This was part of the 1996 Real World Tag League tournament.
It’s not the famous one, but it is once again really really great.
Unlike May or July, Kawada and Taue now face off against this team as the best version of themselves.
That primarily means Kawada is back at his best, but that extends to that it no longer affects Taue like it did in July. Misawa and Akiyama try to go after just Taue early on, but keeping Kawada at bay isn’t quite as easy as it was in July and in May before that. For their part, the HDA approaches the match in a more productive way instead of getting bogged down in some petulant rage when a thing doesn’t go well. They also choose to focus less on that anger against Akiyama, as they instead spend the match trying to bomb out Misawa. It stands to reason that if a Misawa hot tag is always what turns things and if he’s always so capable of breaking up double teams, it’s sort of a waste to go after the other guy. Misawa teams lose when Misawa can’t make a difference. Get Misawa beat up and he won’t be so able to do that, and force some distance. Misawa and Akiyama win when Misawa can help Akiyama and set him up. It’s how Doc and Ace got the titles off of them in September, it’s how the Army beat Misawa and Kobashi whenever they beat them. It’s still a really hard fight, as the past has shown, but it makes a lot of sense.
Kawada and Taue are better and more insistent in the attack on Misawa than they’ve been in over a year too. As soon as they get the distance, it starts with the Doomsday Nodowa Otoshi to the floor, a Powerbomb on the floor minutes later from Kawada, and an attack that’s clearly working. They’re able to totally keep Akiyama out of the match for the first time ever, and it very much feels for the first two-thirds of this like this is a match that the Holy Demon Army win.
Unfortunately the one thing they don’t seem to account for is that Misawa also bothered doing some homework.
He debuts new backflip counters to the classic Backdrop Driver/Nodowa Otoshi double team, gets out before they can do real damage, and they turn it back around. It’s not the drumming that it felt like in July and Kawada doesn’t totally blow it for the team like he did in May, but there’s a big enough momentum shift that you can really feel it when watching for once.
Beyond just Misawa improving, Akiyama makes a big stride in this match too. Akiyama now is able to completely hold Taue at bay. After the year Taue’s had, it feels like a bigger victory than holding Kawada at bay in July or even beating Kawada in May. The classic strategy works once again then, although it’s on Kawada this time. He fights everything, he’s defiant in fun and meaningless ways because he can’t not be, but Taue is cut off from the match entirely. It’s a handicap match in the last several minutes, creating a really sort of casually cruel thing where Kawada has to now find out what it was like for Taue when Kawada was going through his shit in the spring and summer.
Kawada survives the Tiger Suplex, before Misawa gets real matter of fact about this and hits two (2) Tiger Drivers in a row to give them the win.
Even with everything going right, they can’t do it. It feels particularly mean spirited, even if Misawa and Akiyama did absolutely nothing wrong. A very casual dismantling in the back half, after a year of the Holy Demon Army struggling, adjusting, and getting back to where they were. After spending half or more of the match doing seemingly everything right, only for it not to matter at all. Kawada shook off the slump and came here more motivated than ever, only for Misawa to finally put himself in against him and painfully knock Kawada back down to Earth one more time. As much as the HDA have grown and re-unified, Misawa and Akiyama have now started to gel as an actual team instead of just getting by on the strength of Misawa as a solo force, and the mistakes other wrestlers were making against Jun Akiyama.
It’s as if a Warriors Third was conducted by a James Harden team instead, the same dominance out of nowhere but removed of any joy or fun.
A genuine heartbreaker. Kawada and Taue came into this off of a major non-title win, spent the first half seeming unstoppable, only for it to all fall apart. This time, without any real reason for doing so. For the last year, they’d been able to point to some reason for a loss, a why of it all that they can go and fix. Without any of that this time, it feels like they just might never beat this team.
HANDWERK 