Haikyu!! To The Top

Episode 18

It's perhaps neither here nor there, but whenever I hear “dumpster battle” I don't think of cats versus crows. Maybe it's just where I'm from, but my mind always goes to trash pandas versus dump ducks. (That's raccoons versus seagulls to you.) That particular dumpster battle isn't one that Haikyu!! is likely to bring us this season, but after this episode we're halfway to the one that the boys in the show are hoping for, because Nekoma has just managed to defeat Sarukawa.

It certainly wasn't an easy victory for them. That's mostly due to the fact that Sarukawa figured out early on that Kenma was both a strength and a weakness for the team – he's the brain, yes, but his stamina is not nearly as good as the rest, and that makes him vulnerable if another team figures out how to exploit it. And Sarukawa definitely did: they managed to keep him moving for almost the entire two sets rather than letting him play a waiting game until he was absolutely needed, causing Kenma to become so tired in the second set he actually tripped over his own feet and went down. Really, it's a good thing he's so skilled at visualizing and coming up with strategies, because his low-energy self could otherwise be a major liability instead of just a minor one some teams figure out how to use.

But it also helps that Nekoma is a tightly-knit group. That's something we've seen be a strength across all seasons of this series; the closer the teammates, the stronger the team. That's because they don't just know each other's strengths and weaknesses as players; they also understand each other as people, which was largely the point of last week's character-focused episode. Without understanding how Tora and Kenma function as a unit (despite what he says this week, I'm not sure Kenma would reliably think of Tora as a friend) we would have a harder time seeing how they could play off of each other as part of a team. And even though Fukunaga was largely in the background of both this week's and last week's episodes, we did see that he was helping Kenma in his own special way – be it a bucket of water to separate he and Tora or spotting him as he failed to lift a relatively small weight, Fukunaga was always paying attention to whatever it was that Kenma was doing. This week that translated into him being ready when Kenma made a last-second decision to set the ball for him, something that took on greater weight because of what we learned.

Despite that, this episode did feel a little rushed. It makes sense; there's a lot of stuff to get through and not many episodes in a season to get through it in. Also, as much as we may like Nekoma, they're technically the opposition in the game these past two episodes have been gearing up for; Karasuno's the protagonist we're meant to be rooting for. While I wouldn't have wanted this to necessarily be a one-episode break from the game against Inarizaki, I also kind of wish it had been an OVA or something, although with the story flow that might not have worked all that well. Be that as it may, we at least still got a good sense of Kenma's stamina and how he functions when someone is expressly targeting him as a potential weak link, and given that the Karasuno boys know him decently well, we can't say for sure that they won't employ a similar strategy.

That is, of course, assuming that they can beat those darn Miya twins and make it to the dumpster in the first place. I guess we'll see next week.

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Haikyu!! To The Top is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.