Vs Cerezo Osaka (away) 13/4/24 J League match 8

Cerezo Osaka 1 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

Well, I dunno. What’s there to say? One again we lost. Once again we lost away at Cerezo. Once again we lost away at Cerezo and I’m not that pissed off. Oh hang on. That’s probably the headline. Last year’s away game here saw us get battered 3-0, but I came away from that game with some positivity thinking that at least the great Oniki had finally tried something different. Not sure that’s particularly the case with this match, but at least you could say that we played better than we did against Machida. Admittedly that’s not a high bar to clear though. As the games pass this year and the defeats keep on piling up it would make sense to get more angry about our 2024 uselessness. Certainly looking at the result of this game would give you plenty of things to moan about. But to be honest, I thought this was a game that should have been a 0-0, with both teams showing that they were pretty crap when it came to finishing off chances. As it was we’ve ended up even closer to the relegation zone and the bottom of the table and Cerezo ended the weekend at the top. To be honest, this was something of a blessing, as usually the trains after the game are unpleasantly busy. It seemed that knowing that they’d gone top of the league, the Cerezo fans decided to hang around and enjoy the moment. I can't say for sure as this was another game where we left pretty soon after the final whistle. For these kind of shitty performances at home we’d probably go on the final whistle, but at away games, particularly when we’ve put up a bit of a fight, I feel like I should at least wait and acknowledge the bow of shame. Not going to hang around cheering off our losing team till they get back into the changing room though. Life is really way too short for that. I was considering if there was a way to enjoy Frontale games more this year and the only thing I could think of would be to avoid the matches as much as possible and otherwise continue with the away game activities or home game routine. That way you’d get all the fun and none of the misery. Hmmmm. Perhaps worth considering. As I don’t think there’s much to be said about either Cerezo, (basically not that good on the day, but crucially, with some kind of plan and like most teams, not as bad as us), and the ref, (pretty crap but not offensively so apart from him letting pretty much anything go unless one of our Brazilian players was involved in which case, he gave them a booking), I’m going to dispense with the usual headings and instead wrap this up in one bloated miserable diatribe. Well, maybe not miserable, as like I said, this defeat was a vast improvement on the Machida game. But definitely bloated and certainly a diatribe. Ok, here we go.

I've said it plenty of times and whilst people don't like to hear it, right now (and for a while as far as I'm concerned but not to most), Oniki is a bit crap isn’t he? I suspect the board and him will realise this fact shortly after our relegation to J2 is confirmed. I think it’s clear that we are very much in the diminishing returns era now. I’ve been moaning for years and with every passing game it seems that what I’ve been saying seems to be coming increasingly apparent. Admittedly, we’ve been getting shafted by injuries recently. This weekend the club has confirmed that Maruyama is injured. And Miura has a knee injury so don’t expect him back any time soon. And unsurprisingly, Jesiel's injury been confirmed. Don't forget that Oniki played a clearly unfit Jesiel, kept him on the pitch long after he looked like he was crocked, and eventually left it till we’d conceded and he was completely crocked till he changed anything. So he’s definitely got to be blamed for Jesiel’s absence. Let’s hope it’s not a long term thing. But history says that it probably will be. So yeah, plenty of injuries. You could say that’s why Oniki played a striker at right back and a midfielder at left back. Well, you could, but there was a player on the bench who can play in either of those positions, so the truth has to be that Oniki as usual likes to play his favourites, regardless of logic in all but the rarest of occasions. For a bit of positivity when it comes to injuries, Oshima and Gomis played in a practice game on Sunday against JEF. Perhaps slightly unfortunate that we have plenty of fit players who play in their positions though and a manager who is wedded to the same players in pretty much the same formation. Perhaps Oniki will go for Oshima at right back And Gomis at left back in a game soon. That’s the level of out of the box thinking we’re dealing with.

So Segawa at right back and Tachibanada at left back. Sounds like an attacking line up, right? Well… maybe in theory. It was nice to see us equal our total number of shots on target in the whole game against Machida after just four minutes in this game. The match stats will tell you that we had a magnificent five shots on target in this game! Sounds even better when you consider we’d only had 13 shots on target in the previous five games. But crucially, we still failed to score. That’s three games without a goal now. Blimey. Although I don’t see there being a great deal of difference since we switched to two defensive midfielders, (when we played FC Tokyo at home and somehow... won! That result is looking increasingly bizarre week by week. Unless you remember that two of the goals were absolute gifts from Chofu and the other was scored after their keeper had been sent off), we’ve tightened things up a little at the back but have significantly blunted our attack. Oniki did exactly the same thing last year, (or was it the year before?), when he played Tachibanada and Joao Schmidt together. Much like last time he tried it, it has stopped us conceding for fun. Unlike last time though, in 2024 this change means us conceding one goal and losing rather than keeping a clean sheet and hoping for a 0-0. The attack blunting effect of the change is pretty much the same as when Oniki last tried it though. Erison looks completely isolated and our don't-go-forwards-if-there's-a-backwards-pass-available approach is unsurprisingly not that effective when it comes to scoring. So don’t any of you dare say he NEVER changes anything! Obviously the truth is that he seldom changes anything and when he does he changes to a formula that he’s tried before, which didn’t work then and won't work now. That’s the beauty and quality of Oniki Frontale! BRAVO!!!!! It’s a shame that the other myriad formations or tactical approaches that are available are never even considered by him. Perhaps he’s only got a very limited number of options on his magnet board. It always makes me laugh how he seems to shuffle his magnets as a sign to show everyone that he’s really thinking. Shuffle them around, stand up purposefully and then impose exactly the same tactics as last time. Please, someone in the club, steal that board and smash it to pieces. I think he needs to go magnet cold turkey. It’s the only way we’ll break out if this insanely looping reality that we’re in. Most teams would look at our steady decline and notice that something needs to change. It looks like we’ll go with the ‘wait till we’re relegated’ route before anyone even dares question Oniki’s tactics or abilities as a manager. Before I was aware of the extent of our latest injuries I looked at the starting line up and my only conclusion was that Oniki had a nice job lined up somewhere and was desperately trying to get sacked so he could get a pay out rather than resign. Now I know the extent of our injuries… actually maybe I still think that same thing. But the truth is, Oniki is unbelievably risk averse. The weird thing is that he sees playing 3/4 of the defence out of position as being less risky than playing players who aren’t experienced but can play in those positions. I’m almost convinced that if we got a couple of injuries in the goalkeeping department Oniki would probably play Tachibanda there rather than Ando or Hayasaka. Thankfully we haven’t had that particular crisis yet as Sung Ryong kept us in the game again early on in this match. Well Sung-Ryong and some truly crap Cerezo finishing. The stats at the end of the game were fairly even, with us actually having more shots. The truth is though that this was another crap performance and one where we came up against a team who were also on this occasion playing like crap so luckily we avoided getting whupped. Our results have been terrible but you could probably say that we’ve been kind of lucky considering how poor we’ve been.


I’m not that interested in continuing this blog post much longer so let’s rip through one other notable thing. This game saw us come up against Nobori for the first time since he left us. When he came to say hello after the match he was moved to tears. I suspect this was probably tears of joy as he noticed he’d dodged a real bullet by leaving us before the start of this season. Not sure where he was playing for Cerezo as it sometimes looked like left back, sometimes centre back and sometimes defensive midfield. I wonder if the Cerezo manager actually has some original ideas about how to play football. Oniki take note please. I suspect it’s unlikely that he will. Nobori was the latest in a long line of players we have discarded to ‘weaker’ teams who’ve come back to us, beaten us and kept their new team in a much higher position in the league. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have got rid of these players. I actually think our squad this year is better than last year's. It’s just the complete lack of ideas that is the killer. 

 

(No) Banner wisdom -

 

I'm sad to say that there were no amusing banners on display at this game, which means that my snarky section is dying before it even really got started. So instead this week I'll change the focus slightly.

Heavenly audio -

 

Every team seems to have a rousing anthem to gee up their fans before the match. FC Tokyo go for a karaoke backing track of 'You'll Never Walk Alone' with Colin from the local Eikaiwa multi-tracking several vocal parts in a few different voices, (Chofu Eikaiwa employee, Chofu ALT, Chofu based gaijin TikTok content maker), over the top to blast out at maximum volume to cover up the mumbling coming from the stands. YFM have their shitty towel twirling 'banger'. Vissel Kobe proudly sing about the three lions on their shirts and the return of football to it's true home in Hyogo. And of course I shouldn't forget Urawa having a look at their logo and the hip music lover on their staff scanning through his collection of 'NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL MUSIC!' CDs to find the first song with the word 'house' in its title (it's on NOW 23 in case you were wondering). Cerezo took a different approach and asked their staff if any of them had a casio keyboard at home, the cheaper the better. Thankfully one of them did and after carefully selecting the Funky Pop preset and letting it rip, they did a bit of one finger drum pad fills to keep things exciting. Of course it was crap, and of course every team does these kind of crap things. But you know, I just thought I'd try to inject just a little of of levity in this otherwise dour post. 

Next up Tokyo Verdy at home next weekend. They now sit ahead of us in the league. That’s true for fifteen teams though, so perhaps not worth mentioning. We've already lost to the other two newly promoted teams at home. And we’ve played two of the teams who are below us in the league so are supposedly worse than us and lost to one of them! The other was a slightly unsteady win at the start of the season before we knew quite how bad things were going to get. Ah! The glory of 2024! How nice it would be to go back to the days when we could play like shit but not lose! With Takai away with the U23 Japan team it seems like we'll be enjoying this injury crisis in defence for a while. But we should be used to that kind of thing, as it seems we have an injury crisis in defence every season. 2024 is going to be the year of throwbacks and repetition it seems. All of the problems we've had in previous years just keep cropping up again. I guess that's got something to do with us doing exactly the same thing every week and expecting things to magically start working. I suppose at least we'll soon have one new thing though to experience soon though. The excitement of being in a real relegation battle. 

 

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 60')
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 55')

Subs
Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
MF 6. ZE RICARDO (on for YAMAMOTO 73')

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 73')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto

FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for MARCINHO 58')

FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 73')
FW 28. PATRICK VERHON (on for WAKIZAKA 79')

Goals

LEO CEARA (Cerezo) 70' 1-0

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

Briefly toyed with doing a serious FMOTM, and then with a sarcastic one. But finally settled on just not bothering.

 

Highlights  

 

Vs Machida Zelvia (home) 7/4/24 J League match 7

Kawasaki Frontale 0 - 1 Machida Zelvia

Aaaaaahhhhh. Another lovely day out at the football! What could think better than getting out the house in a lovely spring day, having a beer at the stadium, singing the songs of and cheering for your favourite players as they enter the pitch and then watching another 90 minutes where we almost entirely failed to have a shot on target?‘But come on’, you say, ‘Don’t exaggerate!’ I apologise. We did have one shot on target. I can’t remember it, but the stats say so. And ‘Don’t be so glum’, you say, ‘This is only one game’. And once again, I have to hold my hands up and acknowledge my error as we’ve had plenty of shots on target recently. In fact we’ve had a massive 13 in total in our last five games. Accounting for additional time in games, I reckon that works out at a wonderful one shot on target every 38 minutes. So it’s kind of unfortunate that I can’t remember yesterday’s one shot on target. If we carry on in this way, and why on earth would anyone ever imagine that we’d try to play in any other way, I’ll have to make sure I pay more attention and enjoy, if my calculations are correct, the 81 remaining shots on target we will have in the next 31 league games. And let’s look on the bright side. If we’re only having one shot on target every 38 minutes, I guess that means our conversion rate is pretty good, as we’re scoring about once every 70 minutes. Bravo! Who says I’m never positive on here? So what was there apart from the feast of shots on target in this game? Well I guess we had the league debut of Ze Ricardo and a first start for Yamauchi. Naturally they were the first two players to be changed, apart from the injured Jesiel. (More on that later). After all it’s the Oniki way to give new players a little sniff of the action and then withdraw them at the first opportunity, apparently believing that it is them who is letting us down, rather than all the other players who’ve played all the other games that we’ve been terrible in. Or, dare I say it, could it be the manager who is still going with the same idea, which has diminished in effectiveness so significantly that it must now be at minus levels? Our game plan literally now helps the opposition beat us. It used to be the case that if you liked seeing attacking play and goals we would be a good team to watch. That probably remains to be the case, but now we’re a good team to watch because the opposition will almost certainly attack and score. This year has been rotten so far. We’ve lost at home to both of the promoted teams. BRAVO! We’ve lost to a team that currently sit in 17th and have only one win this year. BRAVO! Still, at least it means that I can get to the pub quickly after the match as I don’t think there’s much point in staying to wait to clap the players after the game. I think they probably feel pretty embarrassed to have to come and stand in front of us. Aaaaahhhh.

Us -

It’s a shame that I can’t have a bit more fun in these posts at the moment. There’s no room for funnies and it’s all just a bit bleak, isn’t it? I’m sorry to sound like a broken record, but this one’s got to go down as another Oniki disaster. In retrospect, the surprise inclusion of two centre backs on the bench probably hinted at what would most likely happen. Clearly Jesiel wasn’t fit to start the game. Almost immediately he was stretching after every effort, looking like he was injured. But was he removed? Of course not! Far better to wait till he was really properly injured and we’d conceded, right? Oniki has done this before with Jesiel too. We know he’s a great player but we also know that he’s a bit injury prone. After he got back to some kind of fitness after a long injury, he was absolutely unnecessarily used as a sub away at Sagan Tosu a few years ago and came on and got another big injury. We can only hope that this isn’t the case again. Not only did Oniki failing to take him off when he was clearly not in a good way probably worsen the injury but also basically gave them their goal. Jesiel could hardly move at that stage so it’s no wonder that they cut through us with ease. Also it probably didn’t help that Oniki still insists on playing a striker at right back. It’s no surprise that opposition teams like to attack down that side. More often than not, they’ll either get past him or they’ll get a free kick. I don’t blame Segawa though. I blame the manager who thinks he’s a better option there than all the right backs we have. I guess we can at least be slightly thankful that Tachibanada wasn’t available for this game as if he had been, Oniki would probably have played him at right back and moved Segawa to left back. No idea what’s happened to Tachibananda to be honest. We don’t normally get this kind of information so that’s no surprise, I guess. Oniki is a problem. He’s been grasping so hard for something, anything to turn our form around. Well anything other than making some big changes to the team and tactics. Of course we know those can’t be tampered with, right? So when we got a bit of a flukey win against FC Tokyo he felt he’d found his magic formula. And decided to wring it to death through three games in nine days. A not-in-perfect-condition Jesiel shouldn’t be playing three whole games in nine days. Ienaga is almost 40 and he too was expected to play for the majority of those three games too. And even for the younger and fitter players, I suspect the relentless shitness of our play has got to be grinding them down a bit.

We're probably either about to blast the ball over the bar and into
the stand or more likely play it back to Sung-Ryong

And then think about the players who are watching from the stands, seeing how terrible we are playing and are still not really getting a look in. But you know, keep on with the same stuff, right? Do that short passing stuff at the back to ‘draw out the opposition’. If you manage to not lose the ball and successfully draw the opposition out, as soon as you get to the centre circle, be sure to pause, pass the ball back, generously letting the opponents get back in position in their line of ten defenders. Joyous stuff! Under no circumstances try to attack. Make sure that Erison doesn’t get the ball. If by some chance he gets the ball, make sure that he has no support. Keep those lovely sideways passes coming. In this game it was an impressive 559 passes per shot on target. On Wednesday against YFM we only managed 304 passes for our one shot which must have been a huge disappointment. In this game we had 62% possession, a massive 17 shots to their 7 but still they managed to get double the amount on target. Is it just me, or is our football just a complete waste of time? We’ve often spoken about our football as being a kind of art installation, where the aesthetic is more important than result. So I’m sure everyone in the stadium really enjoyed the first 38 minutes of the game where we didn’t even manage a shot off target let alone one on target. Once again our starting line up did nothing and it was only when we made changes that we started to do something, But let’s be honest, even then we didn’t do much. Looking back I guess the real highlight for me was seeing that arsehole Tani get sent off. I’ve had a problem with him since he got a Damiao overhead goal ruled out by crying because he’d poked himself in the eye or something. Of course we didn’t bother taking advantage of the extra man and instead contrived to just come up with more ways of missing the target. Confidence and effectiveness must be at an all time low. Presumably the best way to solve that is by keeping the same tactics for the next five games. DON’T. UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. SHOOT. And don’t ever change anything.

Them -

In this match our art experiment came up against its polar opposite. Machida were ugly, thuggish and dull. Oh, and effective, so the opposite in that way too. They took their chance and I don’t think you could say we even really made a chance.  I don’t think they’ll win any admirers for the way they play and I can’t imagine anyone outside of Machida will take much pleasure in them winning. They didn’t even look that good. But they did crucially look better than us. Their manager, aside from his stone age approach to the game should be derided for his white trainers, suit and white t-shirt combination. But should be praised (faintly, reluctantly) for coming up with (perhaps that’s not the right word, maybe digging up) tactics that work. We all knew they’d play like this and we probably would have been able to deal with them if we hadn’t decided to play a striker at right back and a defender who could barely move. I think that in spite of the piles of cash they’ve spent and that they have stashed in various places around their stadium, they are probably in a false position at the top of the league. But as long as they keep playing teams who are both as shit and as overconfident in their abilities as us, they’ll probably keep winning.

Ref -

Only one line will suffice here, I think. Yamamoto is a useless attention seeking waste of space of a ref. But even he’s not as bad at reffing as we are at playing football.

Banner wisdom -

‘This is Machida’

There were a few things in their flags to have a look at. ’No-one likes us, we don’t care’ for example. Yeah, but not really for the same reasons no-one likes Millwall. A stone island logo flag to attempt to sure up the hooligan thing. Oh, and of course one of the Japanese imperial flags that knucklehead fans in plenty of teams love. But the highlight has to be ‘This is Machida’. I know plenty of people believe Machida is in Kanagawa, but I’m a little surprised that the fans didn’t know better. Maybe that flag makes more sense at home games, eh?

Next up Cerezo Osaka away on Saturday. There’s a nice beer truck outside the stadium. Aside from the red card, the highlight of this game for me was watching a boy try to push big bits of beautiful looking clear ice through a drain cover after the match. There’s definitely a way to extend that into our season / supporter’s money / players’ careers going down the drain, but I’ll let you do that bit yourself. Let’s hope I can find some ice and a drain on Saturday as I think the football will be awful again. Something to look forward to, eh? Unless Oniki changes something. But as far as I know there isn’t a porcine airport near the stadium so I think it’s unlikely pigs will be flying.

 

 

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

DF 4. JESIEL
DF 2. TAKAI Kota

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 6. ZE RICARDO (Yellow card 23')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON (Yellow card 56')
FW 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata

Subs
Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (on for JESIEL 35')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 66')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for ZE RICARDO 46')

FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for YAMAUCHI 46')

FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for YAMAMOTO 82')

Goals

FUJIO (Machida) 32' 0-1

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

If you've come to this section, expecting there to be anything here, you have made a big mistake.

 

Highlights

Vs Yokohama F Marinos (away) 3/4/24 J League match 6

Yokohama F Marinos 0 - 0 Kawasaki Frontale

A 0-0 is never usually something to get excited about, but to be honest, after this 0-0 I actually felt quite pleased. I don’t know what that says really. Definitely it says something about the lowering of my expectations for this year. The 3-0 win against Chofu was clearly a game where the score didn’t really reflect the performance and with that in mind, I’d say a 0-0 away at our most disliked rivals probably has to go down as another step in the right direction. I mean, they also look pretty average this year, but when you consider some of the teams we’ve lost to already this year, this 0-0 was a decent enough result. Perhaps it’s best to not look at the details too much though, as for long periods of this game we really rode our luck. I think they hit the woodwork a few times and we had to rely on a great performance from Sung-Ryong to keep us in the game. And that’s just what he did. However, there were definitely times when we might have been equally likely to snatch a win. Well, if we’d managed to hit the target anyway, and that’s a big if recently. All in all, this was a pretty low quality game but was at the same time, quite an exciting one. No-one wants to hear this kind of balanced and reasonable take though. So let’s get on with some ridiculously exaggerated stuff about us and some ridiculously petty stuff about them under the old headings but with a new bonus section.

Not a bog standard pitch, but a pitch perfect bog

Us -

An unchanged side from against FC Tokyo was the least surprising thing about this game. Oniki presumably thought he’d finally found the magical combination to win and was therefore never going to change it. I can’t say I would have changed much either. It’s probably worth mentioning though that until he changed the starting line up in the last game we were leading only through what, considering the assistance from FC Chofu, should probably count as a half own goal, the Tokyo defence doing their best to put each other out of position and allow the ball to be put into an empty net. I still think Segawa at right back isn’t the solution to our problems. Once again in this game, he did alright, but there were clearly times when you could see he wasn’t a defender and we got lucky on a few occasions. I don’t think we should really be asking strikers to do the tough tackling in defence if we can avoid it. That’s probably partly why Marcinho got his second red card in twelve minutes of game time since he was last sent off. There’ll be more about this in the opposition and ref sections but for now, I’ll just say that I feel sorry for him as clearly he’s not a dirty player and he can’t be feeling very good right now. With Miura getting crocked by a YFM foul, which I think the ref didn’t give and probably didn’t even see, and potentially out for a while (after he left the pitch on a stretcher), we might see some shuffling around at the back. Presumably Sasaki could play in his favoured left back spot and either Ominami or Sai might play at right back. Who am I kidding? Oniki will somehow clone Segawa and play him in both positions. Skipping quickly around the rest of the pitch, Sung-Ryong continuing in goal shows that the goalkeeper position is maybe just going to be one that we swap after every defeat. The centre back pairing of Jesiel and Takai definitely seems to be the best one we’ve tried so far, but that is also probably something that will only last until they really have a nightmare and then we’ll shuffle the defenders again. Both Takai and Jesiel have had games in recent memory where instead of looking solid, they’ve messed up repeatedly, so let’s just hope they don’t both do it at the same time. I think it’s undeniable that they are our first choice pairing right now though.

The midfield didn’t work quite as well as against Tokyo but was still ok, I think. I’ve seen it mentioned in a few places that our formation has been changed to 4-2-3-1 or 4-2-1-3 but I didn’t notice any difference really and we’re probably talking more about approach and tactics being the difference. Guess it’s something that we can look at on the website and think that Oniki is making some amendments to the plan which wasn’t working. I don’t see Seko as being a defensive midfielder and I don’t think he was playing any differently from when in his usual position next to Wakizaka. To be honest though, the stand is so far from the pitch at the Nissan Stadium that it’s hard to appreciate anything that isn’t happening immediately in front of the nearest goal. With Miura being subbed due to his injury in the first half, we kind of lost our flexibility through subs. (Hahaha, as if we would have made interesting or different changes anyway!). Maybe we should have tried to last till half time with ten men and then we could have made the change during the break and then would have had three substitution windows left. As it was, we finished the game without making a fifth change. Not sure either Kobayashi or Yamamoto could have done much anyway as the end of the match was just wild, random and a total rollercoaster of mess. We came so close to winning it, but also came so close to losing. However, you have to think that our supporters would have left the ground a lot happier than the YFM fans. And that’s exactly the way I like that balance to be! But let’s not get too excited, eh? The possession stats were surprisingly even, and the shot count was closer than expected (18 to them and 15 to us according to Flashscore). The big problem for us, and I guess for them to a certain extent is that out of those 33 shots, only five were on target, and only one of those on target shots was by us. So it’s something of a surprise to find that I came away from the game moderately satisfied when you consider that we only hit the target once. Flashscore also says that nether team had a shot on target in the second half. What a display of the highest quality! It also says that we outshot them in the second half, which is pretty poor for them, isn’t it? Especially as it was 12 vs 10 for a significant portion of that time.

Ref -

In order to link seamlessly I’ve changed the usual order of my subheadings slightly. I thought the ref Kimura was once again an absolute disgrace. It does seem to be the case that was soon as a ref thinks they are the top dog in the league they become even shitter than they usually are and I think this is the case with Kimura this year. The imbalance when it came to giving out cards in this game was insane. Takai got one for disrupting the air flow around the always liable to topple Anderson Lopes. In the replay you can clearly see the moment that the waft of air punches into the strikers leg and causes him to fly through the air. Kimura was so determined to give Tachibanada a card that he missed the horrible foul on Miura. Sasaki got booked for not even making contact. It was truly one-eyed. Nothing for an elbow in the back of Wakizaka, nothing for Tono getting booted in midair as he’s kicking the ball, (which was similar to the Sasaki yellow where he made no contact and did get a card). I guess the difference is that when we get fouled we go down and maybe lie there for a bit and then get up. We really need to work on that writhing and wiggling thing if we want Kimura to notice and get his cards out. I’m, not going to moan about the red card, but I think Marcinho was a bit unlucky as the terrible pitch didn’t help with his planted foot sliding as he made the tackle. Let’s ignore the fact that the ref didn’t even seen to give the foul till the linesman intervened, as he was so focussed on the action that he missed it. Even though he apparently hadn’t seen it, the yellow came out quickly, as an almost Pavlovian response . YFM player on the floor rolling and wriggling, get the card out. As soon as it was referred to VAR I knew it was going to be a red and we can’t have any complaints. Well aside, from the fact that the ref who had got most things wrong previously actually got this decision right… eventually.

The side of the pitch that they forgot
to plough before kick off

Them -

It would be easy to fill this section with a lot of personal attacks on YFM players and snide comments about almost every aspect of the club. And you know, it’s nice to do the easy thing sometimes, isn’t it? It’s kind of astonishing that out of their current and last two managers, it seems that Kevin Muscat was the most reasonable of the three. Kewell who I thought from his playing career was a decent enough person, seems to be a whining little (vertically at least) shit. After the game he said that most of our chances were offside which seems a bit of a weird thing to focus on. He also had the cheek to complain about the pitch. Perhaps he didn’t realise it was a home game. The pitch was an absolute disgrace to be honest. Huge swathes of it with no grass at all. Not particularly heavy rain resulting in massive puddles and boggy patches. Presumably Kewell blames us for the weather too. His team is full of players who roll around on the floor at the slightest of contact and often do the same at no contact at all. But clearly that approach works when you have an experienced ref like Kimura in charge. Somewhat surprisingly considering the rain, thankfully their supporters didn’t get their shitty little tricolor umbrellas out and do their coordinated twirling. Their club slogan this year seems to be ‘Brave and challenging’. The first half of that seems to be a barefaced lie given how easily they go down. I like to think the second part is directed towards either the challenge of them trying to stay on their feet after sensing the approach of an opponent, the difficulties of attempting play football on a bog that has been painted green in places, or the experience for their fans of watching a team obviously full of cheats and arseholes fail to score against ten men who haven’t been able to defend for most of this year. Or maybe all three. Traditionally it is said that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But whilst I acknowledge that some of our slogans have been awful too, I think stone throwing is the only natural behaviour when it’s your neighbours. One final thing, when they showed their team announcement video, the weird pattern around the neck of their shirts made it look like they were all wearing tight chunky gold chains. Or perhaps it’s just my eyesight. Or maybe they are all the rage in Yokohama and that was the intention. Naturally, it goes without saying that all of our kits present and past have been absolutely flawless.

Banner wisdom -

A new section where I focus on the insight of other teams banners and flags and appreciate their wisdom.

‘Sail for the TOP’

 

I initially interpreted this as an attempt to sail uphill which I think doesn’t normally work. But maybe the TOP part is an acronym. Any suggestions as to what it stands for, please let me know.

 
 

So, an unusual evening where I somehow managed to leave the stadium feeling pretty good about what on reflection was an absolutely terrible, albeit somewhat exciting game. I guess even when you draw, it’s a moral victory if your opponents are more upset about the result than you are. The first half was pretty awful for us, but we really gave it a go in the end, so well done to the players. Next up we have Machida Zelvia at home on Sunday. I’ve been long saying during their good run that they would be found out sooner or later so was delighted to see them lose to Sanfrecce. I’d be even more delighted if they collapse when they come up against us. Not totally convinced that will happen though. Even though it will be our third game in nine days, I would imagine that Oniki won’t change anything much, although the Miura injury might mean that he has to at least make a change there. Fingers crossed we can put another dent in Machida’s fairy-tale rise to the top part of J1, all achieved with merely an absolutely fucking massive financial investment. It’s the stuff dreams are made of! I guess with this in mind, whatever the result, the next blog post could be an interesting one.

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

DF 4. JESIEL
DF 2. TAKAI Kota (Yellow card 22')

DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (Yellow card 45+5')
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (Yellow card 56')
FW 9. ERISON
FW 17. TONO Daiya

Subs
Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (on for SEKO 83')

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (Yellow card 61') (on for MIURA 45+5')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 62')
FW 23. MARCINHO (Red card 73') (on for TONO 62')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki

Goals

Not a sausage

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

There will always be a few candidates in a match where we were down to ten men and hung on. If we’d managed to win it perhaps it wold have been someone further forward, but as we didn’t score, it has to go to…

TAKAI Kota and JUNG Sung-Ryong - Sorry Jesiel for not involving you in this, but Takai seemed to do a really good job of keeping last season’s top scorer and legendary moat jumper Anderson Lopes quiet. Hopefully both players can continue their seasons in that way. And Sung-Ryong, after having almost nothing to do last week was really worked hard in this game and made some amazing saves.

 

Highlights

Vs FC Tokyo (home) 30/3/24 J League match 5

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 0 FC Tokyo

Ah…. It’s lovely when we win, isn’t it? It’s even better when it’s against a local rival in a somewhat artificially constructed derby. And by a few clear goals! Ambassador, you are really spoiling us. I’ve come away from this game with scandalously few notes which means this is all going to be a bit slapdash but I’m sure you’d expect nothing else. As the next game is fast approaching and it’s already Monday evening when I’m writing this, let’s get into it.

First of all a few words about the latest starting line up. Sung-Ryong was back in goal. I think I said before that I think there’s not a great deal of difference who we have in goal this year and with that in mind, I think it’s very much a case of you hang on to the spot unless you make a massive cock up.  In the cold light of day rather than during the game, I’m not sure Kami flapping at that cross that hit the bar against Kashima was a total clanger, but it seems that might have been the reason for another change in goal. This game, with FC Tokyo having just the ONE shot on target, (I think in second half injury time!), is unlikely to give us any new insight into who should be in goal. I will say though that the save was a pretty good one, and instinctively I feel more comfortable when Sung-Ryong is in goal. That opinion is a bit harsher on Kami than it was last year though. In central defence I thought we’d already tried all the possible combinations but I was wrong! Jesiel and Takai was a new one! I don’t know if them playing together is the magic formula though. I think pretty much every centre back has made at least one horrible blunder this year. People might comment that Takai has been in the team for our two 2024 clean sheets. I’d probably counter that by saying that he was in the team when we conceded five times against a newly promoted team too though. Yamamoto didn’t play, I think for the first time we’ve had Oniki’s first choice 11 out. I don’t think you can really make a connection between his absence and us winning though as I think he’s consistently been our best midfielder this year. But it seems that he and Wakizaka are probably best in the same position and I can't see Oniki dropping Wakizaka. Hmmm. It was nice to see Tachibanada back where he plays best though. Of course though this meant that the only natural option at right back was Segawa (hehe), who is presumably ahead of Sasaki, Sai, Ominami and Tanabe there. I think that’s all of the people in the squad who play right back who weren’t selected. Up front Erison returned from injury, much to my delight. Sadly we didn’t get the (at least) one goal his appearance normally guarantees. But he really is our best option there as he’s just a brute. And a brute with a great eye for goal. (Well apart from the fresh air shot/half scuff in the second half when it seemed that we were focusing on experimenting with different ways to waste great scoring opportunities. Replacing the banned Marcinho was Tono, who finally got a chance to play in something like his best position. I think having him there gave our attack a bit of variation. Not saying that Marcinho shouldn’t play, but just that we shouldn’t rely on him so heavily, and so predictably. So that’s the changes in the team. I think Segawa had a pretty good game to be honest. Likewise Miura. The midfield looked really solid and the amount of time that we just robbed the ball from FC Tokyo shortly after they entered our half was lovely! We scored three times! Amazing! We carried on attacking right up till the end instead of taking the ball to the corner flag constantly after the 85th minute. It was fun! I am fully aware though that this is very much coloured by the fact that we won. So with that in mind, let’s get negative!

The first goal was an absolute gift from FC Tokyo. In fact maybe that actually made the first goal going in all the more enjoyable. The other two goals came after Tokyo were down to 10 men after a very welcome red card for their keeper which probably decided the game, even though the margin at that stage was only one goal. I think that vocally I celebrated the red card a bit too much, particularly as there was lengthy VAR check after my celebration before it was finally given. The second goal went in off Nagatomo’s backside which also was very amusing. OG = お尻ゴール. Hang on this is supposed to be the negative part and instead I’m posting enjoyable stuff… (Before I switch back to that, let me just say that Yamauchi’s assist and his subsequent celebration was a real joy). However, let’s not forget that quite a lot of the first half of this match was basically both teams focusing all of their efforts on intensely pressing the opposition’s short goal kicks to absolutely no effect. It was nice of FC Tokyo to join in with our usual Frontale performance art piece of futile yet beautiful repetition. Any excitement about us winning has to be tempered by the fact that they seemed to be able to do almost nothing when they approached our goal. I don’t know if that’s their preferred front three this year, but if it is, they must have really been having an off day, as aside from their late fast break and only shot on target, they never looked like they were getting anywhere near close to scoring. Matsuki, who obviously is a contender for number one hate figure, looked pretty useless I thought. Delighted! Araki whose parent club makes him a perfect fit for the same award was also anonymous. Lovely! But with this in mind, you’ve got to say that any delight about our comfortable win has to be qualified by the overall poor quality of the game. With this in mind though, I think the performance wasn’t actually that important. I don’t particularly think we’ve been unlucky so far this year and have largely got what we deserved. But a first home win should hopefully create a bit of good feeling around the team. It certainly did in the pub afterwards! (Although obviously the team weren’t in the pub with us). So to sum up, I’d probably say the right thing to do is to delight in the big win, whilst understanding that the performance was by no means as impressive as the result suggests, and while the goals put a nice gloss on things, the real significant things are the three points and the boost it will hopefully give us.

FC Tokyo fans either claiming some regal heritage or
really should go and get that checked out by a doctor

Oh, almost forgot to mention the ref. I thought he was a ref that let a hell of a lot of things go, but officiated the game in a pretty even handed way. So I suppose that is almost…. praise. So let’s undermine that by saying that there was one absolutely horrendous bit of reffing from him when Ienaga was being relentlessly fouled, but managed to keep the ball, and the ref decided to wait until Ienaga had shrugged off the fouler and played a nice pass into the middle towards the goal until he blew up for the free kick, which from my scant knowledge of the rules of the game seems to be the complete opposite to how you’re supposed to play the advantage in these kind of situations. See, I couldn’t resist a bit of a moan, could I? But Ueda did… alright. Which in 2024 J1 amounts to high praise to be honest. A quick look back at posts on previous games he’s been in charge of suggests that he’s either pretty good, or absolutely terrible, with the one constant being that he doesn’t give much. Thankfully he went for a pretty good on this occasion! And before you start thinking that my past opinons were based more on our results than the ref’s performance, the last two games we’ve had with him were a big win where I thought he was terrible and a dodgy draw where I thought he was pretty good.

Ref Ueda about to commit an absolutely crunching
foul to break up a Frontale attack

Next up, YFM away on Wednesday in what is a bit of a local derby packed couple of weeks, because after that we have Machida at home. I don’t know if the fixture computer does this on purpose. You might think it would make sense to put the closer to home goes in around Golden Week as loads of people are traveling at that time. Instead, the fixture computer, which is almost certainly a modified fax machine, has given us Sanfrecce Hiroshima away and Avispa Fukuoka away around that time, nicely slotting in Urawa at home in the middle lest anyone get the idea of combing the two away trips. And then after Avispa we’re back home against Consadole before retuning to Kyushu for the second time in two weeks. My league game 100% attendance is going to be killed off very early on this season. YFM away will show us quite how positive we should be after this game. They aren’t doing particularly well this year either but it’s never an easy game and they are almost certainly my most disliked team in the league. Although Kashima and Urawa obviously are right up there too. Sorry this post has been light on anything amusing and hasn’t even contained that much moaning and opposition baiting. I guess it’s just a relief that we’re back going in the right direction. Whether that is a lucky accident or not, I guess we’ll find out soon.

Team
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 34')
DF 2. TAKAI Kota

DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. ERISON
FW 17. TONO Daiya

Subs
Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for SEGAWA 64')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for IENAGA 90+5')
FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for ERISON 82')
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for TONO 82')
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for WAKIZAKA 90+5')

Goals

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) 34' 1-0

YAMADA (Frontale) 83' 2-0
TACHIBANADA (Frontale) 90+2' 3-0

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

This is a bit of a tricky one for a change. It could easily be someone from the midfield as the ball just didn’t seem to be able to get through it when Tokyo attacked. And it could have been a few other players too, but I dunno, for me one player stood out slightly and that was…

MIURA Sota - Has had a reasonably positive start to his career with us but like everyone has had a few dodgy games. But in this match he just seemed to be at the heart of a lot of our positive play and looked to have really found his feet.

 

Highlights

Vs Kashima Antlers (away) 17/3/24 J League match 4

Kashima Antlers 2 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

Well, what is there to say? Another loss, this time away from home, just to inject a bit of variety. After keeping a perfect 0% home record in 2024 it seems that Oniki wants to get to work and change that away result success rate. In recent years we never lose away at Kashima. But recent years haven’t been years when Oniki was at his completely-out-of-ideas stage and that’s clearly where we are now. Plugging away with the same tactics which haven’t worked for about three years. Keeping all the same players in, some of whom who have been playing like they’re recently new to the sport. Making sure that the one certainty is that there will be a midfielder playing out of position at full back. To be honest, I’m not sure I need to even write this post, do I? You know what I’m going to say and even if you have never agreed with my opinions, you’ve got to say there is some evidence for them being accurate now, isn’t there? I’m going to try to keep this as brief as possible as the only people who could get any joy out of reading this are Frontale haters and I’m not going to waste any effort pleasing them. So here we go.

First half we got a bit battered down our right hand side, as was expected with us playing a midfielder there and as has been the case every time we’ve done that recently. We scored a goal, slightly against the run of play and not via the method that Oniki seems to be wedded to using. He must have been furious! In the second half, after a classic Oniki half time team talk, we conceded twice in the first five minutes and then proceeded to get a red card. We had a marvelous 59% possession and had a momentous two shots, both of which were off target. Much like in the last game we’re averaging around 200 passes for a shot on target. It’s truly turgid stuff. The second half was a perfect demonstration of Oniki’s master plan. Even trailing and with hardly any time left, we were still fucking around passing the ball along the defence line. But it wasn’t really a surprise, was it? Oniki’s subs were just bizarre, deciding to remove our better midfielders and leave his favourites on the pitch. The bench was just weird, basically leaving us with no real way of changing the game given that we are apparently playing wearing the virtual handcuffs of always, no matter the situation, having to stick to Oniki’s master plan. But to be honest, I’m not that upset. I totally expected the game to go this way and in the end we were lucky that we only conceded twice. But, just one more reminder that in the whole game we had two shots on target, managing to do even worse than the three we had against Kyoto. And the worst thing is that the two shots we had on target in 90 minutes against Kashima came in the same attack! Basically, aside from our goal, we didn’t even come close. An absolute waste of time!

 A rare foray into the opposition half

Here’s what I think are some of our issues, basically stated as I feel there’s no need for me to spend time trying to justify them particularly:

- The defence is a mess, as you might expect given that most weeks we’ve had at least one player in there who’s not a defender or at least one player playing out of position. I think we’ve now tried pretty much all of the possible combinations of Jesiel, Takai, Ominami and Maruyama. The one that looked reasonably steady was of course Oniki’s idea of what is our second string and was naturally changed for the following match and that back foru combination has not been seen since. I think pretty much everyone who’s played there has had at least one nightmare game. In this game their first goal came from Maruyama charging half way up the pitch to beat Yuma Suzuki to a header and totally missing it, leaving the ball to run through to an almost empty defence. That was probably another Oniki tactical innovation though so maybe it's a better idea to point the finger elsewhere? I guess you know where I'll point it?

- Probably neither Kamifukumoto nor Sung-Ryong are the answer in goal sadly. The endlessly repeated myth of Kami being crucial for our build up is, as far as I can see, total nonsense. He’s not really much better than Sung-Ryong on the ball, but seems to have an endless appetite for trying to do things he’s not quite capable of, like when he raced out of goal to reach one of the many Kashima hoofed long balls and messed up his header, glancing it behind for a corner. I haven’t watched it back, but Kami looked absolutely bewildered for their second goal. (Actually this is a bit unfair now having seen it as the ball bounced weirdly off the bar from the cross. The Kashima player celebrated as if that was his intention… To be honest though, I think there’s a chance that even if it hadn’t, Kami would have still been watching the ball sailing over his head). And not long after that goal he booted the ball off the pitch from a totally miscued goal kick. That’s what he’s in the team for! Apparently... I love Sung-Ryong but I think time is catching up with him a bit. I don’t think either keeper can be blamed too much though as the mess that’s in front of them can’t help and can't give them much confidence. So until that’s sorted out, it probably doesn’t matter that much who’s playing in goal.

- Oh my god, the endless ridiculous insistence on playing 4-3-3 with Ienaga in a free role. Particularly dangerous when we have a midfielder behind him at right back. (For some reason a lot of Kashima's attacks were going down that side. I wonder why...). And never thinking of trying anything else. And even if he is wedded to the formation and the same players, why does he never even consider that he could change our approach? The absolute arrogance of the man! Against Kyoto we went with that plan and Tachibanada at right back. Until we abandoned it because it wasn’t working. And then in the next game, went back and gave it another go! And it didn’t work again! Good thing Oniki changed it, right? After a terrible first half it might have made sense to change it at half time, but instead he decided to leave it till after we’d conceded twice. Genius level stuff! The mid-half triple change was perhaps even stupider, completing his mission to remove the midfielders who were playing the best, leaving the others on the pitch and adding a striker to the midfield. To an extent he’d hamstrung himself by bizarrely choosing the players he put on the bench. There was a bit of trouble in our end at the end of this game with a couple of our supporters scuffling. Presumably this was down to one of them saying we’d been totally shite and someone else going with the usual, ‘well done guys, let’s try again next game and definitely not complain’ mantra. I’m sure you know who I think is right. Of course, I'm not saying that fighting about it is the right thing to do as it obviously isn’t. But I do think we should stop celebrating awful performances because we are nice guy supporters. Instead much better to just fuck off out of the stadium at the final whistle. Equally, I can’t see any real benefit in booing the players, especially as I think the problem stems from elsewhere, but at the same time, I’m not going to give them a good old clap for losing yet another game.

- Pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass and pass. Repeat. And repeat again. Don’t even think about trying to attack. All any fan wants is completed passes! Pass and pass and pass. Don’t try to score as moving the ball forwards makes it more difficult to rack up the completed passes. Far better to do it in front of your own goal, particularly if you're losing as the opposition aren't as bothered about trying to get the ball off you. So we can carry on with the pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass...

Bit of positivity, the bus back wasn’t so bad! On the way it took about two and a bit hours and on the way back, around three hours. Obviously it’s a significantly worse journey when you’re coming back with no points but at least it gave me the opportunity to start writing this shitty post. I think perhaps they have alleviated the traffic situation slightly by changing the departure time of the buses to more than an hour after the game was due to end. I guess if we’d won we could have enjoyed this extra hour celebrating in the stands, but as it was, instead of spending the extra hour sitting in traffic, we instead spent it sitting on a bus which wasn’t due to depart for about 55 minutes. So much of a muchness really, but you know, I’m just trying to draw out any kind of positivity that I can right now.

Kashima were Kashima-esque. Unbelievable play acting for most of the game, definitely a focus on the dark arts. I think they aren’t that good this year. But not as bad as us, obviously. Yuma Suzuki did Yuma Suzuki things. And his teammates also did Yuma Suzuki things. At one stage one player fell to the floor and seemed to be confused as to whether he should be clutching his face or his leg. The ref bought it. In the past I’ve thought that Nakamura was one of the better refs but he was all over the place in this game. Somewhat amusingly the big screen seemed to be proactively highlighting his mistakes by playing replays that showed he’d obviously cocked up. He lost control of the game later on and seemed to be intimidated by the Kashima players. He was pretty shit. The thing he did that annoyed me the most was that after a long run of giving them a free kick every time we made a tackle, he decided to give us a free kick for a Kashima offside, just as we were racing up the pitch counter attacking, not even considering playing the advantage. But maybe he did us a favour, as it allowed the Kashima players to retreat back into defence and therefore we were in a much better position to be able to rack up some more passes! It’s all we fans want to see! Not saying he was biased at all. I think the big screen replays demonstrated that his stupid decisions were going both ways. Although it perhaps hurt us more as both of Marcinho’s yellows looked a little borderline, at least with my Frontale hat on. No need to blame the ref. No need to blame the players. There’s only one person to blame when it comes to this defeat and that is the clown prince of Kawasaki, Oniki.

Can say with confidence that this did not lead
to a shot on target as it happened in the second half

Four games done and after a lucky first win we have three defeats in a row. We’ve played three teams that could be troubling the bottom third of the table and even though we usually play badly against these kind of teams, we’ve done extra badly this year. Against Kashima, perhaps we had a chance to play a bit better as they probably would try to attack us a bit more. But no, we just carried on playing badly. There is nothing to feel even slightly optimistic about. The one goal head start that we got from Erison playing has disappeared now he’s injured. Well, at least that’s what we believe is the case. I don’t think the club officially said he is, and therefore we’ve had no hints to the possible length of his absence. Maybe Oniki’s decided we have better routes to goal. There has been some talk online lamenting how many important players we've lost since last year and blaming that on our 2024 malaise. I think this is hugely off the mark though. I think our squad is better than it was last year but is just being chronically mismanaged. Some might say that we're much weaker at right back but I think that ignores the fact that Yamane really dropped off last year and the fact that we keep playing people who aren't right backs there. Nobori was also slightly on the slide, and whilst I think Miura isn't quite with it yet, he will be better when he settles in a bit more. Perhaps Miyashiro is the biggest loss, but then again we never used him properly anyway, so the loss is more of a conceptual one than anything to do with reality. Once again for me it comes down to how the players are being instructed and managed and surely no-one can think that's being done well at the moment, can they? Next up, FC Tokyo at home, but !!PRAISE THE LORD!! that’s not for two weeks. I’m looking forward to next weekend already as there is no football, which suits me fine at the moment. I would say that if Oniki’s legendary skills make it four losses in a row he should be under some pressure, but who am I kidding, there’s no way he’s going anywhere. I wish he would go… anywhere. We’re fifteenth right now, and I get the feeling that he won’t be under any pressure until our relegation is mathematically confirmed. Then the geniuses up top in the club, might decide they need to have a word with him and will probably end up accidentally giving him a new contract because he won our final dead rubber match of the season. And can you imagine how bad Oniki's tactic, (the singular is intentional here and not a typo), would be in J2? That's truly the stuff of nightmares.

 

Team
GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto
DF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 34')
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 54', second yellow/red card 75')

Subs
GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 3. OMINAMI Takuma (on for JESIEL 64')

DF 5. SASAKI Asahi (on for YAMAMOTO 53')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for YAMADA 64')
FW 17. TONO Daiya (on for SEKO 64')
FW 30. SEGAWA Yusuke (on for MIURA 81')


Goals

MARCINHO (Frontale) 36' 0-1

CAVRIC (Kashima) 47' 1-1
SUZUKI (Kashima) 50' 2-1

 

My Frontale Man Of The Match

 

I don't think so, do you? Oh actually, he's probably got nothing to do with Frontale, but I'll give it to the guy sitting in the weird hut by the touchline. No idea what's going on in there. But even if he totally messed up whatever he's supposed to be doing, he still did better than any of our players.

 

Unusual place to put a shed, but why not, eh?

 

 

Highlights