dawho5
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Everything posted by dawho5
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This is a really good grappling match. Greco is clearly the quicker of the two and he has counters every time Ishikawa gets aggressive and shoots in on him. Once Ishikawa is in trouble, he seems to have trouble escaping as Greco always seems a step ahead. Greco also likes to use bodyscissors style moves in an attempt to take away Ishikawa's breathing. Ishikawa switches it up and lets Greco be the aggressor, which leads to a few successes for Ishikawa. He gets a little overconfident and forgets how he got to Greco and shoots right in off a rope break, which leads to more problems for Ishikawa. Ishikawa tries to even things up with a suplex as he is clearly the bigger and stronger of the two. Greco scrambles right back into grappling with a clearly winded Ishikawa. Ishikawa smartly goes back to counter wrestling and it works, getting him some very nice submissions that Greco narrowly escapes. Ishikawa continues with the advantage and momentum, but can he make the comeback before the slippery Greco finds the hold that Ishikawa can't escape? This should probably be above 75, but very likely not in the top 50. -
This was an alright match. Morishima has some really huge offense, including the world's biggest running plancha. The story seems to be playing off of Morishima's inability to really come up with believable ways that he could put Misawa away. It's not excessive during the finishing run, but one thing really bothers me. Morishima uses lariats all match because that's his one weapon that can do a whole lot to Misawa. Problem is, he uses it four times as a nearfall too. I know Morishima has other things he could plug in there to build to his big backdrop (which he does with...backdrops). A bit too much repetition at the end. Morishima doesn't seem to have grown much in the two years between these matches at all.
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I thought they could have just had Kobashi go, say, 40 with Kawada at the time and it would have put him over. You have to remember thatat that point Kobashi was still well below Kawada in the pecking order. It seemed almost like a slap in the face to Kawada to not put Kobashi away. I think that most of the problems I have with 2000s puro are based on match length. If they cut the majority of the "big" matches down to 15-20 minutes instead of 25-30, they could eliminate a lot of the excess nearfalls, noselling, one counts, strike exchanges, etc.
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I do like when the NOAH matches surprise me. Takayama has been treated like a warm body in these tags he's been in for NOAH the last few years. In this he is a force of nature again. He is the equalizer to Kobashi, and that matchup is the engine that drives this match. They are dead even throughout in a very entertaining way. Sano is half worthless half okay. Aoki is mostly just there. I really hate how most of the time when Honda shows up he is just there to put over somebody who doesn't have the ring smarts or the skill he has, but in this match he gets to shine a little on his own. He is so very wasted in NOAH. I really wish he'd gone to Battlarts or Futen or even NJPW. As much as I hate to say it, his style would actually have fit far better there than NOAH. Even Steven match until we get to the KENTA heat segment. As always, it's good, sometimes despite Sano's worst efforts. Kobashi gets the hot tag and...has to really work to make anything stick because Takayama is back to 2000-2002 form, and that right there is why this match is good. When Kobashi has to work instead of just rolling over everyone with chops, it's entertaining. Finishing sequence is actually really well-worked, with the exception of Aoki and KENTA flying all over the ring in a completely out of place section of it, no he-should-be-dead kickouts like most NOAH tags. This will probably be somewhere in the 65-80 range.
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This was just a brawl for the first 15 or so minutes. No structure, just the NJPW guys kicking the crap out of the Zero One team. Z1 gets their comebacks, but nothing too long. Finishing sequence keeps the chaos rolling along and it works since the rest of the match didn't have any real story besides the "invaders vs. home team" thing. They work a nice rope break on the ankle lock. Both Hidaka and Taguchi survive more big offense than they should. Overall just a fun invasion-style brawl.
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30 minute time limit means this won't be overlong. Nakajima does well enough with his heat segment, selling the beating pretty good. Only problem is, by the time it starts we have established that any strikes he throws that aren't kicks have no effect on Akiyama & Rikio. So the exact moment of the big comeback is pretty easy to spot. Same problem happens during the finishing run. Sasaki does fine as the hot tag, but some miscommunication during his run of not-quite-finisher spots with Akiyama doesn't do the match any favors. Nakajima gets tagged back in to have his moment in the sun, hits a nice German and goes back to being the heavyweights' toy again. Finish is fine, too many lariats, too many obvious strike exchanges with Nakajima, but perfectly good match otherwise. They don't overdo the nearfalls or kill any one guy too much. Just there's enough not right that it probably won't get a vote.
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This match is easily Tanahashi's best as ace so far. His match against Fujita outclasses everything I've seen of him as an ace, but that's beside the point. There are a few things that work for this match that a lot of his NJPW matches just don't have. For one, the refereeing is even. Wada starts by saying "break", counts and then gets physically involved if he has to. For both wrestlers. I can't tell you how much this elevates him above that dumbfuck with the red shoes in NJPW. Secondly, the wrestlers involved seemed to be booked as even. This makes Tanahashi's abandoning of the legwork for a portion of the match not stand out so much. Especially against Nagata it seemed like the only way he could do damage, so abandoning it in favor of his nearfall offense seemed stupid. Here it seemed more like a natural progression. Suwama looked like he was taking damage from the non-leg stuff, so it doesn't feel like such a disconnect. And last, but definitely not least. The finishing run was well-worked, fit with the rest of the match and didn't go overboard. Moves were teased or done and then sold after so there was no cover. Suwama re-bangs up the knee by bringing the knees up on the frog splash, which is I think a nice use of the leg work by Tanahashi. It kills the counter to his finisher a la Kawada working the arm so that when people blocked the gamengiri it gave him time to still get back on offense. Tanahashi has recently added to that by working a Texas cloverleaf as a finisher/nearfall and does that here. Suwama hits some big nearfalls and seems like he's ready to put Tanahashi away with the powerbomb, can he do it or will Tanahashi be able to finish him off after wearing him down? The strike exchanges, a slight lull right at the beginning of the nearfall sequence and some less-than-crisp striking by both work against this, but the structure and lack of going too far put it somewhere around 50 for me.
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Mostly a juniors exhibition style match. Hulk, a DG guy, surprisingly supplies the majority of the structure by playing a really good face-in-peril. The hardway bloody nose from KENTA's kicks helps this out for sure. KENTA and SHINGO have some kind of heat between them or KENTA is just being a dick to the "big man" on the other team. Can't tell. Finish has SHINGO kicking out of some big KENTA offense before going down to the GTS and a head kick. SHINGO comes off looking really good from this match, so I have to think that's what it was about mainly.
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No, the one you were talking about. Really, the Candy Okutsu one.
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So early match is again perfectly good. Could do with more selling of the leg by Goto, a lot more, during his offense but that's the one strike against it. On a side not, what the fuck is with the NJPW head ref? Is he supposed to be a heel ref? Or is it just a bad attempt by NJPW to have American style ref problems in their matches? He very rarely physically interjects himself when it's a heel, but boy, once a face gets fired up and throws down on a heel, we better get control of this thing. The finishing sequence actually features some leg work by Tanahashi, which is still nosold. Tanahashi again dies several times on bumps and kicks out. Then comes back instantly without selling any of the damage when he gets a counter in. Finish actually plays off of the legwork, but a lot of bullshit in between kills it.
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Juniors spotfest. Taka has become someone who I both love and hate to watch. His offense is really simplified, but he tends to get into these WWE-esque finisher counering sequences that drag the match down for me. And he tends to repeat the same 5 spots in the longer matches I've seen him in during the late 2000s early 10s. Not sure Ibushi should be using the phoenix splash as a nearfall. That's not exactly two count material if you ask me.
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Right away you get the sense that this is a big night for Kobashi. Some reading tells me that it's his first match back after recovering from cancer. That Kobashi is one tough dude. And the match...holy crap is it great. They go back to the more All Japan style of doing things rather than the NOAH way for the majority of the match. And the few instances where it isn't that way get set right pretty quickly. Kobashi works this absolutely tremendous heat segment. Kobashi getting beaten up and showing vulnerability (read here: not screaming, no-selling and killing everything in sight with chops) is so fucking great. Kobashi makes his comeback, then they go into the finishing run with not a lot of falls and a lot of fighting over who gets to hit their big moves. WOOOOO! Kobashi looks to be doing well and cruising towards the win, but he ends up on the wrong end of some offense from both Misawa and Akiyama after Akiyama surprises him with an exploder to counter a lariat. Takayama makes the BIG SAVE and hands Misawa to Kobashi on a silver platter. Lariat! Akiyama barely makes the save! Misawa does a big nosell, but it's not too bad because it's a half nelson and those are worthless by now anyway. Kobashi kicks out of an emerald frosion, so Misawa gets some help from Akiyama to hit one from the top and put Kobashi away. If NOAH would have just stuck to matches like these, the 2000s would have been a much happier time for me. I can definitely see this above top 30.
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So again, they have a great opening part of the match. This time they skip the Nagata beating and go straight to Tanahashi outwitting Nagata by suckering him into giving up his leg on the apron. And Tanahashi does really good work on the leg. Nagata comes back and progressively stops selling the leg, which works. Mainly because Tanhashi forgets about it until there are about 5 minutes left in the match. I can't imagine why since he's eating a bunch of kicks to set up big nearfalls. Nagata hits so many big nearfalls it gets past the point of ridiculous. He hits a super belly to belly after a super exploder that gets 2. Then comes the brainbuster. Then the exploder 98 that gets...ONE. Then his backdrop finisher that just looks sick here gets a big nearfall. So basically, Tanahashi takes Misawa-level punishment and is fine to keep going. Then he finally has motivation to attack the leg, which works into the finish. I hate how the conventions that developed take good 15-20 minute opening segments and trash the match just so we can have big nearfall sequences.
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First 20 minutes of this match were about as perfect as a juniors wrestling match can get. Nakajima was attacking the arm, Kondo had hit one big move on the outside to mess up Nakajima's collarbone/neck. They play off of this for a long time, going back and forth and teasing momentum changes hitting the spot they have weakened. Then we get to the nearfalls. Kondo's second nearfall is a Razor's edge dropped into a piledriver. Something was said about a lack of overkill, but that's not what I saw given the last sentence. There's ten minutes left in the match and Nakajima ought to be in a hospital after that. Anyway, Nakajima leaves the arm alone for a while and just goes into his big finishing offense. Kondo finally starts going for the lariat and eats kicks to the arm that...sort of slow him down a little. I'm not saying that the finishing run was badly worked, because it was not. I'm saying it was completely out of place given the first 20 minutes and like most 10+ minute finishing runs in the 2000s it was overdone. Perhaps not to the level of a lot of it, but enough that I'm not voting for this match given the other major flaw.
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The beginnings of this were great. Brawling around the ring with lots of hate and venom, great way to start a match. Things start to fall apart with the dragging around by the head, but I'm willing to let it pass. The ref grabs a chair when Nagata is going to use it on Makabe after kicking it into his face. Makabe uses this to turn the tides and grabs the chair. Makabe hits Nagata with the chair 4 times while the ref is nowhere to be found. Did he get lost? There are ways to set this kind of thing up better, especially given how Japanese referees are viewed. Then during the heat segment, makabe clearly has a chain wrapped around his arm and is going to hit Nagata with it. Ref sees this, but oh my, one of Makabe's buddies is on the apron. This again undermines the NJPW head ref in a big and incredibly bad way. I know that this kind of stuff was pretty common in American wrestling. But you look at referees like Joe Higuchi and Kyohei Wada and this kind of shit would not have flown on their watch. They would be in there shoving that heel around with no regard for whether or not they got hit by whatever illegal object they were holding. Then Nagata gets his big comeback and the ref...physically pulls him off of Makabe in the corner. Once again, what the FUCK? Ref saves some face by not counting a few foreign object-assisted finisher type things, but the damage has been done in my book. Finish goes too long for the condition these guys are in by a long way. I really wanted to like this because it had a Southern brawl feel to it that you don't get a lot in japan. Only problem with that is a lot of the big heel moments were inadvertently or not ref-assisted, which is really out of place in this setting. Find a better way to do those and this is a great match.
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I went in expecting a lot of big spots with no particular focus on any kind of psychology and...Marufuji surprised me by wrestling an incredibly basic match. Ishimori and Ibushi seem like they are the reasons this match is here, to showcase their athleticism and ability to hang with Marufuji and KENTA. Both are incredibly athletic and have all kinds of really impressive flippy stuff. KENTA seems to be developing some idea that he needs to have a thought process going in the ring here also. I've started going into these looking at them as athletic exhibitions rather than wrestling matches. When things that resemble good pro wrestling come up I get pleasantly surprised. Oh, I also thought it was a really impressive go 2 sleep by KENTA for how he got to it. That little dude has some strength to lift a guy his weight like that.
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First twenty minutes were pretty good. Shiozaki has the clear advantage early, mauling Danielson with big chops. Danielson goes to work on the right arm to neutralize that advantage. Shozaki switches to lefty and it's more even. Then they go into a NOAH style suplex trading contest for some nearfalls, probably because they are in Tokyo. Haven't seen enough ROH to know if that's the standard way of finishing matches there, but it is suspiciously like a NOAH match. Finish makes sense with the early and mid match, just wish they hadn't inserted the completely unnecessary suplex nearfalls in between the two. Could have done with less Shiozaki no-selling, but it wasn't overly bad. I like both of these guys and they have a great match in them. That was not it though.
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This match was really, really good. Mutoh works over the leg, Suzuki works over the arm. Both have odd offenses and let their personalities come out in the wrestling, which works to the advantage of the match. They do this great sleeper -> counter -> sleeper sequence that really works well. Everything is absolutely great up until the multiple shining wizard nearfalls. I know that it usually takes more than one, but three in quick succession before the first nearfall seems overdone. Mutoh hurts his knee on the moonsault and pauses to sell it before the cover, makes the nearfall work really well. Suzuki does his best to take advantage of this, but can he put Mutoh away before he falls to the shining wizard? With the exception of Suzuki not selling the leg for a little while and the excessive SWs, this was a well-wrestled match where neither did more than they needed to in order to get the story across. I can see this around the mid-30s to 40s range.
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This match was almost really good. Opening sequence was well-done, with Tanahashi showing he's got the quickness and technique to keep up with Nagata in the technical work, even if he's doing non-traditional stuff. Then Tanahashi gets a quick advantage and decides he's gonna do lots of strikes to a vulnerable Nagata on the apron. He gets really cocky and lets Nagata back in the ring without mugging him, which proves to be a major mistake. Nagata is PISSED after that apron attack and destroys Tanahashi. That was fun to watch. Nagata goes to work on the arm after a while, looks like he's winding up to his really big offense. Tanahashi catches Nagata, could have been his plan all along, but it seems like a lot of damage to take for a small victory like that. Tanahashi works over the leg for a while until we come to the part where the match falls apart. They go into...nearfalls. Nagata does a good job of selling the leg throughout, wish I cold say the same about Tanahashi and the arm. To me, if you take out the 3-4 minutes or so from right before the top rope exploder -> shining wizard combo (which always seems to come too early) and skip right to the sling blade countered into a backdrop (really well done), and throw in one or two Tanahashi falls before the end you have a really great match with a solid story told all the way through. as it is, you have a pretty good match with some excess stuff in the wrong spots.
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This has some pretty good stuff going on in it. The opening moments with Takayama putting Rikio over as an immovable object are really good. Sugiura's performance outside of the bad strike exchanges and no-selling is also pretty good. Rikio gassing again is not so good, but he seems to recover it as he goes. It's really odd to see Akiyama being outdone by Sugiura. If anything, Akiyama and Takayama are here to highlight the fact that the young guys are the real focus of this match. And Akiyama isn't even that old. Akiyama should be down for 3 twice just before the 20 minute mark. But we go 8 minutes longer so we can have MORE BIG NEARFALLS. Boo. Probably won't be getting a vote, but at the very least an interesting watch.
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Interest is all on you, sir. Whoever is going to read it will, and the people who don't aren't something you ought to worry about.
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You know, I look at these DG matches differently than your NJ/AJ/NOAH juniors matches. Those are supposed to have some kind of coherent structure and story. DG matches like this one really aren't. Just 9 guys flying around the ring (and outside of it) killing themselves in a spotfest. And this one does not disappoint on that level. There's too much to really cover in a small amount of text. The first elimination is a brilliant piece of booking and work. The big dive train not too long before it is incredible. BxB Hulk is a great face (heel?) in peril. He bumps like a maniac and has the facial expressions to get milage out of it. Yoshino is tiny so he makes a pretty convincing secondary version, but he's got all these weird submissions and rollups out of nowhere that save him far more often. The big guys have some fun exchanges. Doi and Yokosuka have this nice enemies/friends thing going on throughout. Saito comes up big a few times. Overall, this is 25 minutes of non-stop action that is a nice break from the normal "epic match" nonsense. I think this and the earlier 3-team matchup are on par as far as overall quality, but they have very different setups and spots to them.
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Rikio and Morishima going after each other early was really good. Akiyama being at the mercy of Morishima and Yone and the crowd buying into nearfalls 15 minutes in was weird. Had he really fallen that far? Rikio gasses right about halfway through and it's obvious. He kind of recovers during the finishing run, but it hurts the match. Early on, the match seemed centered around Rikio and Morishima making a beeline for each other. Don't know if Rikio gassing killed that and they called an audible on the Akiyama heat segment or what. Either way, match doesn't really fit together well and ends up just being your run of the mill NOAH bomb-fest by the end. Edit: And as a bonus, we get treated to some leading through the arena by the neck. They may have the fighting spirit to fight through being hit in the face over and over and dropped on their heads. But even if a wrestler has fighting spirit, once you grab them by the back of the neck they are helpless to fight back.