A sense of real optimism and camaraderie came crashing down pretty quickly as we faced our old friends Shane FC at the Private School out in Katsushika City.

We had a line-up that was crafted around the long ball game. The intention was to bully them with strength upfront and pile in with midfielders to add to the pressure. We saw more success with this in the latter stages of the game against Jetro FC.
It didn’t work.

Firstly a weak pass-back from Rowan allowed their pacey striker to pounce early on clock a goal very early in the game. Another defensive error led to us being two down.
Only then did we find a bit of composure. The gameplan still wasn’t working though. Shane won every long ball rendering our attack null and void. Worse than that, it was actually just granting them possesion every time we lofted it forward.
The couple of occasions a chance fell at our feet it didn’t even hit the target.

Our only goal came in the fallout of a free-kick we had near the edge of the box. The ball bounced out, their defence played the offside trap sucessfully against our strikers but didn’t consider Rowan running through to nick the bouncing ball and then to pop it into the left side of the net.
A bit of belief was restored but unfortunately another seemingly rudimentary stop from the back-line slipped under their feet to again gift Shane a goal.

Mistakes at the back and no real challenge at the front with the midfield being pulled all over the place in between, it was BFC’s poorest showing for sometime and to cut a long story short, Shane put away anothwer 3 goals in the second half.

Not one to remember. We should definately be beating teams of that caliber.
There’s a bit of a recalibration needed during the week off before the next game.