G. Osaka 1-1 S-Pulse

Barry writes:

ガンバ大阪　１対１　清水エスパルス
G. Osaka 1-1 S-Pulse
Myojin 40 --------------------- Okazaki 70

Att. 19914

Line Up

GK Nishibe

DF Tsujio
DF Hiraoka
DF Bosnar (yellow 40)
DF Ota

MF Hyodo
MF Honda (yellow 68)
MF Ono

FW Okazaki
FW Johnsen (yellow 69)
FW Fujimoto

Subs Used

Takaki on for Tsujio (66)
Hara on for Hyodo (89)
M. Yamamoto on for Fujimoto (94)

Report

This is what away days should be about: a weekend away in an awesome (if crazily crowded) city seeing sights, scoffing local delicacies and, of course, watching a cracking game of football.

We could have, and maybe should have, won this creating as we did chance after chance. Whereas against Sendai we put most of them away, on Saturday we either failed to hit the target or were kept at bay by some inspired goal keeping. Okazaki was denied on more than one occasion but he finally hit the target in the 70th minute when his shot was deflected home.

But yeah, we played well. We're on form and even against a team who will, despite their current position, will surely be at the top reaches of J1 come December.

Not done a panorama in a while

A draw will be harder to take for Gamba who are still languishing uncharacteristically at the lower reaches of the table, and an away point at one of the better teams in the league is no bad result at all. All our away fixtures so far have been against what you'd regard as the better teams in the league and we're still the only team in J1 unbeaten.

Only seven games into the season the league table is still pretty meaningless of course, but the next four games against the Saitama teams of Omiya and Urawa, then Kyoto followed by bottom club Niigata give us a huge opportunity to maintain a high position before the World Cup break.

Videos

Gamba's penalty:




Okazaki's equaliser: