KUSHIDA/Alex Shelley v Prince Devitt/Ryusuke Taguchi
First half of this was nothing special but fairly inoffensive. The second half of this had a couple of spots I thought looked good (big Shelley bump, Shelley tope and one of the Shelley/Kushida double teams), but I hated the way it was worked. On the one hand they largely isolated Taguchi which fit with the post-match angle they were going to run and kept Devitt out of the ring which is a huge plus. Devitt is just terrible. I don't know if there is anyone in wrestling I would rather watch less than him. The guy is a good athlete, but everything he does looks choreographed and his selling is so bad I would actually prefer him to not sell at all. Anyhow despite keeping Taguchi in I thought a lot of the offense during this run looked really low impact for a style that lives and dies on high impact offense. Also the reversal fests were just insane and there was really no heat segment at all despite the fact that Taguchi was basically being booked in a go it alone position. There are plenty of matches worse than this, but I would never want to watch this again and in no way did I feel I had watched a good match. I did think he post-match angle with Devitt turning heel was mildly amusing, though largely not for the reasons others enjoyed it.
Hiroyoshi Tenzan/Manabu Nakanishi/Super Strong Machine/Akebono vs. Takashi Iizuka/Tomohiro Ishii/YOSHI-HASHI/Bob Sapp
This was actually a pretty good match all things considered. Yeah you have Bob Sapp breaking out some sub-Zeus level strikes and Iizuka straddles the line between charmingly goofy and annoyingly goofy, but there was a lot to like here. I have no clue what the post-match attack on guest commentator was about, but it at least let me know who the heels were and the heels worked like heels in this match. They were using weapons, taking cheapshots, cut off the ring on Super Strong Machine for a while and were using every trick they could to try and take down Akebono. Ishii was a fun little spark plug and probably the best guy on his team, but I thought the best guy in this was clearly Akebono. Having to carry a segment with Bob Sapp isn't easy but he did as well as he could. He was a real fun brick wall and he has a way of closing space that is so in line with his sumo background that it feels more threatening than it otherwise would. I loved his little shove off of Sapp as they built toward the finish and it was cool to watch him in their directing traffic before the fall. This isn't anything that I would tell people to go out of their way to see, but I did like it.
El Terrible/Tama Tonga v. Valiente/La Mascara
Decent enough spotfest that probably suffered some in my eyes because I watch a lot of lucha. If I was coming at this from a perspective of non-lucha watching, NJPW fan I could see really enjoying the novelty of some of the offense, especially since it was packaged in a format very similar to the way a lot of NJPW matches are formatted. Valiente's big dive always looks great and Tonga is slowly getting better (I like his big elbow and the way he sold the Mascara dive was cool), but this did not have the trappings I look for in a good lucha match. I wouldn't say this was bad or even close to it, but this is not what I want out of these guys, especially Terrible and Valiente.
Togi Makabe/Tomoaki Honma vs. Masato Tanaka/Yujiro Takahashi
There was a lot of hard hitting in this, but I could live without ever seeing one of those minute long chop fest ever again. I absolutely hate that shit and it is a good way to immediately take my interest out of the match. They won back some goodwill with me pretty quickly because they actually segmented this match fairly well with a decent, but short heat section on Honma and Makabe being pushed as the unstoppable lariat machine. Really did like the Honma slow-mo deadlift suplex spot and I have to give credit to Tanaka for trying really hard and looking solid for a guy his age with the amount of miles he has logged. Still this felt like a sped up version of a really good match, more than a really good match. I liked this fine for what it was, but there are tons of matches every year worked similarly, with longer face in peril sections and as a rule I’m going to like those better than something like this in almost every instance. Perfectly watchable, solid match, with a finish I enjoyed, but another match that I wouldn’t really say was worth going out of your way to see.
Minoru Suzuki v. Toru Yano
I wish I hadn’t heard anything about this in advance because I had built this up as a potential show stealer in my mind and while I thought it was pretty fun and perhaps better than it looked on paper I was ultimately disappointed. They did a good job establishing the dichotomy between the two wrestlers, and I will never tire of Suzuki’s facial expressions and forearms, but this was not the match I expected. Suzuki was surprisingly not all that vicious and what was sold to me as an “out of control brawl” really wasn’t all that out of control, nor was it much of a brawl. I did think Suzuki did an admirable job making Yano’s little flurries look credible, but I wanted more violence out of this. This is something that I might like more in five years than I do now.
Yuji Nagata/Hirooki Goto v. Kazushi Sakuraba/Katsuyori Shibata
Man it sucks to see Sakuraba go down. I hope he’s not out long because he’s easily my favorite guy in New Japan at this point. I thought the Shibata/Goto stuff was hit or miss, with some over the top silly stuff and some good looking stuff, but I really did like the Nagata/Sakuraba exchanges a lot. Sakuraba just carries an intensity and aura of violence with him that very few people in modern wrestling can match. I liked the feeling out matwork early and even though I could give a fuck about Nagata I thought when they went to war the second time they did a good job mixing in his spots out of the Sakuraba attacks. The suplex that dislocated Sak’s arm looked brutal as fuck. This was on the road toward being a really good match and instead was more of an appetizer.
Rob Conway v. Satoshi Kojima
This is not really my kind of match but I have to give them credit for succeeding in making a match that easily could have felt like meaningless filler come across as a big deal. I also kind of dug the outside interference and NWA rep cheering along for Rob, as the Conman as a poor man’s Ric Flair, with poor man’s Arn Anderson and poor man’s JJ Dillon seconding him was sort of novel. Lots of near falls and big spots and thinks of that ilk and again that’s not my thing. But for matches of that sort this was a perfectly decent match. I can’t imagine ever wanting to watch it again, but it wasn’t painful.
Shinsuke Nakamura v. Davey Boy Smith Jr.
I thought this was a very strong clash of the titans style match. I’m not sure this works as well if you don’t buy Smith or Nakamura as titans, but to one degree or another I see them both that way so I really liked it. I would have liked to see more Smith grappling stuff because he’s really good at it and I think it would have added depth to the match, but instead they heavily played him up as a monster for Nak to have chop down and it worked well. I will never like Nakamura’s whacky hulk up routine and I thought his comebacks were a bit to abrupt, but the selling was better than I could have hoped for in the body of this. Really enjoyed the consistency of Nakamura coming back with strikes, first targeting the ribs which Smith sold well for the most part and then later going for the kill shots to the head when he got in deep shit. For his part Smith has a variety of good offense and very capable of controlling a match on top. I really liked his flurry of escalating near falls toward the finish, as one spot seemed to lead to the other and they were milked well. I also liked his big bump on the airballing of the top rope legdrop. Nak’s flurry to win at the end looked good and protected Smith in loss, though again that fucking running in place, “he’s a maniac!” freak out thing he does is the shits. By no means was this a perfect match, but even with its flaws I thought it was very good.
Hiroshi Tanahashi v. Kazuchika Okada
This was both better than I had feared and nowhere near as good as NJPW fans have been saying. I’m going to try and be diplomatic here because there were things about this that I did think were done well. I thought Okada’s selling was very consistent for example. I also have to give them credit for the pacing as usually these long NJPW matches are either hyperactive as fuck or bore me to hell or both and while I didn’t really like this match I wouldn’t call it boring or hyperactive. On the other hand there was a lot I really didn’t like about this. For example I fucking hated how Okada kept coming back with shots from his hurt arm. Yes he was selling after every shot but I swear 90% of his offense in this match directly involved the use of that arm and it just made him look like a dumb fuck. I guess the idea was to make the arm damage the focus of the match but it was extremely gratuitous to the point of being absurd how often he was throwing elbows in this. I also thought Tanahashi’s arm attack offense was incredibly poor. In general I don’t like Tanahashi’s offense, but I can forgive things like shitty punches to the body in a match like this. What I have trouble forgiving is the fact that he never really worked compelling holds on the arm and instead did some strike attacks that didn’t look particularly vicious or impactful and various whips of the arm into the mat. I am sure people will accuse me of nitpicking here but this drove me crazy as a couple of holds would not have been hard to do and even if poorly applied would have been a far stronger base of attack. I also really hated the middle of the match big spot run, though I give them credit for selling more on the back end of it and not letting the match turn into a Tanahashi/Anderson-like spot running stretch run of doom. I could criticize other things I didn’t like but the general point is that I didn’t think the match was any good. It wasn’t a disaster and it was a lot easier for me to get through than the Dome show match, but this was probably my least favorite match on the entire show.
Overall Thoughts:
I actually liked this show better than I thought I would and prefer it to the Dome show. There is only one match that really connected with me completely and that admittedly may be because I’m becoming a bit of a mark for Harry Smith. Still the majority of the matches were decent, and while there was nothing close to as good as Sak v. Nak from Jan 4, there were enough thinks I liked to not make it feel like a waste of time.
