Paul Green
info@sleague.com
It is a totally different Albirex Niigata (Singapore) team this season, as many have been saying since their pre-season performances showed us how much the influx of new players in 2011 has helped them prosper.
They might have had a setback when they lost three games in a row to the top three of the Great Eastern-YEO’S S.League, which as it happened coincided with the devastating earthquake and tsunami in their native Japan, but they seem to be over that now.
Either side of those three games their form has been solid, and they had just beaten the Courts Young Lions 5-0 four days before meeting Geylang United at Jurong East Stadium on Wednesday night.
The White Swans, now resplendent in their new adidas strip of orange and blue, began this game well, with Bruno Suzuki Castanheira testing Eagles goalkeeper Nazri Sabri in the first minute and Ryuta Hayashi dragging a shot just wide of the left-hand upright in the eighth minute.
But then their opponents Geylang suffered a double early blow when attacking midfielder Masrezwan Masturi had to leave the field with a swollen knee, not for the first time this season, and Romanian midfielder Vasile Ghindaru felt his hamstring go again, with less than 15 minutes on the clock.
“We lost one of our foreigners and a national team player in the space of two minutes, which threw our game-plan out the window,” admitted Eagles coach Mike Wong after the match.
“We had to make a lot of structural changes to cover for those key losses,” he explained.
Albirex went on to win it 3-1, having led from a goal on the stroke of half-time, which, though cancelled out on 74 minutes by the visitors, was followed by two more second-half goals to put an even bigger smile on the face of the always cheerful Albirex coach Koichi Sugiyama.
It must also have pleased celebrity guest Hidetoshi Nakata, who took his seat in the stand at half-time with little fuss or ceremony, and the former Serie A star would have seen the second-half goals as well.
“I never even knew he was here!” said a surprised Sugiyama after the game, when told of the former Japan international’s presence at the game.
In winning by two clear goals at the finish the home team did not have things go their way all the time, though their coach seemed unperturbed about the conceding a goal so late in the second half, which might have given Geylang just enough time to hang on for a point.
“I felt with our change of pace and our superior possession we could always do enough to win the game,” he said.
“They (Geylang) may have lost two good players, but I knew they were tactically very sound, so we still had to work very hard for the points. Having said that, I expected them to tire towards the end and that’s what happened.”
What the Albirex coach omitted to mention was that Geylang had a man sent off in the last six minutes, Jonathan Xu getting his early shower for a second caution in the game.
Albirex had just regained the lead shortly before that.
The first goal had come about when, just before half-time, the centreback conceded a free kick out wide on the right, which was expertly driven towards goal by the White Swans’ driving force, the irrepressible Tatsuro Inui.
The ball might well have beaten Nazri as it torpedoed its way towards the roof of the net, but just to make sure, Albirex defender Norihiro Kawakami got his head to the ball to force it past the despairing dive of the keeper.
Having seen Geylang withstand a barrage of first-half attacking from the White Swans only to lose a goal in stoppage time might have daunted many teams, but the visitors showed their fighting qualities as soon as play resumed.
Syed Fadhil got the better of his man down the right and sped to the by-line on 56 minutes. His firm cross was ideal for Shah Hirul to latch onto, but the shot, when it came, was fortuitously glanced over the bar for a corner by Albirex defender Kawakami, whose touch was not entirely an intended one.
Then followed more magic from an inspired Fadhil, who once again got to the by-line with some panache.
From there he produced the perfect cross on 74 minutes to allow Hafiz Rahim to steer the ball past a beaten Yoshito Matsushita.
Geylang took heart from their impressive comeback and threatened Albirex for the next ten minutes with Kim Jae Hong, Fadhil and Jung Hee Bong giving the home defenders plenty to think about.
“We did well to come back,” said Wong, “but we tried to play football as we looked for a winner and then gave away possession when we shouldn’t have done.”
A free kick had looked promising for the Eagles with 83 minutes played, but after a number of players had combined out wide on the left, the ball was intercepted in the middle of the field by the home side and promptly despatched in the direction of the Geylang goal by the Albirex midfield.
White Swans substitute Yosuke Saito dashed through the middle and slipped the ball in behind an undermanned Geylang defence for Musashi Okayama, himself a substitute as well, to drill his shot past an exposed Nazri.
Once Xu had been sent off, Hirul had to leave the field too with a cut lip in the last minute, leaving the visitors down to only nine men as their substitutions had been exhausted.
Albirex made the most of this as Shotaro Ihata laid on a neat through pass inside the Geylang penalty area for Inui to steer home and make it 3-1.
A fourth win of the season for Albirex, then, after seven games played, and two of those victories coming at Jurong East, a far cry from last year’s barren run at the ground where not a single win was recorded.
Geylang, meanwhile, are having a horror start to the new season.
They have won only twice now in seven games and have not collected a single point on their travels thus far.
“We are going to have a shortage of players for our next game again,” noted a distressed Wong.
The two who came off early, plus Yasir Hanapi, who got his fourth yellow card of the season, will be out for the next game against Tanjong Pagar United, with the injured pair no better than an even chance of recovering in time.
For Albirex, however, their season holds great promise as they move into fifth spot with this win and boast a goalscoring record second only to Home United and, as their matches have shown, a range of players who are capable of finding the net.
No fewer than seven different players have scored for the Japanese team this season, fully illustrating their versatility in all departments of the game.
And that versatility could see them haul their way even higher up the table in good time.
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