Commissions continue yey again, this one coming from longtime reader Bren. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
This was for Shelley’s Impact Heavyweight Title.
Having known me/followed my writing for some time, unless I am mistaken and this is a totally different guy with another name, I know that this was picked with love.
Alex Shelley and Hiroshi Tanahashi are two of my favorites ever.
They’re both not insignificantly responsible for some of the ways I think about wrestling. Sometimes people say I’m something of a harsh critic, which has never been anything I’ve aspired towards or intended, but if I made a list of guys who I consider myself very forgiving towards and/or whose matches I tend to naturally want to look on the positive sides of, Shelley and Tanahashi are both on and probably near the top of that list.
Unfortunately, time finally came for Hiroshi Tanahashi, and it probably came like a year or two before this match.
Really, I wish this happened like four years before it did, around the time of that great Tanahashi/KUSHIDA match. Hell, I wish it happened ten years before it did, around the time that they were having six or eight man tag matches together in New Japan. But that is not where they are. Tanahashi finally seemed to give in to Father Time at some point around the 2021 G1 Climax. He can’t run, he has problems bumping here and there (you may notice in this match a few times where a younger wrestler might do a fall onto a knee or crumble down, but where Tanahashi kind of awkwardly seems to opt for a back bump instead), and no longer is able to do what he did for so many years, possessing just enough to cover up for how hurt he is. Were Tanahashi at his physical prime, were his body still capable of keeping up with the mind that — as this match shows — CLEARLY still works great, this is probably a great match, like a lot of Tanahashi’s good to great Ring of Honor work around that time.
It’s still genuinely pretty good.
What works about this match are all the more abstract things that Shelley and Tanahashi can still control.
Both veterans of the double limb match, Tanahashi and Shelley have a lot to offer on both ends. Shelley’s ideas to attack the left arm are all both good and occasionally even still inventive (if 2004 Alex Shelley felt twenty years ahead of his time, 2023 Shelley still feels like a year or six months ahead with some of the transition ideas he works with). His selling of the knee is genuinely very good, and another case where real life physical knowledge very obviously helps him out, adding in stretches in down moments that feel and probably are genuinely things a trainer or PT guy like Shelley might tell someone to do to help with a hurt leg.
Tanahashi has less to offer here outside of selling the arm, but he still sells the arm very well, and shows what still works upstairs in moments where he clearly never has to show pain but still chooses to, or a moment later in the back half where — after being initially hurt via the classic double stomp to the arm holding the top rope transition — he has it there for a moment, but takes it away after half a second, not wanting to get burned again. Tanahashi is also great in some early moments at playing with the crowd, reacting to one guy cheering for another kick to the knee by repeating it until a bunch of people begin cheering for simple kicks to the kneecaps, turning a “ONE MORE TIME” cheer into holding up five fingers and getting a big reaction for kicking Shelley five more times in the leg. At all times, you can see the mind of one of the all-time greats, even if the flesh is lacking.
As a non-regular and more end-of-the-year catch up binge Impact watcher (fool me 400 times, shame on me), Shelley also does a great job at what feels like a slower turn, or at least the display of a harder edge. Small reactions at moments when the crowd sides with Tanahashi up through the end run, where Shelley throws a Boma Ye and Rainmaker out there in succession for a nearfall in what a guy who was there at the time knows is a bit of an insult. It’s not a one match heel turn, this isn’t Shingo and Gargano, but it feels like either a nice gradual escalation of something slowly happening on TV, or if I misread it entirely, a sort of slightly harder edge that comes out in more heated competition.
So, while not a great match, due to the limitations of Tanahashi in a match like this, pure mechanics and technique, still a match that I got something out of, and that I’m glad that I watched.
Alex Shelley keeps the belt with the Shellshock.
Not a great match, but one that still feels real good.
HANDWERK 