Jetlag

How about this: 1. he doesn't know how to sell. 2. he doesn't know how to do any offense that doesn't look like crap. Even as spotfests his matches have nothing going for them. They are usually slow, uneventful, low on crowd reaction due to Marufuji being confusing rather than engaging. etc. And he really doesn't have many great spots.

I enjoyed that match. Altough Satomura wasn't the focus, her exchanges with Kana ruled. These two have to be among the best matchups of the 2010s in japanese wrestling (the other best matchup being Akiyama vs. anyone)

Found her 2010 singles vs. Kana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atpUDLdCFsw Damn epic match and likely their best against eachother, check it out if you haven't

Another piece in Yoshida's great 1999. Futagami is much lower on the totem pole, so Yoshida makes it clear she wants to finish this in 30 seconds. Futagami doesn't much but she has a handful of spectacular counters for Yoshida's signature moves. Futagami has a kind of miserable charisma, like a female Masao Inoue, but manages to give Yoshida a lot more than she expected. Didn't like the double finisher pop up before the finish, altough it was fairly well done. Yoshida continues to look like a female Negro Navarro crossed with Tamon Honda, clutching her opponent out of nowhere for the Air Raid Crash and locking in unique chokes out of thin air. A few variations on her Spider Twist submission in this match.Great selling from both girls throughout.

I wonder to how many other wrestlers this would apply. The closest thing I imagine would be Bret Hart's popularity in germany. I guess the popularity of certain british wrestlers too.

jdw has made great post after great post in this thread. I'm still not sure what JvK is going for here.

Before I would've said that he is great but lack of footage prevents him from making the cut. But now OJ has unearthed a match from 1962 and I'm not so sure about that anymore. Based on quality he is a near godlike worker and one of the best euro heels. And most of the stuff we have available is from a 50-60 year old. If more ITV vault videos can be made available I imagine his stock would skyrocket for me.

Kawada vs. Akiyama, 2/9/93 is probably the best japanese rookie/vet match I've seen.

Are there even 10 wrestlers with more immediate impact than Breaks? Aside from his heel act he also has the advantage that his matches are filmed in small intimate locations with the audio being mixed well. Dandy was a technical wrestler/brawler but doesn't have any shtick or attention grabbing mannerisms. I think Breaks vs. Casas or Breaks vs. La Parka would be the better comparison.

Haven't seen this one in a few years. It was a pretty solid match with well worked holds and a few impact moves from the europeans. Billy Robinson tries escalating the match a few times but kind of hits a brick wall in Dory Funk Jr who is exactly as bad as I remember him being. Funks work over Robinson's back a bit leading to a few well timed reversal segments and nothing more. Funk and Billy get on eachothers grill leading to lots of amusing mugging and a nice punch combo from Robinson. Hoffman is pretty good landing an awesome throw on Dory, busting out stiff shots on Terry and has a variety of great knee attacks. Robinson busts out his backbreaker and the Gotch style tombstone piledriver on Dory which Dory doesn't react to at all. Just kicks out, then reverses the next hold and doesn't even make it look like he needs to tag out. Matwork isn't very special. Lots of moments where there's a little mingling on the ground, then a tag out. Really hot last minute before the 45 minute draw with finisher attempts, reversal etc. There's probably worse ways to spend 45 minutes but I wouldn't recommend anyone to watch the full fight.

Really fun match and another glimpse at the stylistic weirdness that was going on in ARSION. The first couple minutes are pure women's BattlARTS style. Omukai really lays it in on Futagami in the corner with some malintentioned knee strikes and then rocking her with that running solebutt of hers, so Futagami, after a brief mat scramble, replies in kind by just standing up and punting Omukai square in the eye. After that it turns into a more typical joshi style match with dives and suplexes but they always go back to the submissions. Futagami doesn't seem to react to anything so the crowd responds big when she points to a guy who was obnoxiously chanting Omukais name the whole time. Omukai is not afraid to land the most god awful hits to the face. Very much worth watching for the intense submissions scrambles between, building to an intense finish.

This is such a great match. Really made by the contrast in styles and them trying to show each other up. Saito lands some huuuuge deadlift germans and locks in the Olympic on Honda, making it clear he has no respect for the olympic veteran. The stand up sections are really great here as each elbow and kick lands with bad intention. Some incredibly stiff shots there that get the crowd rocking. Honda's selling is top notch. It all builds to a great finishing run as Honda makes Saito pay dearly by locking in one Hell after another another. Several great counters including Saito countering another Olympic hell by launching Honda into the air. March 2003 was one hell of a month for NOAH.

WOW! This was a super fun match. It was distinctly joshi and a nice contrast to the matches Mariko Yoshida was having the same year. Carlos Amano, while not a complete worker yet, was really fun just diving for leg submissions all over the place and using her size and agility to survive. To my surprise, Hyuga made this match. I've never really noticed her before but she blew me away here with her performance. She did a great job controlling her opponent. She did a great job selling. And she did a great job getting the story of the match over. Amano would try using her submission skills to her advantage, but Hyuga wasn't having it and decided to put her in her place with a couple submissions of her own, resulting in a few great spots. This includes a couple of nifty armbar counters and an angry Hyuga raining punches to Amano's head from the back mount. Neat structure here where Hyuga controls the match early on, while Amano tries attacking her legs like a rabid dog with a few different strategies. Hyuga keeps cutting her off while selling the accumulating damage on her legs in very believable fashion.Totally out of left field great selling performance. Perfect finish too. I think Hyuga may deserve a closer look after this.

The event was organized by an outlaw group, meaning it's not CWA. Appears to be the finale of some tournament. The date is 1985. That's all I know.

Takayama was mostly jobbing in All Japan early on. There are some goodies though, just not the epics you want. There is a longish match against Misawa from 99 though which is a damn great one and he looks like the Takayama we all know in it.

I consider Yatsu vs. Tenryu in SWS and to a lesser degree the mid 90s Yatsu vs. Fujiwara singles to be very notable singles bouts. I also heard he was good in Choshu's promotion in the early 2000s but there's not footage online. EDIT: I just checked and he also had good singles matches against Choshu and Hara.

I watched this match and I was blown away by how good the psychology in this bout was. It felt like an AJPW heavyweight bout structure in a violent 70s style revenge massacre. That and the fact that they kept this interesting and high in intensity over 25 minutes was damn impressive. The announcer points out Gino gets pins in order to improve his confidence and that is a neat story. Gino looks like he's really losing his cool being locked in a cage and you buy it when he panics and tries escaping the cage after Lothario attempts to rip his guts out. Gino's positioning and tactics were damn great. Lothario is great as a tough bastard with nasty punches and holds that just look excrutiating. Everytime he gets ahold of Gino he looks like he is just going to rip him in half. Selling in between the falls was incredibly well done and kept you buying into the gimmick despite them having 60 seconds of rest before the count. We even get an AJPW style big match finisher to top it all off. Great great match.

Great Sasuke is awesome. And someone whose variety is undersold, I feel. He brings that Sabu-like car crash feel to junior matches that desperately need it. You never know he might crack his own skull or unexpectedly lay in an ultra stiff spin kick. Underrated matworker. Looks good in a number of different roles, working as top face in his own company, as indy sensation going at it with the big stars in the big league, as established star against lesser guys, and as a hardened, possibly insane veteran politician wrestler. One of the few juniors to look really good throughout the 90s and 2000s. Plenty of strong singles bouts under his belt including matches against guys like Magnum Tokyo, Kenou or Samurai, and then a bunch of multiman tags including spotfests, brawls and stiff wars like the Shinzaki tag mentioned above. Are you sure there's 5 japanese juniors clearly better than him?

I don't know how much actual comedy I've seen him do, but his veteran heel shtick (which he seemed to be doing mostly in BattlARTS matches) where he was doing eye gouges and shoving his thumb up his opponents arse etc. was pretty great. Like the world's most violent Masao Inoue.

Gernot Freiberger runs that channel. He is a great historian and has posted lots of great history and anecdotes online. I don't know how much of it is in english though. You may try contacting him on YouTube. Indikator (who posts here or used to, atleast) is also very knowledgable. Axel Dieter recently passed away which is why I guess those matches were posted just today. Maybe Dieter vs. Moose Morowski will be uploaded too. If you ask me, the best matches from germany we have on tape are a couple Wanz/Vader brawls, Dieter vs. Morowski No DQ 1980, Franz van Buyten vs. Dave Taylor in a chain match 1985, and Van Buyten vs. Terry Rudge in a tournament finale 1987. The last two can be found on Youtube aswell as many Wanz/Vader matches. Franz van Buyten was a worker from Belgium but he was the babyface in Hamburg and did great work there. Germany was a weird wrestling marketplace of all sorts where all kinds of workers went there to earn money or gather experience. Workers who spent time in germany include Bret Hart, Atsushi Onita, Chris Benoit, Chris Jericho, Masakatsu Funaki, Shinya Hashimoto, Hector Garza and others. Shows were usually organized as tournaments that ran for weeks at times in the same place. Otto Wanz (an austrian) was the big popular heavyweight face of the territory and also promoter.

Beginning with Ricky Morton as a base is a great start. Rey's fireworks are well-executed, timed on point, make sense and are something he needed to stay over and credible with his size an frame. Don't tell me he would've been better if he used Flair's offense being a 1,60 tall cruiserweight... so I'm not sure what is there to sell. If you hate fireworks in general there is no selling him to you. As for Rey's best, I think the two Eddie matches (1997 and 2005) are up there with Liger's best. I may be a little biased towards the 05 match though because that feud was one of the first things I saw when I started watching wrestling. I'm also a big fan of the entire series with Psicosis, especially their title match in AAA. He doesn't have the hate-filled, intense wars like Liger but that stuff is here and there, like a pretty brutal match against JBL or a smugly worked sprint against Drew Mac And like said earlier he has a number of great performances, like making an Elimination Chamber match watchable by bumping himself to pieces, or having a legit great, elevating series with CM Punk.

Wrong thread, ignoire this post While I'm in this thread, I should mention I got the service and while I only watched 3 matches so far I'm really digging it. Great work.

Voted Rey. I prefer the structure and smarts of his TV bouts over Liger's bomb dropping and repititive matwork. It's close though.Their best matches are close but Liger has more. Rey wins based on "average" matches though as he has ton of great average matches and Liger's best run (probably the NOAH tags) doesn't touch that.

This was really good and a testament to Andre's greatness as he works ~25 minutes, makes his opponent look believable hanging with a 7 ft behemoth without losing his aura. He pretty much dominates the first fall locking in a variety of holds with his gigantic hands. I dug the spot where Harley knocks himself out with a diving headbutt as it further emphasized Andre's invincibleness. Andre is determined to work this like a title match, exemplified by him signaling to Harley that's it not a good idea for him to go "there" when Harley tries grabbing his hair from a bearhug. Harley mostly works this in desperation mode, going for weapons, distractions and attacking on the outside. Andre shows his sensibleness by concluding his series of arm/shoulder holds with a butterfly suplex to set up the finish. Nice symmetry with each fall escalating and finishing with a sequence on the outside. Body slam over the 3rd rope was crazy. 2nd and 3rd falls are really hard fought, showing some great toe to toe fighting and a great Andre comeback.

Kawada also has a shootstyle bout in U-Style, against Illioukhine if I remember correctly. Don't you forget it! Actually I just looked it up and it was only 4 minutes. I remember it being pretty good though.