Commissions continue again, this one coming from longtime friend of the program and frequent contributor Tim Livingston. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
This was a first round match in the V-TOP Tournament.
Longtime readers of this site — or perhaps just of mine in general or shorter term ones who are very good at catching on to the sort of wrestling I like most — will be familiar with the idea that I do not like Manami Toyota a whole lot. I don’t think she is a bad wrestler, she has some phenomenal hits on her record, but she is one of the most frustrating good wrestlers ever, who is wildly wildly hit and miss in a way that, combined with a reputation that I never quite understood until Will Ospreay mania, makes it very easy for me not to like her.
However, against Aja Kong, so many of the problems I have with her are fixed.
Manami Toyota can be annoying because the bursts of pure activity often feel mindless and like the result of someone who is terrified to let anything breathe, on top of how she will often jump to 100 miles an hour way way too early in longer (15:00+) matches, having a genuine issue with pacing anything but pure sprints or, on occasion, matches in which everything happens to line up just right, but these are not problems against Aja Kong. That is not to say these parts of her game do not exist anymore or that Kong reels her in enough to matter, but that against Aja Kong — someone not only taller and bigger, but who hits harder and has some of the best offense in wrestling history — these aspect of Manami Toyota feel less like issues, and more like absolute necessities in order to survive.
When she leaps at Aja early, when a sunset flip bomb off the top is hit within a minute, when she leaps right to three gigantic all-show level high spots in a row in her comeback in the second half, all of these things that usually would annoy me and cause this deeply pronounced eye roll and sigh at home suddenly feel necessary.
That is not to say it is without flaw, or even a match I have this great love for on any level close to what a famous star rating might say about it.
On top of those problems still kind of existing, how Toyota’s selling is not magically perfect just because the context fits her approach better, it is also a match that, for all its fireworks, very clearly holds something back, in a way that one notices with the hindsight of their later matches as well as in a context that is a whole lot about Big Offense. It’s not something I blame anyone for, as obviously, if you have plans to run this a few more times as a major top title match in the next year, you ease up a little on the biggest stuff, but it is noticeable in a match like this.
Mostly though, I just like it a whole lot.
Kong’s work in control is all that one expects from one of the twenty five or so best wrestlers of all time, and nobody ever does a better job of channeling Toyota — beyond just who she naturally is, but how these matches go compared to Toyota against almost anyone else — than she does. Every piece of offense is mean as hell, but whereas someone like Toyota herself or many current and future disciples have an incredibly hard time balancing these ideas, Aja never struggles with finding a happy medium in between a real actual flow and progression of a match and also constantly doing tons upon tons of cool shit.
Manami Toyota, within the framework provided, also does tons upon tons of really cool things. At her best, one can squint vaguely and see a cross between the endearing recklessness of Sabu and the babyface charm of Chigusa Nagayo, and although clearly lacking the mastery or total self-confidence of both, a happy medium between two of the best wrestlers of all time is a pretty great spot to land in. Every major thing comes with this moment of danger before it and either a joy when it works out or a scream when Aja avoids or, even worse, finds a counter for it.
The entire back half of the match exists walking on a very fine wire, and as the match shows, there are few more thrilling ways to live.
It’s not perfect, for every reason detailed above, but it is better than most. The drama built not only actually hits me as a viewer thirty years later in a way Toyota matches often struggle to, but it comes together as that kind of ideal package. Jaw-droppingly cool pieces of offense, and enough of a framework to not only make them make sense, but to allow them to enhance the overall package. Everything as it ought to be, not that — save for their rematches — it was ever a road map followed nearly enough.
Kong finally levels her with a kind of three-quarters Steiner Screwdriver to win.
They have something even better in them, but even still, you aren’t going to find too many more Manami Toyota singles matches I can like more than this.
HANDWERK 