ACL 2013 Group Stage vs Guangzou Evergrande

3-0 Loser in their home stadium at Guangzhou  First match of the season and I have to say its not a good start. I watched it on G+ live at home, unable to make it to Guangzhou this time. I was surprised there was a live broadcast on my Cable TV, never watched the channel before as it is mainly broadcasting baseball and I don't like the Tokyo Giants which is both owned by NTV/Yomiuri group. The stadium was great it was completely packed with extremely loud crown it almost felt like a National Team playing against each other. I wished I was there.

The starters for Reds were as expected, Shinzo Koroki had a minor injury so Petrovic decided to go with Genki Haraguchi as the FW. Other than that it was the usual gang form the pre-season matches.  Guangzou had a pretty impressive starter 3 foreign attacker and the rest are all China national team members according to the TV announcer. Barrios who scored the first goal used to play with Shinji Kagawa in Dortmund (Germany) so quite familiar to the Japanese audience. Reds was playing pretty good until we lost 1 goal from losing the ball in mid-field. After that the game was Guangzhou's and they scored two more goals mainly from our own mistakes. Trying to keep the ball is a good strategy but I don't think in a away environment like this it is less effective as the player are under strong pressure and make mistakes to lose the ball in our won field. Especially after we lost 1 goal we should have thought of doing something else, but then again I also understand that Petrovic sticks with his plan throughout the game.

Couple of good things that I took from the game was that Sakano replacing Marcio during the second half and played FW was quite good. I had little expectation for him as Reds was less successful with university graduates especially for FW. The other thing was although we lost the game it wasn't as bad as the score shows. If we scored the first goal we had a good chance of winning the game. We have to switch to the next match on Saturday  should be a easier opponent compared to Guangzhou and easier stadium to play as well.