Reports said that indeed Kagawa will be dropped and Kashiwagi will play with Hasebe in the center of the pitch. Yuto should be back in the starting XI.
Line-up: Nishikawa. H.Sakai - Yoshida - Makino - Nagatomo. Hasebe. Kashiwagi - Kiyotake. Honda - Kanazaki - Muto.
New uniform, new team, and new approach from our manager. Great display from Kiyotake and Kashiwagi, I wonder how Kagawa will manage to plays himself into the starting line-up again.
The only meaningful conclusion from this game could be that Oita Trinita overinvested money to get some success but no one can say that used those money in a bad way looking at today's NT lineup.
Yes, 4 players of today's line-up (Nishikawa, Morishige, Kiyotake and Kanazaki) were members of Oita Trinita's squad in 2008 which won the J-League Cup and was competing for the J-League title and eventually finished 4th. One has to wonder what if this quartet stick with their team after its relegation will they manage an immediate return to J1 and be a force to be reckoned with?
I don't know what happened to Kanazaki, I had high hopes for him when he was very young but he faded a bit and struggled with injuries. After the came back from Portugal though, also thanks to the new Kashima, it's like he has that fire. Hope to see him more.
I never understood why Nürnberg set Kanazki out of the door so early. I still read the interview from Nürnberg Management and Coach. They said before he arrived there that he is an excellent player who increases the quality of the squad. In his first match he hockey assisted the equalizer goal and was highly praised and one game later in which the hole team including Kanazki was bad everyony said that he is maybe not good enough and after that he barely played more then 5 minutes per game and 4 month later he was selled to portugal. What a management Nürnberg was having ? Buy a player,praise him and after 1 and a half game you said that this player doesnt have the quality for one of the worst teams in this bundesliga year ? Very Weird, I mean he has made 4 games for Nürnberg and overall he played only 94 minutes in this games, you can`t rate a player on this and in his first game he was great by the way.. I still think he was good enough and like many other players from abroad... with some time he would have adadped to this league like Haraguchi. But he is still young and even in Japan he can shine and play for the JNT. Happy for him !
Kanazaki isn't really a finesse player but he ran and attacked his defenders, it's more that you can say about the ghosts usually upfront.
Portimonense's website featured Kanazaki's goal. I didn't know he was at Kashima on loan (until January 2016) - Portimonense has him under contract until 2017, apparently. http://portimonense.pt/pag_detalhe.php?id=6885&catg=3