fxnj

Any matches you'd recommend? I've seen Owen work NJPW and seemed like just juniors workrate stuff without much in the way of heeling it up.

Watched this trying to determine why people hate post-comeback Michaels and I'm still confused on that. The beginning of this match with them doing amateur wrestling is some great stuff. Such a uniquely Michaels for him to try to outwrestle an amateur champion in the prime of his career. He gets schooled like you'd expect and I love how he sells the frustration on the rope breaks. He tries to shift into more pro-style stuff like headlocks and armdrags but again gets upstaged by his younger and more athletic opponent until he just cheap shots Benjamin with a hard forearm. The match loses a bit of its initial charm after that as it becomes more of a workrate sprint, but it's still entertaining stuff with Michaels taking some big bumps. Benjamin gets a good opportunity to showcase his athleticism, especially when he counters the superkick into a nice looking jumping spinkick. The finish is famous with the younger Benjamin taking an unecesssary risk going to some springboard move and paying dearly for it when Michaels catches him with the superkick mid-air. Honestly, I expected to get bored and turn the match off half-way through, but the match kept my attention the whole way really feels like it's about as good of a TV match as you could expect from WWE at this point. Great example of getting a guy over in losing as well. Benjamin really comes across here like he belongs in the main event scene and it really feels like he could have won if he didn't take that risk at the end. ***3/4

Fuck the people spazzing out about shodate. The cable news example isn't political at all and actually quite apt for this topic. Everyone knows that any news network out there has some bias or agenda that it wants to push, albeit some are more obvious about it than others. The good thing is that means if a big network gets things completely wrong, the other places will call them out on it. The result is that these networks have a dialogue between them and the consumers are free to choose who to side with. No place is going to be right 100% of the time, so it's great that we have options. The situation with Meltzer in wrestling is that there's only one real source of consistent news, so the consumers have no choice but to accept whatever he says. If you want to learn about what went into some old angle, even now your best bet is to just look at old Observers or ask Meltzer. He tries his best, but he's still a human with his own biases and he's been wrong numerous times. We have a Meltzer thread here with 8000 posts that mostly consist of criticizing him. It's a bit concerning, then, that when an actual insider like Pritchard, who tries to set up a legitimate alternative to Meltzer for historical information and begin the same sort of dialogue that actual news networks have with each other, he gets branded out of the gate as heading some "anti-truth movement." It understandable that Meltzer himself would call Pritchard a con-man as he essentially serves a competition in a space that Meltzer has dominated up to now, but it's not good for people here to just go along with that. In wrestling the truth is always going to be a lot more blurry than it would be elsewhere, and that's part of the charm. It's nothing but a good thing to have options and for Meltzer to be treated a public figure open to criticism rather than a purveyor of truths.

Could you name some specific examples from matches? I've seen a fair amount and never really thought he was comparable to Murdoch. Short answer: Not really, but I'll try to if you give me some time. I have one example but it's very minor. At around the 24:30 mark, he's matched with Black Terry and he sprinkles in some stuff that's more style than substance. It's very cool and very fun, just little bits of misdirection, but for the point of the match that they were at, and the stakes, and what came before, it took me out of things just a little bit. I feel like there are more blatant examples, however. Maybe this will give you a sense of what I mean though? Thanks for posting that match. Forgot how great it was and how awesome Navarro was in 2009. I believe that match was set-up when, immediately after a heated match the prior week, Navarro cut a promo about how he could kick Terry's ass. I only know that because my mom, who knows Spanish, happened to be in the room while I watched it, lol. Anyway, it makes sense given that that he'd act cocky when he finally does get his hands on Terry. Looking just within that match, though, it seems pretty clear that he's baiting Terry until he finds an opening to apply the RNC, which also goes with his role as the cagey veteran.

Could you name some specific examples from matches? I've seen a fair amount and never really thought he was comparable to Murdoch.

It's not easy to find footage of a lot of the big matches from before the 90's. The 90's peak produced some universally loved classics, but a lot of it can be divisive due to how influential Toyota was on the overall style. Also they went out of business 15 years ago while NJPW is still producing great matches.

If you're a big fan of the CMLL house 6-man style and don't mind the restrictive formula, CMLL is #1. I'm not a fan, so I find the majority of CMLL matches a chore to watch with the exception of the handful that break the mold every year. AJPW, NJPW, and WWE have had worse matches, but they've also had a lot more matches that I'd care to watch, so they'd be my top promotions in some undecided order.

Since 2015, he had the Roman MOTYC, great Undertaker feud with 2 MOTYC, cool Orton match, great Goldberg feud, Joe feud wih 4-way MOTYC, and Styles MOTYC. He must have been a hell of a worker before that if being in several of the best matches and moments for the last few years tarnishes him for you.

I can see a number of different perspectives on the leg work. On one end, you could say that Tenryu just worked the leg a little for the sake of being a dick and Kawada no-sold it appropriately. I agree it was clear that it was never meant to be a focal point as the leg work was somewhat brief and Tenryu was still taking cheap shots at Kawada during it. On the other hand, you could say it hurt the pacing by killing the momentum that they'd been building to that point and meant that it took some time to get the heat back to where it was before the leg work. But you could also say maybe they brought the match down on purpose after they'd went all out in the first 10 minutes. Dunno. I think we are overthinking an ultimately minor segment of an incredible match.

Kenny Omega deserves some love. Forget the whole 6 stars deal, he's a very ballsy and creative worker who's been involved in a number of great matches in a wide variety of settings throughout the decade. Meiko Satomura has also quietly assembled an impressive resume of low-key MOTYC's throughout the decade.

Where is Inoki overrated? Almost all I've seen written on him in the last decade boils down to people bitching about him booking himself as ace or people who don't get matwork shitting on his matwork. Even amongst people who haven't seen much of him, his reputation doesn't seem great with many newer fans buying into the narrative of his time with the promotion as some sort of dark age. John Cena seems like a good pick. Though the consensus seems to have changed, for the longest time he was hated by large sections of WWE fans who convinced himself he was shit and refused to give his matches a fair chance. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of his newer output and even find a lot of the praise for big matches from his storied 2007 run like Cena/Umaga and Cena/Khali hyperbolic. Rey Mysterio is another guy. Definitely didn't deserve to get shit on by Attitude Era fans, but him finishing in the top 10 and above Kobashi in the GWE is way too damn high.

Don't want to hijack the ROH/AJPW thread with NJPW talk, so I thought this would be a cool topic on its own. 80s NWA was guys trying to speed up the mat-based style dominant up to around the 70s. 90s AJPW was Baba trying to cut the fat off the NWA style while also seeing how it could be pushed further. 00s ROH was tape traders aping AJPW while also incorporating influences from other wrestling they grew up with. 10s NJPW was what happened when those tape traders got a shot at working an NJPW that had already started aping 90s AJPW. Who did it better? My thoughts: 80s NWA has always a bit rough around the edges to me. It was a necessary bridge for the wrestling landscape to evolve, but I think it holds up worse than a lot of the 50s-early 70s stuff. I don't think that Ric Flair literally wrestled the same match every night, but I do think it's a problem that the matches rarely featured dynamics that evolved beyond just good vs. evil, and there is too much emphasis on keeping things moving with constant action at the expense of struggle or telling stories deeper than just working a bodypart. 90s AJPW is the gold standard for me. It basically took the American style that AJPW had used for much of the 80s and cut out all the bullshit in the name of developing the in-ring product. Instead of clear-cut faces and heels, the matches were great at feeling like a clash between different personalities and wrestling philosophies. Every big match feels like a chapter in a book, and there's a remarkable over-arching story told from the Jumbo/Tenryu feud up to Misawa/Kobashi and Baba's death. They found ways to push the action far beyond the NWA style, while also putting a bigger emphasis on the struggle and selling. Though it's not well-known for its matwork, I think even on that metric the AJPW guys are the best I'd ever seen at making basic sequences engaging. 00s ROH is the one I've followed the least. Based on the handful of pimped matches I've seen, it seems to try to combine the physicality of AJPW with the pace of juniors matches, at the expense of some of the storytelling and detail work. I find it entertaining, but I have yet to find a match that really grabs me like the 90's AJPW masterpieces. Also, it seems kind of brought down by the lack of an overarching story for the whole thing. Though it tried to mimic AJPW's style, its booking style was very different with most of its big matches being treated as one-off dream matches rather than telling the long-term stories of a static roster of characters. 10s NJPW is a promotion I'd followed in the earlier part of this decade, but my interest kind of fell off right around the time it started getting pimped as the greatest wrestling ever done. I've watched many of the pimped matches, though, and 90's AJPW with guys who are worse at killing time is probably how I'd describe it. I have to admit that the matches have some of the best stretch runs I'd ever seen and even improve on classic AJPW in some ways, but I generally don't find the beginning and middle sections of the matches that engaging. It does seem to have quite a bit of long-term storytelling, especially in the Tanahashi/Okada feud, but the booking seems kind of wonky and I don't find the matches quite up to par with Misawa/Kawada.

I have no opinion as ROH is one of those promotions I still want to do a deep dive of, but I think it would be a cool idea to add 80's Crockett and 2010's NJPW into the mix considering those would be the most critically lauded styles of each of their decades and they all built on each other.

Definitely too short. My time is valuable and guys wasting it just to go long for the sake of going long is one of the worst trends of modern wrestling.

The term "resthold" is the product of guys not realizing the importance of holds in building a match and not putting in the effort to work them in an interesting fashion.

I'm torn on it. On one hand, I do think Keith's usage of the term has done a lot of harm in propagating the view that any form of matwork or submissions is automatically boring and is only done to kill time or to give guys a rest. On the other hand, I don't think the term would be able to exist if not for workers like Flair and Race who were promoting the work-rate style Keith champions long before he was writing and who often did treat matwork as "restholds" are normally thought of. It's bad that the term's become so misused, but guys who sit in headlocks and armlocks for no reason deserve to get called out on it.

The Wrestlemania Theater version of this is incredible. Really makes the match feel even more epic with the cinematic angles and the streamlined commentary.

So sad seeing Vince's face at 3:20 of the WWE tribute. Looks like he cried quite a bit when they filmed that clip.

I remember the ensuing Matt Hardy feud being pretty underwhelming and basically being the beginning of the end for Matt's career until his recent rejuvenation. They probably could have kept them as a face team for longer than they did. Besides, the real bullet didn't come until after Jeff had already left the promotion later in the year.

I think I remember that part. Misawa hit the first Tiger Driver outside the ring and just waited for Kawada to get back up rather than try to put him away. Seemed like a weird strategy. I still think the match is good but it was definitely the moment where the style began to get excessive (as much as I still enjoy those later matches). And I would still rank this match higher than the 5/1/1998 match. The set-up for the spot was Kawada trying to catch Misawa off guard with some hard strikes in the match's beginning just for Misawa to fire back with some hard elbows and the aforementioned Tiger Driver to the outside. With the exception of a big spot here and there on the outside, the style generally emphasized finishing matches in the ring, so I don't see an issue with Misawa waiting inside for Kawada to roll back in. That Kawada doesn't come back in immediately serves to both sell the prior beating and to show how he's regrouping after his initial strategy backfired on him. There's a similar spot a few minutes later I find a bit more problematic, though. Kawada viciously works over Misawa's arm on the outside and then he just rolls back in and waits for Misawa to recover on the outside so he can armbar him. Given how aggressive he is for the rest of the match, it probably would have fit in better if he had just forced Misawa back in the ring before the armbar. Still just seems like a minor issue to me.

6/6/97 has some pretty underrated psychology. Pay attention to the match's structure and you'll notice that Kawada never lets Misawa string together more than a couple of moves at a time. For the whole match, Kawada is hell-bent on cutting off any sort of a control segment from Misawa, even towards the end when he's completely spent and his cut-off attempts essentially amount to him feeding himself into Misawa's big moves. The match is all about Kawada's desperation to finally get the monkey of a clean Misawa pin off his back. He goes full throttle from the beginning as if he wants the statement of beating Misawa in short order just like he did in the Champion's Carnival, regardless of the war with Kobashi that Misawa went through before that. The match is wrestled like an ungodly stiff bomb throwing sprint where both competitors are just too tough to go down early. There's a great moment where Misawa just has enough of Kawada's bullshit and slaps him, and his more subdued performance for the rest of the match is a nice and subtle "fuck you" to Kawada. Kawada's selling of the tiger suplex as his death knell later on is tremendous especially, knowing how Misawa had always used it in their prior matches to turn the tide. On a night where Kawada threw the kitchen sink at Misawa and then some, Misawa didn't need to do anything crazy besides just letting Kawada wear himself out and gets the knockout with a basic elbow of all things. The match does have it's flaws. I've always felt the layout buried Kawada a bit with Misawa kicking out 4 backdrop drivers and 2 powerbombs (with 1 being on the floor). Though I'd be lying if I said the excessive head drops and gratuitous stiffness wasn't a big part of the match's appeal when I first saw it years ago, these days I do feel that they did take things beyond what I'm comfortable with. The ref botch, though it's not their fault, undeniably hurts the flow of the match as well. Last I watched it I had it at about ****5/8 rather than *****. I do think it's a step down compared to 7/93, 6/94, and 7/95, but the hate the match gets around here still seems kind of puzzling to me.

These two guys had a great trilogy of matches 2001-2003. They all kind of blend together for me with them all involving fantastic bodypart work and Kawada serving as a great foil for Mutoh's trademark explosiveness. The ending is actually what makes this one stand out to me. I'm pretty sure it was Kawada intentionally doing the ganso bomb and wasn't a botch at all.

What are you talking about, brother, he had the Million Dollar Dream. re: the Bret/Austin talk, though, to what degree does this overrated talk stem from people thinking the Survivor Series match is better? Did that mindset exist immediately from the time of WM13 or did that only build and build in the years afterward? He did have the Million Dollar Dream, and him never going for it made the lack of near falls all the more egregious to me the last time I watched it. I would still have it at ****1/2, but nitpicks like that definitely count against it when you're talking about whether or not something deserves *****. Speaking personally, I always had difficulty analyzing the match because of how it's been canonized by WWE and for how much I love the overall feud. It wasn't until I listened to Austin's podcast commentary on the match a while back that I've been able to take a step back and think about it more critically. His commentary is great at breaking down both the things the match did well and in raising some valid points on how the match could have been improved. Specifically, as iconic as that image of Austin bleeding in the sharpshooter is, the finish when watched in a vacuum does him seem kind of flat with him just passing out as soon as Hart gets it locked in. It could have been a lot better if they worked more of a struggle and had Austin reverse the move, which also could have helped fix the aforementioned issue with Austin not getting any near falls.

Flair vs. Steamboat 2/20/1989 Never got this one. Just feels like them running through their shtick in front of a hot crowd without really much of a hook behind it. Entertaining but ***** and better than Clash VI? Hell no. Cena vs. Punk 7/17/2011 I think this is a case of people confusing a match's build with the actual match. Punk's pipebomb promo was amazing, but the match itself never really stuck out to me and was sloppy at points. Finish was great, though. Okada vs. Shibata 4/9/2017 Limbwork that goes nowhere, dull strike exchanges, and it's too damn long. Also the story doesn't really make a whole lot of sense with Shibata dominating Okada the whole match just to fall to the rainmaker like he's just another guy. Okada vs. Omega 6/11/2017 Actually haven't seen this one in full, but I'm listing it anyway because the first 30 minutes bored the hell out of me to the point that I just shut the match off with no interest in watching further.