This was for Nakamura’s IWGP Intercontinental Title.
It’s quite the famous match. As much for the now iconic fist bump at the end and the significance of it being the last singles match either had in New Japan as it is for genuinely just being a really great match. The former often overshadows the latter, which isn’t necessarily fair, but these things often never are.
The best thing to say is that the match itself more than lives up to the moment that it’s retroactively become.
Despite their doomed WWE meetings, this really is such a natural combination.
What works so well for them is that despite surface level stylistic differences, at this point, both tend to believe in the same things and wrestle with a similar ideology. Nakamura at the Tokyo Dome has these big larger-than-life feeling struggles that slowly build up to a titanic back half, where every move feels like a major blow, and I’ll be God damned if I wouldn’t describe a big AJ Styles match in the 2010s in a real similar way. Slowly building up to a major back half, where there’s not a lot of waste to be found and where the majority of things that happen in a match — if not all — have some kind of function and utility.
In the spirit of the men wrestling it, this is a remarkably sure-footed affair that mostly makes that confidence feel correct.
There are very few surprises to be found here.
Nakamura and Styles don’t wrestle a particularly fancy match. These are two brilliant offensive wrestlers and this is a match primarily about offense. It works for the reasons almost all of the great matches involving these two work, which is that they’re very good at slowly building up and getting the most out of so much of what they do. Mechanically great, but transforming the lizard-brain pleasing hard shots and cool moves into something much more satisfying through the process of teasing out, building up, and then delivering. It’s absolutely nothing you wouldn’t expect coming in.
There is, however, one lovely little short term bit in the middle that I love SO MUCH. After going to a stalemate, Nakamura yanks AJ off the middle rope onto the mat. AJ sells his back like he’s re-injured his recent injury (we are all still extraordinarily skeptical given that it allowed him to rest and only work the big matches to exit territories before going to the WWE), only for AJ to bolt up to his feet as soon as Nakamura turns his back to give him space, and pounce on Nakamura.
As a response to the ruse AJ pulled, Nakamura more directly goes after AJ’s back for a few moments, being the one to dominate the middle instead of the expected route of that role going to the antagonist of the two.
It’s a beautiful story, AJ faking being hurt worse than he was for an easy opening, but still being hurt enough to make for a similarly easy target. After all AJ’s done for most of the last two years, it feels like the perfect way for his last major singles match to go, constantly punished for taking the easiest approach now that it can finally backfire on him in a really major way. It happens with the minor back work in the middle, but also near the very end, as AJ’s overreach in trying the Styles Clash off the top from the previous year’s Dome match against Naito allows Nakamura an opening that eventually sees AJ Styles defeated. Okada beat him twice in title matches in 2015, but it’s really only here (and in the Tanahashi G1 match) where AJ Styles truly feels like he gets everything he’s had coming to him.
Something that also works very well about it an this match in general is the way it kind of softly babyfaces AJ Styles, despite how much he deserves it. He still is who he is, but he winds up more sympathetic than ever before as a result of being the one to take more punishment here, bumps just a little bit wilder and in a more respectable way, and winds up gaining something by the end, allowing for the events of the next night to be set up just a little bit better. It’s a tact that New Japan will return to in 2017 and 2018 when the time comes to turn Kenny Omega into a top babyface, to mostly successful results, but in this one match, AJ Styles does it significantly better and more naturally. Both in terms of the way the story led them here, and in the way he’s able to sell it, which applies both to the mechanical aspect of his hurt back, but also just being able to shift slightly over instead of flipping a switch from BAD to GOOD.
We’ll have plenty of time covering 2016 to talk about the ways in which a downgrade happens in this position though.
What we don’t have nearly enough time left for, sadly, is the sort of wrestling these two do in the back half.
It’s wonderful. Big dome style wrestling, ultraconfident bomb hucking, great set ups and payoffs, all just about as crisp as possible. The things that don’t go immaculately smooth land in a naturalistic way, still looking painful and adding a sense of realism because of the way guys like this are able to adapt in an instant. Perhaps the match’s greatest virtue is that, as these two have barely ever even interacted before anywhere in wrestling, every single thing that they do has a novelty to it. It’s all new, on top of every other thing that it does correctly.
The escalation is just about perfect, offering up some big new developments and small little changes to the ordinary that feel just as major. AJ Styles uses the classic cut off knee seen in Nakamura’s Tokyo Dome fights against Sakuraba and Takayama in years past, and when giving out the first Styles Clash kick out in his entire NJPW run, it only comes as a result of the one-arm version out of a Triangle Choke. Nakamura has to shift things slightly, pour on more Boma Ye variants in a row than he normally would, and even needs the trusty old top rope Landslide from Tokyo Domes past as well after AJ’s previously mentioned overreach. A northern Boma Ye and then the regular Boma Ye follows that, and Nakamura keeps his title.
Once more in the Dome, the King stays the King.
A genuine spectacle bell to bell, only elevated into something of greater meaning and importance by everything that’s followed. The last really great Shinsuke Nakamura singles match. The last AJ Styles singles match in New Japan. Not the exact end of an era, but one of the last matches of its kind. You still get shorter matches, but they’re NEVER style bombfests or G1 hoots, they never feel as monumental and significant as this did while possessing those same virtues. What we have here is a major New Japan title match with absolutely zero pretense to it of anything beyond that of a pure offensive display, under twenty five minutes, but feeling like fifteen, carried off by two of the most watchable and enjoyable wrestlers of this time and place.
Pro wrestling comfort food, and the sort of wrestling that is sorely sorely missed.
HANDWERK 