July 2012

While this falls outside the "Learning to Love Okada" look-back at his singles work, I casually watched this exhibition and made a couple mental notes. Firstly, it was predictably worked very light, but it was still an interesting card on paper. Next, this was not a resume-padder for Nakamura. He was out to lunch, really bad kicks, not good at all. Okada worked in peril and was fine here for what this was - good bump by [insert AJPW wrestler name here] on the Rainmaker to finish also.

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AJ Styles vs Christopher Daniels - Destination X 2012 Last Man Standing Another match forgotten in the treasure trove of TNA wrestling. TNA is/was a shitty promotion, but you cant have all that pure talent on their roster and not being putting out hidden gems even if the booking is dog shit. I think that's why TNA is the promotion with the most to offer in the way of hidden gems because there is always they matches forgotten and overlooked because of how toxic the promotion is. An incredible, old school, hate filled brawl to the finish. There were no carwreck spots, no big budget action movie stunts. Just two men that hated each other and wanted to punch each othe…

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Everybody knows about the match these two had at Over the Limit, so this kind of goes somewhat forgotten at times, but I've always thought that it's brilliant. It's completely different from that said OTL bout of theirs, as it should've been; going into it, the feud between the two had been growing deeper & more heated, and the thing had a No DQ gimmick attached to it, so it only made sense that they beat the absolute shit out of one another here, to put it bluntly. There's lots strikes throughout & both guys deliver big time on the offense delivering those strikes -- all the chops & kicks look superb. Especially Bryan went really kick-heavy here, even more so…

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Last stop on the Kizuna Road tour and I was most interested in here in the Okada/Anderson interaction as I know they have some big matches upcoming with the G-1. They get a decent chunk of this match with Anderson booting Okada hard in the corner, and Okada reversing his powerbomb into the inverted neckbreaker. Anderson gets off a bunch of neck breakers and does hit his big power bomb but Yujiro breaks up the pin, which makes him look pretty strong. Naito wins with Stardust on Yujiro. This was perfectly fine.

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Talk about it here.