Blue Lock – 22

「声」 (Koe)
“Voice”

Episode 22 of Blue Lock places Isagi’s team in the right position to score when the next goal from either team will be their winning goal. But as Isagi and Rin hustle their hardest to outmatch one another, Bachira is currently looking inward to reflect on what he’ll personally have to do to show how far he’s come.

PULL UP IN THE MONSTER

Bachira is such an interesting character to me because of how he grapples with how he handles self-reliance. While he’s propped up an imaginary Monster to be his playmate when everyone else shunned him, being in a room of his own peers has forced Bachira to confront how his own personal skills have improved now that he doesn’t have to rely on his Monster.

Nagi’s tough love has been notorious for changing how his opponents and partners approach soccer, so him pulling up next to Bachira to brag about how he’d rather pick up Rin and would encourage Isagi to choose Rin instead of Bachira made him confront his current biggest weakness; complacency.

He’s spent so much time leaning onto his Monster to stave off loneliness that he wasn’t used to pushing himself to his limits, and mostly played for fun by coasting off of the complacency relying on his Monster had gifted him. But now that he’s found like minded soccer players, they’ve noticed how much of a detriment it’s been for Bachira to play on auto-pilot when he’ll have to prove that his dribbling skills have greater utility against his foes.

Feeling outmatched leaves Bachira feeling like he’s squandering his talents, especially if it meant that the Monster was discouraging him from moving forward as a defense mechanism to keep others from hurting him. But when he has both his own talents as a speedy dribbler and his adaptability with any of his teammates, he no longer needs to lean on his Monster to help him stave off insecurities of being lonely or weird.

It makes it all the more awesome when he refuses to let himself get rusty as he pushes forward by his own ego, casting away his Monster so that he can juke and dribble the ball away from everyone. It’s a riveting sequence as he’s doing mid-air spindashes and triple nutmeg maneuvers, all the while letting his tongue flail about like MJ. It’s the closest that Blue Lock has gotten to a JoJo moment where Bachira’s big comeback play is depicted with such grand bombast.

ISAGI’S CHOICE

To put salt on the wound and push Bachira to light a fire underneath himself, his overreliance on his Monster makes Nagi’s comments sting even further because he’s spent so much time wanting to reunite with Isagi that he had assumed in the back of his mind that Isagi would choose him immediately.

It adds plenty of stakes on Bachira’s end because, deep down, Rin would seem like the no-brainer choice as a prospective prodigy. For Nagi and Isagi, I can see Rin being more promising as a master of many trades and how, no matter what team composition they have, Rin could adapt as long as the rest of their players know their place as NPC’s who are not nearly as multifaceted as Rin.

In my eyes, however, Rin’s Achilles heel is a major liability since unpredictability shakes him up. He’s a beast, but he’s extremely boned if he can’t mesh with his teammates or is unfamiliar with his opponents’ tricks. On top of this, he’s also even less likely to cooperate with Isagi when Isagi’s already fashioned himself to be a strategist on the field. It would take more than some egging on for Isagi to get Rin to relinquish control over to him.

He comes off like the kind of player that Ego derides as someone who is ready for the J-League, but would trip up easily at the World Cup. Where he’d go very far and dunk on many star players across the nation, but the moment any international team decides to throw unpredictability into the mix would be the moment we’d see another loss on the world stage.

Meanwhile, Bachira is a safer choice to me because only Isagi was able to read his approach. He works great in teams and meshes well with them, similarly to Chigiri. And because Isagi thrives in the unpredictability and chaos of how his teammates operate, he’d have greater trust in Bachira to freestyle his talents yet read his other teammates on such a level that he’d work well with others.

Compared to the others scrambling about to figure out what’s going on, Isagi understands Bachira to a greater level that he could read where he’s coming from thought-wise. On a strategic level, he’d be a more convenient weapon than the loose cannon who gets psyched out during unpredictable matches.

This is all speculation since it takes into account that Isagi could potentially win all of this. There’s still plenty of game to go, and with the idea that Isagi was the only one to catch up with Bachira, there’s still a possibility that Isagi won’t be able to push the ball further than the front of the net. It does make it all the more exciting to speculate though, especially since the winners of this match could determine where the Blue Lock program winds up going from here.

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