This was part of the Five Unit Survival Race round robin tournament.
An absolute blast. This is the good Dragon Gate shit, one of those times where everything comes together perfectly. The style is going to be what it is, but every so often things just all fall into place correctly and everyone has as good a night as possible. Sometimes it happens in main events, and sometimes it happens in the middle of the card like this. There are younger and more limited guys in this like Ben K and Ishida, but the pace is so frantic and everything goes so well that it doesn’t matter at all.
The big takeaway here is how the Eita/Yamamura/Ishida team seemed like a team of the future in a way that hasn’t really stuck me from a DG team since Shingo and BxB Hulk first joined forces in those initial New Hazard matches. This isn’t quite as well rounded of a team. It’s not a very diverse unit at all, Eita is a flier and submission guy and both Yamamura and Ishida are fiery young kickers, but there’s both a ferocity and smoothness to everything they all did together that floored me. Anyone familiar with the situation knows how much we lost out on with Yamamura as a singles guy, but everyone around him lost out too. His energy is infectious in this match and it brings everybody up. Big R is also a STAR in the back third of this. He and Yamamura have their perfect chemistry again, but he and Eita have a killer run near the end too. It’s insane to think that this guy and the absolute turd he’s been since turning heel again in 2018 are the same person. It would be easier to accept if he also retired and the modern version was simply an impostor using his name.
Eita ultimately traps Kotoka, the poor guy not having any sort of attribute here besides heart. El Numero Uno gets sunken in and with some help from Yamamura’s kicks while Kotoka’s locked in, Over Generation scores a win.
Nothing complex about this, it’s twelve minutes of cool moves, holds, and dives. A delightful little fireworks show where everything hits perfectly and maybe it also hits me at the exact right time to be really positive about it. Sometimes this shit just works.
***1/4
HANDWERK 