FC Tokyo fans - On the move....to On the Gas!

We started this blog for our LMS Fantasy Podcasts, but as I got stuck into writing FC Tokyo match reports and analysis pieces, more and more its become about the Gasmen.

Fantasy Premier League...and a J2 team...maybe not the most natural of combinations. Therefore, after taking some advice from my learned colleagues, I've decided its time to divide and conquer, branch out, and start a Tokyo-specific blog.

So, from now I'll be posting on all things FC Tokyo over at
http://on-the-gas.blogspot.com and I've started that blog off by importing my Nine Months of Hell series from here.

I'll keep all of my 2010 Tokyo match reports and other posts here...but...
This blog will now focus entirely on the Fantasy Pods, and I hope you'll continue to enjoy them.

LMS Fantasy Podcast - Cup First Round Draw Special

8 LMS Managers + 16 practice golf balls = 27 minutes of drunken frivolity.

TGI Fridays in Machida was again the venue, Lucky Luc was our special guest, and we had a crackin' time before, during and after the Draw for The First Round of the LMS Cup. Games will be played in Gameweek 24 of the Fantasy Premier League season.
 
Now we did have the odd technical problem, figuring out how near or far away to hold the recording device proved tricky at first, but the volume levels should be fine here, no need to turn down for this episode. Then, Part 3 ended up being very tricky to record, I cocked up and a great segment of The Monsieur going round the table getting reactions to the draw was lost, when he tried again the twatting bartenders at TGIs got on the P.A. and that was ruined, so once almost everyone had cleared out Graham, Takeshi and myself provided the hard-hitting analysis.
 
Highlights? Well, there are loads.
 
Enjoy.
 

FC Tokyo 2010 - Nine Months of Hell Part 3

Konno will go. Oguro's on loan so he's gone, Gonda might be off. The big Qs are Yonemoto, Hirayama, Casual & Ishikawa. #FCTokyo
5 Dec via ÜberTwitter
 

Nine Months of Hell Part 1           Nine Months of Hell Part 2

I'm posting this a lot later than originally intended, but a relaxing week back home in Australia, and almost two more in Japan have me well and truly calmed down, and dealing with the reality that FC Tokyo will play in J2 in 2011. So here, in Part 3 of my wrap-up of the 2010 season, we'll look at what lies ahead as we get set for our first season in the second division since 1999.

The goals are simple: win the two derbies against The Spews; and finish in the top three, which will see us return to J1 in '12. The latter looks very attainable the way our squad is shaping up, but there should be at least five teams battling for promotion, and we'll be a big scalp for the minnows, so it won't be as easy as some fans seem to think. Anyway, I'm gunna stay positive (I promise!), so lets do this in two sections:

Section One - The Squad

In the immediate aftermath of our relegation, I feared we'd lose up to eight of our best players, as might be expected with dropping down a division, and with several of our squad in the National Team frame. In particular, as you've already seen from my tweet above (follow me @benjmaxwell), I thought it was dead certain that Yasuyuki Konno would be off, as he's a permanent fixture in Japan squads, while there had to be major doubts over the futures of Shuichi Gonda, Takuji Yonemoto and Naohiro Ishikawa, as Gonda and Yonemoto are sure to be involved in the national set-up in the near future and would, I thought, want to advance their claims in the top flight, and Ishikawa, despite his poor 2010 season, would still hope to be involved in Alberto Zaccheroni's plans with a strong bounce-back season somewhere in J1 in '11.

On top of those four, I thought players like Yohei Kajiyama, Naotake Hanyu and Masato Morishige (two relegations in two seasons, nice going buddy, maybe he should go join Urawa) might feel they were "better" than J2 (and would all be on decent money that we might not now be able to afford), while it was my fervent wish that Tatsuya would finally rack off, and there are plenty of Tokyo fans who want shot of Sota Hirayama - despite his strong finish to 2010. If Gonda were to stay, that would surely mean the end of Hitoshi Shiota, as we wouldn't need two top-level keepers in J2, and lastly, relegation was always going to mean the end of hired gun Masashi Oguro's time with us.

So all that meant we were going to be in for a major overhaul. Or so I thought. But, amazingly, as news began to filter out of Kodaira in dribs and drabs, it was almost all positive, and whether the players have made a pact to atone for the horrors of '10 together or not, as it stands, here in early January, all of the big names bar Oguro will be back in the 2011 season. Not only that, we'll finally fill our allowed number of foreign players for the first time in three seasons (too little, too late on that score if you ask me).

In particular, the commitment that Konno, Gonda and Yonemoto have shown - possibly forgoing national team ambitions - is a massive boost ahead of the new season. That is not unprecendented of course in the J.League - Seiichiro Maki of Chiba and Hisato Sato of Hiroshima famously stayed on with their teams after relegation - but its great to see that loyalty from our big names.

Here's the information we have to hand about who's in and who's out so far, with thanks to dokool from the original English FC Tokyo blog http://www.aishiteru-tokyo.com/ (posted on the forums of Big Soccer and edited after further comings and goings from the original posting date of December 30):

Sayonara

End of Loan
-FW Masashi Oguro
-FW Ricardinho
-FW Shunsuke Maeda (thank the Lord)
-MF Seo Yong-Duk
Full Transfer - Out
-FW Shingo Akamine (to Sendai)
-DF Kim Young-Kwon (to Omiya)
-GK Nobuyuki Abe (to Shonan)
-MF Tatsuya Suzuki (to FC Shitebucket) wishful thinking, why doesn't he just piss off?!
Loan - Out
-MF Toshihiro Matsushita (to Sendai)
-FW Kentaro Shigematsu (to Fukuoka)
-DF Ryo Hiraide (to Toyama)
plus some other youngsters not in the first team frame

Yokoso

Full Transfer - In
-FW Roberto César Zardim Rodrigues (from Avai FC, Brazil) [registration name: ロベルト]
-MF Roberto Julio De Figueiredo (from Yokohama FC) [registration name: ホベルト]
-MF Tatsuya Yazawa (from Chiba) oh shit, another guy named Tatsuya!
-DF Tomokazu Nagira (from Fukuoka)
-GK Satoshi Tokizawa (from Kusatsu)
Loan - In
-FW Pedro Junior (from Gamba Osaka)
-FW Daiki Takamatsu (from Oita)
-MF Kazumasa Uesato (from Sapporo)

Taking all that in, starting with the "Outs:" its a shame to see Kim leave, but he has South Korean National Team ambitions so fair play to him; Aka had run his race with us and we wish him well in his first full season in Sendai; and it was inevitable that Oguro would go. As for Shigematsu, well, he's a fan favourite and there'll be plenty who would've liked to have seen him stay, but it'll probably be better for his development if he has a full season with a team he will feature for more prominently, and then return with his tail up. Ditto for Hiraide. Of the others, I'm certainly not sad to see Rica, Matsushita or Maeda shown the door. Rica made Emerson look like Garrincha, Matsushita never settled with us, and Maeda....Maeda....well, we're all still wondering why we brought him in in the first place.

Of course there's still time for guys like Hanyu and Shiota to leave, I would've thought some J1 clubs could use their experience, but as it stands both will be with us at the start of the season (and both probably won't play much at all). The signing of Tokizawa makes Shiota, in particular, expendable, and perhaps the club are just waiting for a bid on him.

On top of the eight confirmed "Ins" you can add players like Sotan Tanabe and Daishi Hiramatsu, who played next-to-no part last season, but the first thing about the list above that jumps out at you is our improved depth in midfield. The problems we had in 2010 after Yonemoto's knee injury, and Kajiyama's injury-hit and sub-par season are well documented, with converted full back Yuhei Tokunaga playing practically the whole season in central midfield, central defender Morishige joining him on (too many) occasions, Hanyu failing to gel with Tokunaga in the first month and Matsushita failing to fit in anywhere. So the additions of the ホベルト Roberto and Uesato give us two more central options, and mean the defenders can return to defending. This covers the loss of Kim, and means we go back to having three specialist full backs (Toku, Kenta Mukuhara and Hokuto Nakamura) on top of our solid group of centre halves.

On the wings I'll admit to not knowing much about Yazawa, but he scored 15 goals the past three seasons with Chiba, and joins Ishikawa, Yohei Otake, Tanabe and Hanyu (plus possibly Hokuto if Tokunaga and Mukuhara establish themselves as our starting full backs) as our "wide-boys".

The two Brazilian strikers will hopefully make us forget Rica (and Cabore...and Emerson) quickly, and both come with decent scoring records - a big difference from Rica - with ロベルト Roberto scoring 22 times in the past two seasons in Brazil, and Pedro Junior netting 15 J.League goals in spells with Omiya, Niigata and (his parent club) Gamba. Also upfront, Takamatsu is an interesting signing, he's joined us after ten years and 58 goals with Oita, but he never really kicked-on to elite status after playing in the Athens Olympics in '04 and winning two full Japan caps under Ivica Osim.

These additions appear to have strengthened us where we needed it most, and mean we'll easily have the biggest, most expensive and most experienced squad in J2 in 2011 (perhaps ever in the history of the second division).

Section Two - The Division

Ah, yes, the second division. J2 has doubled in size since our last (and only) season there, 1999, with Tottori joining as the 20th J2 club, and the expansion has been rapid, with six other teams joining in the three previous years. All that has meant the end of the triple (and earlier quadruple) round-robin format, and means in 2011 we'll play 38 league games (as recently as '09 each team played 51 games!) on all four main islands of Japan, with four teams in Kyushu, two in Shikoku, and Sapporo in Hokkaido.

What does this all mean for us? Well, some new away trips for our fans to far and distant corners of the country, and plenty of empty seats in the away end of Aji Sta. On the pitch though, expansion has seen the overall level of the league slide, and means our squad's "name" players and experience will make us prohibitive favourites to win the league. The other obvious teams I expect to be in the hunt for promotion are: Chiba, who finished fourth in 2010; The Spews (5th); Shonan, who will hopefully play the same open, attacking football that they stuck to despite finishing bottom of J1 last season; and Kyoto, who sent us down in the last game of 2010, long after their own relegation was sealed. Of the other teams, Tokushima will need to tighten up their defence to be in the mix but should be good to watch as they were fairly free-scoring last season, enjoying their highest league finish (8th) in their six-year J2 tenure, while Sapporo (despite losing Uesato to us) are always well supported and were in J1 as recently as 2008 (and The Fat Man plays for them!).

Speaking of the way clubs are supported, that will be a huge change for our fans, especially away from Ajinomoto Stadium. Attendance figures between the divisions are naturally skewed because of the smaller cities in J2, but the difference in 2010 was startling:

• Average J1 crowd in 2010: 18,426 (our average: 25,112, fourth in the league)
• Average J2 crowd in 2010: 6,696 

Promoted Kofu had the highest average of the J2 clubs with 12,406 per game, and only Chiba, Sapporo and Oita were also over 10,000, while there were eight teams with an average of under 5,000.

Our average hasn't been under 24,000 since 2002, but that is certain to change due to the much lower number of away fans to Aji Sta, as well as an expected decrease in fans in the ホーム自由席 seats based on A) apathy towards J2 and B) the lack of games against our J1 rivals (Kawasaki, Urawa, Kashima, Yokohama).

On rivalries though, the big one against Kawasaki Tokyo Verdy 1969 (A.K.A. The Spews) is back, and the two derbies will see the biggest crowds of the season at Aji Sta. Two derby wins and top three. That'll do for me (although 30 goals from ロベルト Roberto would be nice too!).

So there you have it. Nine Months of Hell is over and done with. If you managed to get all the way down here, thanks for sticking with me. I got a lot of things off my chest in Parts 1 & 2, and now that its over I feel ready and excited to renew my SOCIO membership. Mission accomplished.

COME ON YOU GASMEN!

Special LMS Podcast - Founding Fathers of the LMS

It was an absolute pleasure to catch up with my co-founding father of the LMS, two-time Champion Gareth Balston, in Melbourne last week, and luckily I'd taken the recording device with me on my trip ... so we blabbed away for over an hour (edited down to 52 minutes here).

In this, the 10th season of the league, we began by talking about Gareth's strong league record, reminisced about the managers still with us and others who have come and gone, and had a lot of other ground to cover obviously, but unfortunately the Stellas kicked-in after a while so you may notice a difference in the quality of the analysis!

Highlights included:

• Gareth serving it up to old sparring partner Steve King...
• and then massacring the pronunciation of Marouane Chamakh's name...
• on more than one occasion.
• His old man walking in to get the bottle opener.
• Me? I wasn't up to much

Enjoy.

LMS Fantasy Podcast Episode 8

Better late than never, here's Episode 8 of the Fantasy Podcast. Technical issues almost derailed the whole thing, I was ready to give up on multiple ocassions, but luckily Kesh was on the case and fixed everything, so this is posted three days after it was recorded. As it turns out we didn't miss much, with seven games postponed over the weekend.

Marrakesh and The Monsieur joined me in the living room for a discussion on, amongst other things, how shite our three teams are, and we manged to blab on for just over an hour in a monster five-parter, covering: the last two Gameweeks; results from the LMS Cup Qualifying Round; Questions for Kesh (back by popular demand, you know); a preview of the XMas & New Year slate of games; and a look at the LMS League and Head-to-Head standings.

Highlights included:

• Kesh launching two seperate tirades against Mario Balotelli.....
• and then forgetting Wayne Rooney's name
• Mathew recounting, in horrifying detail, watching a bloke knock one out on a train platform
• while getting his arse kicked by a 7% Chu-Hi

Nothing from the dog this time, sorry.

Enjoy.

FC Tokyo 2010 - Nine Months of Hell Part 2

FC Tokyo are relegated. They should all be lined up against a wall, and shot. I am disgusted. #weakc++ts #FCTokyo
5:24 PM Dec 4th via ÜberTwitter

*WARNING* This is an extremely long post. Feel free to come and go, read it in bits and pieces, if it's length, and negative tone, prove too much for one sitting.

This is Part 2 of the grieving/healing process I need to go through as I, and all Tokyo supporters, mourn the end of our 11 year run in J1. Part 1 was all about the numbers. Here, its time to vent hard at the 24 players who took the field in an FC Tokyo shirt in the 2010 J1 season. With very few exceptions, the squad vastly under-performed, and while injuries can be used as excuses in a few cases, to say they are even slightly to blame for our relegation is simply bollocks. That is because, even though we had quite a lot of player turnover, and failed, YET AGAIN, to fill our allowed quota of foreign players, we thought this was one of our best squads ever, loaded with homegrown talent.

At the end of 2009, we bade farewell to club legends Ryuji Fujiyama and Satoru Asari, legendary eater Yusuke Kondo - officially the fattest man ever to play in the J.League*, defenders Bruno Quadros, Teruyuki Moniwa and Hideki Sahara; and midfielder Jo Kanazawa. Of those seven, only Bruno (23 games) and possibly Fat Man (12 games, 6 starts) were important on-field members of the squad in '09 (the other 5 made 29 appearances between them), but would the veteran trio of Fujiyama, Asari and Moniwa be missed more behind the scenes, at training and in the clubhouse, than on the field?

Nah, we'll be fine, we thought, as we brought in (with descriptions from the club website): Masato Morishige - "Top-class defender. Strong in one-on-one situations, powerful header and able to build play;" Ricardinho (didn't come with much of a C.V., but hey, he's Brazilian!) - "Lightning fast striker with dazzling dribbling ability and thunderous shot with both feet;" Toshihiro Matsushita - "Dynamic attacking midfielder. A major threat with free kicks;" Kim Young Gwon (South Korean Under 21 international) - "Aerially dominant defender with accurate left-footed passing ability;" and our prolific youth team striker Kentaro Shigematsu - "Physically strong centre forward with sound technique under pressure. Clinical finisher." We weren't to know it at the time, but those descriptions would turn out to be utter bollocks.....

Right then, here we go. My opinions only, and if I've slated your favourite player then I'm sorry, but he deserved it. I decided to grade on the following scale based on how much was expected from individuals and how well they delivered:

• A Excellent Season 
• B Consistently Good, Perhaps Exceeded Expectations
• C Acceptable Standard
• D Below Acceptable Standard, Failed To Meet Expectations 
• F Rubbish/Useless/Shite/Tatsuya

but unfortunately, because he didn't play a J1 game for us, after 10 appearances (2 starts) in '09, Sotan Tanabe's grade is - N/A, as is Hideto Takahashi's - 3 games (2 starts - hauled off both times) and Daishi Hiramatsu's - 1 game, 1 clean sheet, unused sub 7 times before achilles injury.

FC Tokyo 2010 - Nine Months of Hell Part 1

Same XI for us to start 2nd half. This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.... #FCTokyo
4:33 PM Dec 4th via ÜberTwitter

My tweet at the start of the second half of the final game of the season at Kyoto.... Sums up the season as a whole pretty well though.

This is the first of three parts I will post over the next week or two covering FC Tokyo's 2010 season, from the first game win over Yokohama through to the darkest day in our club's history, December 4th, 2010, the day we plummeted through the trapdoor into J2, our first ever relegation. Our eleven year run in J1 is over, we've gone from legitimate title contender in '08 & '09 (and Nabisco Cup Champions '09) to relegated laughing-stock in 2010, and we are a J2 team for the first time since our inaugural year as a J.League club, 1999.

Here I'll go through the season in numbers, including how we fared differently (ie. worse) than in '09, and in later installments I'll go through the squad player-by-player before finishing with a look at who'll still be around and how we'll fare in J2 in 2011. Some of you will no doubt want to draw a line under what went on this season, put it behind you and try to forget it, but I'm still processing it all so I'm attempting this as therapy, hoping that at the end of Part 3 I'll finally have "closure" as they say in psychology circles. A mixture of stats, analysis, ranting and foul language, here is my take on FC Tokyo's 2010 season:

I warned of the threat of relegation as far back as late-August, and, despite chastising those who thought we were "too good to go down," I guess in the back of my mind I thought we were, too. We kept making it so hard for ourselves though, and so many potentially pivotal moments in the run-in: Gonda's penalty save v Niigata; the gutsy win in the Shimizu typhoon; Hirayama's tour de force at Yokohama and Oguro's brilliant lob v Nagoya all ended up being for nought, as Kobe just wouldn't go away, and we shat our trousers in the last ten minutes of the home finale v Yamagata and all 90 minutes at Kyoto.

We finished 16th on 36 points with 8 wins, 12 draws and 14 losses. Tellingly, just half our points came in games against the other eight teams who finished in the bottom half, our record was W:4 D:6 L:6 against those teams, and W:4 D:6 L:8 against the top half. Our inability to do the business against the teams we were scrapping for survival with, like Omiya, Yamagata, Sendai and Kobe ultimately cost us, while we took only one point from a possible six against Kyoto.

Kyoto 2-0 FC Tokyo: J1 Week 34 (FC Tokyo Are Relegated)

I'm sat here, almost two full days after it happened, and I still can't get my head round the fact that we are now a J2 team. How the hell could we have lost to Kyoto, an absolute rabble who hadn't won for almost three months, and only three times all season until Saturday? And what the fuck was Okuma playing at, putting out the team he did, and persisting with it for so long?

We all knew the score going in. The biggest game in the history of FC Tokyo. Our eleven-year run in J1 on the line. We'd blown our chance to secure safety the previous weekend against Yamagata, but a point ahead of Kobe, we needed to win or simply match their result and we'd stay up. We could even afford to lose if they drew. Our fate was in our hands, we'd won our past three away games (against vastly superior teams to Kyoto), and Kobe had a "tough-looking" trip to Urawa to contend with. We weren't to know that the Red CubicZirconias would perform like an Under 13 girls team, but as long as we took care of business and didn't let the pressure get to us...

The first signs of concern came when the team was announced. Naohiro Ishikawa was missing through injury so Ricardinho came in for him (ho hum), but on the other flank Naotake Hanyu was dropped and replaced by Tatsuya Suzuki (what the FUCK??!!), making his first start since Urawa at home in early September, and first under Okuma's management. He must've trained the house down during the week, or maybe Hanyu nicked the last eclair from the dessert buffet right out from under the manager's fingertips or something, but that one was hard to fathom. Tatsuya is my favourite whipping boy (because he is shite), but even his staunchest supporter must've raised their eyebrows at his selection.

But wait, there's more....our joint top-scorer, Masashi Oguro - who had started EVERY LEAGUE GAME since he joined us during the World Cup break, that's TWENTY-ONE CONSECUTIVE GAMES - was dropped and replaced by a defender, Masato Morishige. Twenty-one starts, seven goals, five goals in the previous nine games, the best finisher we have, and he was left on the bench. Absolutely ludicrous from Okuma, and anyone who wants to try and defend that decision needs their head read. Tiredness? Absolute bollocks. Tactical? Some tactics, leaving your best striker on the bench.

FC Tokyo 1-1 Yamagata: J1 Week 33

Two numbers sum up last Saturday evening at Ajinomoto Stadium - FC Tokyo's last home game of the season - for me. Two little numbers that added up to a pissed-off fan fuming at his wildly inconsistent team. How could we go from beating the newly-crowned champions, away, to failing to beat a team with absolutely NOTHING to play for, at home?

The first number is four, as in four minutes. Four bloody minutes. If we could've just hung on for another four minutes, we would be celebrating our brilliant end to the season, where our Gasmen proved they were "too good to go down," beating three top-half teams in our last seven games on the way to seeing off Kobe's valiant survival attempt. But we didn't hang on, and while we didn't lose, it sure felt like we did, as we blew our first chance to ensure we'll still be playing in the top flight in 2011. We are just a point ahead of Kobe going into the final game of the season next Saturday, but more on that later....

The other number is one. Now that could mean a few things from, or after, this game: we scored one goal; we are one point ahead of Kobe; there's one game left, Ricardinho's only scored one league goal all season etc etc, but the one "one" that really sums up the evening, and the season in a nutshell is this:

FC TOKYO WON ONE OUT OF 15 LEAGUE GAMES AT AJINOMOTO STADIUM IN 2010.

LMS Fantasy Podcast - Cup Draw Special

TGI Fridays in Machida was the place to be last Friday (funnily enough), as the qualifying round draw for the LMS Cup took place. The Monsieur suggested I bring along the recording device to capture all the shenanigans, and here's the result.

There were five LMS managers in attendance (a sixth came, drank Grolsch and left) and the banter was flowing thick and fast, just bear in mind it was done before the latest weekend of Premier League games, before my season went down the toilet like last night's vindaloo.

By the way, if you download this to an iPod or mp3 player, don't have the volume up too high, coz it was noisy as hell in the bar, and we might have had the recording device A LITTLE TOO CLOSE TO OUR MOUTHS at times.

Enjoy.