Kakeru is excited by the prospect of playing a match on the Kamakura City grounds, a step up from their school field. But is Coach Iwaki doing this just for fun, or is there a deeper motive behind his actions? And who will get the rebellious members of the former Soccer Club to come back?
What They Say:
“Enoshima Soccer Club Reborn”
With the Soccer club still split, the former Coach Kondo has returned to talk to his former players. He will show the unsatisfied players the rhyme and reason behind Coach Iwaki’s managment.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Sawamura and the hold-outs from the former Soccer Club are still sticking to their resistance, but we know that that cannot last forever. And the agent for softening their stand obviously will be Mr. Kondo, the former coach of the Soccer Club. He takes three of the lead players from the rebels, if one may call them that, for a little nighttime excursion. It appears that Coach Iwaki has been working nights at a construction site, and Kondo takes them to see him, without being seen. You may wonder why Iwaki would be working nights? He’s doing so in order to save enough money to rent the Kamakura city stadium for one of the team’s practices. It would be a good experience for them to get used to playing on the big stage if they are going to get anywhere in the inter-school competitions. Kondo wants to show his former players how much passion Iwaki has for the team. It does impress them, but they are still skeptical about the new coach, since he is far too soft on the players. But Kondo challenges them to put that impression to a real test. How soft is Iwaki in reality?
Not very. The players on the team come in the next day expecting a friendly match against a local team that a friend of Iwaki’s plays on. The practice match goes well for Enoshima at first, with Araki leading them to two goals easily. But the other team was not playing seriously, they were just waiting to see what Enoshima had. That’s because they’re not just some random high school team. They are the Kamakura University team, runners-up in last year’s intercollegiate competition. Enoshima are obviously outmatched for this game. Iwaki has thrown them into a shark pit.
Kondo takes the leading members of the rebels to see the game and they learn a few things about Iwaki. First of all, he has been playing Araki while he’s fat not to be soft on him. No, if anything, he’s being extra hard on Araki, since he’s forcing Araki to develop greater cardiovascular fitness without losing weight first. Also, one can see how “soft” Iwaki is from the fact that he put his largely untested team in front of a group of experienced and determined players who overmatch them in many respects. Still, the members of the Enoshima club manage to find a way to come back after finding themselves down by 2 goals at the half. Thanks to hard work from Makoto and Kakeru (Araki is too heavily guarded to affect play anymore), Enoshima manages to level the match by the very end, but it leaves the entire team gasping for air.
But the exhibition has its intended effect. The rebellious players are fired up now and come back to practice. At the end of practice, the new starters and reserves for the team are announced. The expected people make the team, including Kakeru, though he is a reserve forward, not a starter yet. Now, they have to look ahead to the inter-school competition.
After the somewhat melodramatic overkill of splitting the team apart in the last episode, they went down the cliched road of having the former coach Kondo come in and show the rebellious players from the former SC that Coach Iwaki is not what they think he is. He is not soft. While his practices may not have the high tension and stress that Kondo’s workouts had, Iwaki is very hard in his own way. He pulls no punches in playing Araki while he is still fat, and he does not coddle his team, pitting them against another side that clearly outmatches them. This is definitely the school of hard knocks, not a soft approach. Of course, this is not a real revelation. Anyone reading the Big Book of Sports Drama Cliches would have been able to guess these things. But fortunately for this show, they do a decent job of executing the regular formula. That’s been the greatest strength of this show, even with its occasional missteps. The execution of the standard playbook is more often than not well done, as it is in this episode. The pacing of the shifts and turns seem natural, well, natural enough for manufactured drama. Therefore, the show continues to move ahead and entertain. Now with these preliminaries over, it is time to see how well this team can play in a real match.
In Summary:
The break in the Enoshima Soccer Team was bound to end, and it was also pretty easy to guess that Coach Kondo, the former coach of the Soccer Club, would have a hand in bringing his former charges back into the fold. It was also pretty predictable that Coach Iwaki would turn out not to be the laid-back, easy-going person that he seemed to be when it comes to coaching. Of course, he is actually very passionate about all of it, and does not go easy on his team. But the rift is healed and the new starting lineup and reserve team members are announced. Practice time is over. Now comes the real test, a match against another school.
Grade: B
Streamed by: Crunchyroll Review Equipment: Apple iMac with 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard