When it pains, it roars

With due credit to influential 90's scenesters Jawbreaker for the title, it was one of those days in Shimizu yesterday as mother nature and a rookie referee conspired to make it a painful day out for Shimizu S-Pulse fans, with the Shizuoka side held to a 1-1 draw at home by bottom club Kashiwa Reysol.

A pre-match trip to the dentist made it an even more eye-watering outing for your correspondent, and the mini-typhoon that swept in off the Pacific to lash the Nihondaira foothills made it one of the most uncomfortable afternoons of football I can remember.

So apocalyptic were the conditions in the hours before kick-off that I eschewed my usual bicycle ride to the ground in favour of hitching a ride with my friend Yuichi. As we drove to the ground in tumbling rain, the picturesque country lanes and back alleys that wind their way around the Nihondaira foothills were soon enveloped by a ghostly fog, so much so that I half expected a pipe-smoking Sherlock Holmes to emerge from the mist with the trusty Watson by his side.

Talk about English weather - these weren't so much April showers as an April monsoon, and to make matters worse, the temperature dropped alarmingly, guaranteeing a bone-chilling reception for both teams and the hardy (or foolish?) souls who ventured out in the less than welcoming conditions. 

My first mistake was taking up my place on the terraces some forty minutes before kick-off, ensuring that by the time debutant referee Jumpei Iida blew his whistle for kick-off (ironically it was the only decision he got right all day), I was already soaked. Then when I whipped out the camera in a vain attempt to capture just how inhospitable the conditions were, I realised at an unhelpfully inconvenient moment that the battery was dead.

Given the treacherous conditions, the game was unsurprisingly nothing to write home about - although any attempt to blame the litany of misplaced passes and elementary mistakes on the conditions overlooks the fact that these are two of the most out-of-form sides in the league.

Former S-Pulse midfielder Kota Sugiyama earned warm applause from the home fans, and he was at the heart of Kashiwa's best moves, as the combative midfielder urged his side forward. Nevertheless neither keeper was really tested in a first half in which the most interesting aspect was Kashiwa striker Popo's set-pieces - three times the Brazilian fired in crosses that sailed over the heads of team-mates and out of play.

"We believed" was the quip at half-time from a less than impressed Yuichi - Shimizu S-Pulse's 2009 slogan is We Believe - and it turned out to be more accurate than my suggestion that Popo was "the worst foreign player in the league" and "unlikely to contribute anything of note in the second half."

For a match in which relatively little occurred, there was certainly several talking points - not the least the performance of rookie referee Jumpei Iida. Most young referees earning their taste of top flight experience would be satisfied to fly under the radar and simply let the game flow. Not so our Iida!

Instead he infuriated both teams with a series of bafflingly pedantic decisions, the best of which saw him order Takuma Edamura from the field for a seemingly indeterminate period of time - which I've since learned from The Rising Sun News was an order for Edamura to change his boots.

It's hard to argue with Iida's decision to award Reysol a free-kick on the edge of the area for Jumpei Takaki's cynical foul just before the hour mark, but the fact that Reysol players would go down if they felt so much as a gust of wind made the decision harder to bear. 

Cue Popo firing in a virtually unstoppable free-kick that Yohei Nishibe somehow conspired to claw out, only to watch in disbelief as Masahiro Koga simply headed home the rebound into an unguarded net.

By now things were looking dire - at least for the S-Pulse fans amongst the crowd of 9,756 that chose to brave the conditions - and the goal saw S-Pulse maraude forward in an increasingly desperate fashion.

The late introduction of strikers Kazuki Hara and Frode Johnsen saw both play an important role in the S-Pulse equaliser, as a series of one-touch passes opened up the Reysol defence and allowed Shinji Okazaki to burst through and slide home the equaliser.

S-Pulse had the bit between their teeth in a frantic finale, and they were desperately unlucky not to win the game when Hara smashed an effort that looked goal-bound for all money, until Takanori Sugeno stuck out a lunging hand to claw the ball onto the post and out for a corner.

There was no applause from either side come the full-time whistle as fans made a beeline for the exits, with the weather somehow conspiring to get even worse in the second half. Indeed, so abysmal were the conditions that for the first time in three years I experienced something almost unthinkable in the J. League - total silence on the terraces.

It's not like Shimizu S-Pulse gave their fans much to shout about. They did just enough to earn a point in this game, but they certainly didn't do anything to convince fans that they can finish in the top half of the table come the end of the season, following this painful outing in the wet for fans from the orange half of Shizuoka.