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Another sumo tournament has rolled around.
As usual, the specter of injuries looms over this tournament with a lot of high profile wrestlers having pulled out or coming into the tournament with big injuries that may cause them to withdraw during the competition. Here are the top division rankings for this tournament:
Tournament Topics:
A Few Returnees, No Debutants: Three wrestlers are returning to the top division, while none will be making their debuts this tournament. Two of the returning wrestlers are guys who once looked like top division mainstays, in Aoiyama and Myogiryu. Unsurprisingly injuries and sub-par tournaments caused them to drop down to Juryo and it will be good to see them in the top division again, although I wouldn't be surprised if they struggle here too.
Sophomore Tournaments: Two of the debuting wrestlers from last tournament will be coming into their second top division tournament with a lot of momentum behind them. Ryuden and Abi both went 10-5 in their debuts and it would be great to see them keep it up. Abi particularly had a lot of great performances and stood out to me as an exciting young wrestler.
Knocking on the Sanyaku Door: Fan favorite Endo is once again competing at M1 and will be looking to finally put in a good performance to get promoted to the sanyaku ranks for the first time. The other three times he's been at the rank he wasn't able to get a winning record, twice going 6-9 and the other time 3-12. I think with the absences at the top he'll be in a good position to break into the top ranks.
Long Awaited Returns to Komosubi: Both of the Komosubi for this tournament are returning to the rank after a long time. Chiyotairyu has been away from the rank for 21 tournaments, and Ichinojo has been out of the rank for 16 tournaments. Both have struggled a lot, but have been looking quite good recently, with Chiyotairyu sticking around the top of the Maegashira ranks with 8-7 tournaments, and Ichinojo riding a couple of excellent 10-5's.
Injured Georgian Champion: After winning the January tournament with a fantastic 15 days, Tochinoshin will be coming into the March tournament with a thigh injury that he picked up in during preparation for the tournament. It would have been great to see him competing healthy again considering he was doing some of the best (if not the best) sumo of his career in January. We'll have to see how the injury affects him, but we all know that this attitude of competing while injured is what's crippling so many wrestlers and hopefully Tochinoshin doesn't just make matters worse for himself.
A Tale of Two Ozeki: While Goeido seems to be back to his old ways of just barely scraping by, Takayasu is coming into this tournament on the back of a 12-3 Jun-Yusho tournament and is probably looking to get the championship this time. I think it's too early to be talking about Yokozuna promotion for him, but with the state of the Yokozuna ranks at the moment, if he can go 15-0 this time maybe a case will be made for him.
Two Out, One In: Both Kisenosato and Hakuho are sitting this tournament out, leaving Kakuryu again as the sole Yokozuna. Encouragingly, Kakuryu was having a great tournament in January, but all that came to a grinding halt in the final days of the tournament as he picked up an injury and limped across the finish line after dropping four of his final five matches. Hopefully he's coming in healthy (he's almost certainly not) and can show the kind of sumo he was doing early on in January.
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So there you go!
Stay tuned to Kintamayama's YouTube Channel for daily highlights of the top division, and check out Robert Mensing's YouTube Channel for English versions of the NHK digest episodes (although I don't think they include all of the top division matches). Or go straight to the source, on NHK World's Sumo website. There's also a great blog at tachiai.org with news and information.
And as usual, for anyone who'll be watching the sport for the first time, please feel free to ask any questions you might have here and someone will try to answer them. Also be sure to check out my Introduction to SUMO thread for a brief (although quite outdated at this point) overview of the sport.
Hakke-yoi!
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