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YCAC, Wednesday, April 29th
This was the big one. Winner takes all, title decider, great weather, new pitch, big crowd, all we needed was to walk on the field holding hands and we’d feel like Brazil in a world cup. Then the whistle blew and that was pretty much that. A letdown that will sting for some time to come. But if there is one thing about sport - it teaches you to deal with your defeats and how to come back from them. After the Hibs had dominated the season in the 08/09 TML and still in the FJ cup, it seemed like we hadn’t lost a game since Sid had brown hair. A quick look back through the record book shows that although it hadn’t been quite that long our last defeat was v the BFC on March 29, 2008. Exactly 13 months prior to this title decider, and you can throw in a FJ Cup & Phuket tournament victories into that period too. Unfortunately we met a YCAC team on a great roll of momentum and the match was a largely a one sided affair, with the YCAC, inspired largely by Tyson, ran riot over the Hibs, banging in four goals all from our Achilles heel – set pieces, and we hardly mustered a chance on goal ourselves.
The Hibs lined up with seven of the starting 11 being gaijin, thus depriving the TML head honcho of bestowing on us his favourite moniker – the “Jibs” – get it? Bring it in tight - you see Japan and Japanese begins with J, so if you change the H in Hibs..….oh forget it it’s obviously going over your head. Nevertheless no matter what nationalities lined up in green all of us were on the back foot soon after the kick off. Despite talking about not giving away silly fouls repeatedly in the pre-game talk, we gave away one two minutes in when the YCAC wide-man was going nowhere. The ensuing free kick saw the ball not cleared well, a goal mouth scramble and Tyson poked in from one metre. The same thing happened twice more in the next twenty minutes, corners or free kicks that were not dealt with by our defence and goals followed.
The second half saw the Hibs begin to hold the ball for slightly longer and push forward in more numbers, but we did not really muster a great chance on goal. In the dying moments Tyson was left unmarked on the back post from a corner to make it four. A bit of niggle was getting into the game mostly due to frustration and Mike McGirr nipped at the heels of a YCAC attacker and sent him down, not a particularly dangerous, nasty or professional foul, just a bit frustrated and cynical. However ref Q decided to make a statement (which I think was “I’m capable of making very harsh decisions if you guys aren’t nicer to each other”) and gave him a straight red. I think of the crowd of close to one hundred and 25+ players watching he was probably the only one that thought the challenge was worthy of anything more than a yellow.
All in all there is not one Hibs player who could be satisfied with their performance on the night. We couldn’t string a set of passes together, gave the ball away easily and defended poorly. In a nutshell we choked. Having not played or trained in four weeks and we had become used to the wider expanses and more time on the ball that Hachioji offers, the smaller YCAC pitch showed up our lack of match sharpness and YCAC was well adpated to the smaller field and high pressure game. So that was that. The YCAC are newly crowned champs and congratulations and kudos to them, they are worthy winners.
We can take some solace in the consistency of our team over the years. Despite being the most prolific goal scoring team in the past five seasons only one Hibs player has bagged the golden boot (Keita tied with Karl in TML season 1). This is because of our range of attacking geneoptions sees a large range of Hibs names in the top scorer’s list. It’s this range of options that has seen the Hibs remain near the top while other teams have risen and crashed when one or two key players leave. It will be interesting to see how the YCAC are able to deal with the loss of Tyson, who seems to have had a hand in virtually all of their goals this season, and who arrived at half time for our cup game earlier this season and they were three nil down by the time he got on the pitch. There’s also the possibility of Hide “Love you long time” Yoshioka forgetting which shirt he is wearing and begin to bang in a few own goals from time to time. Interest now goes to the relegation stoush and the cup, it will be tough to get back up for the remaining league games, but we’ll give it our best. With the impending return of Ranoldo-esque Yohei and ex J leaguer Tani, we can look forward to the next season with optimism.
Report by Bevan Colless.
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