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I must say, having read a few chapters of the manga I can definitely tell that the production company is trying really hard to make this anime more appealing to children by enhancing the amount of humour in the story.

The humour part is not necessarily a bad thing. If I was to be critical about the manga I would say that it does seem to be a little too stiff, so having the anime be filled with more humour is actually a nice change but with this episode, much like in the last episode, the humour did seem a little forced and over the top at times. Still good to have Kota being the main source of humour but also having Kakeru in comedic situations is a nice change of pace, especially since the previous episodes have portrayed his misery and angst quite extensively.

The episode skipped ahead quite a bit since the last one, still sticking to a pace which by no means makes any sense to me but probably has something to do with the fact that there are around 30 volumes out and the manga could essentially finish at any point. Still missing out a lot of the crucial parts in the manga would definitely leave those who haven't read it with one definite question: how and why did Araki loose all of his weight I'm interested to see how the anime makes up for missing out these crucial facts.A good thing about this episode is that we finally get to have an episode where everything is covered and a new part of the storyline starts up the next episode. Unlike the other episodes, this one ends halfway through the match with Araki's appearance; good job if you ask me since I was wondering when we might finally see some cliffhanger-esque situations arising.

If I was to summarise this episode, I would have to say that it was a nice watch (emphasis on the word nice). Maybe it's because of the first five episodes' impact that I wasn't on the edge of my seat but I think that this is a pretty much the case with most sports anime and of course until the story progresses once again they will continue to be nice watch's. The biggest part of this episode was the discovery of Kakeru's fatal flaw - clearly he's going to have to train like crazy to erase it.

Well next episode we get to see a little bit of co-op play between Kakeru and Araki, also we will presumably see the conclusion of the match between the FC and SC.