This was for HARASHIMA’s KO-D Openweight Title.
Soma Takao is not a great wrestler. Most of the time, he’s not really even good. He CAN throw a good enough elbow, but most of the time, he doesn’t. Even when great wrestler push him to throw a little heavier, he often doesn’t. He seems incapable most of the time of moving with any sense of urgency, operates with an inability to make you believe for half a second that this is any sort of struggle or contest, and performs with little to no impact or snap. At the right moment, I might be willing to call him one of the worst wrestlers in the world. As I write this in 2021, it’s been years since he had a great match, probably even a good one.
Suffice to say, the fact that this is a great match is a minor miracle performed by HARASHIMA.
It’s not perfect. I don’t love it as much as some. I don’t really love it at all. Soma still has to be pushed into throwing strikes like an adult. He still struggles to move with a lot of urgency, and his control work is hit or miss. However, he can be pushed into these things at this point and when HARASHIMA realizes it, he spends the match mostly successfully pressuring Takao into better behavior. With the exception of other singles matches against some of DDT’s heavier hitters, I’d struggle to name a better Soma Takao match.
Primarily, that has to do with HARASHIMA. It’s hardly his greatest performance, but it’s one of his meaner ones in recent memory. There’s a sort of gleefulness to his outing here, and it’s all over the match. The early matwork is typical for HARASHIMA, save for this moment where he sprawls on top of Soma as he tries to get up and just stay still there, like he’s daring Soma to do anything and to show a single thing to him. In moments when he maneuvers into a top mount, he always crosses his right arm over the throat. It’s a smart little touch, like always, of HARASHIMA to block anything, but he also literally spends a chunk of the early sections with his hand on Takao’s throat, and him unable to respond. The witless neophyte can do almost nothing until he takes big risks to hurt HARASHIMA’s back. He’s incapable of holding and advantage, despite being pushed to be a little more vicious than usual in his attack. When HARASHIMA is able to take over, there’s occasionally this joyous smile when he gets to lay in a particularly nasty shot or cut off, of which there are many.
In a lot of ways, it’s HARASHIMA’s version of the Destruction 2011 match between Tanahashi and Naito. The long term champion and Ace is faced with a would-be successor who understands little to nothing about WHY the man on top of the mountain is where he is. By the end, it’s clear that he understands nothing and is a pale imitation of the real thing. It’s a wonderful sort of match, and while HARASHIMA is a lot too nice to script the match around making it clear in the way Tanahashi does, it works for all the same reasons. Your eyes tell you that this guy is a loser, and the match rewards you by teasing a false elevation that wrestling promotions often force, only to reassert the way things ought to be. Luckily, unlike New Japan, DDT won’t make HARASHIMA put this blank space where a human should be over for years and years, until at least he’s no longer a valid successor.
The end comes wonderfully. Soma unloads with the best flurry of his life, opens HARASHIMA up, but just can’t close. The story of the entire match takes place in one thirty second span, where Soma gets the champion up for the Gin & Tonic, but HARASHIMA fights it. Takao can get one leg but not the other, and instead of using science or gutting it out, he simply settles for the one leg version, and it’s not enough. Soma lacks the skill or the heart and settles for something lesser, and it’s never going to be enough to get to the top. HARASHIMA finds openings from there, tees off, and retains the title with a real mean looking and sounding Somato. Not the world ender that the one against Isami Kodaka recently was, but impactful all the same, with a hand on Takao’s face in the cover to really drive it all home.
Given the other output of Soma Takao, this is the point at which a reasonable mind would start to seriously consider HARASHIMA as a top ten talent in the entire world.
HANDWERK 