Sunday, February 24, 2008

Pre Season Match - Gifu vs Nagoya

FC Gifu 0 - 1 Nagoya Grampus
A 20th minute PK by Nagoya striker Yonsen was all that stood between J1 club Nagoya Grampus and J2 newcomers FC Gifu today. And it could have been even better for Gifu had midfielder Kojima converted his PK chance early in the second half.
FC Gifu will be reasonably happy with their performance. Their man-to-man defence was good, they had more possession then Nagoya, the interplay between the players was generally pretty good, and they could easily have come away with a draw in this game.
Nagoya Grampus on the other hand, after a great opening 20 minutes, will be disappointed with their effort and relieved to come away with a win. Their defence was solid but they missed a number of scoring chances and were outplayed by Gifu in the mid-field.
The only real difference between the two teams was on attack where the Grampus forwards definitely showed the ability to set up scoring chances whereas Gifu's efforts were constantly thwarted by resolute Nagoya defence.
All in all though, a great game, and Gifu will take some confidence out of the game with them to the J2 opener in two weeks. Congratulations though to Nagoya who take the points in the first official Kisogawa Derby.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not that bad of a performance for the Gifu in my opinion.. They didn't have any experience in dealing with great J1 teams and they need to grow in that, developing a succesful tactic against teams with far superior (financial) powers.

Anyways, only two weeks until the J2 starts!! :) How many fictures do they need to play? Last season it was like 40+ or a crazy number like that, I hope they've changed to playing each side 1 time home and away?

richy said...

Yes, not a bad effort at all really.
But the key is to continue with strong performances throughout the whole season. This year there are 45 games (Playing each team 3 times) whereas last season there were 52 games!
Next season it could become less again depending on if any more of the JFL teams get promoted. I think five teams have applied to become J2 teams, results considering, for next year and if a couple of these teams are promoted then it looks headed for two games against each team, home and away. You'd hope so anyway!
Plenty of interest in the JFL again this year!

richy said...

sorry, 45 Rounds this year, 52 Rounds last year!