Jetlag

I would throw in her 2001 singles matches vs Ran Yu Yu, and the 2002 sprint against Meiko Satomura in for singles recommendations. I haven't yet done a full-on deep dive into Amano, but I can safely say she's always worth watching when she's not in some bullshit tag playing the jobber. The GAEAISM channel has put up lots of good stuff lately on YouTube.

Good-great undercarder type guy early in his career, who sometimes brought things into BattlARTS that didn't belong, tho he has a lot of stuff from that era that holds up well. But holy fuck when he put on the Joker makeup and became the god of the sleazy technical matches, it has to be the reinvention of the decade. He is doing pretty well in Tenryu Project right now too it seems having to wrestle in a ring is limiting his creativity a little. Amazing resume of matches considering he often fights without a ring, or opposite untrained karate guys and other sleazy phantom figures.

Somebody posted some 70s German wrestling clips to Youtube. Just about a minute each so don't get your hopes up but it's still something. Roland Bock vs Jack Rowland Bock vs Johnny El Corso Going by Cagematch, the Rowland match might have been as early as 1974.

He looks great whenever he steps in the ring, but he's only had about 40 matches, a chunk of which we don't even have on tape unless somebody is going to steal Kiyoshi Tamuras hard drive to get us the U-FILE files. Another guy who's worth considering if you really, really, really like shootstylists.

Oh hell no. He has some good matches but he's so often very lazy and lame, dragging down matches even though he clearly has the skill to do better. A travesty considering how much he was wrestled compared to other guys who almost never make tape.

Super talented and perhaps the best guy in Japan just based on raw ability, tho I'm still waiting for him to come out and have a bunch of great matches as he's stuck working subpar shooters in GLEAT. It seems they are moving him into a more vicious feud with Izuchi so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that that might give us something good.

Too spotty in my opinion, tho he has flashes of greatness. I'm a bit disappointed by his Kyushu Pro work. I could see him having more of a case if we a get a bunch of his FUTEN or perhaps early U-FILE matches somehow, there are some sick looking clips with him involved and that style is clearly is strongest suit.

I think guys like him really suffer from the overhype. Like, with the kind of praise that is getting heaped on him, I expect to see some seriously mindblowing shit, and instead I get tornado DDTs and spanish flys which every indy guy is doing now. Like yeah he is decently spectacular, but doesn't really stand up to someone like Rey Jr in the 90s or Le Petit Prince, or even the likes of Jerry Lynn and RVD. Also since I've seen French Catch I'm not very impressed by the fact that all his matches are insanely long. Pudgy bald guys like Angelito could do better exchanges over similiar timespans. All that and the fact he doesn't really excel through storytelling or selling makes me have zero interest in watching him.

@itako18jp have also started selling various never before seen indy footage on Twitter and Goto is another guy who benefits massively as they have released a couple gems involving him, including one match that goes 30+ minutes and is really great. One of those matches makes Tarzan Goto another wrestler who has had great matches in 4 decades.

I still stand by much of what I wrote about Pat Roach earlier. Great guy. While we have a good deal of him on tape, there is not much of his heel stuff. There's one match vs Mike Marino on YouTube where Roach is full on cocky giant and it's pretty amazing. He reminded me a bit of Andre there. He had surprisingly few TV matches in the UK at that point but there's some interesting looking stuff. He lost by KO to George Gordienko on TV in the early 70s, and had another TV match against a guy labeled "Seigi Sakaguchi" and I'll be damned if that's not Seiji Sakaguchi on a somehow forgotten foreign excursion. I'd give my toe to see that. Roach also had lots of nice performance very late in the game. There is a brief TV match with Johnny Kincaid that has some awe inspiringly painful looking holds and selling, and also an old man tag from Germany in 1994 featuring Axel Dieter, Klaus Kauroff and someone else that I recall being pretty fun.

I think he suffers from the fact that he was at his best when Japanese wrestling nerds had much higher standards so he wasn't considered anything special. Then the Okada shock happened and New Japan gained a ton of new fans when they became more available to an international audience. Then Shiozaki changed his look to Okada lite which was just weird and didn't make him super interesting to the new fans. If someone now was having the kind of matches Shiozaki had during his best years people would be all over him.

Nominating Taro Yamada Taro Yamada has had an odd career. He works all kinds of undercard gigs on the Japanese indies, mostly short tags in promotions like 666 where he barely gets to do anything. Then Mutoha comes around and puts him into 20-30 minute long technical wrestling epics and he turns into an absolute monster wrestler. He along with Hiroshi Watanabe and Yasushi Sato really owes it to that promotion. Oh and he had a bunch of awesome matches with Keita Yano too. But yeah. When Taro Yamada is allowed to do stuff he absolutely is one of the best wrestlers of the 2010s-2020s. Great matworker, and beyond that has a really vicious side. His matches with Konaka, Keita Yano, Yasushi Sato, Hideya Iso etc. absolutely have some of the best wrestling you'll see and he also has some gems that go into a completely different direction like his bout with Takahiro Tababa. Fascinating wrestler and another case of someone who is completely out of nowhere great that we discovered mostly thanks to the Mutoha organizers being gentlemen and unveiling their footage to a wide audience. Recommended matches: vs Konaka, Mutoha 7/5/2015 Terrific match, Mutoha at its very best. It’s a rounds match that begins in a fashion inspired by World of Sport matches, with both guys displaying slick counters and moving in and out of holds very swiftly, but it quickly becomes a tangled nightmare as both guys would tie each other up in increasingly esoteric ways. Yamada was an absolute monster here, he looked like a true master of the llave style, and he just does things that nobody else does. He was tying up Konaka in so many different ways here, but also putting lots of creativity into his set ups and escapes, it was an absolute onslaught. Yamada is very much the driving force for most of the match, just tying Konaka in knots, and it seems Konaka only survives because Konaka is a flexibility demon and he can be put into contortions that not many other wrestlers could stand being put in. Although Konaka has a few moments where he really catches Yamada and it feels like a big victory each time. Not only were the submissions mind blowing, but so were their escapes from them. It was a display of mat wizardry in the truest sense. They do 20 minutes of outstanding grappling before the fifth round of 5, at which point Yamada loses his cool and finally nails Konaka with that curb stomp he likes to use. After that the time was running out and each moment felt frantic. Really edge of your seat stuff with both guys displaying incredible technical proficiency and body control while maintaining a competitive aura. I have been watching technical matches from Europe, Japan, Mexico, America for 15 years now and this was as good as any that I’ve seen. vs Hideya Iso 1/13/2020 Another really good match from Mumejuku. Very mat based as you expect. Iso has that Osamu Kido-like vibe, he’s a dumpy technician who doesn’t look like much and doesn’t do fancy moves but he has that easily overlooked kind of charisma and he can pull out some cool crafty stuff. This was Isos best performance that I’ve seen and Yamada looked like one of the best wrestlers in the world. It was pretty much Isos traditional, basic skillset vs. Yamadas llave holds. Several really good mat exchanges here, I especially liked Yamada pulling off a Paradise Hold in plausible fashion. They just went out and wrestled so there wasn’t some kind of exceptional story although I was rooting for Iso to upset his opponent. Sometimes you just want to watch two guys wrestle for 20 minutes and they delivered. Gnarly finish. This stuff is why Mumei was maybe the most important promotion in the world during that time period. vs Keita Yano, Wallabee 6/14/2012 Damn great match, I imagine if Yano had never stunk up BattlARTS and instead was only known for doing weird technical matches while wearing his joker makeup and clown singlet in a tiny gym we’d all be Yano superfans. Taro Yamada is the last guy in Japan still holding up the T2P style matwork and one of the most underrated grapplers on the independent scene. This was 25 minutes of matwork that was like a great IWRG style title match. It was a mix of Yamadas llave holds with Yano going along and some cool RINGs-like leglock work thrown in, with both guys doing a great job escaping and transitioning between holds. Whole match felt fresh and competitive and never was like a derivative or weird LARP, these guys were trying to pop each others shoulders and/or ankles the whole time. There were one or two geeky moments where Yano did some “rope running” although it was more like a comedy spot with Yano hooting like an owl, and both these moments lead to cool spots, one where Yamada actually trips Keita with a drop down and another where Yano tricks Yamada into his special hold. There wasn’t some kind of story if you are into that but there were a few great nearfalls and I deeply respect these two for just grappling it out for 25 minutes without slowing down, and never throwing a strike or even a body slam, it was all submissions and funky cradle pins (especially loved Yamadas weird Delfin Clutch variation), just really tightly worked stuff that wouldn’t look out of place in a WoS or lucha title match. I did love Yanos dickish knee slide across Yamadas face and the moment where Yano had enough of the llave holds and challenged Yamada to an amateur match was really cool. Finish was great aswell. Best Yano match I’ve seen by far and actively a great match, which is a major shocker. Yamada played a huge part too but I’ll be damned if Yano wasn’t feeling it that night. Apparently there have been a few matches between these two and I look forward to checking them all out but as it stands this is the best I’ve seen from Yano by a mile.

If there's any particular NEO from that time period you'd like to see, let me know because I have a ton of it from the 2002-2004 years. If you ask me, most of that stuff has been forgotten for a reason because the promotion was largely terrible from the little I've seen, but if other people enjoy that style of wrestling I won't stand in he way.

Came across this article talking about how the entire Granada TV archives would be moved, catalogued and made accesible to the public in 2022: https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/vast-granada-tv-archive-returning-24019217 It seems to be mainly talking about music related stuff as well as the paper archives, but hopefully it's a step towards more old WoS footage becoming available sometime in the future.

There actually is a full version of the legendary Smith/Hawkfield vs Misawa/Akiyama draw. Nothing mindblowing happens in the first 20 minutes but there is some solid hold for hold stuff between Smith and Akiyama, and lots of spots where Smith and Hawkfield are helping each other out to cut off the offensive runs of Akiyama and Misawa to keep things plausible. Very impressive build to the last ten minutes. You have to hand it to them for getting this much reaction out of Smith kicking out of a Tiger Driver at the last minute. Definitely a classic when you add in all the storytelling, cool bits of wrestling and a fucking Streetfighter character being there.