I don't think anything of what you said is wrong, but I don't entirely agree either. To elaborate, it's true that there's this theme in Atobe matches and it's the most prominent against Irie, Germany and now vs Australia I feel. I didn't think of connecting the Hiyoshi match with these because I felt like it's more about Hiyoshi and not so much about Atobe. At the same time I also felt like he didn't develop much in the 9/10 match in the sense of actual development, it was more like a reinforcement of the Irie match - first "Tezuka" saved him, then that support got removed again and he had to deal with the situation by himself.
I think in a way Atobe symbolizes the Evolution (this being his major keyword) of the MSers from relying on Tezuka as their pillar to standing on their own two feet. Fuji also plays into this plot a bit of course. If we tried putting it into one of those grids I used in the other thread, maybe this would work:
Protagonist: Atobe - Evolution towards independence
Sidekick: Fuji - Essentially supports Atobe's goal by breaking free of Tezuka's influence
Antagonist: Tezuka - Not in a conscious sense, but his presence alone makes others rely on him
Skeptic: Niou - The fact that he uses the Tezuka illusion could be seen as Tezuka being a necessary presence, thus inhibiting the others' growth
What do you think?
Regarding Yukimura, I think his story centers around "victory" vs "fun" with himself being his worst nightmare in a sense. I do agree it's vague (just as most things about Yukimura really), but I think you can definitely see it.
Vs Sanada he went into the match trying to play for fun. But as soon as Sanada threatened his victory, Yukimura completely abandoned that thought. He was afraid of losing and returned to his old mindset immediately. You can see this very well against Fuwa since Yips became even more powerful and terrifying than it already was. Then in the Germany match he was faced with a similar situation as vs Sanada. He fell into the Yips himself and made it clear that he was frightened. Then two important things happened: (1) he can't think of tennis as fun, but victory is what's fun to him; (2) he overcame his own fears when he broke out of Yips and in a way himself in the process.
Overall I think Yukimura went from "being afraid of losing" to "having fun winning", reconciling his originally conflicting goals. This might seem like two sides of the same coin, but changing from avoiding failure to pursuing success is actually a big deal. Whether or not he'll develop any further along this line remains to be seen. It didn't seem like this was an obvious theme against Australia, but it might've been a transitional match similar to the one vs Fuwa - first Yips grew stronger and now it seems to have weakened to its original form again. It's also possible that the flashback has some significance down the road.
As for Ryoma, he hasn't done much in terms of matches, that's true. But until he left for America, we still followed the story mostly through his eyes. The only exception to this was really that we saw the 3rd court vs 5th court team shuffle rather than the BJB beating 2nd court.
