S-Pulse 2-1 Chiba (Nabisco Cup)

Barry writes:

Three points, and with FC Tokyo beating Yamagata, it's means we can possibly clinch our place in round two with a win away at Kobe on Sunday.

A second half corner for us

A plus 10000 crowd for a midweek Nabisco Cup game for the first time in nearly a decade - brilliant work from the S-Pulse massive, and it was a pretty entertaining affair, all told. We lost Masaki to injury just three minutes in, but Honda stepped up and did an excellent job in his stead.

Hara opened the scoring on 19 minutes with a great finish from a Jungo through ball. It's his first goal for a while, so will do his confidence the world of good. 70 minutes later Johnsen pulled a ball back for a free and advancing Hyodo who, to my surprise, didn't smash it out the stadium, instead he drove a low, hard and sweetly struck shot past the keeper into the back of the net.

Leaving stuff unattended for the entire game isn't uncommon. It wouldn't happen in Liverpool!

Shortly after that, Chiba pulled one back, but nobody really noticed, and it was soon all over. Let's do the business on Sunday and give ourselves a stress-free final match day against Tokyo in a fortnight.

Player celebrations reach new levels of gayness :-D

Line Up:

GK K. Yamamoto

DF Takaki
DF Aoyama
DF Iwashita
DF Kodama

MF Fujimoto
MF M. Yamamoto
MF Edamura
MF Hyodo

FW Johnsen
FW Hara

Subs used

Honda on for M. Yamamoto (3)
Paulo on for Hara (75)
Tsujio on for Fujimoto (83)

Highlights

Extended highlights courtesy of You Tube user imoimo9's personal cam.



Official pictures can be found here.