could have had a penalty in the 17th minute but maybe I was grasping for some kind of lifeline. One thing that slightly annoyed me was that he was constantly telling Cerezo to stop wasting time (which they did pretty much from the off, even before they were leading), doing that ‘hold up your arm and point to your watch’ thing but then in spite of that and three goals having been scored only added 2 minutes at the end of the first half. To be honest though, it would only have given Cerezo more time to score more goals, so in the end he was probably doing us a favour. It was nice to see a few more people back in the stadium. We didn’t manage to break the 20000 barrier though which was a shame, but given the distinct lack of fun that we’ve had at matches so far this year isn’t a great surprise. Maybe as the weather warms up a little and, who knows, maybe we might even start playing a bit better, we might see a few more people back. There has been talk of the J League thinking about the possibility of allowing singing again. In spite of what Urawa fans might think, it’s still not allowed (oooooooh, those bad boys! They’re sooooo dangerous and ooooooooh wild). That would definitely make the experience a bit more fun and as someone who attends matches to have a nice time rather than someone who pours over the footage online searching for details to make ‘smart’ comments on Twitter, that would be a very welcome thing.

Next up, as mentioned above, Jubilo Iwata away on Wednesday. We have plans to visit two brewpubs before the game and then another two afterwards, so to be honest, the match might actually not be very clear or remain in the memory for long. How nice it would be if we could actually have a bit of a shake up of line-up and maybe we could even play some nice football for once this year. It will probably be more sideways and backwards passing against a ten man defence after Ralph has got them an early lead though. Come on Oniki, do the right thing and change things up a bit. The players need it and we need it too!

Team 

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

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 18. CHANATHIP

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki (on for YAMAMURA 46')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 65')

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for TACHIBANADA 46')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for CHANATHIP 46')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 46')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten

My Frontale Man Of The Match

You'd probably normally expect me to skip this in a hissy fit but I think there was actually, unbelievably, someone who deserved it. So, it goes to...

MARCINHO - was having a lot of joy down the left in the first half and throughout the game looked like our only real goal threat. The fact that he was still running and scored in the 86th minute with the game already well lost says a lot. Well done to him!

Goals

 

INUI (Cerezo) 13' 0-1

INUI (Cerezo) 28' 0-2

YAMADA (Cerezo) 36' 0-3

YAMADA (Cerezo) 68' 0-4

MARCINHO (Frontale) 86' 1-4

Highlights

 

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 12/3/22 J League match 5

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 0 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale

Another pretty dodgy game where we once again managed to scrape a result. This definitely didn’t feel like a 2-0. In fact given the general poor play on display from both teams in front of the goal, even one goal seemed to be beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. This post is going to be brief and thrown together. I had my COVID booster on Friday so we didn’t go to this game. I’m not particularly suffering from too many side effects, but it’s fair to say that this kind of game, where there wasn’t much of interest happening, would have been difficult to concentrate on even if I wasn’t in my own personal fug. Please bear this in mind when assessing the quality of this post. As is always the case when I watch a game on DAZN rather than attend it, I find it difficult to focus and therefore don’t bother going into too much detail in the post. Some might say the same about the posts on games I attend I guess. I know nothing more about this game than other people who were also watching online know. I have very little insight and am even struggling to think of any jokes. With all this in mind, let's get going on what is truly going to be a great blog post!

We failed to beat Sanfrecce last year, drawing 1-1 with them home and away, so it was nice to improve on that. We started pretty well. Well for about three minutes and then we were back to the same ponderous and inconsequential stuff that we’ve become so familiar with recently. One particularly frustrating moment was when we were breaking with three against two and somehow contrived to dither, let them get some more players back and then loop the ball high off the pitch for a goal kick. Kind of summed up the game to be honest. Our backheel pass count was very high but the backheel pass completion rate was very low. Everyone loves it when their team is winning comfortably and starts turning on the style. It’s not so much fun when you’re drawing 0-0 and failing to create anything and you have players backheel passing straight to the opposition or off the pitch. Normally this kind of play comes with confidence but that looks very lacking right now. It feels like our new tactics are to bore the pants off the opposition, until they get so worn down by the tedium that they let us score. We shouldn’t forget how badly Sanfrecce are doing so far this year. However, we still struggled to make any real chances against them. In the last game, we had only nine shots with only one on target which we scored. Astonishingly, we had even less shots in this game (only eight, but thankfully three were on target). I guess our first goal doesn’t count as a shot as it was an own goal. It’s really not much fun to watch us this year. Whoever we start the game with, we (almost always) struggle and we only ever get going when the subs start happening. The three undroppables whose performances I always seem to recently moan about had pretty dodgy games again. Shortly before our first goal, I said ‘please let Oshima take this corner’. As I saw him lining up for it I said ‘and please let us score from this’ and we did. So perhaps all year the problem has been me not asking for goals enough. I will endeavor to do this more in upcoming games.

We now don’t have a game till the start of April so the players can have a bit of a rest and Oniki can have a bit of a think. Although I suppose Yamane and Taniguchi aren’t going to be resting much. I suspect the result of Oniki’s think will be that we just keep on going as we are. To be fair though, the results have been generally positive. It’s just the performances that make getting a weekly COVID booster and its side effects more appealing than watching the match. Fingers crossed for some excitement sooner or later. But yeah, keep the wins coming too please.

Team 

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

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya (Yellow card 68')

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki

MF 10. OSHIMA Ryota (on for KOZUKA 67')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 83')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 78')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 67')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 67')

Goals

 

NOGAMI (Sanfrecce) OWN GOAL 73' 0-1

YAMANE (Frontale) 88' 0-2

Highlights

Vs Nagoya Grampus (home) 12/3/22 J League match 4

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 0 Nagoya Grampus

The day of this game was a pretty fun day. All apart from the two hours we were actually in the stadium watching football. Once again we’ve come away from a match with a win which came hand in hand with a bit of a dodgy performance. Honestly, it’s a miracle that we’re top of the league at the moment. Although perhaps we won’t be when  the teams behind us have played the same amount of games as we have. All year I have been expressing some surprise at both how badly we’ve been playing and how we’ve been getting results. probably the only memorably good periods we’ve had were the first 20 minutes against Kashima and parts of the second half against Gamba. Perhaps it’s significant that we had ‘the reserves’ playing for the former and also that in the latter, we needed subs to change our fortunes. The pretty much regular starting line up that Oniki has been going with for five out of six of the league games hasn’t been doing the job. Whether this is due to players not playing well, tactics not working or a general decline in our fortunes and qualities it’s hard to say. Probably a bit of all of the above to be honest. There were some small causes for optimism in this match, but they were steamrollered by the usual dull and ineffective tactics and play. Also, many aspects of this game have been steamrollered by some pre and post match drinking. The morning after I woke up feeling ok but with a slight unease and disorientation which I attribute equally to the alcohol and the experience of watching this game. Once again, we have some work to do. Whether we will do it is another matter. I have very few notes on the match, only one thing about Nagoya (Leo Silva is a diver) and not much about the ref (giving yellows one way only, let himself get overruled by some Nagoya complaints at one stage), so this could be mercifully brief!

 

Let’s talk a bit about our problems. I eat too much, I probably drink too much, need to do more exercise, jump to conclusions a bit, can get overly emotionally involved with things. Oh, hang on, I meant Frontale's problems! Wakizaka and Yamane are still well off the pace and well off their best. I can’t see Oniki changing Yamane to give him a break and it seems that Wakizaka is the first name on the team sheet. I wonder if the significance of wearing the number 14 shirt is weighing on him a bit. Kengo, have a word and tell him to just relax please. Or Oniki, give him a rest for a game. The fact that we don’t have a game till next weekend almost certainly means that he’ll be in the starting line up again. Oniki doesn’t seem to want to rotate even when we have a packed schedule, so a week without a midweek game surely will mean no changes. Although there is actually one that he needs to make as Chanathip has picked up his fourth yellow so will miss the next game due to a suspension. Four yellows seems absurdly low to get a suspension to me, but those are the rules. I wonder if Chanathip suffers some kind of reverse big foreign player problem. In the way that if a big Brazilian gets fouled he’s perhaps a bit less likely to get the free kick as the refs have it in their mind that he must be faking as he’s a big guy and wouldn’t go down so easily, I feel that Chana seems to get a yellow for every foul as the refs think he’s so small that in order for the opposition player to go down he must have been fouled badly. Equally, the refs seem to think that he’s so small that any time he goes down, it’s because of his size and isn’t a foul. He seems to get everything given against him and nothing given for him. No complaints about his yellow in this game though. Didn’t see the same rule getting applied to Nagoya though, but I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s a shame he’ll miss the next game as he seems to be getting better match by match. His pass for the goal was a lovely one, (although I feel that Damiao deserves a half assist for the dummy), and was one of many nice passes that he’s been trying recently. As our players get more in tune with what he’s doing I think we’ll only improve. His absence in the next game might give someone an opportunity to stake a claim for a spot. I wouldn’t mind seeing a big change in the midfield actually with Wakizaka getting rested too. Might make sense to start with a midfield pairing that we have used in a match when we’ve needed to up our game a bit. 

 

I’m not sure the midfield is the whole problem though. We had only nine shots in this game. Only one of them was on target. Thankfully it went in (Langerak, J League’s best keeper etc. etc. made no saves in this game). Our lack of willingness to shoot is shocking. As is our lack os willingness to try another other ways of approaching the goal rather than short-passing it all the way to the goal line. When teams come to defend, (as surely more and more will as they see through our cunning plan of doing the same thing in every game for about three years), we could do with someone occasionally giving it a whack from distance. I guess understandings take some time to build up but you might have hoped that something like this might have been worked on in pre-season. Also, it is only Chanathip for Hatate that is the difference from last year. All a bit weird really. The longer we keep skating on thin ice but miraculously coming away with the points, the more chance we have of falling in the freezing water. Which happened against YFM but Oniki just gave them a towel and told them to try a different pond with equally thin ice for the next game.  When Urawa trashed us in the Super Cup we were told that they would storm the league. They have four points from six games. Teams seem to be pleased when they lose unluckily to us but I think they are failing to notice quite how rubbish we are recently, and how us not beating them easily doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve played well. There now follows a short factual intermission where I roll out some stats comparing our first six games this year and last year. Don’t worry, this kind of useful content won’t last long and it will get back on to jokes and moaning soon. Points wise, we were only one win better off last year with 16 points instead of the 13 we have this year. But the goal difference was +10 and instead we have +3. Last year we had scored 14 and conceded four. This year it’s 10 and seven. It’s probably the shots that shows the real difference though. Last year we’d had 94 with 38 (about 40%) on target, but this year it’s 68 with 23 (roughly one in three) on target. So basically we’re shooting a lot less and a lot less accurately too, which isn’t exactly a great combination. In 2022 we average 3.8 shots on target per game, so we challenge the keeper less than twice per half. Which all might explain why my personal excitement factor has dropped from a 27.4356 in 2021 to a 7.3112 in 2022. In other words, praise the lord for pre-game drinking.

This has been a weird blog post. Some actually information in there. And mercifully short too! This game wasn’t perhaps as much of a disaster as I’ve made it sound but it was far from fun. I keep asking for a shake up but never really think it will happen. I think Oniki is in charge of the team (although Ienaga did appear to overrule him on his potential subbing), so I guess it’s down to him to shake us out of this performative slump. But the results probably mean that he might imagine that we’re doing ok. Of course it’s absurd to complain when we’re top of the table, but we’re only there as we’ve played more games and anyone who has watched our opening fixtures surely can’t help but feel slightly uneasy that the wheels are due to come flying off quite soon. Ironically, given our defensive woes, aside from the YFM game we’re not actually doing too badly at the back. But then again it does seem to be the case that either Sung-Ryong has a blinder and saves us or as was the case in the this game, the opposition also can’t shoot. Our next game is away at Hiroshima next weekend. These games are never particularly fun to watch and this time I’ll be doing it on my sofa the day after my COVID vaccine booster, so expect even more whinging next time. Or maybe we’ll find out that it is my attendance that is causing our dullness. Hopefully not, but whatever the reason, it would be nice if we could get past it soon.

Team 

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

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya

DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo

DF 15. SASAKI Asahi

MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

MF 18. CHANATHIP (Yellow card 15')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro

FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 27. TANNO Kenta

MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for CHANATHIP 60')

FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 73')

FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 60')

FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 73')

My Frontale Man Of The Match

I mean, I dunno really. Let’s skip it this time as it wasn’t exactly great.  

Goals

 

MARCINHO (Frontale) 25' 1-0

Highlights

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