Urawa to take on Gamba in head-to-head showdown

To borrow a phrase from legendary Australian cricket commentator Bill Lawry, "it's all happening in the J-League!" For the third season in a row, the J-League will go down to the wire after Urawa Reds failed to wrap up the title when they drew 0-0 with FC Tokyo at the weekend. Elsewhere Gamba Osaka scored a dramatic last minute winner against Kyoto, that did more than just consign Kyoto to the Second Division next season. This was the tenth match since Tokyo lost 1-0 to Kyoto on September 16 and since that time, the club from the capital had scored eighteen goals. Including Urawa's 2-1 win over Sanfrecce Hiroshima on September 16, Urawa had scored twenty goals before their match against FC Tokyo at Ajinomoto Stadium. Given that Urawa's Brazilian striker Washington looks capable of scoring every time he touches the ball, while Tokyo's Brazilian Lucas Severino has weighed in with seventeen goals of his own this year, a 0-0 draw seemed the unlikeliest of results.

Gamba's 3-2 win over bottom club Kyoto Purple Sanga was more expected, especially in light of what one might term some 'generous defending' from the Kyoto defence late in the match. Magno Alves' hat-trick also saw him leap to the top of the Brazilian league - sorry, J-League goalscoring charts. He now has 25 league goals - one more than Washington, while another Brazilian, Juninho, has nineteen. And if you think your intrepid reporter was around to catch any of the goals, the glory, the coincidences or conspiracy theories that either of these two drama-charged matches produced, you're wrong!

That's because I was at a draughty Ecopa Stadium, to watch Jubilo Iwata beat Shimizu S-Pulse 1-0 in a dull Shizuoka derby. According to Jonathon Birchell's classic book on Shimizu's tumultuous 1999 season, "Ultra Nippon: How Japan Reinvented Football," these two are the most bitter of rivals. You could have fooled this reporter, as the two clubs eked out one of the most passionless derbies I've ever witnessed. Ryoichi Maeda was the hero for Jubilo, converting a penalty on the hour mark to at least send half of the 37,711 crowd wild. The thousands of orange-clad Shimizu fans massed behind the southern goal didn't seem too perturbed though, out-singing the strangely lifeless Jubilo fans for the entire match. Their team out-played Jubilo for the entire match too, but only went close when Jungo Fujimoto hit the crossbar with a chip that had Japan captain Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi well beaten in the Jubilo goal.

So the club from eight kilometres down the road take the points from the club 70 kilometres up the road, in a stadium that both teams sporadically share. That's all par for the course in the weird world of the J-League, where the talking point next week will invariably be Urawa's sold out title decider against Gamba Osaka. Over 63,000 lucky ticket fans will be at the game, while millions more will tune in to the match live on TV. Not me though, I'll be taking my seat at Nihondaira Stadium, to watch Shimizu S-Pulse take on Sanfrecce Hiroshima in a match that possibly only me and the old ladies from the hairdressing salon will care about.