Microstatistics

The fact that Bryan vs. Lesnar never happened is incredibly disappointing.

Interesting that Daichi match was discussed here because, after watching it recently, I think it sums up my thoughts on Naoya Ogawa perfectly. Great on offense, great charisma and character work but mediocre with everything else. He is as polarizing as Shawn Michaels or Kurt Angle are. I am in the middle with him. Decent-good, no way terrible but definitely not great. Shinya Hashimoto made him look way better than he actually ever was which should a positive for Hashimoto rather than Ogawa.

It's funny Angle and Benoit had that highly praised match a few days before on PPV and Rey gets a much better match out of Angle in Anyways this is great great cat and mouse stuff. Rey was probably Angle's best opponent. Also Rey takes an absolutely disgusting headdrop bump that would have made the All Japan dudes cringe. ****

Rewatched this first time in years and I don't know, I liked it. Nowhere near their best but really good. An excellent selling performance by Kawada, truly great. His determination and fire were also great. Also liked the finish: after all of that overkill and violence, he gets pinned by a simple German suplex that wasn't even executed properly. *** 1/2

Very little for me. Commentary in US matches is, more often than not, pretty bad so I try to generally not pay attention to what they're saying. Japanese commentary is great but I don't understand 97% of what is being said so it has no real influence.

Simple answer: a lot. Two people could watch the same match and interpret the overall story and individual spots in completely different ways.

I'm just about done with the 2008 feud and concur. Forgot to mention it in my earlier post, but 2008 is a hell of year for Michaels. The Jericho matches & angles are all great, I think the Flair match it awesome and he pulls some good things together with Batista as well. Agree that 2008 feud was really good. I'd give that WM match around ***3/4 so very good but not quite great. It's a really great Jericho performance but a mediocre Michaels performance. My biggest knock against post-comeback Shawn is that he could be inconsistent. When he was on, he was really great but would occasionally phone it in.

Cena's latest indy tendencies got me thinking about his career and his wrestling ability in general. I came to the conclusion that his stuff since 2015 doesn't really diminish what he did when he was really good/great because you could argue he is in his post-prime and what he is doing doesn't represent his best work. That being said, as I thought about it, he is nowhere near as good as someone like Bret, IMO. Cena has more decent-good matches for sure but that's more due to accumulated quality resulting from the sheer volume he worked. It's harsh to say he was hit or miss but he could be inconsistent. I'd take Bret's average performance (even when he might BS his way through a match) over Cena's average performance. Bret is way superior when it comes to inputs and he is much more versatile. Bret also completely swamps him when it comes to truly high end matches (****+) matches, IMO. In fact Bret's list of great singles matches against a variety of opponents is pretty staggering. I have no idea why some people say he doesn't have the volume for an all timer. Cena is easily the better ace though.

Have you seen Fujinami's matches vs. Go Ryuma from the late 70s NJPW?. Completely different from the NWA/70s All Japan style of working headlocks, armbars, hammerlocks for extended periods of time. Same with Hashimoto/Hase matwork in the 90s. Also like Loss said, Jumbo/AJPW are part of the NWA style when it comes to working the mat (Though Jumbo is one of the guys I don't mind watching work that style)

I have it behind at least 3 Tamura matches but this is still an excellent chess-like match. From a technique and CV endurance standpoint you are not going to see anything better/more impressive. The holds are really quite minimalist compared to the flashy stuff Tamura did with Han and Yamamoto but the story is still pretty involved (took me a few watches to grasp it). **** 1/2

Generally agree with this, as I simply want it to be active and look painful. Don't just lay there. The proponent should work to make it look like he's going out of his way to wear down his opponent and inflict real damage, while the man selling should actively put over the position he's in and work to escape. Don't just lie there. It's funny that's your criteria and you picked NWA Old-Style matwork because to me that style seriously lacks all of those aspects you mentioned. Not being judgmental, it's just interesting how one thing can be seen in two completely different ways.

Added an option for it. I think you are referring to the late 70s-80s New Japan matwork which I can't believe I forgot about. Tatsumi Fujinami is the best non-lucha non-shoot style matworker ever, IMO. Edit: I changed it to strong style which now includes 70s, 80s, 90s NJPW matwork, basically Inoki's style

The type of matwork done varies depending on location and era and different people prefer different things. Shoot-style and lucha matwork are easily my top 2, light years ahead of NWA style matwork which can be sleep inducing at times to be honest unless someone really dynamic is doing it. I like British matwork a lot but not nearly as much as lucha or shoot-style matwork. It was a difficult decision for me but even though lucha matwork can be jaw-droppingly great, shoot-style is probably my favorite style of pro wrestling ever so I went with that.

I would strongly recommend Kobashi's GHC title 2003-2005 run. It might be the best heavyweight title run in history in terms of diversity of opponents and quality of matches. It's one of the main reasons I think Kobashi is clearly the greatest of the four pillars.

Yeah but that doesn't make it a workrate style. No ones thinks 90s All Japan's greatness stems solely from lots of big moves and tons of nearfalls. In fact that's one of the criticisms. I know people like MattD have said they think the style started going overboard from as early as 1993.

Lol so true. Why couldn't he watch AJPW and Crockett tapes with his girlfriend?"If only Cena watched workrate wrestling B instead of workrate wrestling A things would be so much better". I hope you're joking.

This is probably an exaggeration but it holds some validity. It's weird Cena gets a relative free pass for a lot of the stuff he has been doing recently. If modern Japanese workers or indy workers or even Kurt Angle constructed matches the same way he has been doing, they would receive a ton of criticism. Maybe I'm wrong but I seen, in Cena's case, people notice the bad tendencies but just gloss over them. Overall I'll take Cena comfortably because of good matches against a variety of opponents and ability to deviate from the standard formula. Angle has been pretty boring since 2004 or so.

A common criticism of styles like 90s All Japan and a lot of modern wrestling is that the matches have a ton of excess. I was wondering what exactly is people's definition of excess. Is it too many big moves and spots? Is it too many nearfalls? Something else? For me, excess is anything that does little to drive the narrative and basically does not play any meaningful role in a match . So, hypothetically, if a match has a 100 nearfalls and all of them are consequential and further the match, then it's not excessive. While a match with 5 nearfalls, where 3 of them were pointless, that could be considered excessive. I ask this because the criticism is mostly associated with maximalist styles. This might be a weird example but Sangre Chicana vs. Perro Aguayo from 2/86 has a ton of nearfalls, some of which I honestly thought were unnecessary and did little to further the match. That falls under my definition of excess. But that's a minimalist lucha brawl instead of a Kenta Kobashi match with lots of half nelson suplexes so would it be odd to say that match has excess?

He has had matches in NOAH, Ice Ribbon, Dradition etc. Nothing too extensive but enough to see he worked really well in more traditional settings. Though like Elliott mentioned, the argument for him is basically he could do a ton of different stuff and could even work like 5 different styles into one match.

1. Tatsumi Fujinami 2. Negro Casas 3. Terry Funk 4. El Dandy Honorable Mentions: Eddie Guerrero, El Satanico, Buddy Rose, Nick Bockwinkel, Daniel Bryan, Black Terry, Jushin Liger, Alexander Otsuka, Pirata Morgan

As long as it needs. Might not seem like the most useful answer but basically this. I have seen GOAT level matches that are 40+ minutes. I have seen great matches that are barely 5 minutes. It just depends.

Great Topic Daisuke Ikeda vs. Glenn Jacobs (PWFG, 8/13/1994) *** 1/2 - The first match that came to my mind when I saw this thread. Probably the best 5 minutes of Kane's singles career. Shawn Michaels vs. Mankind (WWF, 8/11/1997) *** 3/4 - A more than worthy sequel to the greatest US match of all time. MItsuharu Misawa vs. Toshiaki Kawada (AJPW, 4/19/1997) *** 1/2 - High level storytelling jammed into 7 minutes

On the internet atleast, the anti-SJW and anti-feminist crowd out number the so called SJWs by a huge huge margin. The anti-PC culture is far more prevalent than the PC culture. I don't think such a huge backlash to some possibly unreasonable demands is justified.

Agree, I don't think there was anyone ever who was that good that early in their career. Also it's hard to put into words how good he was on the mat. Had him at #7 on my GWE ballot but there are times I honestly think I should have put him at #1 even above guys like Tenryu and Satanico (my #1 and #2).