New Urawa Reds manager Volker Finke might not have been smitten with the team he saw play twice last season, but the German admits his first taste of the Saitama Stadium crowd was love at first sight.
Reds invited Finke to Japan at the end of last season with a view to replacing then-manager Gert Engels, but the first match he saw could not have been a worse advertisement for the job.
Urawa, at that point only one point off the top of the table with three games left to play, slumped to a shambolic 2-1 defeat to Shimizu S-Pulse that all but killed off its title chances.