From the dizzy heights of our second half demolition of Kobe, we’re back into the depths with another totally limp cup exit. It’s fair to say that this hasn’t been our year cup-wise, and it’s also true that we’d scraped our way to this stage with a comeback against Sony Sendai and only managing to defeat Mito on penalties. Sadly, on this occasion we weren’t able to muster the kind of comeback that we’ve relied on heavily in some of our games this season. Whilst recently when we’ve gone behind it has seemed likely that we’ll eventually get back into the game, for most of the first half on this occasion it looked like we’d not even be able to score even one, let alone three or four. Chinen gave us a lifeline bringing the score back to 3-1 but it looked like the red card would finish us off. Surprisingly, it actually seemed to spur us on, and in the end we could probably feel that we were unlucky to not take it to extra time. But for every opportunity to score we had, we gifted one to Montedio, and we can’t have any complaints about exiting the competition at this stage.
So, what went wrong? I don’t want to point the finger solely at one player, but Taniguchi had a nightmare. He was probably at least partly at fault for all three goals. I’ve referred to him before as one of Oniki’s undroppables, and I know I’m biased in this respect, but he’s been saved by Nara time after time recently. I don’t know if something’s on his mind, but he appears to have lost all form and confidence. It’s something of a mystery as to how a J2 side can so completely outsmart us at set pieces and yet we’re top of J1. You've got to hope that this was a blip, but if you want to be pessimistic, our best eleven has conceded six goals in the last two games. Hopefully none of our upcoming league opponents were watching and taking tips from this game. Aside from Taniguchi, our left side in the first half was awful. Nobori and Saito looked like they’d never met, let alone played together before. Hasegawa was a big improvement in the second half but the damage had already been done. Kobayashi again didn’t have the best of nights, Ienaga was pretty quiet. Sung-Ryong can’t be blamed too much for the goals, but the red card was a bit rash. He gave the forward an opportunity to drag his leg and go down. Apparently he’ll now be banned for our next league game. Since when does it work like that? Seems a bit stupid to me, but those are apparently the rules. Basically, too many players had off days at the same time. Perhaps they underestimated the opposition after getting a lot of praise for the second half performance against Kobe. Full credit to Montedio though. They came with a game plan to put men behind the ball and hit us on counter attacks and from set pieces and that’s exactly what they did. And they did it better than a lot of J1 teams have. Also, they didn’t seem to time-waste at all, which is almost unheard of recently. I wish them the best of luck for the rest of the season. Also, in the past rarer than a J League ref having a good game, but becoming something of a common Frontale Rabbit trope recently is the fact that I think Oniki made all the right decisions in this game. Can’t blame him, certainly from a tactical point of view. You’ve just got to put it at the feet of the players. Yamagata was a fun trip, aside from the football, and seems like a nice place. Just a shame that the result and game were so rotten.
We now have a week and a half off till our next league game, home against Kashiwa next Saturday. Easier said than done, but we’ve got to try and put this out of our minds and get back to the second half against Kobe form. It would be nice if we didn’t give the opposition a couple of goals head start in our remaining games. Now we’re top and have a lead, we’ve got to avoid doing a Hiroshima, and letting Hiroshima back in. Hopefully, Hiroshima will continue doing a Hiroshima for the next four games, but I’d rather it was us taking some strides towards winning the title, rather than wishing the games away and clinging on. Fingers crossed, eh?
Subs
GK 30. ARAI Shota (on for OSHIMA 67')
MF 6. TASAKA Yusuke
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for SAITO 56')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for MORITA 46')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
My Frontale Man Of The Match
In situations like this I normally would sulkily give it to no-one but instead I’m going to split it three ways between the three people who did a decent job when all around them were doing less than mediocre jobs. So, step forward for your rosettes...
CHINEN Kei, HASEGAWA Tatsuya and ONIKI Toru - Chinen put the ball in the net. The goals weren’t the most beautiful but he was in the right position more often than not and gave us a lifeline. Hasegawa shook things up on the left and that was where all of our opportunities were coming from in the second half. He clicked much better with Nobori than Manabu had and you couldn’t argue with him starting the next game if Abe is still absent. And Oniki, as I said above seemed to do the right things but was let down by the players. I’ve given him plenty of stick recently so it only seems fair that I give him some praise when he seems to make what are in my opinion the right calls. Probably criticised him too much then and am praising him too much now, but you know, aiming for some balance.
This is a blog post that is once again low on details and high on emotion, this time with the bonus of being fueled by alcohol! The potential presence of a certain Mr. Iniesta has driven J League attendances into something of a frenzy recently, and our home game against Kobe was no exception. If you add into this the fact that our attendances have been steadily creeping up and we’ve had sell outs on a few occasions, this was always going to be a tricky game to get a good seat for. Our good attendances are leading to increasingly crazy pre-game queuing rituals. It’s great for us to be getting big crowds, but it’s not so great that now you have to get to the ground a good five or six hours before if you’re looking to get the view you want. And personally speaking, we’re comparatively lucky, being in the SG section with its different entry gate meaning that we don’t have to join the crazy early morning lottery that some have to take part in each home game. Anyway, all of this is a big preamble to basically say, we had plenty of time to kill before the game and I decided to fill it almost entirely with booze. This definitely added to the excitement. And to be honest, this was a game that could have made even the most sober of fans imagine that they’d been on the sauce. Looking at the scoreline you might think that Oniki Frontale had been swapped with Yahiro Frontale for a week, but it probably made it sound more of a contest than it was. Kobe scored a couple of crackers from long range, one of which was celebrated in particularly obnoxious style by Mita, (no Schadenfreude in seeing him get booked for petulantly kicking over a water bottle as he was being substituted. None at all. Honest…), and got a real gift of an own goal from us, probably delighting fans of clanger defending worldwide. But we came back. And in the second half, you can say Kobe got away lightly with us ripping them to shreds time after time. There was a lot of talk before the game of this being Fake Barcelona vs the Real Barcelona. Although I’m not sure quite how the presence of one ex-Barcelona player elevates the rest of the Kobe squad to that level. I suppose though that was the thinking behind the Iniesta transfer. Also no Schadenfreude seeing a total moneybags team who are attempting to thwart their opponents by buying every football player in Japan and a few from overseas too, fail again in their quest to be Asia’s number one football team and instead have to look over their shoulders at the bottom of the table as they slip further and further down towards J2. Anyway, enough of this and on with talking about the few things that happened in the match that I can remember, in no particular or rational order.
The Iniesta factor! I think we kept him pretty quiet, or perhaps, his teammates kept him quiet. We definitely didn’t put him under that much pressure and we stood off him quite a lot. Kengo didn’t clatter into him like he did with Neto a few weeks ago. It seemed like Iniesta and Podolski mainly wanted to pass to each other, and who can blame them really. Sure, Kobe scored some good goals, but they only had four shots on target in the game and their defensive frailties have got to be a concern for them. Apparently this is the first time Iniesta has been on a team that have conceded five in his career. I guess that’s shows there’s a big difference between Barcelona and Kobe! He praised Frontale in his post match comments and I now wonder if he might be regretting joining Kobe. Although the full to bursting bank account must compensate a little! It’s good that we performed so positively in what could have been a tough game (if Kobe weren’t rubbish…). I’d say that they probably need quite a few more players if they’re serious about building a team that wants to challenge. In spite of the score in the first half, I think their keeper kept them in it. He made a couple of good saves and it looked like we could be in for a frustrating evening, particularly when we conceded the third. But we really stepped it up in the second half and it was lovely to watch. I guess Hiroshima taking one point from their last five games, and generally speaking, this happening before we started our games, has got to be a big morale boost for us. And this comeback will also be a big boost, along with the knowledge that we were playing some great football in the second half. The fourth goal was a beauty, and once again we had different goalscorer for every goal. Quite a few of these goals were pretty significant too. It was great to see Manabu get his first league goal, taking his chance due to Abe’s suspension. I suspect that this might help him push on, as he hasn’t quite got going for us yet. Funnily enough, I thought he was probably about to get subbed just before he scored but he had another 15 minutes after his goal where he looked very dangerous and was unlucky not to get a second. What a time to come into some form! Kobayashi also finally scored a penalty! It took some guts to step up after missing his last two and it was great to hear that Oniki had asked Ienaga to have a word with him if we were awarded a penalty. Apparently the conversation was something along the lines of ‘You’re Frontale’s ace, you can do it, but if you don’t want to, I’m fine with taking it’. I think it’s probably an unseen side of Ienaga that he seems to really support the other players in the team. Which makes me once again remember the marvelous shoulder flick at Yuma Suzuki who had messed with Nara. Someone please make a gif out of that! Lovely memories! Oshima and Elsinho also deserved their goals. It’s been a while since they last scored so they were long overdue. Elsinho seems to have really upped his game in the last few matches after a bit of a low spell, perhaps something to do with the plight of his fellow Brazilians. Oshima finished the game with two assists and a goal which is a pretty good performance doing the things that get noticed, alongside the usual less noticeable but perhaps more important work he does in the midfield. And all of this was achieved without Kurumaya (injured), Abe and Morita (both banned). Finally, Nishimura was the ref, and once again he was rubbish. His name was probably the one I screamed the most during the game as he, from my biased point of view, messed up decision after decision. But just to show you I’m not biased, I think we were a bit lucky with the penalty decision. Sorry this post is extremely jumbled and rambling. But that’s how my head has been today.
There are now four games to go and we have a four point lead. Things are looking bright, especially given Hiroshima’s current form, but I’m not counting my chickens yet. In normal life, I’m not particularly superstitious, but when it comes to football I’m terrified of jinxing things, so I’m just keeping my mouth shut right now. It seems that we’re coming into form though, (but not wanting to jinx it, I’ll say that we could lose our next match. Is that enough to cancel out the slight confidence I expressed?). Two more wins in the last four games should be enough to seal it. Three would confirm it. Depending on Hiroshima though, we might be able to get away with less. It would be nice to carry on in this style though. Our remaining fixtures, in order, are Kashiwa at home, Cerezo away, FC Tokyo away and Jubilo at home. Hiroshima have Jubilo away, Sendai at home, Nagoya at home and Sapporo away. This week saw ex-Frontale player Chong Tese do us a big favor scoring against Hiroshima. Hiroshima’s remaining games see them face Neto and Okubo and current loanees Miyoshi and Itakura. I’m sure they are all playing 100% for their sides, but think that maybe they’d also like to do us a favour and give Hiroshima a thumping for us. Frontale family!
Next up though is Montedio Yamagata away in the Emperor’s Cup on Wednesday. I’m quite looking forward to that trip! There’s no league game next weekend though, so we’ll have to wait till the week after to see if we can take one step closer to a second consecutive league title. It looked so unlikely earlier in the season, particularly when they bought out the latest fixtures poster with the slogan ‘to consecutive title’ just as we lost to Gamba and put in a stinker of a performance. But, one step at a time, fingers crossed and keep up with all those pre-match rituals that seem to be working at the moment. Go Frontale!
The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that a previous year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want. And we have that extra footage video again at the bottom.
As the end of the season approaches, things are getting serious. It’s a tense time. We are leading the league for the first time this year. Some people have put as down as nailed on champions but I wish I had the same confidence. I think I said a few games ago, that I thought that there was no way Hiroshima would win all their remaining games and it looks like their form is disintegrating. Likewise, I didn’t think we would win all of our games, and we didn’t won this one. But it was a decent point to pick up in a tough game against rapidly improving opposition. I was hoping that they would play the kids, given that they are still involved in four competitions. Sadly they didn’t, and this was a battle. In keeping somehow with the increasing tension, these blog posts seem to be getting more jumbled and lighter on detail. I’d be delighted if the season finished now (unsurprisingly, given that we’re top). This tension is affecting the way I’m watching games. And I think perhaps there was an element of the pressure being on us rather than Hiroshima and this adversely affected our performance. I guess we’ll see if this manifests in the next game too. This was a frustrating, irritating, yet somehow satisfying afternoon. I think, looking back in a positive way, we’ve come through what looked like being, and turned out to be a challenging fixture. Obviously, three points would have been lovely, but I think on balance, we should be satisfied with one.
The most notable thing about this game was the insane weather. It’s October, but it was very hot. We were totally exposed to the sun in the stand behind the goal, so much so that most people spent the majority of the three hours before kick off, hiding in the concourse area. I had left a sandwich in my bag on my seat and when I returned to eat it, it seemed that it had been slightly toasted. These conditions may have contributed to the general lack of quality in the game. There was a lot more grit than style in this match. Kashima were a very dirty team, (of course I’d say that...), and Leo Silva and Jung were both lucky to have not been sent off. Jung in particular, as he spent the majority of the match kicking lumps out of Kobayashi and gave away the penalty which he can have no complaints about. His only yellow though was for a push at a corner. Again, no surprise for me to say this, but Kashima are a very unlikeable team. And their fans aren’t much better, spending the majority of the first half booing our possession. We started pretty well, hitting the post early on and with plenty of the ball. Sadly though we were lacking a cutting edge up front. I think Oniki made a mistake putting Abe on the right and Kobayashi up front. The opposite would surely have made more sense, but like with his undroppable favourite players, Oniki also seems set on playing Kobayashi up front at all costs, in spite of the evidence that Abe up front and Kobayashi on the right always works better. It wasn’t really Kobayashi’s day. The penalty miss was another rotter. If you’re going to put it low into the corner, you’ve got to find the corner and he made it far too easy for the keeper. Admittedly not as easy as last time when he kicked it straight at the Shonan keeper who didn’t even have to move, but still it wasn’t exactly a tough save if the keeper guessed the right way. There was a ridiculous amount of interference and mind games from Kashima as Kobayashi was waiting to take the penalty which can’t have helped. The keeper in particular was really taking the piss but the ref did nothing. Perhaps, however these misses can be blamed on me. I’m never confident when we win a penalty and always hope that someone else will take it rather than Kobayashi. Surely there must be another option? Fair play to him for stepping up after the last miss, but I’m not sure where we go from here. Do we keep letting him step up until he scores one? Personally, I’d rather someone else took them. It would be fair to say that his penalty misses have cost us four points in the last month. Kashima felt cheated that they didn’t get a penalty for a Taniguchi handball. It was at the other end of the pitch so I’ve only seen it on replays and I’ve seen them given and not given. I think the ref was right on this occasion, as his hand is in front of his body and the ball is blasted straight at him. Kashima disagreed though and at the end of the game booed the ref off. I laughed as I thought he had given pretty much everything else their way. It was another rotten refereeing performance to be honest. He lost control of the game early on and if he was consistent with his decisions Kashima would have been down to nine men for a significant portion of the game. Instead it was us who had a player sent off, (that notorious bad boy Abe...), and although it was pretty late on, it made for a nervy end to the game. Can’t argue with either of the yellow cards. The first was a bit silly and for the second, he took one for the team, stopping a potentially dangerous break with a foul. Unfortunately, this means he won’t be available for the next game. Neither will Morita, who picked up his fourth yellow, so we’ll have some changes again. Ienaga will be back though.
Briefly returning to my old ‘positives and negatives’, with positives first. We took a point from a tough game and one in which we were really under pressure in the second half. And Hiroshima lost again. Negatives, the penalty miss, the lack of chances and some weird subs. Given the booking and the fact he was playing out of position, Oniki should have probably have taken Abe off when Suzuki came on. I guess though his hand was forced a little by the two previous subs given that both Morita and Kobayashi had to leave the pitch due to injury. Hopefully neither of them are serious and Morita will at least have some time to recover given that he’ll miss the next game due to suspension. I feel for Abe though. He can play either on the left or up front, but he spent almost the whole game on the right out of position and then when he finally made it onto the left, got sent off chasing back to cover from one of our own corners which we’d fluffed. It seems like I’m moaning a lot again, but I was fairly satisfied with the result, if not the manner in which it came about. Guess it’s just that I really don’t like Kashima!
Next up, Kobe at home but it’s not for a couple of weeks so hopefully we can all have a bit of a rest! Whether a certain Mr. Iniesta will play, I’m not sure. I hope so, for Kengo’s sake, as he is apparently a big fan of him, but I’d rather he didn’t and they continue their fantastic run of six defeats in their last seven matches. That game is a must win. They are a club in some turmoil and we need to get back to winning ways. Hopefully the two weeks will do us good and we can turn in a good performance. Go Frontale!
Subs
GK 30. ARAI Shota
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya (on for KOBAYASHI 82')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for MORITA 66')
MF 22. SHIMODA Hokuto
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto (on for NOBORIZATO 85')
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
MF 37. SAITO Manabu
My Frontale Man Of The Match
This wasn’t the most dynamic of attacking performances so I’m looking at the other end of the pitch for this. Taniguchi didn’t have the best of games again, and I think he’s being carried by Nara at the moment. Perhaps he’s tired. I’d love to give it to Nara, but everyone would think I’m biased so it will go to….
OSHIMA Ryota - did a great job in the middle of the pitch, winning the ball fairly and not having to resort to the dirty tactics Kashima’s midfield used. Shows much more strength than you’d imagine he has and his control was perfect in this game. Bravo!
Goals
None
Highlights
The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that a previous year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want.
This will be a pretty short post as I think I’ve said before that I don’t particularly want to write much about games that I haven’t attended. This was the away trip I was most looking forward to this year, and we were all booked and ready to go before the monster typhoon intervened. You could say we’re quitters, but with a cat at home, we couldn’t really risk getting stranded in Kyushu, as I believe quite a lot of Frontale fans are as I write this. Putting aside those stranded fans’ feelings for a moment, I was quite pleased this morning to find out that our gut instinct had been right, and we wouldn’t have been able to get home. I’m still gutted I missed the game though, as the way things stand, we might not be visiting Nagasaki next year. Hopefully, they can get a run going and escape relegation. Things are pretty tight down there, but V-Varen are bottom, so obviously have most to do.
After the disappointment of Wednesday’s performance and result against Shonan, this was a welcome, and crucial return to winning ways. Once again, we were in the slightly fortunate position of playing later than Hiroshima, so were no doubt boosted by the fact that they lost again, knowing that we could potentially go top if we won. I was wondering how Oniki would respond to Wednesday’s game. I’m still not really sure what happened there to be honest, but I think it was just a combination of us still not knowing how to best play against super defensive teams and plenty of our players concurrently having an off day. Dropping Shimoda and Abe seemed a bit weird though, but I’m not trying too hard to understand Oniki’s decisions now as he clearly knows a lot more than I do about football and us sitting top of the table makes it difficult to criticise what’s going on without sounding slightly insane. Surprisingly, we switched to two up front with Chinen alongside Kobayashi, I guess to combat the increased numbers of defenders. If only he’d thought of that against Gamba! It all seemed to work anyway, as we cruised through the first half scoring twice, well in control. I don’t know if we thought the job was done by half time or whether Nagasaki sticking the big man on up front threw us, but we were woeful in the second half. But we hung on, in spite of conceding a late goal, and took the three points back to Kawasaki. Not the most exciting of games, but an effective result and given that we’re now sitting on top of the pile, I think we’d all take six more lacklustre wins. But now we are leading, we’re the target. Hiroshima’s form has been pretty bad recently, but dropping behind might just give them the kick up the backside they need to get back in gear. And I can’t say with confidence that I think we’re going to win the rest of our games this season! It has certainly got interesting now though, and we managed to avoid falling foul of any clangers from Tojo, back refereeing us for the first time since that Hiroshima game ‘offside’.
Next up, Kashima away, who unfortunately have just moved into third place, so now have something to play for. We just have to hope that still being involved in four competitions means that even their moneybags squad gets a touch thin and they gift us the three points. The game is sandwiched between the first leg of their ACL semi-final and the first leg of their Levain cup semi-final. Who knows where their priorities lie, but the league is the competition they have the least chance of winning, isn’t it? I’m sure they’d be happy to derail our chances though, given what happened last season. We go into this game without Ienaga, who somewhat foolishly picked up a late yellow for kicking the ball away and now will miss a match due to accumulated bookings. Probably could have done with having him play as, with a few exceptions, he’s been great recently. It doesn’t seem popular with Oniki, but I think we could play Kobayashi on the right and maybe continue with Chinen up front or play one of the many attacking left midfielders we’ve got up top. Or even Akasaki as I know Oniki likes to get players involved against their former clubs. I guess he’ll probably go with Suzuki on the right, but personally speaking, I’d like to see Kobayashi out their again as he always looks dangerous in that position. Fingers crossed that the interminable post match coach journey back from Ibaraki is a positive one! Go Frontale!
The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that a previous year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want.
I’m going to knock this post out quickly as there’s not much I can remember from the game. And I say that, writing this on the train home. This is always a fun away game given the fact that it’s a local derby, but if we’re being honest, it’s not a great view, with the stadium being a very shallow bowl, and we never seem to do very well against Shonan. Also, during this game, the rotten weather added an extra level of obscurity to what was going on on the pitch. This match was postponed last time due to a typhoon. It seems that the typhoon like conditions had also been postponed till today. The first half wasn’t so bad with the rain stopping on occasions and otherwise varying from a sprinkle to a shower, but the second half was unmitigated misery from a weather point of view. Just about the most exciting thing I can say about this game is that among the officials, we had one called Kawasaki and one Fujisawa, which I found pleasantly amusing whilst at the same time being a perfect impartial balance.
In spite of league positions, this game was always going to be a tricky one. Shonan were not going to play the way we wanted, and this could well be a situation that we find obstructing us again this season. Some people seemed to be presuming that the game in hand was effectively three points in the bag, but as Shonan seem to delight in doing, they ruined our evening. At least we didn’t lose, I suppose. In spite of us controlling the game, we did give them a few chances to nick a goal and destroy all our built up confidence. Thankfully, they didn’t manage to get the goal, but I fear they might have taken a hammer to our morale. The fact is, whilst we dominated possession and chances, we didn’t really do enough to test their keeper. The penalty looked like an opportunity to snatch a win in unlikely circumstances, given that we didn't look like we'd ever score, but, and I think I’ve said this before, Kobayashi probably shouldn’t be taking them. He never looks particularly confident, has missed a few and has been very much off the boil recently. Both Chinen and Abe looked a lot more assured when they have taken recent ones, but Abe was off the pitch, and it was never going to be handed to Chinen ahead of Kobayashi. Hopefully, we can find someone else in the squad to take the next one we get, and hopefully Kobayashi is happy to pass on the mantle. Can't blame it all on the penalty miss though, the whole performance was very subpar. We didn’t really deserve to win and this game was us back to our ponderous worst. I don’t want to jump back on Oniki, but the subs were a bit confusing. We seem to be back to the old shuffle half the team with every change technique. Why we didn't bring on Manabu, I don’t know. We weren’t succeeding at passing it through their defence and the long balls we tried weren’t being collected by our front players, so why not try something different? It's the same old story of us failing to break down a team who come to the game with a plan to disrupt us and pack the defence. As we still struggle to play against these tactics, I can't believe anyone bothers trying anything else against us.
Well, there’s not much else I want to write about this game. I don't really want to think about it, as it went exactly as we might have feared it would. Let’s wrap this post up and move on to the next game, which is now a totally crucial away fixture against Nagasaki. Win that and if Gamba beat Hiroshima, we’ll go top. Given that I’m a pessimist, I think that Gamba will do their half of the deal and we might stumble again. But yeah. Let’s just put this behind us and move on. Seven games to go...
Subs
GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for ABE 61')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for IENAGA 83')
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto (on for SHIMODA 71')
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
MF 32. TANAKA Ao
MF 37. SAITO Manabu
Goals
None
My Frontale Man Of The Match
It clearly can’t go to any of the front players who all misfired to various degrees. Taniguchi was misplacing passes willy-nilly at the start of the game and both full backs were back to our recent lethargic worst. As Sung-Ryong hardly had anything to do, and I'm running out of options, I’m going to give it to...
NARA Tatsuki - because I like him, and he wasn’t rubbish. In fact, some of our better attacks came from his passes. Yeah, maybe ridiculous, but if it’s going to go to anyone, it might as well be him.
Highlights
The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that a previous year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want.
The games are coming thick and fast again, and in spite of the numerous public holidays over here, I’m still having trouble getting these posts done on time. So this is another slightly rushed one. Nagoya seemed to have turned the corner a little in recent weeks, pulling away from the relegation zone, due to them getting themselves in order and signing some good players (Hello Neto!). So this was potentially a trickier game than the league table made it look. It was another decent performance though, with an unchanged starting line up from the 7-0 demolition of Consadole last week. Sure we didn’t score as many, and we conceded, but it’s another win and crucially our neighbours FC Tokyo managed to halt Sanfrecce Hiroshima, with a 1-1 draw, cutting the gap at the top to four points, with us having a game in hand. I still think all the pressure is on Sanfrecce as they have blown almost all of the huge lead they had earlier in the season. Crucially though, that lead is still partially intact, and if we want to win successive titles, we need them to slip up again. At the moment, this seems like it could happen, but we also need to keep winning. I’m probably more confident of the former happening than the latter, but it’s undeniable that we’ve just started to build a nice run. Still, plenty of potential banana skins on the road to the end of the season though, starting with our next two games away against Shonan and Nagasaki, both of whom are fighting for J1 survival and will probably not come at us like Consadole and, to a certain extent, Nagoya did. If we can get through those two games with two wins, maybe we can start dreaming. But, personally speaking, I’m going to keep talking our chances down until the season is over, as I just feel more comfortable this way!
This game looked like it would be similar to the Consadole one. With Kazama in charge, you’d expect Nagoya to play in his normal attacking way. However, they seem to have toughened up a bit in the middle of the pitch and taken their foot off the attacking football accelerator a little. I was surprised by how dirty they were, with quite a lot of nasty little fouls flying in. I should say though, that we were pretty clever with respect to Neto. I love Neto and still think we would be much better off with him rather than without him, but it’s always been true that he does on occasion get a little caught up in the game and lets his emotions get the better of him. Right from the start of the game, Kengo was getting right in his face with some meaty challenges, some of which were possibly fouls… maybe… It worked though as he finally kicked back and got a yellow towards the end of the first half, significantly reducing his effectiveness in the second half. Nice work Kengo! But yeah, Nagoya were playing a pretty smart game with us, not letting us settle but also not pushing up on us as much as you might expect, and a lot less than Consadole had. They were defending in numbers and Langerak was having a good game. Just as I made a note saying that, we scored, so I’ll take credit for it, thank you very much. Our first goal was a beautiful headed finish, in off the post past a stranded Langerak. Unfortunately for Nagoya, the finish came from one of their own defenders and whilst we were making chances, it was pretty generous of them to put one of them away for us. Our second was an absolute screamer from Abe. A really nice goal and two in two games for him. Hopefully he’s about to hit a rich vein of goals. He had a great game, all over the pitch, making a lot of important challenges in defence and always in the right position when attacking. The same couldn’t be said about Kobayashi, who was having a bit of a nightmare, and was apparently not feeling too good after the game due to dehydration. He missed a couple of absolute sitters but did manage to eventually get on the score sheet, although it looked to me more like another own goal at the time. And actually looking at the replays, it still looks like an own goal, but I guess in these cases the striker wants to get it and the defender would probably rather not have it. The encouraging thing about this goal is that it came very shortly after we’d conceded. The goal we conceded was a little unfortunate as Nara missed a challenge and the two defenders behind him didn’t really move. But, scoring shortly after conceding is good from a psychological point of view for us and the opposition. This game wasn’t one way traffic. Sung-Ryong made some good saves and aside from the goal, the defence had a good game. When Chinen came on for Kobayashi he did a good job, winning pretty much everything in the air. At this stage, the game was almost in the bag. Nagoya had to push for goals and consequently were giving us more space than we’d had all game. Abe almost got another beauty when he hit the post from outside the box with the keeper rooted to the spot. It’s really nice to see someone shooting from distance as Oshima doesn’t seem to do it so much recently and long distance specialist Moriya is still injured. Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of this game though was the fact that even when two goals ahead we were still pressing the opposition and winning the ball time after time, breaking up their attacks and nicking it off them in their own half too. It seems to be something we’ve got a lot better at in the last two games and I think this is almost certainly contributing to the better performances and results. Let’s hope we can keep it going.
Apologies, this post is a bit rambling and again light on details but I’m running out of time before the next game and right now I’m trying not to change anything in the hope that I’ve somehow hit on a lucky combination of pre-match rituals and blog posting styles that is contributing to us winning and Hiroshima not winning. As long as these results continue, I’ll keep on with these slightly random posts. It’s certainly been a lot more fun to go to games these last two weeks. Of course, every good run comes to an end, but lets hope we can stretch this one for another couple of... months. Is that too much to ask? Next up, a couple of away games, Shonan on Wednesday (our game in hand) and Nagasaki on Saturday. You’ve got to think that we need six points from these two games, but they’re just the type of games that we sometimes tend to mess up. Hopefully though, we can take the confidence we must be gaining and perform to the best of our abilities. Fingers crossed! Go Frontale!
Subs
GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for NAKAMURA 78')
MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 72')
MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto
DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES
MF 32. TANAKA Ao (on for OSHIMA 90+2')
This is a bit trickier in the last game where Ienaga was involved in everything and was an easy selection for MOTM. Once again, he performed well and he seems a natural in the Kengo role which he takes up when Kengo is substituted. Kengo did a great job too. Shimoda and Oshima went fairly unnoticed to me, which in recent times I’ve come to think means that they were doing a good job. Sung-Ryong made some good saves when he needed to, but unfortunately couldn’t stop the goal from going in. And Elsinho and Kurumaya seem rejuvenated recently. But for both sheer excitement and also doing the dirty work it goes to…
ABE Hiroyuki - great goal, and almost a great second goal too, but gets it mainly for always being involved, up front and in defence and even when he inevitably gets switched to right wing for the last 15 minutes of the game.
Highlights
The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that a previous year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want. And we have that extra footage video again at the bottom.
Jeez, where to start with this one. There was way too much action to be able to go into any detail about particular goals. There were so many of them that it was at times difficult to gather thoughts in between. This was a fantastic game to watch apart from those moments when human compassion kicked in and my thoughts inevitably turned to the opposition players and fans. It’s never nice to get beat and it’s always horrible to get thrashed. This game seemed to be something of a perfect storm contributed to by a few notable aspects which I’m going to break down into bullet points rather than try to construct any kind of coherent narrative out of what was just a really exhilarating blur. Bit of a cop out I know, but I’m a little baffled as to whether this is us showing our true colours or a real freak of a result in a bit of a strange season. Anyway, here we go.
- Finally we’re back to playing players in their best positions, and covering absent players with players who play in the relevant position rather than trying to put bigger name square pegs in round holes. I was delighted to see both Nara back alongside Taniguchi and Shimoda get a chance alongside Oshima. Kurumaya was much improved back at left back too. This is the first game in ages where I can have no gripes about any of Oniki’s decisions. Sure there was a bit of shuffling done when Nobori replaced Oshima, but the game was already won by then, and the confidence surging through the team meant that we could probably have put Abe in goal and Sung-Ryong up front and still kept the scoring going. Bringing on Tanaka was exactly the right thing to do in the situation and he got a great reception coming on, and the place really erupted when he scored. Can’t say anyone had anything near a below par game. They were all great. When a few players are in bad form, well, that’s life I guess. But when the majority of the squad is out of form, you’ve got to think there could be something going wrong behind the scenes. Which brings me on to my next point…
- Morale has seemed so low in recent games. Elsinho has looked uninterested, Nara’s few appearances saw him lacking his usual enthusiasm. The end of the last game against Kashima was a real low for us I think. The support had been great, but the performance terrible. We’d been dismantled by a side who have been pretty inconsistent this season. Perhaps this result caused some behind the scenes soul-searching or clear the air talks. Whatever happened, and maybe nothing happened, this game saw a team who were all playing for each other and giving 100%. The start was pretty ragged from a few players, but they were bailed out by their team mates. Of course team spirit is going to be boosted by a goal fest, but even in the early stages it seemed to be back after a bit of an absence. The reactions when Shimoda and Tanaka scored were great with big celebrations on the pitch, the bench and in the stands. Whether this boost in spirit is a reaction to this last game, a reaction to some ‘discussion’ within the squad and management or down to to people once again playing in their favoured positions I don’t know. But it’s very, very welcome!
- Poor Consadole probably played exactly the way we’d want a team to play against us. We should probably bear this in mind before getting too carried away. They are very much in the minority in this league, being a team who want to actually play positive football and we’re gong to have to try to recreate this performance against teams who will sit back and occasionally hoof the ball long. Their pressing of us in all areas of the pitch caused us quite a few problems early on, but also allowed us to start picking them off with counter attacks. The start of this game was nuts. Both teams were really going for it and there were plenty of chances at both ends. They could have taken the lead early on when the ball looped into net but Tokura was given offside (I think…or maybe it was a foul). If he hadn’t challenged for the ball which was already going in (I thought), and hadn’t fouled Sung-Ryong, the game could have been a lot different. Once again, poor Consadole, as they also seemed to be facing us on a day when everything we hit was on target and rebounds were coming straight back to us (see Ienaga’s goal, give him a second chance and he’ll make sure it goes somewhere you can’t stop it).
So a big victory. Seven goals, seven different scorers. Everyone wanted to score (especially Elsinho, who kept running into goal scoring positions right till the end of the game. A big change in his demeanour from recent matches!). But there was no greediness and everyone was playing for the team. This has really helped out our goal difference which was quite some way behind Sanfrecce’s but now is right up there. The fact that we knew Sagan Tosu had beaten Sanfrecce must also have given us a boost before the game. Everything seemed to fall into place and we should enjoy it, as these kind of things don’t happen very often. However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that there was an earthquake in Hokkaido the previous week, which can’t have seen Consadole turn up in perfect condition for this game. But unlike in previous encounters where we’ve sat back when one goal up, we kept playing, and scoring, right till the end. Hopefully this performance will give us some belief that we can go on and take the title. The belief has been lacking in many quarters recently and this should really give us all a bit of confidence. Hiroshima are still six points ahead (with us having a goal in hand), but you’ve got to think that the pressure is back on them now. They’ve slipped up significantly (again), and we have emphatically taken advantage. Let’s hope we can keep it together! Next up, another team who could potentially try to take the game to us and attack, Nagoya Grampus at Todoroki next Saturday. In a way, I hope they do, and I hope that we can perform like this again! Go Frontale!
Subs GK 24. ANDO Shunsuke DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei (on for OSHIMA 52') MF 16. HASEGAWA Tatsuya FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for KOBAYASHI 73') MF 27. SUZUKI Yuto DF 29. MICHAEL JAMES MF 32. TANAKA Ao (on for SHIMODA 84')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
With so many good performances and so many different goal scorers this could be tricky. I felt Abe ran him close with his excellent tracking back and defending and a cool finish for his goal, but it can only really go to…
IENAGA Akihiro - Totally bossed this game. Had a hand in pretty much all of the goals. After a few anonymous performances, (and being totally missing from the second leg against Kashima), he is back to his best in emphatic style. And he looked pretty cool…
The Frontale youtube channel usually has longer highlights provided by DAZN, but given that a previous year's highlights got wiped when the broadcaster got changed, I'm going to stick with the official J League ones. But you can watch the longer highlights here if you want. And we have that extra footage video again at the bottom.
