At last, we’ve been blessed with English subs for this, the penultimate episode of the series.
This episode didn’t particularly grab me, to be honest. It’s just… I’m a little tired of Tsubasa going on and off the pitch, occasionally collapsing, and banging on about how he’ll win even if it kills him. I think everyone by now is probably finding the Injured Tsubasa Arc a little tedious and repetitive. But more than anything, it’s the most definitive proof of the corner that Takahashi has painted himself into with Captain Tsubasa, at least in the early stages (as I can’t comment on the 30-odd years that followed). He’s got a main character whose whole thing is being the World’s Best Football Guy. Which sounds great! And exciting! And then you remember your series needs stakes and having World’s Best Football Guy as your protagonist makes that kind of hard to work! So what can you do to introduce a little tension without compromising Tsubasa’s raw ability? Of course, you injure him. But you can’t have him off the pitch for too long, because frankly, the audience will not suspend their disbelief to the extent that they can buy Nankatsu beating Toho without Tsubasa. And even for the brief periods where Tsubasa is off the pitch, the story has to make excuses for why Hyuga hasn’t scored, because everyone knows he could score 6 goals on Morisaki in about 30 seconds if he wanted to. So Hyuga has to conveniently refuse to make any meaningful play unless Tsub
asa is in play, rendering his off-pitch moments almost pointless.
To be fair though, who wants to watch Nankatsu play without Tsubasa? Who are we gonna watch, Ishizaki? So this whole situation is inevitable. Tsubasa needs to stay on the pitch, but he also needs to be injured so that the illusion of Nankatsu losing can be preserved without making Tsubasa look like a jobber. But we know that Nankatsu have to win which sort of negates the stakes anyway, so the whole thing is really a vicious circle. And at the end we’re left watching Tsubasa shoot 15 drive shots with a broken leg, slowly losing the will to live. Or maybe that’s just me.
I’m complaining right now, but this is also sort of what I love about the series. In a way, it’s almost refreshing how little Takahashi cares about making Tsubasa a believable or relatable character. He wants him to be the best at the thing, no ifs, ands, or buts, and he’ll engineer the story around that no matter the consequences. It can get a little taxing to watch sometimes, but ultimately I enjoy the silliness of it enough to compensate for that. And frankly, it’s kinda ballsy. I can respect that.
At the start of the episode, it seemed that Tsubasa has suddenly remembered he has shots other than the Drive Shot. Such personal growth, and in the first 60 seconds too. But then he forgot about that about 5 minutes later and just went for a Drive Shot anyway. Okay. Is he actually just working out his Roberto Trauma by destroying himself with the final gift he received from him? I wish the show explored Tsubasa’s mental health issues more instead of painting his instability as incredible determination. I mean look at him here, he’s getting tossed around like a ragdoll and he’s getting some sort of perverse joy out of it.
Worse still, everyone seems to have decided to start egging him on. I guess accepting his impending death is their only realistic option since Tsubasa would probably kill a grown man to stay on that pitch right now, but it’s still a little creepy that everyone around him, teammates and adults alike, is totally on board with him sacrificing himself to this singular match. The kid is both physically broken and mentally unbalanced. Why are they acting impressed by it? I wish I could get my way 100% of the time just by repeatedly talking about my dream. But like this is what, his second time collapsing? Jesus Christ. Tsubasa doesn’t deserve legs.
So this episode was kinda blah (I really liked some of the art at the end though, particularly the very final shot!), but this was always going to be a tough match to adapt. Hopefully the final episode can end it on a high regardless!