Sunday, June 21

Hiroshima 4 - 3 Vissel

Despite Hiroshima dominating the first 20 minutes, this turned out to be one of the most exciting league games this year. Expectations (and emotions) were high with the return of Okubo and I will say that he put in a solid performance in his first match back - no sign of the prima donna antics that prevented him from becoming a true fan favorite last time around. The game looked almost out of our reach after the first 45 however, following a deflected header by Kitamoto and a brilliant move just before half time finished off by Makino.

Had you tuned in from the beginning of the second half, you may have been fooled into thinking that Vissel were the better team. Over the 93 minutes we were not. Although Hiroshima were fragile at the back at times, they looked very dangerous whenever they took the ball into our half and only Enomoto (as usual) prevented them from running away with the match. Still, we were able to get back into the game after an Okubo penalty and an amazing goal from outside the area courtesy of Ishibitsu. 2-2 after 50 minutes and we have a game! Vissel continued to hold out the purple boys for a while and still manage the odd attack, one of which lead to Mogi slotting away his 6th of the season and it looked like it was going to be our day at 3-2.

But matches involving Vissel Kobe often have a twist at the end. For every game we steal in the last 10 minutes at Home's, you can count on us losing 2 away in spectacular fashion. Two goals in 2 minutes (84' & 85') saw Hiroshima snatch the victory that in all fairness they probably deserved.
It still sucks though...

If I am not mistaken, 2 of their goals were deflections off Kitamoto. Some people will tell you this is just bad luck and there's nothing you can do about it, but I don't subscribe to that theory. If you let your opponent have enough shots on goal, some are eventually going to find the back of the net and some of those will inevitably be deflections/own goals.

Check out the Makino(2nd) and Ishibitsu(4th) goals - very nice.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Cracker from Ishibitsu, candidate for goal of the year. Unfortunately very weak at the back and it looks grim with Kim nam il out for another 6 weeks.