A great one with Endo working over Akiyama's knee aggressively while the 51-year-old legend battles back effectively with excellent selling. This may have gone over 30 minutes but it did not feel like it. The action kept me captivated from leading to an incredible end with Uncle Jun being victorious and capturing the KO-D Openweight Title, great stuff.

I'm excited for Akiyama having a Tenryu-like run carrying a promotion in his 50s, but please god stop it with the 30 minute long matches. Akiyamas is clearly a great wrestler still and his potatoe knee strikes ruled, but this was so full of obvious time killing and blatant filler it sucked the soul of the match. I'm not sure I've seen Endo before, he looked about as good as Yoshinobu Kanemaru here. There was some leg work and neck work going on here, but it ended up not mattering in the last 15 minutes of the match. After a slow but acceptable beginning they really lost me about 20 minutes in when Endo did this parody level bad superkick followed by a sequence that involved guys popping up after suplexes. There was also a pretty bad moment where Akiyama tried this powerbomb like move into the ropes and they completely blew it. This would be pretty great if you cut it down to about 8 minutes while editing out 75% of Endos offence.

There is a 14 minute match between these two in the D-Ou Tournament last year that almost everyone agrees was the better match. 

 

While I liked this match as well as both of the Akiyama vs Takeshita matches, I'm not sure I'm totally loving these matches that much either. There is a little too much bloat in them and this is no different.