The Shrine

So I was looking at this month's NPOT and the natural discussion is whether the German guy can beat the Team Japan doubles with just 1 guy (they also play 3 on 1 in NPOT, because your doubles partner might be a spy from the other team), and while 1 on 2 is pretty lopsided, I'm pretty sure a pro would have no problem beating 2 normal guys in tennis. So then I remembered before POT, there was a manga called Shoot! which is about soccer where team Brazil played team Japan with only FOUR person. The Brazilians asked for offside rules to be enforced even in Japan's half since otherwise if they ever go on attack and lose the ball (obviously all 3 guys but the goalie has to be on offense to even get anywhere) they'd pretty much always lose a point but otherwise it's played like a standard game, and to absolutely no one's surprise the Brazilians end up winning in the first half. It's only until the second half when the Japanese started realizing that they have 7 more people than the other side so they can like, triple team everyone who isn't the goalie. The Brazilians ended up calling the game after it was tied 1on1 since it was starting to look bad after the Japanese started triple teaming. They also had remarks like how Japan is a strong team because a lesser team would've lost to Brazil even though they only had 4 guys. I've seen a lot of crazy stuff but this is pretty insane because it's not like you're playing Dragonball Z soccer/tennis/basketball/whatever. It took a half before Japan even realized that they could just triple team everyone (they were playing it like a normal soccer game I guess).

The only thing in recent memory I can think of is Kuroko's Basket in the scene where Kuroko and this other guy was double team this boss guy who has Naruto powers where he can look at you and people keel over, so he used his eye powers on the guy guarding on the right side, and he keels over so the boss guy makes his move to the LEFT side, and Kuroko stole the ball and boss guy is like "IMPOSSIBLE THE OTHER GUY ON THE DOUBLE TEAM IS ON THE LEFT SIDE???" I mean yeah, you totally put two guys both to the right or left of whoever you normally double team. Nobody would possibly thought of putting one guy on the left and one guy on the right. Maybe that's why the boss guy was able to beat double teams so easily because people normally put both guys on the double team on the same side in that particular universe.

Personally I love the blatant racism and stereotyping in sports manga, or maybe it's just the translations that lead me to believe that.

Well, a lot of sports manga don't even get to the international stage, but yeah there's a lot of blatant racism there. Like Eyeshield 21 it's like "Patrick Spencer is faster than Japanese because he's black". "Mr. Don is stronger than the Japanese because he's white."

I remember there was a scene in Last Inning where the main character's school got a transfer lefty from America who turns out to be a pretty ordinary guy and people there are like "Aren't transfers from America all super bulky guys who can throw 95 MPH heat???"