It starts with Ashito, young striker of Ehime. Ashito is pretentious, hot-blooded, and talented, and yet he is very serious-minded and kind. He is frustrating at times with his arrogance and temper but it is hard not to root him on. He is a single child and his mother is short of finances, making him lovable and giving extra merit to his incentives and motives.
The coach of Esperion Youth FC, Fukuda, scouts Ashito and they go to Tokyo to have a trial. There, he encounters future teammates and good friends: Otomo and Tachibana. As most of children his age, Ashito fantasizes about becoming a professional footballer. However, the necessity not to squander the efforts of his mother and his unprivileged origins make him strive even harder to achieve that dream. One of the most emotional moments of the show and it also occurs at the very beginning of it is a letter his mother sends him off as they send him to Tokyo.
When Ashito comes to Esperion it is established that he is in over his head. He needs to forget all the things he believed to know about football and reinvent himself. Through his friends Otomo, Tachibana and Togashi. Ashito starts his own change of image. They contrast with other characters because of their bond due to scouting and pain.
Another character worth mentioning is Kuribayashi, who is the most talented in the team Esperion and Akutsu a defender, who is kind of a foil to Ashito. The antagonism portrayed by Akutsu is hard to accept, even as we see the action through the eyes of Ashito, but with time we find out that they have much in common than they would care to admit. Akutsu turns out to be one of the most complicated and fascinating possibilities in the story.
It is not in the pitch where Ashito develops. His lack of maturity and impetuousness that can be seen as early as the first chapter touch his life on a personal level too. As a matter of fact, he ends up losing high school tournament due to his inability to control his temper. The action against a romantic background (the love story between Hana and Anri) is the most likely weak narrative of the series; both are good characters in their rights. The actual growth and improvement of Ashito is that he keeps encountering players who are stronger than he is, like Tripone or Ren, two characters that force him to reconsider his worldview and come to remember. They should have had a dinosaur moment, too; I wish we had seen them returned to that state after the series had finished.
Matches are good, even though the overly-explained tactics can sometimes drag the pace down - in comparison to battle manga such as Be Blues that focus on speed of action and overdramatization of artwork. Nevertheless, Ao Ashi excels at the realistic display of what it means to become pro. Fukuda is obviously influenced by European models such as the one in Barcelona, yet the manga does not disgrace Japanese football. Indeed, the last arc is so much a sentimental love letter to the way Japan handles the game, it makes total sense to show us how this approach can progress without destroying what it is.
One similarity between the real football academies and this fiction is that not all the characters are made stars at the end. We become attached to some players who never get their chance even though they end up on the bench which is part of what makes the story seem so realistic in its scope. The series has no final victory, but a sense of origin, Ashito is the player he was supposed to be. Even the title is symbolical, Ao indicates youth and immaturity and Ashi (indicates thinking. The story of Ashito is eventually the discovery of how to think on and off the pitch.
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