Commissions continue, this time from an anonymous contributor (if you don’t leave a name on the ko-fi, I will put you under this umbrella, or you can always just ask, if you want, I suppose). You can be like them and pay me to write about anything that you want. Usually, people just want wrestling matches, but you ought to not let that limit you if you have a mind for something more ambitious, as this post suggests. You can purchase these things by going over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, where reviews currently go for $5 per match (or $5 per half hour started, if you want a movie or TV episode or something, so like an 80 minute movie is $15). If you have a want for something that cannot just be solved by multiplying a number by five, drop into the DMs, and we can talk.
This was a Naniwa style Elimination Match.
For me, having just gotten into Dragon Gate around the start of 2007, the Typhoon vs. MO’z feud is something of a blur. At the time, it was seen as a real down period for the company. Not just from when the Typhoon stable formed in January on, as they would stay in existence until the end of 2008, but the preceding six to nine months centered around a CIMA face turn against heels Yoshino and Doi (bad casting), and CIMA vs. Gamma as the top feud in the company. The problem was less the idea of the company primarily splitting into two gigantic groups, as I adore the Junction III vs. Blood WARRIORS feud a few years later, but more so that this involves many of the least interesting wrestlers possible, without a great central babyface, and with many of the better wrestlers hamstrung by the house DG heel style.
That down period ends with this match, less so because of the match itself and more because of what follows it (more later), but it’s still a pretty great match that stands out as pretty easily among the better ones of this little holding period.
It also has some usual problems.
Some are out of the control of anyone in the ring or laying the match out.
As is often the case before they began airing full shows around the first few years of the next decade, this is clipped for television to air on the Infinity program. No matches were greater victims of this than the longer elimination matches — as discussed previously — and this is no exception. While not quite as extreme as losing half the match as in the match linked above, this is still a thirty minute match that television editing cuts down to some twenty-three minutes, and it’s not great. On top of a few real haphazard edits, it’s a bummer to clearly just be missing part of a match.
There are other things here though that they can control, but simply don’t put a lot of effort towards.
Like usual with the majority of these staggered entry elimination matches in Dragon Gate, the first half is almost entirely filler. You have you flashes here and there with the runs that are effectively hot tag bits when someone comes in, like Yoshino or Saito’s attempts at it, or the Sydal vs. Evans stuff when both get in, but primarily, the first half is a lot of guys simply trying to fill up space. When the switch suddenly flips and the match shifts towards a stunning amount of activity, it’s pretty jarring, as yet again, Dragon Gate opts to do something in a very weird and annoying way.
Of course, once all the fireworks get flying, a lot of that just doesn’t matter all that much to me.
Many of the fastest and smoothest wrestlers in the world throw their stuff out there for the last ten to fifteen minutes of this, and it whips ass. Some is down to pure performance. Matt Sydal is the best junior heavyweight wrestler in the world at this point, at the peak of his athletic powers (you can argue 2004-7 or 2014-15 for overall peak, each has its merits) and the match lets him show off. The same goes for Masato Yoshino here, and in a different way, the match also gives Typhoon’s big likeable babyface Ryo Saito a bunch to do too. So much more of it comes down to design though, as again, the Gate is so skilled at throwing more mercurial guys like Susumu, CIMA, Doi, Kishiwada, BxB, etc. into matches like this and only letting them do the stuff they do incredibly well on offense. The layout is pristine, building different guys up to throw them at each other, like establishing Sydal as the match’s best flier, only for Kishiwada to truck him, which then makes it more impressive when he can be taken down. It all leads to an especially great run at the end, putting Speed Muscle against Yokosuka and Kid, in which all of these different bombs get set off all in a row, creating that Dragon Gate Magic once again, if on a smaller scale than they would in the past or in the future.
Everyone gets involved again at the end, and after a crutch shot from Anthony W. Mori, Doi backs up into the springboard Ultra Huricanrana from Kid, and Typhoon wins.
The greatest drama here comes not in the match itself though, but in the teased payoff that comes only once the match is over. Going into the match, each stable promised someone on the other side would stab their team in the back, and once Typhoon had won, BxB Hulk and Cyber Kong both turned on their teams. Rather than a mere effective trade though, they shook hands, announcing that soon-to-be-returning Shingo Takagi and YAMATO were with them, forming New Hazard.
It’s here that, for me at the time, the company became roughly a hundred times more interesting, not only putting an end to a fairly stale two-sided war, but introducing a stable that still, sixteen plus years later, is probably my second or third favorite in company history.
(Monster Express forever. Too easy.)
Great match too, I suppose.
HANDWERK 