Japan couldn't score on offense or stop China on defense. With just three minutes left in the third quarter, the point gap had already ballooned to 66.
On the sidelines, Japanese commentator Tanaka Kenji still sounded utterly dispirited.
He seemed to have less and less to say.
At the start of the game, he could get out forty or fifty sentences in a minute.
Now, he only managed one or two every so often.
He'd been completely deflated.
Especially when he looked up at the opposite stands and saw that the 400 Japanese fans who had originally been sitting together in a neat block had now left roughly half their seats empty. Only a little over 200 Japanese fans remained.
Even those two hundred or so fans looked utterly lifeless.
Some of them had their heads down, playing on their phones the whole time, not watching the game at all.
Tanaka Kenji felt insulted.
If even their own fans had lost all confidence, how were they supposed to keep playing?
And as a commentator, how was he supposed to keep talking about this game?
Tanaka Kenji was forty years old and had spent twenty years commentating.
This was the most grueling game of his twenty-year career.
He felt less like an Olympic commentator sitting in the Commentary Booth and more like a chicken roasting over a fire, a fish boiling in a pot, or a piece of meat on a chopping board.
At that moment, he turned and glanced at Yamaguchi Tomoko beside him.
He wanted to see if she had any way of making him feel less humiliated.
Yamaguchi Tomoko was still fiddling with her tablet, head bowed.
Her face remained expressionless. Every so often, she offered a comment, her voice as calm as ever.
She seemed not the