giant killing

No rental DVD this last weekend and as mentioned the other day I had a rather crammed weekend, so I doubt I'd have been able to watch it anyway. I therefore thought I'd make good on something I've been threatening to do and post the first proper review of the streaming anime I've watched today.

I've written a few of these ready to post, but one of the down sides of me catching up with the scanning and also pushing myself to watch anime DVDs when I can as well as the streaming stuff is that I'm getting a huge backlog of things to review.

Association Football, more commonly known in some parts of the world as simply Football or by the abbreviated form soccer is a game I have something of a spotty relationship.

Fundamentally, as a game, I don't really have any problem with it. I can see that it's a game that involves a fair old bit of skill and talent, and those are things I can respect.

As a game it's got a pretty simple set of rules, which is never a bad thing. Games last for a reasonable 90 minutes and have plenty of opportunity to entertain and both the league and cup structures provide long-term interest and tension.

But I've never been a fan of the culture that surrounds football. I don't like it's tribal-ness. The moneys involved are grotesque, the players often appearing more like spoilt children than grown men. I also don't like it's ubiquity. I don't like the fact that whenever you get to the 'sports' bit in the news, actually it's 90% football and 10% everything else (if that).

Giant Killing, if you couldn't tell, is about football - a giant killing being a phrase often used to describe a small team defeating a giant one.

Well, no, I'm not entirely sure that's correct. You see, while Giant Killing is set in the world of football, the actual sport itself is depicted more like a giant game of chess. The amount of thinking the players do and the effectiveness of the long-term tactics they use is not like any game of football I've ever seen.

I don't mean the people involved don't actually think, it's more that the action often tends to flip into slow motion, yet the players are still thinking at normal speed. Also there's a weird way in which the coach never really tells people stuff, but instead kind of sets them up so that they have to realise they answer themselves.

And of course, they often manage to realise just in the nick of time, which adds drama, sure, but can you imagine someone like Alex Fergusson behaving like that?

Overall I did enjoy Giant Killing, but this it's-football-but-not-quite-football feel to it may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Also, obviously being about a football team across an entire season presented the makes with some problems. To start with, the anime is quite in-depth, but around half way through it starts skipping multiple games. This is entirely understandable, but means the pacing shifts quite dramatically.

And while the start of the season suggests some pretty clear goals (as it were), the anime finishes a long way before those are even close, let alone concluded. My guess is the hope was that they'd get a second season, but I'm not sure if they will, so it could be one of those shows without a proper end.