Moshidora - Episode 10 (Completed)

Despite all of the drama and emotion surrounding what happened to Yuki last episode, Minami eventually makes it to the final qualifying game for the nationals... but is her arrival too little too late, with the team losing quite heavily?

In true sporting drama fashion, it's Minami's arrival (and perhaps more importantly her shouts to the team not to give up and strut their stuff) that begins to turn things around, culminating in a closing of the gap to just a single run between the two teams as we move into the final innings of the game.

With everything at stake, it takes a flash of the unexpected and a bit of innovation to turn the tide, with Hoshide ditching the team's no-bunt no-ball strategy in a tactial move before a switch in runner leaves it up to Yunosuke of all people to perform what will have to be the winning hit to enable them to win.  This series being what it is, he succeeds, and thanks to a story about Minami related to him by Yuki no less.  Cue victory celebrations and tears aplenty as the team achieve their dream and reach the national finals.

Okay, so Moshidora might have effectively ditched most of its management discussion for the final couple of episodes (resorting to the odd token mention of its principles here and there instead), but by that juncture it had built up enough of a head of steam in terms of both its characters and their situations to be able to do so surprisingly well - you'd need a heart of ice not to cheer on the team after all they'd been through and Yuki's fate, and for the second episode in a row I found myself a little tearful by the end of it all.  It's the kind of sporting and human drama we've all seen countless times before, but the Drucker's Management hook acted excellently as a door into the series (with some thoughts that have actually motivated me at work to try and do things a little differently, we'll have to see how that works out) before it rolled us into its non-management related story telling with relative aplomb.  Sure, Moshidora is no tour de force of plot or animation, but it was a solid and well-delivered series that benefited rather than suffered from its daily airings to capture our minds, and then our hearts, to good effect.  Hey, it even managed to make baseball kind of exciting for someone who doesn't have a clue about it, which has to say something in its favour.