Seijakuzan

Has Akebono been in a coma for 9 months now? It is bizarre how little information is available about his condition.

Any chance a recap will be available? I have limited Japanese reading comprehension, but I found a clip of the Sapp fight. Such hinkaku from Sapp, and good to see the thunderous belt slap from Asa was in full form.

I don't know if it's related to the scandal or not, but I saw that Asashoryu posted a video of Harumafuji speaking on his FB page. Do we have any Mongolian-speakers that can give the gist of the video? https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10156885091745410&id=11885650409

And what a "fluke" it was!

I've always wished there was some kind of read-only access to writing a pure-SQL query against the sumodb records. I have questions like that that I could answer in 5 minutes of SQL-writing that pop in my head all the time.

Nah, I think he does it properly. Oosunaarashi, and sometimes Hakuho, use theirs like a sucker punch. Takayasu comes from below and uses it to blow up any chance of his opponent reaching the belt, then starts blasting away with the oshi attack.

If someone were to do a serious study on such a topic, my feeling is that an analysis similar to what they do in baseball would yield some interesting results. Something like the WAR (wins above replacement) stat, although I personally have no idea what actual math goes into that particular stat. It's tricky for sumo because the banzuke system already kind of does that, i.e. the ranking movement when you kachi-koshi and make-koshi, so you can also easily argue that it really does come down to just yusho. The wildcard in all of that would be determining a way to quantify the quality of say, the entire makuuchi population for a given year. Then of course you can diverge into two further camps of thinking if you want to talk about who is the best in their prime vs the best careers. Some people think Sandy Koufax shouldn't be in the baseball Hall of Fame since he only had a half dozen mediocre seasons followed by 4 dominant seasons of pitching and then retired. Somewhere out there there's a statistical argument that Kaiou would rank higher on the list than say, Hokutoumi, and the argument wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

What separates even a dai-Ozeki from even a mediocre Yokozuna are the weaknesses. Baruto had no imagination/technique, Kotooshu's height could be used against him, Kotoshogiku is a one-trick pony, and pre-2016 Kisenosato was a mental choke, as examples. Ura has too many weak spots in his arsenal, and when they are exposed, he loses horribly. A huge one for Ura is that no matter how much you're an off-the-mawashi specialist, you have to be able to win on the belt a good percentage of the time if you want to make it to the top. All the joi rikishi will find a way to get on his belt as time goes on. He also relies too much on henka right now, and that won't fly (no pun intended) at sanyaku.

Even then, it'd be worth pointing out that the two greatest quarterbacks of the last decade - Tom Brady and Peyton Manning - are also two of the slowest and least athletic. I would expect a 3rd string running back to do a better job pushing around Goeido. That said, I agree 100% with Washuyama that choosing Goeido was all about respecting Brady's status. I would hope that if Hakuho similarly visited say, Dodger stadium, that they'd let him take a few BP swings against Clayton Kershaw rather than their pitching coach.

As disappointing an Ozeki as Goeido has been, I think when you're #6 out of hundreds or thousands in your sport it's fair to refer to you as a "star".

One thing I've noticed with Ura in this past basho is that he's much more aggressive. As soon as he gets that opening he charges in on the belt with that ridiculously low center of gravity and it's over. But he also got facepalmed directly into the dirt right off the tachiai at least once, so I think it's really going to come down to his tachiai. I've used an analogy before with Kotoshogiku when he was being very effective with mixing up his strategy between pushing his opponent to the edge and either 1) finishing the job or 2) suddenly shifting gears into a pulldown. This is much like another Kazuhiro (Sasaki), who was a master of closing baseball games down by mixing the high hard fastballs with the splitters that fell off the table. Kotoshogiku's yusho was a masterclass of such effective mixing up of strategy. If Ura can develop an effective strategy of doing a 50/50 split of high impact tachiai and his usual feint-and-dive, be unreadable in whichever one is coming on a given matchup, and have a backup plan for each, his opponents will always be kept guessing. I'll be ambitious and say he could eventually pull off a nice long streak in sanyaku if he can develop a better strategy to be less predictable. Size and weight definitely aren't a huge problem at this point.

I've seen videos of Chiyonofuji crying, and if there was ever a Chuck Norris of sumo...

Thanks, I was just guesstimating as I was still years away from discovering sumo at that time Looks like my gut feeling was pretty close.

Did I miss Kotoshogiku announcing his intai? I know they're speculating he might, but I hadn't heard anything definitive yet. Great photo either way.. I remember when it came out. Kaio is obviously the best measuring stick to use for Kisenosato, because otherwise - if Kisenosato never got promoted - he would likely eventually surpass Kaio as the winningest/most consistent ozeki in history. But I also think that Kaio's record confirms that they made the right decision in promoting Kise, because like you implied Kaio was inconsistent, especially with the injuries. The closest he came was this block: 2004.03 O1w 13-2 J Jun-Yusho (10th) 185 cm 175 kg 2004.05 O1w 10-5 2004.07 O1e 11-4 2004.09 O1e 13-2 Y Yusho (5th) 2004.11 O1e 12-3 J Jun-Yusho (11th) 2005.01 O1e 4-6-5 ..and he may have been promoted if he had gone on to repeat a 12-3 JY in the 2005.01 basho. But like all his other yusho performances, they were sandwiched with 9-6 or 10-5 performances or dropping out due to injuries. I don't think anyone has come closer than him or Konishiki, but with hindsight being 20/20 both would have retired much sooner if they had been promoted and then repeated the records they had after their best shot for promotion. If Kise keeps putting up 12-3 and 13-2 performances without resorting to half-henkas or pulling, and with 4 yokozunae, the YDC will be more than pleased with his performance - especially if he notches another couple yusho in the years ahead.

Hell, forget the last 6 basho. Kisenosato has been doing better than most non-daiyokozuna in the 5 years he has been Ozeki. Just glancing through the list I'd say he has already exceeded what at least a third did in their entire Ozeki+yokozuna careers, in terms of win% and consistency.