Haikyuu 2!! Episode 6: Tempo

We open up the episode to Kageyama scaring children and making them cry. Wow, rude. The kid’s just trying to have a good time you didn’t need to make him pee his little pants. At least he didn’t seem to faze Oikawa’s little nephew, probably because he made himself look dumb.

In a surprise turn, Kageyama actually asks Oikawa for advice. Advice about Hinata wanting to make the spikes with his eyes open, Kageyama thinking it’s not easy and he’s not capable of it and all that. And Oikawa says what were all thinking last episode: Kageyama was going back to being a dictator. Basically he didn’t even listen to Hinata and basically ordered him to stop with trying to learn new hits, it’s what Kageyama wanted, not what Hinata wanted. He’s not tossing the tosses that Hinata wants, so teamwork right now isn’t working. Because when it comes to these quick attacks, it’s Hinata that’s in charge, not Kageyama. And until he realizes that, things are going to go nowhere. Pretty solid advice, and of course it had to be by someone who Kageyama respects. But of course Oikawa couldn’t walk away from this encounter without making his nephew take a picture of how down in the dumps Kageyama is and Oikawa feeling awesome because of it.

Who knew Oikawa was an uncle, anyway? And wasn’t it cute that he had a bunch of pictures of his nephew playing volleyball on his phone? Super cute!

Later on Kageyama practices a different kind of toss Coach instructs that would further give Hinata’s quicks more power. Instead of passing tosses that shoot out of his range (like an upwards diagonal), he needs to toss where the ball stops right in Hinata’s range. To make the ball “stop”. So the rest of the episode he does that.

Another person learning to improve his skills is Hinata. Coach Ukai takes him to his grandfather, the infamous other Coach Ukai that made the past Karasuno a power force. Tanaka made him out to be scary but he’s actually a pretty chill grandpa. He teaches the kids in the neighborhood some volleyball and they’re the ones that help Hinata with his training. Hinata learns something knew he never realized: tempo. He learns, of course, to hit the ball with his eyes open, but also not to rely on the setter too much. He practiced with the neighborhood kids with all of their different styles and he ran, jumped, and hit at a certain tempo and grew accustomed to hitting any kind of ball from any player tossing to him. He can’t just rely and trust Kageyama all the time, he needs to branch out and improve on quicks with his eyes actually open. To fight with his own will! That’ll make him a more formidable opponent and the Hinata/Kageyama duo even more scary.

And the rest of the episode was the rest of the Karasuno team practicing and improving on things that they’ve always wanted to be better at, especially seeing the other teams they observed at Tokyo. The last long-term training camp is approaching, which we’ll see next week, so I’ll be happy to see how Karasuno will play. Hinata and Kageyama haven’t actually practiced their new moves together yet so they might encounter a bump in that. Also judging by the preview, it looks like tall jerk Tsukki is going to be facing some problems of his own. I’m not surprised as he was the only one in the team that wasn’t doing his own practices. Even Yamaguchi went to practice serving on his own time. You could learn from that, Jerkishima.