Jetlag

Takada is falling asleep on the mat way too much in my eyes for me to see it like that, really. Is he really feeding holds when he's just a shitty matworker? Atleast Cena will look like he's actually fighting. I like some Takada matches but a lot of the time he's really bland to me. Not as bad as Minoru Tanaka, though.

Common, there's nothing wrong with the Hansen or Vader matches. And the Joe match is all Joe blowing it. I also recall Misawa got the best possible match out of Bison Smith.

There's some 2000s Tenryu stuff where he works as a heel outsider. Couple tags in AJPW and his work in NOAH in particular, especially a tag with Akiyama against Kobashi and Shiozaki. I could see that being worth checking out for you if you are into him working as a prick.

OJ what would be an example of a match where they pummel eachother just enough? IIRC that Tenryu/Yatsu match was stiff as a tree and had just enough pummeling. I recall Yatsu hitting lots of great offense and trying to damage Tenryus equilibrium and Tenryu angrily attacking his kidneys.

I really liked this when I first saw it and it holds up very well on rewatch. The matwork won't make you forget your fancier RINGS bouts, but they created a nice intensity and snap with the constant scrambling for chokes, armbars and aggressive pin attempts. The meat is in they story they are telling. Lots of neat learned spots, aswell as establishing early on that locking up alone with Yoshida is dangerous. Yagi discovers the bandaged arm on Yoshida and goes after it with a variety of flying armbars, until she has the veteran with her back against the wall. Really liked the bit where Yoshida abandons the ropes in order to reverse the armbar but Yagi changes position and it looks like Yoshida has screwed herself. Brutal choke to finish this. Yoshidas defensive style here was pretty great, really. One of the best bouts of the year.

Match recs for her? Only know her as veteran worker who feuded with Sonoko Kato.

Well, I think Meiko can't be faulted for the style she is working. Do you think her matches like that Hojo match would be better if they were worked like a 1993 match? She doesn't really have the opponents to do that, so she has found her own formula that she can stick anyone into and work it out. That 90s style is fucking dead and let's be real going back and watching the matches you can tell why. Can't fault a worker for seeing the pitfalls and taking a new, better route. So I guess this goes to comparing apples and oranges and I think comparing apples and oranges is necessary for this kind of list. The same goes for Casas - I mean give him a break, he's 50 years old, he's not going to do a super intense 30 minute matwork clinic anymore nor is CMLL going to let him. His shtick-ladden arena mexico appearances aren't that different from his 90s work in places like Monterrey anyways. EDIT: Actually I misread that about Casas, but it's not like being the best in the world or in a top 15 in 2015 means you are anything special.

Out of curiousity, do you think Hokuto and Kandori are also non-traditional joshi workers?

Mimi Hagiwara/Rimi Yokota/Victoria Fujimi v. Tenjin Masami/Masumi Sukizaki/Cheryl Day Ah, Devil Masami. Cool to see her so young. This was mostly heels bashing the fuck out of the faces. It felt a little like lucha except with real quick tags and girls running in to break up pinfalls. Yokota and Mimi decide to slow things down a little by doing some armwork but they quickly go back to the fast paced action. Amusing blown spot shortly before the finish where Yokota crossbody blocks Sukizaki's back. I imagine there's an indy worker somewhere using that more or less ironically as a signature move. Fujimi was the best worker in the match, mostly due to her fire and more good chunky girl offense. Ayumi Hori/Rimi Yokota/Victoria Fujimi v. Raquel Rios/Norma Gomez/Yumi Ikeshita (September? 1979) More of the same I guess. Except this also had Yumi Ikeshita who was hellbent on beating the fuck out of everything she met. Goodness gracious what a beating. This was shorter and one-sided. Yokota kind of blends in with the other girls in these tags. Ikeshita wins this with the most hellish Owen Driver. Rimi Yokota v. Mimi Hagiwara (December 1979) This was a damn good matchup. Yokota was in tremendous shape here, especially next to skinny Mimi Hagiwara. Yokota puts in a real beating, working absolutely heelish by biting and pulling hair, but also doesn't forget to show off her holds and put Hagiwara in her place with that beautiful vertical tiger suplex. It was closer to Terry Rudge than Monster Ripper. Yokota really cranks in her holds and delivers some blowaway great legwork, while Hagiwara performed really nicely working underneath. Hagiwara's selling of the leg and graceful comeback attempts were awesome. Can't decide what I liked more, Hagiwara desperately going for a small package only for Yokota to roll through and once again punch the fuck out of her leg, or Yokota calmly briding out of a weak pin attempt from her worn out opponent and continueing the beating. Last cover was thing of beauty. Damn good TV bout here.

LA Park would be near the top of my list.

What are the best Kansai matches then?

Satomura obvious carryjobs include vs. a very green Kana in 2010, vs. way over the hill Tamura also in 2010, vs. Genki in 2004, Hojo matches mentioned, vs. Nanae Takahashi, vs. Kimura in 2006, etc. These are all opponents who don't really have a lot of good matches outside that. Hojo really can't do anything well except selling and all her non-Satomura matches I've seen are crap. Not saying Satomura is a Kawada-tier superworker dragging the Gary Albrights of this world into classics, as most joshi workers are game to some degree and girls like Aja or Kato turn into different workers when they face Meiko. But for me it takes a certain confinement for the style to work and Satomura sets that more consistently and better than damn near anyone else. Again I'm talking about individual performance and not sheer volume or workrate or whatever. I've never seen an individual performance from Toyota, Inoue, Kansai etc. that comes any close to the stuff Satomura does in her average match, not in 1993 or any other time. Atleast not in terms of what I want from a worker, that is good selling, timing, execution, presence, etc. In fact I am surprised OJ mentions Kansai carrying an entire company when I never thought Kansai was very special outside of a singles match against Yamada maybe. I'll probably have to look deeper into it.

Aja and Meiko are pretty close for me. Kansai I don't really like. Kyoko is very hit or miss for me and she has a lot of real crap on her resume. I love Kandori, but she doesn't have exactly a ton of great matches and she's kinda one dimensional. Can anyone explain how on earth Kansai and Kyoko are better than Satomura at anything? Kansai doesn't even a better arsenal of strikes than Meiko.

Is there anything Hokuto clearly does better than Meiko? The only thing I can think of would be storytelling. Even then, I don't think Satomura ever had an angle going on like Hokuto with the knee or the feud with Kandori. Meiko also never had an opponent as good as Kandori. Not saying Meiko has better matches than anyone in 1993 had, but in terms of execution, selling, timing, pacing, I don't think there's anyone clearly better than her. She also may have outworked Hokuto in their singles match (which was coincidentally Hokutos best match in a while)

The only thing I don't like about her is how liberally she tends to bust out her Death Valley Bomb. Especially in that recent Hojo match. What a weird tendencie for someone who notably turned basic moves like sleepers, armdrags and european uppercuts into holy shit spots. Anyways she is quickly approaching Finlay/Regal/Danielson tier for me, in terms of consistency and giving several workes their career matches. Her execution is high end and most importantly because she knows about timing her matches don't get old. And her genuine intensity is awesome and what makes her truely stand out. Who says 2000s joshi sucks when she's better than anyone in 1993?

Of all the chubby indy nerds he's the best. Like Punk he benefits a lot from being brought up in IWA Mid South around guys like Bull Pain and Tracy Smothers. It gave him a serious advantage in instincts. Unlike someone like Cesaro he was good as a chubby nerd and he wasn't afraid to try different things. His last man standing match with Eddie Kingston is a really great mid 2000s indy take on an 80s arena brawl. His performance in CZW vs. RoH cage of death was picture perfect. When he changed his look to something more polished he started carrying himself in a different way in order to get heel heat, as in "he dropped his vinyl pants! he's betraying indy wrestling!" It added a nice different note to his matches, as people really wanted to see Necro Butcher beat the piss out of this brat and splash blood on his fancy new gear. I give him a ton of credit for having awesome matches in many different environments and with opponents like Hidaka, Togo, or Martin Stone that he never met before. In some way he's the bizarro Danielson. His WWE run not working out may be his demise for this list, but his indy performances since then has been a lot of fun and I love the fact that he is a lot more over in NOAH now that he got fat.

No, it was an earlier match of theirs. I think Eddie had long hair. Anyways, I watched a few 90s Benoit matches. The Spring Stampede tag is a pimped match I've actually never seen before. It was kind of big dumb poor man's Fantastics/Can-Ams tag from AJPW and doesn't really do anything for Benoit. I imagine it has status because it was the first tag of it's kind in the US. I could do without this type of match to be honest. Benoits NJPW stuff kind of exposes his blandness. He just seems to be going back and forth between moves. The Sasuke match is kind of a move exhibition. The Kanemoto match was "technically good" but it felt like watching a computer simulate a match. After that I saw Benoit vs. Finlay which was a sprint. Benoit works like junior in it. He throws a mean chop but Finlay absolutely smokes him with a stiff as piss beating that Benoit doesn't really answer. Then I saw a Regal match. Benoit seemed to come alive a little in that. It was still tough for him because Regal was ridiculously awesome in that and all over the place with his Snake Pit-fu. He even had one of the best ways to eat a tombstone piledriver I've ever seen. Benoits best showing in the bunch may have been against Eddie. He controls much of the match and modifies some of his moves to work over Eddies arm. He also absolute obliterates Eddie with the most ridiculous of powerbombs. Even in 1995 you could tell Eddie was different from everyone else (especially juniors) with the way he did things and would slow it down, or even the way he did something as small as a cover. Benoit working dominant was a lot better than move trading Benoit. So far it seems Benoit suffered from 90s ills. I'll probably dive a little more into his WCW work and watch some longer matches because he looks a lot more tolerable there than in his japan stuff. You can tell the Dynamite Kid influence. It also looks like he wasn't as much of an assbeater as he would become later in WWE and instead more of a typical junior, which is a negative for me. Looking forward to watching him vs. Sullivan and Scorpio, though.

He has the epic El Dandy match and a handful of good trios showings. So, about as much of a case as roughly 70 other lucha guys.

I've seen a Benoit-Eddie match from WWE that was almost shockingly bad. And Eddie was able to carry Edge to surprisingly good bout around the same time. I guess part of it was the booking, but they just couldn't meet up and did some dated pseudo-WoS work only for a directionless second half that couldn't decide between junior match and Eddies cheating. I'll check out some of the mentioned 90s stuff, however.

What are his best 90s matches? I've only seen the Owen Hart memorial match and a couple bouts with Villano. I like some of his 2000s work for stiffness and style, but there's also some workrate/90s nostalgia crap there. So far I have him way below Finlay and Regal.

I don't see why comedy would be a general criticism. It was a different thing then as you can see from the workers OJ mentioed. It wasn't like Dick was doing business exposing crap, choreographed slow motion spots while winking at the audience, Colt Cabana style. That match vs. Fujiwara may be one of my favourite "small show" performances ever and a perfect example of what makes Dick so fucking great. It's funny and has cool wrestling and tells a story. It may be better than they match they'd had if they tried to go UWF or NJPW style. Even the infamous 10 minute headscissor dicking around in the Pat OConnor match has it's charms.Then again Dick is also in what may be my favourite US match ever (vs. Butch Reed), so I'm auto-biased towards him. I've seen him pop up in so many awesome matches in different settings ranging from NJPW to seedy Puerto Rico brawls to a random Otto Wanz bout I am baffled how doing comedic bumps would be a great detriment to his career.

How about a dozen or so WoS workers?

Can't stand this dude at all. Awful faux WoS/shootstyle spots, sub-WWE Diva strikes, no sense of menace or legitimacy at all from this toothpick. Only looks good when up against a total superworker.

Tanaka has heavyweight spotfests and garbage brawls. Which are also spotfests usually, but I think I prefer stuff like him vs. Gannosuke where he's playing a sympathetic face over his stuff this decade. Stuff like the matches against Sekimoto all go pointless opening mat fooling around -> strike exchanges -> pointless limb work -> super overkill finish. I think the formula was little more subtle before the Sekimoto series happened, i.e. he would finish all his big matches with the Sliding D, but then Sekimoto suddenly kicks out of 3 of em etc. I think the last Tanaka match I actively liked/cared for was vs. Necro Butcher and that was all Necro. I also recall a really dire brawl with Makabe in NJPW.

I like this dude but it feels like he's been having the same two or three matches for his entire career and they're not getting better. Great offense alone doesn't cut it for me.