It preparation for the upcoming Inter-High, it’s time for a round-robin tournament of first-to-21 to determine the regulars line-up. Among them, only the top three will be able to participate in the singles matches. It was fun to see the first years declare this as their first “team-battle”, as they are competing against their seniors for their spots.
It was nice to see a different side to Kouki this week. For a guy who said in the beginning he wasn’t sure if he was even going to join the badminton team, he’s pretty fired up about it and even won 4/5 of his Day 1 Games. Unlike the other first years, he has a specific goal in mind, and that is to rank 4th because Kento, Hongo Kazuki and Yokokawa Yuusuke (Kento’s doubles partner) have already secured their spots in the top 3 for the singles games.
It appears Kouki’s strength lies in his ability to see the shuttle very clearly, but his weakness is that he sticks too much to the basics. And while he isn’t one to really show it, we saw how frustrated he can get when his senior like Kento doesn’t even acknowledge him, let alone think of him as an opponent. Whereas, on the other hand, Kento has done the opposite towards Ryo, going as far as to declare he will beat him in seven minutes.
However as I mentioned in my previous entry, I suspect Kento isn’t necessarily interested in Ryo as a player, but rather his sister. There have been many instances where he has brought up Ryo’s family name, and the kind of expectations of his performance attached to it, which would explains why he said, “Mizushima. All he got is his name”. But of course there would be no way for Kouki to even consider that possibility.
As for Ryo, while he had a shaky start to the round-robin, by the end of day 2, he seemed to have finally found some momentum. The coach started seeing a more noticeable difference in his performance after his match with the team captain Hongo. While that match looked very one-sided with how chill-lax Hongo was while playing, it seems Hongo had actually been setting him up for success. And the best proof to of that growth was when he secured his first ever victory against Shouhei! And while he lost to Kento (21-5), he did make sure that he couldn’t beat him within seven minutes as he so haughtily declared he would do. It was smart of him to ask Akira to time the match so that he knows whether seven minutes had passed already. Now Kento can’t hold use that against him.
Speaking of which, Kento sure liked setting up stakes, something he did with his match against poor Akira, who was unlucky enough to have him as his first match of the day. Kento was clearly bored with it, so he decided that if Akira failed to score a single point, from then on he’ll call him ‘Aki-Love’. Thankfully Akira was able to dodge that crisis when he lucked out getting his first point with the shuffle just barely tipping over the net.
Meanwhile he didn’t bother doing anything with Shouhei considering his very existence is enough to provoke the guy. He looked so done with it, though he did tell him to shut up in the end because he was yelling so much, hahahahahaha.
As for the twins, we didn’t actually see them interact with Kento much if at all like Ryo, Kouki, Shouhei and now even Akira has- which I’m not entirely sure what to think of that to be honest. In fact, their characters are kind of in a weird position at the moment. It’s almost as if they are there for the sake of it. Hopefully that will change, because it’s weird to see them kind of third-wheeling along while the others are being given more opportunities to highlight their characters. As of right now, the only one who can tell them apart is Ryo, and we’ve been given some concrete clues how while they do have some distinct differences between them, such one who likes curry udon, and the other curry soba.
Next time, we will be the match against Kouki VS Ryo! I was like “AH GEEZ” when the episode ended, I was all set ready to watch some more! I like that there’s a rivalry (err, well, sort of one-sided at the moment) between them, so I’m looking forward to to seeing more of how much Ryo has improved his game!
