Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Roderick Strong, ROH War of the Worlds 2015 Night Two (5/13/2015)

One of the best matches of the year, and another all-time underrated Roderick Strong match from 2015.

These two having a great match is hardly a surprise, but it being THIS great has to come just a little bit out of nowhere.

Despite both being great wrestlers, it’s hard to think about them totally meshing. Each of them has a very deliberate style and they seem to be at odds with each other. That isn’t to say 2015 Roddy can’t sell a knee or that Tanahashi can’t sell his back, but Roderick works faster and more brutally than Tanahashi ever has. Tanahashi works in a more deliberate way than Roderick Strong tends to. Strong matches escalate and can get just as dramatic at their best, but they never quite look like Tanahashi matches do in that sense.

Still, these are two of the best in the world and at no point is this bad.

At most points, it’s great, in a kind of easy and formulaic way. If nothing else, the one element that they have in common is that they’re two of the only wrestlers in the world at this point who you can watch and come away feeling like every single moment of a match has value. The first third or so of this is wrestled very much in this way. Not always incredibly exciting, and a little tentative and awkward, but they don’t take long to get it moving in the natural direction. It’s the sort of match you expect on a lot of these shows, matches that don’t immediately click, but that wind up being Great Little Matches or just barely great through force of talent alone. It’s a match I have no real complaints about, but little superlative praise for.

However, Tanahashi catches Strong on the hairline with the flying forearm off the ropes during his initial comeback, and suddenly, this is an entirely different match.

Roderick gets busted up real bad, and it never really closes up.

It absolutely makes the match.

Like often is the case with these Roderick Strong accidental blood matches (whichever end of it he winds up on), it doesn’t result in a sudden focus shift so much as it does a sudden shit in energy. That goes for Roderick, it goes for the crowd, and it goes for Tanahashi too once he senses that this is no longer a normal match, but has become something really special.

With the shift, the match becomes less about Tanahashi surviving the back work and the onslaught of Peak Roddy, and more about Roddy surviving the sudden change in circumstances. Roderick’s best work in 2015 has been as an antagonist in PWG and EVOLVE, but here he delivers one of the great babyface performances of the year too. The modulation is perfect, ranging from exhausted and dead on his feet to manic and urgent. More importantly, Roderick always knows the right time to do either, and it turns a cool change of pace into the thing that makes the match special. Tanahashi isn’t attacking the cut or changing anything, but he doesn’t have to, because Roderick Strong does. It’s enough to make people totally forget the political realities of the situation and of these shows in general, and begin hooting and hollering along with every bit of offense that Roderick Strong can muster up. The finishing run is out of this world level great, of course. Tanahashi is a master of layout, and Roderick Strong is a perfect partner in this regard too. Both because he has the same gift, and also because he has so much that can be plugged in around Tanahashi’s stuff. Even the limits of this match aren’t really LIMITS at the point this reaches, and with the way it reaches them.

Tanahashi is very similar to AJ Styles in that he always seems to know his place and rarely ever bastardizes his offense, no matter how great an opponent might be. So Roderick Strong isn’t exactly kicking out of High Fly Flows, he’s not getting the one to the floor, none of that. That might seem like a real weakness if this was a different kind of match. It might if not the little accident that makes this such a great match, but we don’t live in a world of might have beens, and in a match where Roderick is visibly wounded and where a gruff veteran performance has turned into a display of heroics, none of that matters. It’s not about that Tanahashi only needed his one version to do it, it’s about how hard Roderick Strong made him work to even get THERE. He cuts off the crossbody version early on, he stops him going up top over and over, he blocks the knee work that Tanahashi tries, etc. All while bleeding like a faucet and failing to ever truly plug it back up.

The way they get to the finish is also perfect and befitting of two of the five to ten best wrestlers alive. After a run of offense from Strong that makes believers out of everyone in the building, he still cuts Tanahashi off every time. Tanahashi finally gets mad enough to throw a god damned honest to goodness LARIAT for the first time in a long time. It’s unique and new, and as always, something that stands out as a result. Roderick sells it like a shotgun blast, the thing he was never expecting from Tanahashi and that finally knocks the rally out of him and brings him down to Earth. Tanahashi follows with the Sling Blade and an especially impactful High Fly Flow for the win. Once again though, it’s far less about the fact on paper and more so about the process that put it there.

It’s an unbelievable match, an even better performance, and one of the few ROH vs. New Japan matches ever that crosses over from being really really fun to being genuinely must-see.

The rare best of the year level Hiroshi Tanahashi match in which you can imagine this being largely the same with any other high level wrestler. I struggle to think of one. Even the Tanahashi matches that put the focus on the opponent or that aren’t about Tanahashi still very much require Tanahashi, and in this match, you get the sense that with the same kind of accident, Roderick Strong could have had a match this great against a handful of other people too. Great Tanahashi matches are virtually always Tanahashi Matches, but this is a great match that Tanahashi just so happens to be in. It’s a great Roderick Strong Match.

It’s not the best Roderick Strong match of the year, it’s not the best Roderick Strong performance of the year, but it’s a very rare thing that few other great Tanahashi matches and great Tanahashi opponents for five years plus in either direction can boast.

***1/2