Commissions continue again, this one coming from friend of the program Eamonn. 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 thing or $10 for anything over an hour, 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 and Sabin’s IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Titles.
I’ve always been very partial to this series from 2009, in large part because like a lot of things from New Japan for a few years before the thing blew up, it seems like it’s largely been forgotten save for a few longer-term fans, even among the sorts of people (most of you reading this) who would absolutely love some Devitt vs. MCMG.
Machine Guns vs. Apollo 55 is a lot like the Time Splitters vs. Young Bucks feud/general Time Splitters arc, in that its larger goal is the elevation of the next Junior Ace right up until the singles series that would take him there (Omega/KUSHIDA, Marufuji/Devitt, but instead of being slow cooked for years, this one is hurled in a microwave as a result of both the Guns’ TNA commitments and also probably the need to speed this up given the state of the division, and done over the course of a trilogy instead. The goal is the same though, and given the constraints, it may be even more impressive, if not as rewarding.
Of their three together, my favorite is the conclusion in September, but this one too is magnificent, and following an undercard major show sprint in the first match in April, a major step forward, not only a great Korakuen Hall main event, but one of the better New Japan matches of the year too.
The match is a fireworks show through and through, and like the best of those matches, works on the level it does for two reasons.
Number one, it is astonishingly well put together.
Even by Machine Guns standards, I think this match (and the sequel) stand out among a handful of their very best. It’s what this sort of looks like in its ideal form, on every level. Mechanically, it’s as crisp as always from four guys who rarely ever disappoint in that way. Performance wise, working more from above and theoretically, as someone representing another company with New Japan’s titles, Shelley (if not Sabin as much) is again a real rude boy, even if the match isn’t entirely about that. Most of all, the construction of the thing feels like a marvel. It’s not overly loose, but they real confidently go into the big fireworks show without too long of any real period in control, but it’s never a mistake. The length of the match certainly helps them at twenty-one minutes, the perfect amount of time for this sort of wrestling when handled by guys like this, but every single thing feels correct. They hit the big moments and have these wonderfully showy counters, but they also get the things right that a lot don’t, like cut offs and teases of moves before they get hit so it feel like a forward step simply to hit one of these moves, or the way the match has enough dramatic nearfalls to get the heart pumping, but also manages to end at what feels like the exact right moment. These formulas aren’t lost, exactly — you’re reading about one you can find for yourself and look up, and hell, the Guns themselves are still doing it at a fairly high level — but you watch a match like this, and look at a whole lot of others to follow in its wake and trace its footsteps, and sometimes, it feels like they are.
Number two, vitally, there’s something behind all of these wonderful things, not just a reason for how and why things happen like they do, but forward progress in a classical kind of wrestling story.
Devitt and Taguchi have been a full time tag team for less than six months, and so much of this series is simply them learning how to be a tag team. Throughout their matches so far, including the first between these two and this one, the goal is always to get someone one on one against one of the two, with only a few real moment of teamwork or double teams on display. It arguably cost them against, at worst, one of the five best and most cohesive tag teams alive at this point, and the aim here is the same. The Guns go for what usually works, the classical twenty-first century strategy (I tend to mentally credit to the Briscoes as they were the first to really master it, but it has roots everywhere) in a tag in this style, spending the back half constantly cutting the other man off while pouring offense on the one left. It works again here, with Fergal and Taguchi’s try failing, until the moment they finally begin acting like a tag team, and not two singles wrestlers competing together.
Apollo 55 spends all match trying to get that together, and it’s only once they do that they can finally succeed.
Ryusuke Taguchi shoves Sabin off the top to break up a double team, something they hadn’t quite been able to do before, before moving into their own two-on-one portion on Shelley. A double team Dodon’s Throne sets up the rarer, pre-Bloody Sunday finish from Devitt, the Prince’s Throne II (a Go to Cheech style set up and spin to the double knee gutbuster landing), and the boys win their first set of titles together.
This one’s always doomed to be a little bit forgotten, not only happening at a time where less were paying attention to the place, but also existing in an already stacked back catalog for anyone catching up years later, and the same can really be said for Apollo 55. Still, it’s always felt a little strange that wrestling this accessible — literally and stylistically — never seemed to get that much praise, because not only is it the kind of wrestling that so often does, but to me, one of the better versions of this sort of wrestling. I have a hard time explaining why something like the Apollo 55/Golden Lovers match fifteen months later caught on but this match and the follow up never did, it’s the same sort of wrestling, but longer and more grandiose and with even more famous names, but it didn’t. Still, if any of this interests you, this and the other matches between them are on Youtube in glorious 240p quality, waiting for you to dig in, and I highly recommend that you do so.
Still only the middle of a trilogy, something of a surprise and sudden victory before a third that ends any questions, but what a middle part and what a trilogy.