This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while but that I felt compelled to post after rereading their match with Karasuno recently, but I think Johzenji are way more skilled than most people remember, and are even more skilled than the series depicts them.

IMO, there are two Johzenji players who stand out, not just among the Miyagi players, but among all the players we get to see, and those are Futamata and Terushima. So we’re going to talk about them, because they sort of exemplify what makes Johzenji so exceptional.

Terushima:

In my opinion, there are two key moments that really highlight how skilled he is.

The first of these is his spinning-around end line hit, which is literally the first attack of the match. I think this is one of the most athletic and acrobatic hits we see in the entire series, and there are maybe 2-3 other players I think could hit it. He’s jumping forward, opening up, and then dropping his left shoulder and using his core to straighten out in midair and is basically using that movement of his torso to add power to the swing as he hits from a position that generates almost no power. He does that while being unable to see where he’s hitting until halfway through the movement, and he does it off a ball that wasn’t even set. Doing that with enough force to be an actual threat and with enough precision to keep it in bounds, even with it being low enough that he has to hit it slightly upwards, is absurd. It might just be because I work with the body, but every time I go back to look at the biomechanics of this movement I’m more impressed. And he does this in the first rally, when most people are still warming up.

The second play, which honestly might be even more impressive, is when he sets what appears to be a quick with his foot. Notably, the ball contacts Tsuchiyu’s platform right behind Terushima, and then he does a full 180 to kick the ball straight up while falling over, which Numajiri is there to hit. And to top it all off, we know that Terushima planned for that to work out how it did. For this, I mainly need to highlight how difficult it is to kick a ball directly upwards while falling on your back. Most people will instinctively kick the ball back over their own head in that scenario, as that’s where the natural path of the leg would carry it.

This paints a picture of an outside hitter with complete mastery over his own body and a mind that can keep up with it. I have to assume that in his third year, with some more time to mature and improve his consistency, he should be maybe the most annoying person to play against in the entire prefecture.

Futamata:

Futamata is honestly the hidden gem in Johzenji’s lineup. This guy might be a setting prodigy.

I don’t think there’s any other setter in the series who so frequently has his opponents at a loss for what he’s about to do. He both attacks and feigns attacks more frequently than any other setter, and he’s really good at getting past opposing blockers because of it. He has probably the most perfectly executed fake-hit-into-set in the series, and a big reason it works so well is because he’d gotten into Kageyama’s head with his previous spike.

He’s also, like Terushima, an athletic freak, because he also has a kick set. His doesn’t seem to be a quick like Terushima’s, since there’s a beat before Izaka spikes it, but it’s still up-tempo. He’s also very smartly rotating his hips to ensure he can kick with the dorsal surface of the foot, which makes the ball easier to control, and the fact that he’s swinging his opposite leg across provides a solid amount of power that it might otherwise lack. And most importantly, this seems to have either begun while he’s still in the air falling from a block or while he’s very off-balance, which makes his control and the fact that he manages to set a hittable ball directly upwards very impressive.

I also need to talk about his one-handed back quick. We’ve seen a few one-handed quicks in the series, but they almost always go down the middle, because that’s a difficult position to generate force from. But Futamata sets his to the right, behind him.

Futamata doesn’t have the intellect of someone like Kenma, nor the stability of someone like Shirabu, but he’s one of the series’ most physically gifted setters and is almost unmatched in his ability to pull his opponents into his own rhythm.