March 1998

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Shane Rigby is some catch wrestler and also he rules. I assume he never had more than a handful of pro wrestling matches, but he is a joy to watch. Great mechanics, bridges and grappling. He is a total Carl Greco-like wrestler and would've been awesome in PWFG. Takemura is just a non-descript rookie here and gets gobbled in entertaining fashion. He has some nice arm rolls and that's it. But Rigby really brings it with the awesome fast takedowns, deadlift german suplex and wrestling mat transitions. This was all grappling and a pretty perfect squash.

You look at this matchup, taking place in MUGA, and you think „this sounds like a lot of matwork“. And you'd be correct. Pretty much a purist's dream match with all four guys hitting the mat hard. Perfect blend of shootstyle, 80s NJPW and MUGA psychology. Ishikawa fits like a glove here and looks great. Aside from all the great arm whips, headscissors and armbars and slick grappling they knew how to make basic holds meaningful and spice things up with struggle. Really liked the young guys getting the advantage and old guy Fujinami busting out a huge kneedrop off the top to break up a submission nearfall. Also Nishimura looks awesome and as good as he was in the 2000s. Mat…

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I really like the Best of BattlARTS comp, however, the fact that matches like this are missing from it – and thus are being overlooked – is crazy. Believe me when I say this was crazy good, not just „eh, why not check out this match, some good matwork and stuff“, seriously probably the best tag they did that year. This matchup the previous month was more of your typical slow building BattlARTS main event with solid mat exchanges throughout and so on, this on the other hand was a fucking house of fire, and it was very different, while still sticking to the story of Honma & Fujita as trying to prove themselves in the house of BattlARTS. So right at the get go Honma star…

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Honma in Battlarts sounds like the weirdest combo never to be a thing, but it actually was a thing for a good while during his early career, and it's also surprisingly strong even though he was losing basically all of his matches...of which like less than 1% got taped. This is just a solid shoot (ish) match for about 6 minutes, and the two really make it work for what they have as Honma focuses on slick head and leg locks while Otsuka is able to get out of all of his attempts at submissions and make him pay with either his own or just slamming the guy, with the occasional burst of action with either strikes or whatnot. Honma is surprisingly good at working a more amateur …

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Ozaki is questionable, but she may have given Amano her overall best match of the year in this one. Solid layout with Ozaki mostly stepping on Amanos face and roughing her up while Amano worked her submission game. Amanos is really great at rolling in and out of submissions. The whole thing had a somewhat early 90s JWP feel to it as they kept it simple and to the point. Somewhat slow in parts early on, but the 2nd half is peppered with cool stuff without going overboard.

These two are such hit and miss workers. Half the time they will do generic sprint bullshit and the other half you'll get something really compelling. This was more on the compelling side because they didn't go long and took a more conservative approach & the match was laid out in an effective way. Lots of nice scrambling matwork in the opening minutes with a giant swing and a dropkick being the highspots. The match was then built around gutsy young Kuzumi trying to just blow away Fukuoka with her bombs and Fukuoka putting her back in place. Fukuoka looked convincingly ace-like by not allowing Kuzumi easy comebacks and using offense that wouldnt look out of place on a…

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I am not overly familiar with Cooga's career, but I assume this is likely her career match thanks to Jaguar Yokota. Yokota may be old enough to be Cooga's mother, but totally smoked her during the sprint portion of this match. In a lucky moment Cooga land an abisegiri to Yokota's knee which is a totally stealworthy transition. Cooga proceeds to tear up her leg including ramming her with chairs. Yokota's selling was world class and her knee was even bloodied which is something I've never seen in any other match. Yokota kept stumbling and hobbling even while irish whipped and failed to hit her fisherman buster in another great spot which lead to Cooga planting her with some…

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