How low can we go?

I originally wasn't going to mention the game; but seriously the way things are going it's better to be honest. The game was played on Monday and really didn't mean much, unless you start to read too much into things, because then things get really scary.

Being a top division team, playing a training match against a second division team should be a gimme right? Yes we played our second string, or even third string team, but a club like the size of Urawa going into a training match against a J-2 team; a win is expected, a draw is not good but acceptable, but a lost is worrying (to put it nicely).

The J-2 team Urawa played a training match against on Monday (16/5) was Tochigi SC and the final score; a 2-1 lost. Can any positives be taken from the match? Yes there can be and I will touch on that later, but lets start with the negatives. A team which features a mixture of fringe players (Hara, Tsuboi, Takasaki, Aoyama), players coming back from injuries (Naoki Yamada, Umesaki) as well as our up-and-coming players (Kojima) and youth squad; a 2-1 defeat isn't really what I would have expected. It's quiet disheartening because if our first XI isn't playing well (which it isn't) these are the players we can turn to? The question I now ask is "How low can we go?"

Now it's time to put on my Red coloured glasses and find some positives from the match (or should I say magnifying glass because there isn't much). Naoki Yamada played the full 90mins, scored Urawa lone goal and overal had a good game, Umesaki played 70mins of the game the best part of it all is that both of them didn't come off injured. I'm actually tempted to say replace Richardes with Naoki in the starting XI; but we'll see in a few weeks.

This is the starting XI against Tochigi SC:

GK: Kato
DF: Tsuboi; Horinouchi; Tsutsumi; Noda
MF: Aoyama; Kojima; Naoki
FW: Umesaki; Takasaki; Hara

Today we face the might of Kashima, a team we haven't defeated in a while. The question is "is the only way up?" or "how low can we go?"