September 2023

I love how Yoshinari Ogawa is now in the old-man lucha role of getting to fuck around in tags and trios for 90% of the year, but he gets to then commit to matches with guys he really likes; guys like Ridgeway, HAYATA, etc, and now this. In a way, he's become what Misawa was in the 2000's with his consistent focus on training and working with his own projects to get them over. It was really cool to see him paired back up with Zack; I thought they were one of the cooler tag duos of the time (I actually covered that recently, not finished sadly) and him getting to cook with game opponents made this a easy great watch. Pre-match has Ogawa be a prick and yank Kaito down …

I was dreading this: Funaki's last few shoot-style matches with Suzuki and Sakuraba haven't been much good, with his Aoki match being a decent but middling performance. Barnett is also a bit of a loose cannon when it comes to his consistency so yeah this was a risky match all things considered. Starting sequences had the classic slow grappling as Barnett got a takedown, but he couldn't really translate it to much as Funaki kept moving his legs around to prevent any proper leverage on toe-hold attempts. I guess it's funny to see the Achilles Tendon being treated as a scary move when it's been pretty much exposed for decades as uncomfortable but not something to tap o…

This was alright. I think the most intriguing factor was Maru basically playing the wiry vet role and how much he learnt off wrestling Misawa when they were in this same situation back in the mid 2000's. The match started off with typical tentative grappling and "big-time" shoulder charges alongside some ok back and forth action. Maru worked the arm for a bit then dropped it while Ospreay kinda just did whatever in terms of setting stuff up limb-work wise with barely a care in the world. The strikes were predictively pretty bad across the board; Maru has his usual wiffy kicks and Ospreay mostly kept to landing very light forearms (to be fair he does land a good rolling el…