Gamba Osaka striker Bare has signed a lucrative deal with United Arab Emirates outfit Al Ahli.

The scorer of 44-top flight goals with Ventforet Kofu and Gamba Osaka is the second high-profile striker to leave mid-season in as many years, after Magno Alves departed for Saudi side Al-Ittihad following Gamba's victory over Kawasaki Frontale in the League Cup final last year. 

The tormentor of Melbourne Victory in the AFC Champions League, Bare's departure could spell a worrying trend for Japanese football, which does not have the cash to compete financially with the oil-rich gulf states. 

His loss will also spell trouble for Gamba Osaka, for whom striker Ryuji Bando has been sidelined through injury for much of the campaign. 

The burly Brazilian is the J. League's second top scorer this season behind Kashima's Marquinhos, having found the net ten times from eighteen league appearances.

57,050 fans turned out at Saitama Stadium on May 17 to watch the high-profile J. League clash between Urawa Reds and Gamba Osaka. Not all of them liked what they saw.

Played in a tinderbox atmosphere, the match exploded into life - and controversy, a minute before half-time. Under pressure from Urawa defender Yuki Abe, Gamba's Brazilian striker Bare seemingly played the ball into touch adjacent to the corner flag. Ever the quick-thinker, Bare simply picked the ball up and threw it to the feet of Takahiro Futagawa. While Abe and his fellow Urawa defenders protested to referee Masayoshi Okada, Futagawa fed Masato Yamazaki to nonchalantly sweep the ball home in front of the Urawa home end. That handed Gamba a 2-0 half-time lead.

The record books will show that Gamba eventually went on to win 3-2, thanks in no small part to a majestic third from Yasuhito Endo that helped the Osakans to break their Saitama hoodoo. Yet few were talking about the result come the end of the match.

That's because in a fit of childish petulance the Urawa players demanded that Gamba halt their post-match celebrations, which consisted of nothing more than jumping around inside the centre circle. Gamba's decision to celebrate in front of the away end at the behest of the enraged Reds did little to reduce the tension. Indeed, it seemed to fuel it.

It's difficult to single out individual Urawa players when the entire squad seemed take part in the scuffle that ensued, yet two players should come under particular scrutiny. They are Urawa goalkeeper Ryota Tsuzuki and defensive midfielder Marcos Tulio Tanaka. Above all else, the actions of these two players endangered the lives of fans packed into the goal at the away end.

Tsuzuki is an ex-Gamba player, yet he was infuriated by the loss, and was repeatedly restrained by his team-mates from seemingly trying to attack his former colleagues. Marcos Tulio Tanaka is renowned as one of the most passionate players in Japanese football, yet he too overstepped the mark, although in Gamba's Bare he for once found an adversary who was not afraid to back down from a fight.

By now the action on the pitch was a mere sideshow to the chaos taking place on the terraces. The boorish behaviour of Urawa's spoilt fans has long been a bone of contention for fans of rival J. League clubs. However the Reds fans went well beyond their usual jeering, as several of them attempted to tear down the fence that separated the two sets of supporters. Some Gamba fans responded by raining projectiles down on their counterparts - not the smartest of moves, as the police watched on helplessly.

In the mayhem that followed one Gamba fan was reportedly injured attempting to scale the fence, while the Reds fans themselves managed to tear down a section of the partition and were only held back by a desperate line of police. One Reds fan lobbed what appeared to be a steel flagpole into the Gamba section. The footage was eagerly seized upon and broadcast all over the nightly news.

It's not a good look for the J. League, which is precisely why in their English-language round-up there is not a single mention of the fan violence. Any hopes that the J. League had of keeping the crowd disturbances quiet are dashed by the fact that an army of savvy fans filmed it from a variety of angles and duly uploaded it to YouTube.

The irony is that when quizzed on the topic of hooliganism, most Japanese football fans will quickly link it to English football. Yet hooliganism was all but stamped out of English football twenty years ago. While clashes between rivals fans still occur, they are generally staged events that take place away from football stadia. They are not the kind of incidents that endanger the general public in front of a police force that has little experience in crowd control.

While Gamba fans are not blameless in this incident, the J. League should throw the book at Urawa for the actions of their fans. Even after the incident had died down, some 5,000 Urawa fans waited outside the ground for up to three hours for the beleaguered Gamba supporters to emerge, before police finally convinced the Reds fans to disperse.

Having offered Urawa favourable treatment for so long, the J. League must now reckon with the monster that they have created. The Reds players and a large section of their support consider themselves above the J. League. A home defeat is now cause for a mini-riot. Opposition celebrations are tantamount to a declaration of war. How did this happen?

Urawa Reds may be lauded for the size of their crowds or their sizeable profits, but unless the J. League treads very, very carefully, then the Saitama club could soon become the straw that breaks the camel's back. No one can say that the J. League hasn't been warned.

Urawa Reds are the 2006 J-League champions, after they saw off Gamba Osaka 3-2 in front of 62,241 fans at Saitama Stadium on Saturday. The final whistle saw an outpouring of emotion from the club's fans, who had not only witnessed the Reds lose the 2004 Championship Series final on penalties to Yokohama F. Marinos, but also finish runner-up amidst chaotic scenes on the final day of the 2005 season. It was a case of third time lucky for Urawa, who were ultimately deserving winners of their first ever league trophy.

Not everyone, however, seems to be enamoured with the Urawa brand. For one thing, the club has a reputation for housing some of the more brusque fans in the league. Others have pointed to the financial clout of the Mitsubishi-backed club, arguing that they have enhanced their squad by signing the likes of Washington and Takahito Soma from Tokyo Verdy, and bringing Shinji Ono back from Feyenoord, to the detriment of their own young players. Personally I don't buy it.

The club certainly does have some of the more aggressive fans in the league. But given that their smallest crowd at Saitama Stadium this season was 34,417 - ironically against the league's other big crowd-puller, Albirex Niigata, the law of averages suggests that you might find one or two more vehement fans than you would at other grounds. Besides, these are football fans and as football fans ourselves, we can hardly criticise them for their passion. The same fans did, after all, continue to support the club en masse when Urawa was relegated at the end of the 1999 season.

As for buying players like Washington and Soma, Urawa was just doing what every successful club in every league in the world does, namely cherry-picking the best players from one of their relegated opponents. Few have begrudged Urawa's crosstown rivals Omiya Ardija for having done likewise, given that ex-Tokyo Verdy players Daigo and Yoshiyuki Kobayashi were arguably Omiya's best players this season. That Urawa bought Washington simply proved to be a wise choice, given that he ended the season as the J-League's equal top scorer with Gamba's Magno Alves, while Soma's decision to join Japan's biggest club was understandable.

Re-signing Shinji Ono from Feyenoord demonstrates, if nothing else, that the club maintains cordial relations with their former players. It is hardly Urawa's fault that their first eleven played so well throughout the season that Ono struggled to get a run. Kazuyuki Toda, for example, could seemingly hardly wait to get away from Shimizu S-Pulse when his loan spell at Tottenham Hotspur didn't herald a permanent deal, despite Shimizu being in desperate need of his combative services.

Speaking of Toda, he was one of the key figures in the match that I attended at Nihondaira Stadium on Saturday afternoon. These days Toda plies his trade with Sanfrecce Hiroshima, who happened to be the visitors to Shimizu's atmospheric ground. Toda was given a frosty reception by the Shimizu faithful, that surpassed even the bone-chilling wind blowing down off the hills that surround the stadium. Those fans were apoplectic in their delight, however, when the feisty Toda was given his marching orders after just twenty minutes, following two late tackles. The second prompted an acrobatic tumble from South Korean striker Cho Jae Jin but in truth, Toda should have known better, and he melodramatically removed his jersey as he trudged from the field, to the delight of the otherwise freezing Shimizu fans.

Shimizu eventually won the match 3-0, and more importantly overtook their bitter rivals Jubilo Iwata on the final J-League standings. But the day and the accolades belonged to Urawa Reds. It has been a long wait for the club, and they will say sayonara to their popular German coach Guido Buchwald, who departs at the end of the season to spend more time with his family. The title drought is finally over, however, and Urawa fans will hope that the club has the depth to fly the flag all the way for Japan, in next season's Asian Champions League.

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.