pol

Today's main event was fantastic. Might be the match of the tournament for me. After watching both once I think I liked it more than Tanahashi/AJ as they did the same methodical build but managed to keep it more engaging all the way through. They did less stuff that annoyed me than AJ/Tanahashi and the finishing stretch was just as great as you'd expect from Nakamura, who may be the current master of finishing stretches. Hell he's probably the best in the world period when he turns it on, it's just unfortunate that's not more than a few times a year these days.

I can see Naito because he delivered some strong performances that got his new character over, even though the losses (especially coming at the end of the tournament) unquestionably hurt him. Goto definitely, he got a big win and his losses came to credible guys. Shibata and Ibushi have had their momentum stalled by (kayfabe) underwhelming performances and I really can't see how you can argue otherwise. Even if you think every guy mentioned came out stronger than they went in, do you disagree that they would have come out even stronger still had they not suffered those random losses? And that the benefits of that would outweigh, say, whatever the hell the benefits of giving Gallows wins over Naito and Shibata are? Also setting aside whether it's bad business or not, I hate the "pecking order doesn't matter and anyone can lose to anyone else" approach on an aesthetic level. There's not even really any surprise factor to it any more since you know everyone is going to take at least 2 losses and everyone other than Honma is going to achieve some minimum level of success.

NJPW has a Kiwi young boy who seemed to have materialized ex nihilo as a fully formed, polished talent from a country with no known wrestling scene. This is interesting. There's a couple episodes of the On The Mat show referred to in the article on YouTube.

I mean the building has long been sold out already so it makes sense not to give anything away. I'm more concerned about the booking of their upper midcarders, which has been abysmal in this tournament.

I think there's a good chance Naito loses to both Gallows and Tenzan since they generally seem to want to give everyone some minimum number of wins. Last year with the 11 man blocks everyone got at least 4 wins, this year 3 is the number. I really dislike the way they book this thing. It makes many matches, especially in the early going, feel completely meaningless when you know almost anyone can lose to almost anyone else to engineer the desired point totals, so wins and losses that would otherwise feel big don't actually matter at all. If Baba was booking this thing, Naito going on a tear like he did early by beating the two top guys in his block - setting aside that Baba would never book a 2nd rung guy to do do that - would mean he's a huge favorite to take the block, but here it feels flat because no matter that he just beat the top two guys in his block, he can still lose to fuckin' Toru Yano and Doc Gallows. I'm not proposing they be quite as rigid as Baba but I think they would benefit in many ways if they took more influence from that style of booking.

Someone uploaded all? the matches from an Akiyama comm. DVD to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL85CGtFeIc-Wm5Rv03Q3EYk-AEMiKZoqt Any new stuff there? I'd never seen the Perez, Dibiase, Omori and w/ Omori vs. The Fantastics matches before. There's also a good number of classics in digital quality, which is nice.

I didn't get the impression that the "it is what it is" talk was being forgiving so much as being resigned to the fact that it's here to stay so it's pointless to get worked up about it.

I like mat-based lucha but I struggle with the maestros stuff. Just far too cooperative-looking a lot of the time.

Some really shitty booking on today's show.

Anderson's goofy mugging is insufferable

I agree that Misawa should have gone over here. It was the right time to do the 'Kawada takes Misawa further than anyone else has, but still can't get the job done' story. What really hurt is that Kawada didn't get him next time. The story had nowhere to go but a Kawada win, but they dragged their heels on it for years. I agree with Parv that it's hard to see Kawada as the ace, but I think he could've been portrayed as an equal to Misawa who was always a threat to take the title from him, much like the top gaijin (and later Kobashi) were portrayed. Instead he never really got past being the guy that was forever nipping at Misawa's heels, even after he did eventually win the title.

Vampiro/Pentagon Jr. was a very smart match. Using that word to describe a match where one guy got set on fire and was rolling around trying to put out the flames for several seconds before someone finally blasted him with a fire extinguisher seems wrong, but hey. Muertes/Puma was almost good as it could be given they seemed determined to work an all-action, back and forth match. Given the size difference and alignments, I thought an extended Muertes heat section would have made for a better match, but it just never came. That said, for the style of match they did, the most important thing is that the transitions feel big - if the transitions feel like cheap excuses for the other guy to stop selling and start doing his stuff, like they did in the Cena/Owens matches, then the 'my turn/your turn' criticism applies. No such criticism here - the chairshot to counter the dive, Puma running up and flipping off the wall... all the transitions felt huge.My major criticism is that I felt the spots came too rapidly to have as much impact as they should. It's quite possible that was due to them editing out periods of both guys selling here and there to fit the match into the time they had. Oh, and setting aside how crappy a move the Flatliner is, the finishing stretch was super dramatic and great.

Totally agree with you. I enjoyed the match, hated the one section, but was surprised to see just how much people liked everything else about it. Intensity and stiffness is always going to have some appeal to me but you can't build a great match on those things alone.

If you don't like guys hamming it up for the cameras during their entrances, that's one thing, though I'm not sure I agree that it's a problem. Not letting guys look into the camera when they're cutting a promo is a whole other issue and, in my view, greatly diminishes the impact that promos can have.

I think getting precious over the term people choose to use to mean "it's not a real competition" makes wrestling fans look really stupid.

I believe getting rid of guys just isn't done in Japan. Not just a wrestling thing but a business culture at large thing. It's frustrating to have so much dead weight on the roster because guys who should be getting a spotlight like Dorada and Honma are lost in those undercard multimans. Frankly they'd be better off paying a lot of those guys to stay home so they can put more compelling matches on the undercard. Feeling like they're obliged to use guys just because they're paying them when it actively makes their product worse is pure sunk cost fallacy booking.

It's true that there are some promising seeds being sown for the future even if this tour overall has been a dissapointment. In the Observer, Dave continued his "80's Crockett" talking point that he's been using for at least a year at this point, saying that a couple years ago was like 1985 and now they're in 1987, with business slowing and the product feeling stale due to a failure to push new guys. I pretty much agree with that perspective and hopefully the NJPW brass see it and are using this tournament to take steps to counteract it. Rush and Sombra coming in should freshen things up a bit depending on how they're used (i.e. so long as they're not buried in meaningless multiman tags). The slow build with Ibushi is going well, and while my aesthetic preference is for them to continue taking their time with it, business demands may require him to be pushed into the title picture sooner rather than later - he's absolutely ready for it anyway. I can see heel Naito as IC champion at some point in the future. It will be interesting to see how Omega's heavyweight push goes if that's the direction they take, since I don't think he's connected with audiences at all as a heel thus far. Goto is someone I just can't see ever working in a drawing position, although there's plenty of other NJPW guys that don't really connect with me and are proven draws so it's entirely possible that he could be another.

Goto challenging for Okada's belt at King of Pro Wrestling and losing, most likely. I thought they had a good match, but nothing remarkable. Probably the third best match on the show after Nakamura/Ishii and Honma/Elgin. I think Okada has shown improvement this year (and it's not like he was ever worse than decent), but he still feels like such a robotic performer to me. He rarely communicates any emotion with his body language or facial expressions, regardless of whether he's controlling the match or getting beat up. It really stood out to me after Goto headbutted him in the jaw and they cut to a shot of Okada laying there holding his jaw looking completely uninterested in the whole thing. The rollup near fall stompers mentioned was good, as was the sliding European uppercut that hit a lot better than usual. One area where I do think Okada has improved a lot this year is in mixing up his match structures such that we don't seem to get the typical repetitive 'Okada opening third' any more. And the stretch run built around Rainmaker counters didn't feel as tedious and choregraphed as it has in the past. Goto is so much of a 'just there' type guy that it's hard for me to come up with anything to say about him, positive or negative. Overall this was like the Japanese equivalent of a Sheamus/Orton match - two guys that are both decent to good, always deliver good matches but both feel so dry that it's very difficult to care about anything they do. (I feel like this is selling Sheamus in particular a little short since his problem is more the way he's booked than how he works, but it's the best analogy I can come up with )

How common was the practice of blading before a match, then doing something in the match to open the cut back up hardway? I'm sure I've heard reference to guys doing this before, but I don't remember where. Foley's book maybe?

I've suspected Russo is back since the first bunch of spoilers from the latest set of tapings started coming out. So many pointless gimmick matches, hotshotting, intergender stuff seems like taking a cue from Lucha Underground which Russo is a big fan of... edit: The Beautiful People are back too? Wasn't that a Russo creation that he was incredibly proud of?

Even ignoring how egregious this particular example was, the "they're fighting through the pain" talking point is a common one to justify that kind of spot and most of the time I just don't get that from the actual performance at all. If you're fighting through the pain you have to communicate that with your facial expressions and body language. Otherwise you're just randomly deciding not to sell, which shits all over the internal consistency that is a prerequisite for suspension of disbelief in any form of fiction. I don't know that I've ever seen any examples of the spot done well outside of a few times in mid-90s AJPW, before they gravitated more towards the full-on delayed selling that informed the modern approach. The famous Kobashi vs. Williams finish is the only one that comes to mind - even if you think it's excessive, you at least can't accuse Kobashi of looking like he just decided not to sell.

I'm have mixed feelings about Naito's new character. I think the change was sorely needed and I enjoy the idea, but I don't think he's there as a heel worker yet. I find his control segments pretty dull. I think he needs some more nasty, vicious looking stuff. I also struggle with the idea of a guy who looks like he just rolled out of bed and doesn't really want to be there beating guys.

En Busca finalists + coaches trios. Shock of shocks, it's not as good as last year's, but it's still a good match, especially the segunda and tercera. I question the wisdom of using an En Busca spotlight match to put over Negro Casas, but it's CMLL, whatever. Unusually raucous crowd for an Arena Mexico show, what's the deal with that?

I'd always got the impression that they went hat-in-hand to New Japan because they needed something hot to prop up business. Like they would have died without it anyway.

Why did the UWFi collapse when Takada was such a huge star? Does it really all come down to the Anjoh/Gracie incident?