Kota Ibushi vs. Taichi, NJPW Climax 30 Day Seventeen (10/16/2020)

Commissions continue, this one from Ko-fi contributor SoundwaveAU, who just fucking loves him some Taichi. 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 an A Block match in the 2020 G1 Climax tournament.

While not QUITE the half-hour of mind warfare that Go Shiozaki vs. Kaz Fujita in terms of the strangest and most delightful matches of 2020, specifically the post Rudy Gobert months, is is way way way high up there for being one of the most interesting matches of the year and decade.

Previously, when discussing the Taichi vs. Minoru Suzuki match a few weeks earlier from this tournament, I mentioned how the pandemic crowds — especially in Japan where only clapping was allowed in terms of a reaction — have a way of draining on a match. You can especially feel it in a match like that, or more narrative-driven ones, which gain a lot from audible reactions and the sort of atmosphere constant noise and the visual of clear excitement can create.

However, as the best wrestlers either immediately knew or eventually discovered, there were ways to break through that.

Either something so great that it didn’t matter as much, like the Reigns/Bryan matches or Bryan/AJ or Mox/Darby, or the sort of wrestling that feels so genuine and/or hits on such a visceral level that the crowd doesn’t matter, but in a totally different way. That could mean the grittiness and pared down hostility of those Lorcan/Thatcher NXT matches or something similar, or as was more common and shown here, by simply hitting really hard, on top of doing something really interesting.

Kota Ibushi and Taichi wrestle each other for seventeen minutes, and it is all kicks, most of them to the hamstrings. Some to the face and chest and back and head, the love is spread around, but the dick measuring contest at the start goes on to define the entire thing. It sounds like hyperbole, but no, literally, the only move used that isn’t a kick is Kota Ibushi’s Kamigoe at the end of the match, even itself still a leg strike. Their arms and hands are only ever used in this match as support mechanisms. To pull themselves up off of the mat, to grab the ropes to stay standing, or late in the match, to grab onto each other to stay up while continuing to trade.

It maybe sounds silly.

Mentally, I always had this down as The Kicking Match, the one where they only kick, but firing it up again, I assumed I had just overblown it in my head. Kobashi and Sasaki eventually moved past the chops, even if that’s the part you remember, and I figured this was basically the same thing. `

No.

Kota Ibushi and Taichi literally only kick each other, and it fucking rules.

The thrills this match offers up — two men kicking each other incredibly hard for minutes on end — are simple, but they work as well as anything else. Sometimes even better.

As always with these sorts of strike-heavy (or strike only) matches, the actual shots themselves, while important, are only like 40% of why this is so great.

The match succeeds first because of construction. How the kicks evolve from the shots to the hammy to the face Yakuzas, ones to the chest and back, all of that. Not only that they change which ones are thrown, but how they keep up the trading of each individual shot for like two-thirds of the match, resulting in a moment where Taichi lands a few in a row for the first time genuinely feeling like a big deal. The pace of the kicks and the hardness also shifts and changes to make the back half far more dramatic than it might be otherwise. Most important, they’re always selling these shots. Neither is usually great at this, but there is always a slight limp at least in the last two-thirds or so of the match. They aren’t hindered exactly, but it very clearly does combine with the slower and weaker kicks to show that this all has taken a toll.

Really and truly, it feels like one of the only matches since to actually look at why those Ishii/Shibata match were so great, and to apply those lessons to a match like this, while also taking the idea of the style to a genuinely hilarious conclusion by having a match where they literally only hit each other and do nothing else. The idea is hilarious, and the fact that it also rules makes it maybe even funnier.

Genuinely, one of the most fascinating matches of the 2020s, not because of what they did, but because of how well it worked.

Because it worked in the first place.

Nobody here is reinventing anything, it is hardly one of the like twenty five matches of the decade or anything, but at a point where so many wrestlers in this company had little concept of how to adapt this sort of wrestling to the new way of things, not only a great little oddity, but a clear path forward. Few actually followed it, 2020s New Japan continued to be deeply boring even when crowds were allowed to make noise again, but that’s probably one of the reasons this match still stands out like it does.

That and all the kicks.

***1/4

Minoru Suzuki vs. Taichi, NJPW G1 Climax 30 Day Three (9/23/2020)

Commissions continue, this one from Ko-fi contributor SoundwaveAU. 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 an A Block match in the 2020 G1 Climax tournament.

It’s fine!

Suzuki and Taichi combine “stablemates fight each other in a tournament” and “long-time antagonists meet in a tournament and do bad things to each other”, two of the better/more reliable round-robin tournament stories, and combine them into one. It mostly works, sparse as it is and as repetitive as some of the chair play in the first half got. If you squint a little, or maybe just know the history of the group and these players in it, there’s also a little bit of an underdog story to it, with Taichi’s slower rise up the cards since a breakout a few years prior finally leading him to the upset over a guy who had been his leader for the past decade.

You get twelve minutes of hitting, chair swinging, choking, a little nonsense, and then some trading at the end. COVID being COVID, on top of the atmospheric issues that every match suffered from, there is also less room for these G1 matches to go as long as they might have a year or two in the past or future, but it would be wrong to say there was nothing to like here. It’s a weird match to pay someone to write about, as something that only really scratches the surface of what it could be and as a match you would absolutely forget about within six hours if you watched it now, but I have no genuine complaints about it.

Or at least about the performances involved, because as much as the Suzuki elbows are a blast, this is a match that works as well as it does because of the attitude and energy or the two involved, constantly sneering and shouting and getting as much as possible out of their limited motions.

Taichi wins with a flash Black Mephisto out of a try at the Gotch-style Piledriver.

Just really really okay. It feels almost mean to call it closer to average than great, because I like the shape of it a lot, and the guys involved did a whole lot right, but there’s probably a reason why most non criminally insane people (NJPW super fans post-2018 are criminally insane people) would not have known this ever happened.

The match is not long enough or efficient enough to really get the most out of it, combined with the lack of energy that most wrestling from this era — and this year especially — suffered from, and it’s clearly not what it could have been. Some match ups were able to push through that barrier through brute force, but this never being a match about brute force meant that it was always going to suffer.

A good match that happened at the most inconvenient point for it.

Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Kota Ibushi, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Final (8/12/2018)

This was the finals of the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

Like any truly great tournament final, it is also about so much more than just this one individual tournament, and before the bell even rings, is a display of some real quality booking, both in simple pro wrestling terms, and also on a level beyond the basic.

It starts on a smaller level first, with the individual stories of our two block winners.

Kota Ibushi and Hiroshi Tanahashi have, as is often the case with the real outstanding displays of tournament booking, both been on outstanding runs through their respective blocks, not only in terms of match quality, but narratively speaking as well. For Ibushi, it’s very clearly the year that he becomes an actual main eventer, stepping above the mass of mid to upper card guys and standing up there with the clear Big Four. Avenging a loss from the New Japan Cup against Zack Sabre Jr., beating the two midcard champions in the block in Juice and Ishii, beating Naito for the first time, and of course, beating the actual IWGP Heavyweight Champion the day before. For Hiroshi Tanahashi, the G1 in 2018 is, improbably, a story of rebirth. After a down few years following passing the torch to Okada in 2016, and especially a less than successful first half of 2018, Tanahashi surprisingly came to life again in this year’s tournament. Not only avenging his own early year loss, this one to Minoru Suzuki, but going through the tournament with only one loss despite a clearly injured leg, ending with a draw that felt like a victory.

If Ibushi getting here is itself a major step forward, then Tanahashi is right there with him, setting a new block record in the twenty man G1 era with 15 points on a 7-1-1 split. The last G1 block that saw anyone do better than this (with 2014’s 22 man G1, there are a few with 16 points, but they had two losses, and Tanahashi had a higher percentage this year) was back in 2005, where funnily enough, old Tanahashi enemy Kazuyuki Fujita went 7-0 (before winning a semi-final and then losing the final), but that was in a block with two less matches, and where one win came by forfeit due to injury. (Others, such as Tenzan in 2006 or Nakamura in 2009, also went undefeated in blocks, but those were smaller than Fujita’s, so he would be most successful.) While Kota Ibushi is doing something he has never done before, Tanahashi is doing something that, in this format, simply has never been done before, which is a really interesting way of evening it out given Tanahashi’s long history of G1 finals before this.

Tanahashi and Ibushi also just so happen to represent more than just themselves, an idea illustrated as clearly as possible by their choices of seconds.

Kenny Omega stands in the corner of Kota Ibushi, a clear symbol of progress, but sometimes simply for the sake of progress itself. On the other hand, Tanahashi’s second is long time rival turned partner Katsuyori Shibata, making his first public appearance in a year, and his second since what was thought to be his retirement, following the best match of 2017, one in which he stood for a lot of the same things as Tanahashi does now, but wasn’t quite able to succeed.

As much as any other match in recent New Japan history, perhaps only topped by the match it eventually led to, it feels like a battle over what New Japan stands for, what it is, what it can be, and along with the battle for the soul of Kota Ibushi also being waged here between his tag team partner on the floor and idol across the ring from him, what it one day might become. Not so much between cool moves and scientific wrestling, but between occasionally flawed wrestling but with a heart and soul and blood pumping through it against a kind of spiritually vacant but mechanically pristine factory line professional wrestling. This match is less explicitly about that, about right vs. wrong, than the match it leads to will be, but it’s hard not to see it here too, somewhere off in the background.

Narrative heft and pure feeling aside, the match also just fucking rocks.

The mechanics of the thing are pretty great. That’s the least important part of this probably, the simple execution of moves and the reactions to them, but they are great, and they’re great in a match up where that was not always the case.

Following their third match together near the end of 2017, it feels like Tanahashi and Ibushi have finally figured each other out as opponents, and grown in certain ways so as to accommodate the talents of the other. For instance, as opposed to their first match together, Tanahashi is not going to go all knee attacks on a guy in Ibushi who is just going to do that. He does some, but it feels like a part of what they’re trying to say in the match, this usual old-school Tanahashi-ism that Ibushi can easily push past. At the same time, Ibushi has improved significantly as a seller of the knee, even when doing his stuff, to a level I would never have expected for him even three years prior. He does his stuff, but because of the level of work Tanahashi cuts it off at, and because Ibushi always finds a way to move in a way that expresses some background level of pain and always holds his knee and the way he never 100% forgets about a hurt limb, it makes it work. There is always what feels like a cost, even for an attack that stopped working some ten to fifteen minutes before the end of the match. That’s the quality that this, and their Power Struggle 2017 match have that, before you get into anything else, really makes this work.

With them having figured this out, more or less, they are free to have the absolute biggest possible version of that match.

Above all, what works so well for this match is the way that it is constructed. Part of that is how the knee work is handled, that it never gets a real run to work like classic Tanahashi knee work does, and the ways Ibushi cuts it off in ways the old man would never expect, but it also just comes down to how great every individual thing is beyond that, and the general escalation of every single piece of offense put out there, getting bigger and harder and more frantic and desperate as the match continues. Not every shot is great, Tanahashi is Tanahashi, but each shot gets progressively harder and feels like a bigger deal than what came before it. The match is spectacular at teasing just about every major move, so that in the back half when ninety percent of those are eventually hit, they feel like accomplishments in and of themselves. The match is also simply just full of some truly horrific stuff from Ibushi, such as his nastiest cut off palm strikes ever, the always nasty battering ram into the middle, and especially, the most grotesque possible WK9 style middle rope deadlift German Suplex, hurling Tanahashi on his neck and shoulder with absolutely zero grace. A lot of people take that bump and make it look sick as hell, but Tanahashi looks like someone who is being given this move against his own will, and that is the difference. That is always the difference.

So, these are the reasons this match is great. It is a collection of wildly different genres of awesome stuff, assembled as coherently as possible, with the mechanics and engineering to support all of their ambition.

These are not, however, the reasons it is this great.

With as much respect paid to what happened and how much it both made sense, was intellectually and viscerally appealing, and just flat out whipped ass, what matters in a big Tanahashi match like this the most is how it happened, why it happened, and the feeling resulting from the how and the why.

Ibushi, once again, is at his best not when cast as the central figure of a story, but as an obstacle for somebody else to overcome. As was the case with his other greatest singles match ever, seven and a half years and change before this, Ibushi is at his best when acting not just as an obstacle, but a symbol of this unchanging and unfeeling fact of life that a past-his-prime veteran has to first reckon with and then find a way past. Doubly so here, with a history of their matches behind them, so it has even more value when a knee attack that did work in their last match fails to work even half as well here, along with all of these other failures in the place of previous successes, allowing Ibushi not only to work as a symbol of the thing, but to express that idea through the construction of the match just as much as his individual performance.  Ibushi is not a total dead-eyed emotionless void as he is in a lot of the better matches like this, breaking out things like the Boma Ye and the bigger offense with some feeling behind it, but in its own way, that also works, because it feels like the performance someone might give in their big moment, so it does create a real feeling of doubt, strong enough at the initial moment I saw it on stream that a ghost of that brief feeling of terror has a way of sticking around.

Still, even coming as close as ever to simulating genuine human feeling, Kota Ibushi is a player in the Hiroshi Tanahashi story, and that is great news, because in 2018, that is the best story in wrestling.

As great as the three Okada/Tanahashi matches in 2018 are, Tanahashi is nearly just as great here.

He doesn’t get to go into the sympathetic leg selling here and this match up does not have quite the same weight of history upon its back, and so the comebacks are not quite as moving and celebratory, but they’re maybe even more impressive because of that. Once the last half or so hits and Ibushi begins unloading, barely phased by a Tanahashi attack that in their last match at least paused him enough to let Tanahashi work, every Tanahashi comeback feels like a monumental struggle. Not only between Tanahashi and Ibushi, but between Tanahashi and himself, between the heart and the brain on one end and his failing body on the other. There are these moments when Ibushi is absolutely dismantling him with slaps and kicks and elbows where Tanahashi either falls down or stumbles back and just barely stays up, where he begins nodding and slightly pumping his arms, and it’s the best expression of the idea of someone willing themselves to keep fighting as I’ve seen in wrestling in years.

In the end, that’s what happens.

For all of the horrific violence and imaginative offense Kota Ibushi has, Tanahashi has the quality that matters the most. He’s just always there. He manages to avoid the Kamigoe all match, even when it isn’t at all pretty. He never outstrikes Ibushi, not really. There is no one moment, like even the Okada draw two days prior, where you get a sense for the thing. Tanahashi just hangs around and hangs around while Kota Ibushi empties the arsenal, and in between avoiding the big shot, and grabbing anything that even comes close to him in the final moments, it becomes enough.

Tanahashi continues the rally, stringing together a rare combination of the High Fly Flow to the back, a High Fly Flow crossbody, and finally the original recipe classic, and gets the win.

One of the two or three best matches of 2018 at worst, and one of the best in the career of either man (for Ibushi, almost definitely number one as a singles). It is the ideal meeting in the middle for the styles of both, a huge and bombastic Kota Ibushi fireworks show, but with the thought, care, and feeling of the very best Hiroshi Tanahashi matches ever. A match that works on every level, the sort of thing that shows the best of pro wrestling at this point in time, and one of the most purely satisfying things to come out of New Japan in some time. A grandiose epic, and at the same time, something wonderfully human.

Wrestling, when done correctly like this long-term post-Ace Hiroshi Tanahashi story from January 5th, 2016 through January 4th, 2019 (which is to say with very little nonsense, with characters you believe in, matches that whip ass, and the time and care taken to get as much out of every element of the process from start to finish over a several year span), can be cooler than sports because of matches and moments like this, the one two days prior, and the other major matches that make up this Tanahashi comeback run in 2018.

Real sports are full of times when Our Heroes hit the wall, and cannot do the things they used to do anymore. They lost their lift up or their burst forward, and beyond winning, cannot do the things we’re used to seeing. As one of the greats and most frequently quoted pieces of work on this blog says, the cruel randomness of the sport is never in flukes, but in how much changes, and how quickly. It’s no fun, but you watch enough, and you get used to it as an inevitability, and a fact of life. Time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses, it only marches forward. Nobody catches it, but for a moment at the end, Hiroshi Tanahashi is able to keep pace with it, like nobody else can. That’s pro wrestling to me. If not always stylistically, this is the sort of thing, narratively and emotionally speaking, that pro wrestling ought to aspire towards. The ability to see things you cannot see but badly want to see in real sports, the end result of being able to manipulate these contests to create something like this, the most stunning, dramatic, and emotionally satisfying version of events possible. 

The magic we wish we saw elsewhere exists in the ring.

Go Ace.

****

Kenny Omega vs. Kota Ibushi, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Eighteen (8/11/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

You could again note that this is a de-facto semi-final for the B Block, with Tetsuya Naito having been mathematically eliminated in the previous match by losing again to Zack Sabre Jr., and that Kota Ibushi is in a must-win setting, whereas Omega can advance to the finals with a draw as well as an outright win, having a twelve to ten advantage in points, but as is often the case, these unofficial semi-finals are about more than just the tournament itself, with that added something on the line being more of a bonus.

Beyond just the stakes of the thing, it is also the first Kenny Omega vs. Kota Ibushi match not only since both joined New Japan, but since their famous outing in this same building (Nippon Budokan aka Budokan Hall) six years earlier from the 2012 edition of DDT’s annual Peter Pan supershow.

Truthfully, I was never the biggest fan of that match.

It’s not to say it’s a bad match, as I softened on it somewhat since the last time I watched. The narrative qualities of it are exceptional, not only on the smaller scale, where Omega cannot handle Ibushi, but in terms of the larger idea of DDT building up the Peter Pan main event for the previous three years as when a top babyface gets their coronation title win and big moment in the sun, only to deny Omega that in kind of a heartbreaker. On paper, it rocks. It is however a thirty seven minute epic where half of the match holds very little value (there is legwork on Kota Ibushi, and while you can fanwank it off as an expression of Omega not knowing how to handle Ibushi as an opponent, I suppose, it’s still an extended period of work in a match that mean absolutely nothing as soon as it finishes), and that overstays its welcome on the other end too. It has some truly incredible moments, but it always felt like there was very little connective tissue on the mechanical end, despite the extraordinary narrative quality of what they were trying to do. I’ve always thought of it as the sort of match that a quality editor could create an incredible twenty to twenty five minutes out of more so than a great match itself. Raw material in need of refinement.

Which is the deal here, basically.

Cut down to twenty three minutes, all of the coolest and best stuff, now armed with a bigger and hotter crowd and another six years of experience refining these techniques and getting worlds better at all of the smaller elements in between those big displays of fireworks (facial expressions, slight movements, but especially smaller scale strikes like audibly impactful elbows even in less dramatic moments), Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi finally have the sort of match that I always believed that they could have, and wanted them to have in the first place.

That is not to say the core of the thing changes.

Kenny Omega vs. Kota Ibushi is still an absolutely deranged display of the coolest, nastiest, and most deranged pieces of offense that either man can conjure up.

It is just a better version of that.

Better executed and far better constructed, with not only so much less dead space, but also far more coherent connective tissue, and a real sense of escalation to it as well. They don’t necessarily increase the hostility between them (itself actually quite impressive in a certain way, as this is a huge bombfest between friends that manages to have an edge to it at points, but without needing to get hateful and spiteful to find that edge), but everything gets a little more desperate and heated, and a lot more frenetic minute by minute. Everything is done as well as it could be mechanically speaking, every bit of it seems like it matters and like they’re trying to win, and it is all very cool and exciting. The brightest lights and loudest noises, assembled and presented in as tight a package as you could ever imagine.

For you absolute cretins who also need some kind of a story, of course Kenny and Kota have one for you there too. It‘s not especially complex, but it’s as well done of a top-this style competition as this style’s seen in some time. Both men do a lot of the same things, with Ibushi tending to find more success with bigger or more inventive versions of something. Omega has the knee to always even things out, but he’s also always the first to panic. As someone incapable of experiencing emotions or many feelings, Ibushi never really does, and always takes advantage when Omega either goes for something too soon like his early One Winged Angel or tries something repetitively. 

Essentially, a million other things have changed, but the core of the match up has not, which is that one guy thinks about everything, and the other thinks about nothing.

Kota again catches Kenny going for too much too soon, and blocks a top rope Angel before the original has ever been hit, going instead into a real God Damner of a top rope Tiger Driver, before taking his head off with the Kamigoe to win. From a narrative perspective, it is again Kenny Omega falling victim to his myriad of neuroses. Mechanically or stylistically or ideologically, it is that, once again, Kota Ibushi invented things and broke out things he never had before in a big match, while Omega relied on simple bigger versions of the existing attack. For the same reasons he beat Naito to start the tournament, he loses again to Kota Ibushi to end it. Against Naito, it is Kenny‘s game, and against Ibushi, it is not. You cannot succeed in a match like this while living inside of your own head against a wrestler who not only is even more inventive, but who is incapable of living inside of his head, because he has never had an inkling to ever even look inside of it. 

Perfect for what it is, and if not everything it maybe wants to be, better than the think it just might aspire to.

I never want to see this match again.

That isn’t to say Kenny and Kota can’t do better against each other. I’m sure that, given the right setting and given all things going exactly perfectly, they can. It’s just that after how totally correct this match got them together, I kind of just don’t want to risk it.

It feels as great as this can possibly get.

Something approaching the ideal version of this thing, a god damned Encounter.

***1/2

Hirooki Goto vs. Juice Robinson, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Eighteen (8/11/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Cliamx tournament.

Like their recent match for the NEVER Openweight Title, it is exactly the match you want when you turn it on. The product you ordered, nearly exactly as you imagined it. Pure, wonderful, meat and potatoes professional wrestling full of hard hits, cool moves, and now with a finish that whips ass, as Juice finally overcomes the injury that sank his tournament run and getting a big one on Goto to end the block.

Mostly, it’s because Juice finally has an injury on an opponent to go after.

Goto has a taped up right elbow, and as is the case with the work done on his hand all tournament, Juice also seems to know just exactly how much a match can handle. He doesn’t spent five to ten tearing it up and trying to make Goto put on a selling masterclass in response, but it’s enough to believably hinder him, and to his credit, Goto turns in the exact selling performance the match requires. It not only adds some depth to it in a mechanical sense and gives them more to do, but also explains why Juice can get the win now when he couldn’t a few months ago, on top of just general improvement over a few months.

Also, it is very funny to see Goto once again simply unable to see the path in front of him that most of the rest of the B Block has seized upon — Juice Robinson’s taped up left hand — and instead just chugging his way through in his usual manner. We are past the point where I can really ever feel bad for Hirooki Goto, a man given chance after chance in the last ten years to improve in the way every one of his peers has, but it is always a delight to laugh at him when presented a chance to.

Following a bunch of cool power moves, and Goto’s arm blocking all of the stuff he can win with, Juice reels off the Pulp Friction for the win.

It still doesn’t seem like the absolute best that these two can do together, but compared to a longer title match, I’ll take it. Fast and loud and sensible and full of heart. We tend to talk about Tomohiro Ishii matches in the 2010s as the ultimate example of G1 style wrestling, but Juice and Goto put out one hell of a case study themselves.

***

Kazuchika Okada vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Seventeen (8/10/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax.

Once again, it is the de-facto semi-final of the tournament.

It is also the best match of the tournament so far, and by a hair, the best of all of the Tanahashi/Okada G1 matches (including the ones yet to come).

Some of you out there with the minds of toddlers have complained and will complain that it is old and dull by now, to have these two once again out there. In the last six G1 Climax tournaments, this is the third Tanahashi/Okada match with the finish it has, and the second one in three years to unofficially act as a block semi-final. It is not a new match, to be sure, but as always with these two, the differences, both major and minor, are, at this point, what makes it still work.

The significant differences between 2013, 2016, and this match are twofold.

Firstly, it is just about the points. With Tanahashi’s 14 and Okada’s 12, it is not an even split like their two previous matches. The loser would be eliminated from the block in their 2013 match, someone had to win in their 2016 match to win the block (as neither did, it somehow went to Hirooki Goto), but there’s more room for tournament numerology shenanigans here. Here, it’s only Okada who has to win, whereas Tanahashi merely has to not lose.

That’s the other big difference here, the way these matches are wrestled.

Each time before, Okada and Tanahashi met in the G1 Climax with Okada as the champion, having already beaten Tanahashi in a major title match earlier in the year. Arguably, those matches came on the heels of the two most widely acclaimed matches they ever had together, Invasion Attack 2013 and Wrestle Kingdom X respectively. The same can be said here, with Okada having beaten Tanahashi three months prior to break his title defense record, in an absolutely crushing defeat. The difference now is that, coming after that, Okada is not the champion, and while Okada’s motivation in the previous G1 matches was simply not to lose as he gained less by winning the G1 than anyone else in it, that changes significantly (a) without the title & (b) looking like he is in something approaching a little slump. He feels not so much desperate and cornered, that is not the Okada game, but always a little pressed and troubled. It’s a much tenser Okada performance than we’ve seen in some time. On the other end of that, Tanahashi wrestles at the beginning of this match like someone who simply has to survive to succeed, but crucially, who changes his goal over the course of the match because that’s not who he is.

Tanahashi and Okada are better than any other pairing in New Japan at expressing these ideas through their wrestling, and true to form, that’s the point of so much of this match. Not just working towards the tournament booking, but branching off from that to once again evolve the match up between them in interesting new ways.

Specifically, that despite having the easier goal, Tanahashi comes into the match with the same level of desperation as Okada, after the heartbreaker in May, and does a far better job of turning that into a result, being more successful with his work on the leg than he was three months prior despite it no longer being the turning point that it used to be, and also breaking out some tricks Okada isn’t expecting. Okada’s desperation also shows itself in ways both big and small, from finally being desperate enough to try and go after Tanahashi’s nagging knee injury, to outright stealing some of his offense to do so. You also get your big obvious New Japan match-to-match pieces of move based evolution, specifically with Tanahashi now avoiding the sudden snatch back into the Rainmaker at the end.

As is always the case with these two, all elements of it seem to work hand in hand. The narrative is never, in and of itself, what makes a match great, despite that provided you care even a little bit (if you don’t, what are you doing here? like, reading this sure, but also still watching these in 2018.), this is as captivating and interesting as ever, if not even more than ever before. Tanahashi and Okada are just better than every other pairing in wrestling at expressing these ideas through their actions, and so when discussing why I liked yet another Tanahashi/Okada match, half of it comes down to simply talking about what happened because it matters so much when distinguishing these matches from so many others around them and that clearly want to be like them.

The individual performances are also tremendous, and for as great as the design is, it’s the craftsmanship that brings those ideas to life in such a vibrant way.

Obviously, I am going to praise Hiroshi Tanahashi.

He’s still been one of the best wrestlers in the world in the last few years while somewhat further away from the spotlight, but it’s his step back into it in 2018 that may have produced his best work ever. As great as he was as the Ace figure — one of the best to ever hold a torch in pro wrestling, really only topped by guys like Cena or Jumbo — he’s maybe even better at this stuff, the desperate old man trying to hang on. He’s as great at the knee selling as he’s been all year, but in a big spot against Okada, also adds some real sympathetic ass human feeling to his selling too. He sure isn’t Kawada, but he approaches his hurt knee in the same kind of a way. There’s a level beyond some stutter step sells or a collapse or moving with a hobble, where Tanahashi seems to express a disappointment in his own body for failing him in a match where, mentally, he has done everything right. It’s so great, the most sympathetic and understandable selling in the world at this point, and for whatever weaknesses he still might have (I mean the elbows, basically. not that he doesn’t throw out some heaters here, but old man Tanahashi has largely reverted back to his pre-Ace form of not being a great/reliable elbow guy.), a performance this good in the harder-to-qualify areas more than makes up for them.

More often than not when I discuss one of these matches in years past, an easy summary would be that Tanahashi turns in a superhuman performance, getting everything right, and making it so that all Little Kazu really has to do is step on the X on the stage at the right moment, not fuck it up, and the match delivers. That’s not so much the case here, because there are two great performances in this match.

As good as Tanahashi is in this match, Okada really isn’t that far off.

While he doesn’t quite sell his knee in a way that feels like he’s battling the forces of time themselves, it’s one of his better performances ever in that regard given the amount of work done on it. He has all the prerequisite stuff, but never feels like he’s forgotten it, able to show the damage done in a way I never find showy or phony, like someone play-selling while doing a fake wrestling match and trying to show that they’re Great At Selling, which is something he’s struggled with in the past. Likewise, he more than makes up for Tanahashi’s major deficiency by throwing some real hot ones out there when they trade shots. This match does not quite have the benefit that their Wrestling Dontaku match did of Little Kazu turning the clock back and playing a full on antagonist, but it does the next best thing in continuing the shockingly interesting summer slump story he’s found himself in. The narrative is that Okada can’t put Tanahashi’s attempts at knee work off like he had been able to the last few times and that he had to go to a pre-existing injury to find an opening, but the small little motions or larger facial expressions that Okada puts out there do just as much to advance this idea of him as frustrated and at a loss. Like his knee selling, it’s the sort of thing Okada so often gets wrong, and yet simply does not.

The performances are, yet again, great enough to support and, on occasion, exactly great enough to elevate everything else about the match, and once again, what they decide to do is far less expected and so much more interesting and memorable because of it.

Rather than the widely expected Okada to win to back to his eventual recovery of the title in the easiest way possible, or even the kind of draw where now the clock runs out on Okada once he’s finally the one fighting against it, they opt for something that is not only less expected and less common, but like so much of the best Tanahashi work, winds up standing out as some kind of larger commentary. The best matches are about something larger, whether that’s more than wrestling or simply an ideological statement about professional wrestling, and while this isn’t exactly a rumination on shooting Jesse James, it is a match with something to say.

Hiroshi Tanahashi starts this match simply wanting to survive, but at some point — be it the High Fly Flow to the floor, Okada’s struggles in the middle of the match, or what feels like it to me, a moment where Okada first collapses during a strike exchange, and Tanahashi’s eyes light up — Tanahashi shifts away from that, and begins explicitly trying to win. Chalk it up to any number of things. Wanting a near perfect G1 record with only one loss, a mark not seen in years and years and years, and certainly not since it became a twenty man thing. Wanting to avenge the loss earlier in the year. Wanting to finally beat Okada again for the first time in over three and a half years. The why doesn’t matter all that much compared to the action itself, the heroism of choosing to go for it rather than playing it safe when the risk is that much greater. Babyfaces do babyface shit, and this is some of the best babyface storytelling and wrestling in recent memory.

Very often in this series, it has felt like one man deserved to win or lose based on strategy, but in this match, strategy feels as if it has absolutely nothing to do with what happened at the end of this match.

Sometimes, in sports, it feels like some higher universal power has intervened, and made a judgment.

Be it on some specific player, a style of play operated by a team, other sorts of behavior, it sometimes feels like some force far greater, more powerful, and less comprehensible than any of us could imagine has made a decision and [player/team x] is simply not going to succeed on the highest level. They may get cut off in the title game or before then, but it feels fated that they are never going to succeed. I am mostly talking about basketball here, as I am writing this (May 22nd, 2023) during the NBA playoffs, but you can probably find some of this in whatever else you’d like. Primarily, it applies to grifters and free throw merchants and such exaggerators and purveyors of dishonest play, the idea that some power above them has decided that they will not prosper when it counts. Your James Hardens and your Chris Pauls and the like. Things fall apart so often for them in one way or another — be it injuries to themselves or teammates, a team mentally breaking down around them, bad coaching, or my favorite, their team missing twenty-seven straight three point shots in a closeout Game Seven — that it cannot help but feel like a moral judgment against them from on high.

The opposite feels true here.

What we have is not a match where Kazuchika Okada is going to lose because of some universal judgment, but a match in which Hiroshi Tanahashi feels explicitly at moments — particularly the last third of the match — as if he is being rewarded for approaching this the right way, trying to win outright rather than game the system.

Beyond just being a difference between this and the other G1 matches they’ve had, I think it’s also just a difference between Tanahashi and Okada as wrestlers and characters best illustrated by the match. Okada, as pure ambition, was always the one with something on the line even in the non-title confines of the G1, and was fine settling with simply not losing every other time. He stops Tanahashi just barely at the buzzer in 2013, puts him off far more effectively in 2016, but Tanahashi is not like him. The match sees him realize he can do it, and in the closing moments when he could grab a hold or stay down a little longer, he never does. You never see Tanahashi cover off of the set-up High Fly Flow to the back, but in the last fifteen seconds of this match, he does, before the clock runs out as he goes back up to try another. You rarely see him frantically grab cradles, but he goes for it here. He tries everything, at a point where he never has to try anything. You can understand the Business Decision Okada always made before, but what Tanahashi chooses to do feels a thousand times better, and that‘s the difference between someone I can live with on top and someone I want to support. Okada is fine. He’s better than he used to be at all of the stuff that matters, and I do not hate him. But he’s not Tanahashi, and this match makes the difference clearer than maybe any other.

That’s made particularly clear not just in how they handle very similar situations, but also in how it feels this time, with the same on-paper finish.

In 2016, Tanahashi’s failure to even come close to a win made a draw feel like a defeat. Even in 2013, although far less crushingly, it felt like each man had failed, Okada to stop another potential title challenge but also Tanahashi to shut down Okada like he had done before. Two years after their last draw, despite the match still ending without the usual way a draw ends, someone a count away from defeat and saved by the bell, the opposite feels true. Everyone in the world knows that Tanahashi probably had him there, and this time, they did something even more impressive. The draw feels like a genuine achievement, a triumph to cap off a shockingly successful G1 season, and improbably send Our Hero back to the finals after looking like it was all over only three months earlier.

When discussing their 2013 draw, I said that moral victories were not real in a rivalry this close.

However, half a decade later, this is no longer the close rivalry that it was, and in this match — in getting further than he had in years, in all of the little victories contained within this half hour, and in a larger spiritual sense because how Tanahashi conducted himself in the same situation, and clearly being rewarded for it by some universal power — has a way of feeling like a victory for Tanahashi.

Watching this match is watching, in real time, one of the all-time greats come alive with the power of self-belief again. Okada came into this match trying to shake off a few month relative slump, but instead of the predictable, Hiroshi Tanahashi feels like the man leaving the A Block feeling like he’s shaken off a slump. The thing is, his is the one he’s been since Okada cemented himself as The Man over two and a half year prior, and after a performance and G1 run like this, for the first time since, it doesn’t feel quite so unfair to ask certain questions.

Go Ace.

****

Tomohiro Ishii vs. Juice Robinson, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Sixteen (8/8/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

For as good as all of the Juice Robinson hand selling matches over the last month have been, this match — this masterful display of not just great G1 meat and potatoes work, but dudes rock ass dumb meathead wrestling at large — is better than all of them.

Juice has his talents and his charms in abundance, especially at this point in time, but as a likeable guy who hits hard, I don’t know that any of them could result in a better match than him simply being plugged into the Tomohiro Ishii formula for fifteen minutes as the guy Ishii bullies around. He might not get to show off the hand selling quite as much as he did against the Knife Pervert or Zack Sabre Jr. or even Naito — although Ishii being Ishii, nothing that obvious cannot matter at all, and so there are one or two crucial moments — but the main quality that makes that work, his natural likeability, is the same that Ishii puts to such great use.

Big Tom spends the bulk of the time shoving and kicking and battering Juice around, and forcing him to stand up for himself. Not as a white meat underdog babyface pushing through an injury, none of that Great Match Factory bullshit, but instead simply as a man. Boil it down, get rid of the extra flourishes so often put on the thing, pare the beast down to the essentials, and that is what Ishii is asking of Juice here. He is beating the shit out of him, and he simply has to fight back believably, throw a chop on his level, hurl his body at the problem in front of him, and Juice does that just as well as, and maybe even better than, his more prestige wrestling driven outings.

As always, the great Ishii matches hit on levels both lizard brained and otherwise.

You show up to this simply wanting the hard hits, and Big Tom has you more than covered. This is a match, fifteen minutes or less, filled up with some real nasty shots and grotesque landings, of all different varieties.

If you want something a little more substantial, relax, the boys have you there too.

Not surprisingly, one of these matches is also a marvel of construction and mechanics. Juice’s comebacks are built up incredibly well all match long to make him fighting back with any sustained success feel like an individual victory itself. Every big move feels like a major blow, everything that happens after the halfway point in the match feels earned, and they even offer up a few narrative delights as it pertains to the taped left hand of southpaw Juice Robinson. Ishii is not going to go deep into some hand work (sadly), but there are moments here where either (a) Juice makes sure it still matters, as a little tiny excuse for himself, such as after throwing the big cut off left hand but being unable to capitalize, or (b) the one moment where Ishii goes to it and it matters more than any other attack in the match.

As Juice moves in on beating Ishii in a classic Ishii style match, Big Tom uncorks a real violent cut off of his own, blocking Juice’s Lariat not only one with one of his own, but one that hits him right on the left forearm and wrist, and Juice’s momentum disintegrates on the screen in front of you. He almost collapses, opening Tomohiro Ishii up for the enzuiguri, and then a real sudden and desperate feeling Brainbuster for the win.

Not just a wonderful display of meat and potatoes violence, but a match with some real heart to it on top of all of those easy thrills. It is the exact sort of a match you would hope Tomohiro Ishii and Juice Robinson would have together, and I mean that as an incredibly high complement.

The sort of match you watch a G1 hoping to see.

***1/4

Hiroshi Tanhashi vs. Michael Elgin, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Fifteen (8/5/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

Going into the match, on the second to last day of the A Block, Tanahashi already has twelve points. The obvious thing to do is throw in a spoiler loss, so that the Tanahashi/Okada de-facto semi-final will simply be that on numbers alone, an even match where the winner simply moves on, and there is nothing complex about it.

Luckily, New Japan’s spark of inspiration with this tournament, and Tanahashi’s year as a whole continues.

I am not super interested in spending a thousand words on Big Mike, but to keep it short, this is an astonishing achievement from Hiroshi Tanahashi. Elgin in NJPW has been one of the most embarrassing wrestlers of the decade. The desperation to be seen as a Great Wrestler, some highly respected gaijin, seeps out of his pores at all times. He does everything he can think of in almost every match, and it is rarely ever good. While a wrestler like Ishii can occasionally pull one out of him through force of will, a wrestler like Tanahashi seemingly has no chance of it.

That makes it all the more impressive when he does.

He doesn’t do the thing you might think, forcing Elgin into a classical Tanahashi match, but instead simply makes a Big Mike match smarter, while living up to his usual standard otherwise. He makes him fight over everything, paces it in a way that allows things to breathe, and does his best not only to make Mike’s stuff seem impressive and to cast him as a challenge worth overcoming, with the natural stylistic contrast helping the stupid weirdo a lot too. Even more than that, the real achievement here is that Tanahashi goes 99% of the way in faking out a classic tournament spoiling loss, only to go the other way at the last second, turning what would otherwise be chalk into something not only a little surprising, but great feeling as well.

At the end of a match that saw the big lug catch, counter, or fight through every major Tanahashi plot, gamble, or usual bit, Tanahashi simply fights his way out of a powerbomb and into a cradle to just barely pull it out.

Tanahashi goes into the final day with 14 points instead of the expected 12, creating a far more interesting scenario for the de-facto semi-final than simply another 12 vs. 12 winner takes all encounter, forcing Tanahashi to make the implicit story of his tournament explicit, and literally just having to survive one more day.

If Tanahashi does, in fact, win Wrestler of the Year in 2018, a match like this will be as much of a reason why as anything on a Match of the Year list. The fact that it is great at all is impressive, but the exact way in which it was great is that much more so.

Go Ace.

***

 

 

Kenny Omega vs. Tomohiro Ishii, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Fourteen (8/4/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

It is not quite the original.

I don’t mean that this is not the first Omega vs. Ishii match exactly, although they had a trilogy together in 2017. However, I never really loved those matches like a lot of other people did, and this match is different enough from all of those that I don’t think it matters all that much that this is the fourth Kenny Omega vs. Tomohiro Ishii match. It would have worked even better had they never once touched before, but like the match seems to emulate, it does not matter all that much that they have.

What I mean by the original is that this is not exactly Okada vs. Ishii, the match that it clearly aspires to be.

You can talk about decades of G1 upsets prior to that, specifically Ishii’s first one in 2013 against then-Ace Hiroshi Tanahashi in Korakuen Hall, but the inspiration here clearly comes from the Okada one in 2015. The reigning IWGP Heavyweight Champion losing an upset to an already mathematically eliminated Tomohiro Ishii, a victory for a certain type of fan, the underdog defeating one of New Japan‘s golden boys. Hell, it even comes at the same point in the tournament, the third to last night of a block. It just happens to have less behind it narratively (go read about Ishii/Okada if you want more here, I thought it was the best wrestling match of 2016, and one of the best of the decade period), and also happens between wrestlers with less physical chemistry, and with a champion/main event figure who it feels a little less great to see eat shit (this is not an insult to Omega really, it’s just that nothing in 2010s New Japan feels as good as seeing Okada eat shit). 

Everything this match seeks to do, Okada vs. Ishii did only two years earlier, and did in a better and more satisfying match.

Having said all of that, it both rocks to see Tomohiro Ishii succeed and to see Kenny Omega get his shit rocked and laid low by someone tougher and cooler than him, so there is really only so much you can take away. It is not the absolute best version of this sort of a match, but this sort of a match is one of the best things in wrestling, the reason you watch tournaments like this, and the match both whips a ton of ass and feels really great when the moment strikes.

That’s not only just because of the thrill of that moment itself, but also because of how great it is in execution. I don’t mean the simple mechanics of it, hard hits and crisp offense, but that’s all there too. What I really mean is that at large, the match is so well assembled and performed just as well.

More than any of their prior singles matches, this feels like a Kenny Epic and an Ishii Epic finally finding some middle ground between them, building a bridge to the other. It is more Kenny than Ishii, to be sure, but there’s just enough ground ceded here to make it really work in a way that their prior work did not.

What works best about the match that wasn’t there in 2017 is the obvious thing, that it finally allows someone to be 100% pro-Ishii and anti-Kenny. Their meetings in 2017 were about legitimizing Kenny and having Big Tom be an obstacle for him to overcome, and while they did a great job of that, this is so much easier, so much more natural, and feels so much better. Kenny, to his credit, doesn’t overdo it like he might have two or three years prior. A few slaps on Ishii’s head at the start and a few minor taunts sprinkled throughout, but otherwise, it is simply wrestling, with very little bullshit.

In fact, the entire point of the match is something directly for big Ishii fans in that sense, which is that the presence of even a little bit of bullshit on Kenny’s part is directly responsible for his loss.

Kenny is more explosive, faster, and more athletic than Ishii, and the major difference in his game from year to year is that he doesn’t try and wrestle Ishii on Ishii’s terms (another improvement for the match overall). There’s no real slugfest here, no attempt to prove a single thing. He has him, for most of the match. Whenever Ishii grits his teeth and pushes through something, Omega is there waiting with some sensational feat that Big Tom cannot do a whole lot against. The problem for Kenny is that he also knows this, and from time to time, cannot help but rub it in. Sometimes, it’s a smile and a light shove of the head, and other times, it’s trying to do one more thing than he needs to, opting to put on a show in moments when he probably could have ended the match, leading to a conclusion where he pays the price for every ounce of bullshit and nonsense that he tried to bring to a match with the wrestler with the least tolerance for any of it.

Something that stands out here with Kenny too is the total mastery over this style of match. I don’t just mean the construction or the escalation of it, although both are as good as always. What I mean is that there is always a little extra something to add real confusion into the mind over how this is going, or these little wrinkles to the formula that stand out, the sort of thing really only Kenny and a few others can pull off in an all-action match like this. There are small differences, nearfalls Ishii would not normally have, first creating doubt in an Omega win, but then also creating doubt in an Ishii one as well. A nearfall or two off of rare moves that, one might think, Big Tom might not otherwise get in a victory. The match is a few minutes too long, to be sure, but those excess moments kind of help the match out in a weird way.

The magic of this is that this is a Kenny Omega style match, but a Kenny Omega style match telling the story and carrying the ideological values of a Tomohiro Ishii match.

Nobody does this like Tomohiro Ishii.

If nobody can quite have these sorts of fireworks shows like NJPW era Kenny, then the same can be said for the things Tomohiro Ishii does in this match. It is a tired point, I am bored of making it, but the performance of Tomohiro Ishii in one of these big G1 matches is the sort of thing that every would-be imitator would do well to take a much much closer look at, and see the things he’s actually doing. The point is never that Ishii hits hard or that he kicks out at one or does a fighting spirit no sell spot.

The point is the struggle behind all of that.

Big Tom managing to get up in key moments late in the match whips ass, but the reason it works is all of the times early on when he tries to do that and fails. It’s the moments of righteous indignation, the measured fighting spirit sells that are only like half successful, all of that. The moments where he tries to stand back up after a third or fourth thing, but cannot, or where Omega catches him. The moments when he knocks Kenny on his ass are made all the more captivating by the ones where he cannot earlier, or where Omega blocks or manages to reel off his big strike first. In the same way that Kenny Omega has a total mastery over his style of match, so does Tomohiro Ishii, and it’s on display in the way he slightly changes up his usual bits. They do a multi-move fighting spirit exchange, and in that, Ishii almost goes down for good a few times, only to stretch it exactly long enough that you think he’s really got him, only to then get shut down, turning a usual routine into a real gut punch.

It’s masterful stuff, especially considering that all of those heartbreaking gut punches eventually lead to a real fist pumper of a conclusion.

Kenny and Ishii put together a motherfucker of a fireworks show yet again at the end, and now with a sturdier foundation than ever before, it finally has the ability to land with some real emphatic force and real impact. The twists and turns are handled beautifully, each Ishii comeback and each Omega cut off ratcheting up the feeling that much higher, and especially the way the final moments are done. Ishii tends to get his big wins with a flurry, usually a big Lariat, Powerbomb, and then the Brainbuster. When Ishii nails the Lariat, but Kenny’s able to escape the big one, the match feels over, making the payoff when Ishii reels off the Brainbuster out of nowhere for the win all that much sweeter.

It is not perfect. There are minor flaws if you want to hate, scabs you can pick at, and it suffers from the comparison it draws and the shadow it intentionally puts itself in. At the same time, an outstanding epic, the best G1 match of the tournament to date, and the sort of match I always thought these two could have under the right circumstances. Another success from the Great Match Factory.

The second best version of one of the best things possible in wrestling is still a hell of a thing, and one of the best matches of the year.

***1/2

Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Juice Robinson, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Fourteen (8/4/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

After the embarrassing output against Kenny Omega on Day Twelve, Zack Sabre Jr. redeems himself just a little, finding himself back in his element now, on the midcard against a wrestler with one clear and obvious injury to exploit.

Before you ask, yes, it does help that Juice Robinson’s injury just so happens to be a hand injury.

I like what I like.

The match is also just really great, and the best possible use of both guys in it.

Zack’s work on the taped up appendage is the sort of Zack work I like to see the most. Not only technically proficient, a display of a ton of cool holds, but super direct as well, with him having one clear focus for the entire match. As much of a fun intellectual exercise as the Two-Pronged Approach, Zack’s recent version of the old shell game technique, can be, there is just something about a match where he immediately sees something, goes for it, and stays on it. It’s also incredibly mean, as Zack does all of this to a genuinely likeable wrestler that the crowd likes a lot, making it feel that much worse, on top of how clearly painful everything looks. It is the ideal Zack Sabre Jr. performance and environment, one in which the match and/or opponent goes out of its way to give him direction rather than letting him riff around by himself, one that casts him as the antagonist he naturally is against someone worth supporting, and one that also gives him no more than sixteen minutes to play with.

Juice is the reason why this works like it does though.

For all of the great things Zack does here and all of the qualities he suggests, it’s Juice as the beating heart of the thing that allows those attacks to have value and to give those disgusting qualities a baseline to be held as a counterexample too. Juice’s selling of his left hand is, once again, superlative. He’s done great with it not only all tournament but all summer, and I don’t want to repeat myself time and time again, but his work with a hurt hand is the best work of his entire career. It is not only that he always sells it well, or how he holds it, but how he always seems to know exactly how much to sell it relative to the work an opponent puts in. Juice is also an expert in how to take it with him when the match moves past it, executing the big stuff but always with the injury there in mind, so it never feels abrupt when a match goes back to it after periods elsewhere, as Zack matches are often wont to do.

It takes two, and this is a wonderful marriage, one that I badly wish had been explored beyond simply this singular G1 meeting.

Yet again, Juice’s hand just hinders him too much against top level competition. He unwraps it to move more freely, but still can’t quite reel off the one move he needs to win because of it, and especially cannot throw his big cut off left hand without risking it doing more damage to himself than anyone on the other end of it. Zack sticks with it and it eventually pays off. Juice fights the usual double armbar, but Zack rolls him over and adds in a Stump Puller to help pull his body back even further. With no free limbs to get out, on top of the hurt arm, Juice has to give up.

Another great chunk of meat and potatoes ass pro wrestling from New Japan’s current foremost expert in the form.

(Zack Sabre Jr. wasn’t bad here either.)

***