Last weekend, SFIDA Setagaya won a football match.
This was useful.
It mattered because three points are generally desirable, but also because they came against VONDS Ichihara, the team at the bottom of the Nadeshiko League Division 1 table. Maasa Taguchi’s 1st-minute goal therefore did more than win an awkward afternoon in Chiba. It put another chunk of distance between SFIDA and the part of the table nobody particularly enjoys looking at.
Relegation is not mathematically impossible. It just no longer needs to occupy quite so much space in the brain.
Which leaves us with a rather more enjoyable question.
Can SFIDA actually start looking up?
Please Bring the Away Version Home
There are currently two SFIDA Setagayas.
One travels around Japan wearing white and causing problems.
The other plays at home.
I would quite like to meet the first one at AGF Field on Sunday.
SFIDA have won four times away from home this season, including that excellent 2–0 victory against Loveledge Nagoya and last weekend’s considerably less glamorous, but possibly just as useful, 1–0 win over VONDS.
At home, they have won twice.
Six of their nine home league games have ended in defeat.
That is a genuinely peculiar split for a team whose supporters presumably aren’t finding anything particularly offensive about them.
The defeat to Nittaidai SMG Yokohama summed it up rather neatly. SFIDA returned from beating second-placed Nagoya 2–0 away, faced a team below them at home, and were three goals down after 49 minutes.
Consistency is apparently considered vulgar in Setagaya.
Sunday would be an excellent time to reconsider.
Unfortunately, ORCA Are Quite Good
ORCA Kamogawa arrive third in the table with 32 points and one of the best defensive records in the division.
They have conceded only 14 league goals.
SFIDA have scored 28.
Twenty-two of those have come from two people.
Misuzu Uchida has 13. Mizuki Horie has nine.
You can probably see where this is going.
ORORCA’s job is essentially to prevent SFSFIDA’s two most productive attackers from turning the afternoon into their own private shooting competition. SFSFIDA’s job is to find a way through a defence which has spent most of 2026 refusing to cooperate with precisely that sort of plan.
There is encouragement, though.
ORORCA’s last completed league match was also at VONDS Ichihara.
They lost 2–0.
Six days later, SFIDA went to the same ground and won 1–0.
Football does not work through transitive property, sadly. Otherwise we could declare SFIDA approximately three goals better than ORCA, open the sake now and spend Sunday doing something less stressful.
But it does tell us something about the slightly strange moment in which these teams meet.
ORCA had won four consecutive league matches before drawing with leaders Shizuoka and then losing to VONDS. Their scheduled game with Nagoya was subsequently postponed.
They have gone from charging towards the top two to waiting around.
SFIDA, meanwhile, have gone loss, win, loss, win.
One team has stalled.
The other cannot decide what it is.
Misuzu Uchida Remains the Obvious Problem
There is something wonderfully reassuring about writing a SFIDA preview and eventually arriving at the sentence: Misuzu Uchida might score.
She has done it 13 times already.
Uchida scored against Nagoya. She scored against Nittaidai. Earlier in the season, when SFIDA lost 3–2 at home to Nagoya, she scored both.
Alongside her, Horie has nine.
Together they account for almost four-fifths of every league goal SFIDA have scored this season.
That concentration is both reassuring and slightly terrifying.
ORCA know where the danger is coming from. There is no elaborate deception here.
Yukino Tsukito and the ORCA defence simply have to stop it.
That makes Horie particularly interesting. If she can occupy the centre-backs, win the first contact and create space around her, Uchida suddenly has somewhere to attack. If ORCA can isolate the pair and force SFSFIDA to attack elsewhere, the afternoon becomes considerably more difficult.
Although perhaps this would be a nice weekend for somebody else to score.
Mizuki Urabe Comes Back
Another lovely little thread runs through this game.
Mizuki Urabe knows SFIDA rather well.
Before Waseda University and before ORCA Kamogawa, she developed in SFIDA SeSetagaya’south system.
Now she returns in the opposition colours.
Urabe has never pretended to be an especially delicate footballer. When she joined ORCA, she described herself in terms of passion and grittiness rather than technical elegance.
That makes the prospect of her occupying the same flank as SFSFIDA’snergetic right side particularly entertaining.
Some reunions involve flowers.
This one may involve shoulder challenges.
History IsIsn’telping
There is one statistic I would prefer to delete.
SFIDA have not beaten ORCA in seven meetings.
Four draws. Three defeats.
Our last victory came in October 2022, a 4–2 win…th that’s a distant memory.
If you have time, you can watch the whole match back above.
The overall history between these clubs is remarkably balanced: six wins apiece and seven draws across 19 meetings.
Recently, however, ORCA have owned the advantage.
They won the reverse fixture 1–0 in May, scoring in the 78th minute.
So perhaps this is another little test of where SFIDA actually are.
Not a relegation six-pointer. Not a desperate scramble for survival. Not even a match they particularly need to win.
Something more interesting.
A chance to beat one of the division-setting teams at home.
We Can Look Up Now
That is the luxury last weekend bought.
The VONDS win was not beautiful. SFIDA needed TaTaguchi’sate goal and then survived Samia Masuda striking the post in the 89th minute.
Fine.
Take the three points.
Hamada has repeatedly resisted the idea that winning automatically validates everything that came before it. After beating Nagoya, he warned against allowing victory to become proof that everything SFIDA had done was suddenly correct.
That philosophy matters now.
Because SFSFIDA’secent results offer plenty of evidence for whichever version of this team you would prefer to believe in.
They can beat Nagoya away.
They can lose to Nittaidai at home.
They can grind out an ugly victory against VONDS.
They have one of the league’s leading scorers, a teenage goalkeeper capable of dominating her penalty area, an intriguing new attacker waiting for opportunities, and a manager still tinkering with the shape of his team.
And now they have ORCA Kamogawa.
Third in the league. Fourteen goals conceded. Seven games unbeaten against SFIDA.
Good.
For most of September, the temptation was to look down.
Sunday is an opportunity to spend 90 minutes looking the other way.
