August 1998

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Here's a rare creature: a bad Tamura match. There's a few injuries happening in this match, but it wasn't even good up to that point. I blame Naruse, who was way too limited at this point to be going 20+ minutes. Pretty dull opening matwork as it was mostly both guys moving from positions in not partiularily interesting ways. Nothing felt hard fought and I think there wasn't a single submission attempt in the first 14 minutes. Then Tamura injures Naruses leg with a kneebar. Ironically the following short stoppage woke up the crowd and produced some hot striking exchanges, but the match quickly fell apart again as Naruses knee started buckling. The leg injury may have been…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbfL1U4sqQ The infamous barbed wire kickpad incident. Shoot style meets hardcore in a brilliant bizarre pairing. Usuda schools Yamakawa in anything technical, so Yamakawa has to get crafty. He turns to brawling which works into his favor. His luck runs out of luck when he tries to bring barbed wire into the mix. Usuda manages to get his hands on it and wraps it around his kickpad and proceeds to kick the living crap out of poor Yamakawa, who is cut to shreds. That punt kick is particularly nasty. Usuda has a grin on his face as he's now schooling this garbage hardcore wrestling at his own game. Usuda gets dumped on his head in a si…

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This went only 7 minutes, but damn what a world class match. Yoshida was just dominating Hamada on the ground here. Absolutely nothing Hamada tried looked easy to get in on Yoshida. Her moments of catching Yoshida looked like something else. Some of the wrestling they did here looked on another level. Also, because Hamada had won the previous tournament match with a flash rollup, all of her rollups here were great nearfalls. Great intro to the tricky Arsion style mix, with Yoshida utilizing shoot submissions and Hamada using her lucha.

Pretty much a move exhibition where they cram as much as possible into a sub 5 minute match. There were a few swank moves and counters and the execution was good, so, this gets the Full Worldwide Point. Mikiko kind of works like a WCW PowerPlant guy in this meaning she busts out all kind of cool random stuff while Ayako sticks to her game lucha offense.

Mari Apache: Genius Luchadola. This was pretty much a lucharesu exhibition with some big nearfalls. Not a lot of selling and a bunch of pop-up transitions. I liked this as Mari is chunky so her graceful flying around is really cool to watch and I prefer swank armdrags over dragon suplexes. Plus Ayako continues to look incredible in her second match ever. Full worldwide point.

Finally Yoshida gets a break from having to wrestle big, heavy opponents. This was worked the same as Fukawa/Ohmukai but better because Yoshida always adds a certain uncooperativeness and all these awesome takedowns and mat transitions to a match. Ohmukai wants to play reckless kicker and Yoshida just mangles her legs on the mat. One of the things I like aboutYoshida is that she always maneuvers around and changes positions so her opponent can't get the ropes. Other wrestler will just sit there and let the guy crawl to safety, not so easy with Yoshida. Not that Ohmukai sold any of that, but man I don't even care. Match was short, to the point, and Yoshida looked like a be…

Reggie took the spider woman out of the last tournament; can she do it again? I love this matchup. They work this like the previous match and do callbacks and all that and start out with a bunch of matwork and it's all stupidly great. Reggie may have been better on the mat here than before as she did these great spots where she just collapses Mariko with her power and weight and it's brilliant. Mariko sells big time for Reggie and snaps her submissions on like a snare. I mean the first 5 minutes of this match would've done Negro Navarro proud. Reggie really lays in the chops and Mariko does her damndest to avoid the power moves. It all leads to an utterly brilliant finish…