Kakeru gets to see Nana play and is blown away. Then, we head into dramaville as the hastily arranged marriage between the Enoshima Football Club and Enoshima Soccer Club looks like it is heading for a breakup.

What They Say:
“Little Witch/The Division of the Soccer Club”

Nana’s secret is out. Kakeru, Motoba, and Kota discover Nana’s secret and have a chance to witness her skills during an exhibition match against Germany. The match is intense and Kakeru swells with conflicting emotions. A rift has formed between the former SC and FC soccer clubs. The SC players consider the coach weak while FC wants to keep soccer fun. To make matters worse, Kakeru has found out some news about Leonardo Silva, Suguru’s biggest rival.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
And so it all comes down to this. A fearsome match with Nana running for her life. What is on the line? A world championship? The title of greatest player in Japan? No, just Nana trying her best to avoid getting groped by a bunch of horny boys during gym class. It’s funny to think that even though she is a nationally-selected player, Nana still has to participate in gym class. And that national team calls again, as now there is a match against a German team, SF Frankfurt, for the Nadeshiko to face.

But Nana’s little secret is out as Kakeru and friends discover the media coverage of the Nadeshiko Japan game. And so he and the comic relief gang (Kaoru, Takase, and Kota–that seems to be Kota’s only purpose in this entire show) go to watch the game. There, Nana is in for it, as she is forced to go up against the tall, blonde-haired blue-eyed Mina Meier, who is not only an amazing soccer player but also a model. Umm, sure, why not. Mina scores first, but of course Nana fights back, using her smaller size and greater mobility to counter Mina’s power and speed. And so we get a tough match including trash talking between Nana and Mina in English (with strong Japanese accents!).

While the match is exhilarating for Nana, it’s not so much for Kakeru. You can tell he’s a bit jealous that Nana is living the dream that his elder brother Suguru had of wearing the blue jersey of the Japanese national team. And there is the fact that she never told him about all of this. That makes for an awkward time at their next nighttime practice in the park, but Kakeru and Nana clear the air, and perhaps also put something of a stop to the Nana show for the moment.

In episode 11, we turn back to the Enoshima club, and things are not all rosy there. The joining of the two soccer teams was never quite natural, and now the strains begin to tear apart the weak threads that bound them. The biggest problem is that the former SC members expect strict discipline and hard practicing, while the FC members are too lax, and Coach Iwaki does nothing to push them to work a little harder. It eventually gets to be too much for Sawamura, the team captain and former SC player, who walks off the field along with several other leading SC veterans. It’s not a good situation, as the break appears to be fixed so long as Iwaki is coach. Kakeru and Nana beg Sawamura to return, but he is firm in his refusal under the current regime.

Things get interesting again when Kakeru visits the doctor and while there learns that Leonardo Silva, his late brother’s friend and rival, is currently going to high school in Japan. Could it be that he is there specifically to match himself against Kakeru?

And then we have some more drama, this time personal drama involving Takase, a former SC player who we now learn apparently gave up a promising basketball career to switch to soccer in order to make money for his family (as soccer is a bigger money sport than basketball, worldwide). During the practices, however, Kaoru spices his play with a few too many nutmegs, that is, he passes the ball through Takase’s legs several times, which frustrates the big man (Takase stands at least a foot over the tallest players on the team, towering over Kaoru and Kakeru). Takase had been one of the former SC players who still showed up after Sawamura left, but now he too is absent, and Kaoru feels bad so he intends to apologize to him. However, when he learns that Takase switched to soccer from basketball for the money, this annoys Kaoru. Of course, things are not so simple, and Kakeru, as usual, stumbles upon Takase practicing by himself at night, and so he calls Kaoru out to see it, the proof that Takase does genuinely want to play soccer, not just for the money.

But the break up of the team still looms.

I’m afraid that after the end of the Nana Mishima Show, it looks like the writers are just reaching for some lazy artificial drama injections in an attempt to add, well, I’m not sure what, to this show. While it is customary for sports dramas, live action or animated, to place seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the path of the hero/heroes/heroines, sometimes it feels natural, but other times it feels very forced. While it is understandable that there would be lingering animosities between the SC and FC, it seems like they should have broken out and caused this kind of rupture earlier. One would think that after the training camp, there would have been a certain amount of bonding that should have occurred there, but apparently nothing lasting was fashioned during their time away together. Of course, there are also clear signs that the teams have never really coalesced: they still wear different jerseys, even though they are supposed to be one team. You would think that Coach Iwaki would have done something as simple as come up with a new, single jersey for the entire team.

Anyway, KitA seems to be wavering a bit after having a pretty interesting run when it focused on Nana. Perhaps the training camp episode, which seemed more like a hot springs episode from some half-assed comedy, was a warning that the writing is not going to veer away from cliches when it can instead pile right into them. The drama now hitting the soccer team is part and parcel of this tendency. The next episode preview, however, seems to be heading back to the pitch to show us a real game, and hopefully this will give the soccer team, both the alienated members and the remaining players, a chance to recall what the whole thing is supposed to be about.

In Summary:
In the first of these two episodes, we see Nana again shine on the field. It has been interesting to see this mini show within the show, the national debut and sensation that is the still oddly-named “little witch.” But the Nana Show appears to be at an end. In the next episode, we return to the Enoshima Soccer Team, but it appears that the tensions between the former FC and SC squads has never been relieved, and at last it breaks out into mutiny. While the circumstances make sense, the timing does not, except for weak writing that just wants to inject some drama into the proceedings. Hopefully, the drama does not take over, so we can get back to the real star of this show, the beautiful game.

Grade: B

Readers Rating: [ratings]

Streamed by: Crunchyroll Review Equipment: Apple iMac with 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard