aaeo_

The interview before the match is very interesting and straightforward, surprisingly sports-like. Casas is really stoic and matter of factly says that Santo is gonna be the crowd's favourite but he's cool with it and he even smiles very candidly when asked exactly where he's from (Tlalpan in Mexico City). But when Santo shows up he starts messing with the interviewer and trash-talking him a bit. Santito enters the arena in a red Cadillac and is carried to the ring by adoring fans. It's really one of the best ringwalks I've ever seen, perhaps only rivaled by boxer Jorge Arce riding a damn dancing horse to the ring. I believe this is what people refer to when they say stuff like "big fight feel". And Ray Mendoza is the referee! Santo just throws out Casas out of the ring instantly after the first lockup, really negating what Casas had said in his interview about him having a size advantage (you see Casas is the WWA welterweight champion, but Santo is *just* the lightweight champion). Casas comes back in and Santo armdrags him very strongly, they're really selling Santito's superhuman strength with some incredible bumps from Casas. Casas powders after another brief grappling exchange. Santo is also schooling Casas with his skill, everything he does is just so graceful and flashy. After Casas powders a third time, he comes back in with a crossbody and wins the first fall after getting a great bodyslam followed by la casita. Second fall starts with Casas beating up Santo. He really embraces being a rudo for the first time in this tape, going from taunting the fans to getting a double wristlock over the bottom rope to killing Santo with straight rights. Santo's comeback starts with a fucking brutal knee. He gets some big offense before locking in a great tapatia, which wins him the fall. Casas' bumping continues being great during Santo's spurt of offense and he even falls face first out of the tapatia. Great stuff! Santo seems to have the third fall won early with a campana but Casas does a great escape. He immediately nails Santo with a right hand, and he gets back in control from there. A moment which I loved was Casas trying to tear at Santo's mask and completely ignoring the referee, so in response, Mendoza tries to choke him out to get him to stop. There are some really convincing nearfalls with Santo's huracanranas but Casas kicks out. Santo lands a great tope but when they climb back into the ring Casas gets the upper hand again (tope suicida!). Santo goes out of the ring but when Casas goes to get a plancha to the outside, he falls backwards into the ring and Santo instead climbs up and lands a senton unto him. Loved those momentum shifts after high spots. The struggle as Santo tries to submit Casas is fantastic, Casas wont let Santo get him on la de a caballo, and he grabs the top rope to escape the tapatia. Casas takes a hideous bump to the outside and Santo gets a big plancha. This third fall is just a war, Casas is always fighting back but Santo just overwhelms him little by little. When he finally gets la de a caballo, Casas stays in it for a long time but can't get out, and Santo wins the match. Negro Casas cries after the match, and reluctantly hugs El Santo. It's obviously a hell of a performance, but it also really gets you. Everything on this match is very stiff and spectacular, and the two wrestlers put on truly masterful performances. No one needs to be told that these two are incredible, but they are.

Heard a very young wrestler (Sobredosis) bring this match up on a podcast as a huge inspiration, so I went looking for it. And it's up on Youtube in pretty great quality! Some stuff from these early XMW shows looks really interesting. Early part of the match is just a showcase for every wrestler, the rules limit two wrestlers in the ring at most times, which is good. There's a funny moment in that early part when Astro tries to get a chant going for himself but Skayde just starts beating him up. It picks up when fat luchador Terremoto checks in and beats up Eita and Tornado. There's a brief sequence where Tornado botches a ton opposite Skayde before getting pinned, but the match improves again when Arez (who this crowd is really into) comes in and takes out Terremoto. Eita eliminates Skayde, and seeing Skayde work against someone who's competent about two minutes after Tornado didn't know how to get pinned is incredible. Arez dropkicks the hell out of Eita but before he can do more, Marvin comes in to fight him. This is when the match gets really good, and it's the part that Sobredosis brought up. Arez just puts on a great underdog performance against Marvin, who sells well for Arez's big flashy offense. Marvin kicks out of a pinfall attempt and chops Arez in the back at the same time, which is pretty dumb but I thought it ruled. After that, Marvin starts slapping the shit out of Arez, the latter tries to strike back but isn't strong enough and he just eats shit. Those few minutes are just incredible. Marvin drops Arez with a huge lariat and that would've been a great ending but Eita is still in this. He comes in, and Marvin also levels him. Sadly, the match just gets worse after that, Eita keeps doing moves and eventually this other japanese wrestler, Douki, interferes. Marvin takes him out, tries to pin Eita, but Arez runs in and breaks it up. And then they go on to have a cool three man finishing run, but it feels kind of hollow after the emotional high of the earlier Marvin/Arez exchange. Good match with a great moment, seems like there's a lot of stuff to check out from XMW around this time.

that is what I did! I get a weird "dynamic link not found" error page.

I'm not voting but you should know that the form link you posted doesn't work. Will be pretty interesting reading the results, cool project.

The two boxing gyms and the Gracie dojo I've trained at all had women sparring/rolling with men somewhat regularly. To me, intergender matches isn't something that outlandish within pro wrestling because of that, even if it'd be hideous to have a man go 100% while fighting a woman. Pro wrestling is definitely a combat sport though.

Got really into this match after Fujinami starts applying a bicep slicer, Kimura tries to stack Fujinami up and lift him up. He exerts a lot of energy but it doesn't really work. Then Kimura slaps him and Fujinami doesn't react but he does sneak in a left hand before getting double underhooks on Kimura. It was wonderful. I've started to appreciate those moments a lot, and the way they work as tiny subversions of a formula. I agree that the matwork on this is incredible. Kimura is a bit wooden, but Fujinami is just such an excellent grappler and a more attentive seller than anyone in NJPW at this time. I've liked every match of his that I've watched from this era. I didn't expect this to hit the fever pitch that it did, and so I was really awed by it. Fujinami's missed tope was amazing. The draw finish was completely earned.

There's a 2-seconds-long clip from this match on the DDT Judgement 2017 opening VTR (which is really lovely and worth seeing). The clip is just a very bloodied Antonio Honda trading punches with Dino. It was enough to make me curious about this match, but it sadly just wasn't online. UNTIL, last week when it was uploaded to Universe. Dino does his whole thing but past both's goofy offense (which at this point was just established as offense to the audience), nothing is really played for laughs. It must be noted that Dino is the KO-D champ at this time and all his matches ended up going super long during this reign. And they're wrestled at a very deliberate, technical pace. But of course, instead of doing headscissors sequences or whatever, he's trying to grope his opponents. I don't know if I've said this in another match thread in this forum, but I don't like Dino most of the time. But with the right foil I can find his matches very emotional, especially when he stops being an audience surrogate for sexual misconduct. Honda is definitely the right type of foil. The pace and length worked really well for me, it feels weirdly brutal for these two. Honda focuses on Dino's arm throughout and some great punches are thrown. Dino starts bleeding after being thrown on to the ringost outside. Honda then exposes a turnbuckle, but he's thrown onto it! He bleeds buckets after that. At one point, Dino does his pervert piledriver and he gets a big spot of blood on his tights. The ending is very strange, after trading and surviving a bunch of big moves, they resort to punching each other and eventually, they just kind of fall on each other like two exhausted boxers. And that goes on for what feels like ages, and then Dino almost softly pins Honda with a Gotch-style pervert piledriver. I liked it. Some of the work is super light, but the match builds really well, and the emotion and selling all feel right. And those are all good things to have. This is worth seeing, I figure a lot of people would hate it but it's unlike anything else. Keita Yano is ringside for the whole thing, too.

Maybe they can get H del Tirantes for Double or Nothing.

Don't know where else to say this but the other Inoki vs. a PKA dork (Lefthook Dayton [ugh, horrible name]) match killed my interest in pro wrestling for 2 weeks or so. Not that that match is any worse than this, it's probably better, but both are very tedious.

You can't pull guard out here in these streets.

Becky Lynch's armbar is pretty bad tbf.

I love Titan's weird finish thing. He does a leglock and armbar and then a pin all at once. He first did it against Triton in a cool lightning match this December, I think. Also thought the cradle that he won the second fall with was nice and a smart touch after being basically dominated by the caveman up to that point. I think Titan pays more mind to submissions and flashy pinning combos than most CMLL wrestlers, so he's been one of my favorites for the past year or so. He also gets in a kickboxing stance early in most of his matches, so he's basically a shooter as far as I'm concerned. The caveman was also great in this match. Some great offense and big bumps from both sides.

Just a pure wrestling match. Still finding their work very interesting. Something like the section where Sakaguchi has Inoki in the crucifix position and tries to do an arm slicer and pin him out of it is very cool. Sakaguchi gets some big offense (loved the running knee!) and dominates most of the match, Inoki slows him down a couple of times but is almost always very overwhelmed and ends the match escaping the manjigatame just a bit before the time limit draw. A remarkably flat finish, but they restart the match! This second match is also very technical, with both wrestlers struggling to defend from the double underhook position. Inoki does a belly-to-belly suplex outside the ring and takes control from there. He tries to put away Sakaguchi with different holds (including a calf slicer, which he did a lot during this match.) but fails. Sakaguchi gets a brief comeback, but he still ends up tied up in a figure four. They reach the time limit again before Sakaguchi submits. A thing that's struck me about NJ's style at this time is how they don't sell big impactful throws and strikes too much (or at all, sometimes), but their selling for submissions is usually very good.

Eddy is a PKA dork, so he's wearing fancy pants and will be throwing some fancy kicks. Rounds are in effect. The crowd is wild on this one but I didn't enjoy it as much as they did. Eddy just doesn't really know how to do any grappling, which is the prerequisite for a good Inoki match. He doesn't know to fall down when Inoki does the leg scissors takedown and he sits the wrong way in an armbar at one point. Some good strikes are thrown, though. But even then, Eddy throws a good enzuigiri a couple times and Inoki just no sells it. The ref is very active with the clinch breaks, which fucking sucks in pro boxing and kickboxing, and it sucks even more in this, a worked fight. Inoki wins by knockout after a leg drop (lol) in round 5.

Ruska has been wrestling since their first match and he's so much better now. This is one of Inoki's best matches as far as matwork goes, which means a lot I think. On the other hand, it's not very competitive and Inoki for the most part just beats Ruska down. Every hold is dramatic and Ruska has to go for a bunch of rope breaks, but you never get the sense that Inoki is in trouble. This is a huge improvement over the first match because Ruska can now do a couple different things, beyond just working in side control. He goes for an armbar! He gets in a boxing stance and throws some shit out there! Inoki gets low and throws a couple kicks, which makes sense after the Ali match and I think Ruska reacts better to those than to the few strikes thrown on their first bout. There's a very cool spot where Inoki applies the boston crab, Ruska stands up out of it and Inoki dives into the mat head-first. Inoki recovers pretty quickly (would've been cool if he sold that more) and after some outside brawling, he puts Ruska out with punches.

Wim Ruska is a big dutch judoka who seems very fond of the ude-garami. It's cool to actually see one of Inoki vs. martial artist bouts, but I don't think it's a great pro wrestling match. There's a couple of interesting moments, like some of Inoki's pinfall reversal and two of the funniest Inoki punch spots (the ref goes "no it's a forearm" and Ruska throws his hands up in exasperation), but I don't think Ruska's style lends itself to good matwork. He basically just wants to sit in side control and try to get the aforementioned ude-garami. Inoki uses Ruska's black belt to pull him up into the backdrop suplex for the pinfall, which was quite the thing to watch.

Much like the 2012 Omega-Ibushi Budokan match, I think this is too long and kind of a mess, but they also do some incredible stuff. They just take several very dumb bumps, starting with Takeshita catching Sasaki's suicide dive and doing a brainbuster on the apron. I also loved Sasaki's elbow drop to the outside. More importantly, Takeshita does Antonio Honda's bionic elbow, which I always find very endearing. They thankfully drop the leg work very early on, so Takeshita's weird selling is not something that taints the rest of the match but it's still lame that they had to fill time with that. Sasaki's matches almost always have ref bumps, but I thought the first one here was actually really bad because Takeshita climbs to the top rope, Sasaki grabs Matsui, Takeshita pauses and goes like "oh no", and then crossbodies both of them anyway. There's a lot to like in this match, some great offense, very good selling from Sasaki, a few good character moments. However, I find it hard to get into big sprawling main events if there's not enough of a cohesive throughline in them, and I think that's lacking here.

This is the end of Aoki in DDT for now, but there's many IGF matches of his that I haven't seen and are probably good. The match delivered all I expected from it, and I'd say is an improvement on their already very good first match. I don't see many people excited about Aoki's DDT run, but I am and I think a spot on this match elucidates why. There's even a moment where Aoki deliberately crosses HARASHIMA's ankles, as HARA has his back, and pushes downwards with his leg. This applies pressure on your ankle and you can see it used as a submission in QUINTET Fight Night 2, which took place just weeks ago, but also in jiujitsu dojos all across the world when taking your first lessons. You don't see stuff like that in pro wrestling enough. It makes any given match much richer to have someone with a wealth of submission grappling experience and a willingness to just do new shit that he's thought up. It's kind of a shame that HARA is the only DDT guy who could really trade submissions and keep up with him on the mat, but I don't think Aoki had a single boring match in this run. I also found the story of this match and the short series between these two very compelling, as HARASHIMA survives and eventually wins with very pro wrestling methods. He bests Aoki in tests of strenght, he pulls off a giant swing and a gamengiri. Even the piledriver, which he'd hit in the first singles match and sets up his finisher this time, is not something he normally uses but differentiates him against Aoki. He wins with the always reliable somato after the piledriver.

Another stop in Aoki's strange pro wrestling career. This time, he's Pedro Takashi's retirement match in the weirdest show of the year. I have no clue who Takashi is but from what I gathered, he's a Muscle regular and his gimmick is doing capoeira. Aoki comes out in full judogi. Takashi is very middle-aged and he may look silly but he throws some really cool kicks. He never hits Aoki with them, but they were nice. Aoki beats Takashi down with soccer kicks and once he takes it to the ground, he starts going through submissions, which is something I would never get tired of. He takes the gi and chokes Takashi with it after being lightly grazed by a flip kick. I haven't yet seen Aoki's second match against HARASHIMA but this might be his best selling performance, he really sells Takashi's knee strikes like death, and then he catches a moonsault! Takashi misses a corner senton after getting Aoki back in the ring. The match gets more dramatic at this point, and Aoki shows more viciousness. He does a Gotch piledriver and he shrugs off a rolling thunder kick. Takashi's selling is great and you really want him to pull off this desperate comeback, but Aoki just keeps beating him down. He puts Takashi out with a rear-naked choke and then lightly sets him down on the mat and pins him, like a damn savage. Worth a watch.

Yoshimura and Okuda feuded with Umeda for a long time when they were in DNA. They were really good heels. This is in Okuda's hometown and an inversion of that dynamic, with Okuda and Naomi fighting from underneath for most of the match. The match is still good. Umeda and Higuchi are really good just silently beating down the hometown fighter. All four like working fairly stiff and every exchange is interesting. They just keep hitting and throwing each other down until Okuda pins Umeda with a bridging suplex. Very straightforward match in that sense. Even if only Okuda has been a pro fighter in any capacity, I also find all four very believable as "fighters" because of their mannerisms. Really good matchup and I'm sure they could put on a better version of this match down the line. Everyone in this match is surprisingly young and there's no reason for them to not keep facing each other.

He does throw one particularly great flying knee in this match and he takes a beating too. It's probably easy to convey being hurt when Shuji Ishikawa is throwing you around, but I still felt Umeda's selling was great. Umeda is one of my favourite active wrestlers, and Shuji almost always delivers in featured matches like this one.

I remain endlessly fascinated and entertained by Aoki's run. He goes to the top rope in this match! He takes a chair shot! This is a match between the four singles title match participants at Judgement, DDT's first (second if you count MUSCLEMANIA [musclemania!]) Ryogoku show this year. The first half of the match has a slow build-up and serves as a preview for the two Sumo Hall matches, there's the methodical technical wrestling between HARASHIMA and Aoki, and the counter-fest between Takeshita and Sasaki. Both are good. Then, Takeshita gets his leg worked over again here and he's still selling like he always has, which is an issue and I hope it's not a focus of their next match. That caused this match to fall apart for me a bit, despite a handful of interesting moments in the second half. I gotta say, I really liked Sasaki opposite Aoki. I think Sasaki did a better job than most of Aoki's DDT opponents, because for the most part he just turtled up and tried to defend any submission attempts through rope breaks or countering into a crossface. I thought that was a smart detail. Aoki hits a gorgeous flying armbar on him early on, as well.

It's occured to me that the "Ibushi hasn't signed a contract" thing waspossibly a work. The only places where he has actually wrestled since 2017 are NJPW and their affiliates (and one Power Hall show, I suppose).

Is there any surviving footage from 80s lucha libre show Pavillon Azteca?

Just as I am about to be done with my DDT Universe binge watch, they've started uploading missing shows from 2014. This match is good in paper and in reality! Sato and Sakaguchi have some heated exchanges. Sakaguchi gets the better of Sato and from there, him and Akito work his leg over. Sato's selling during this part of the match is great, it's just very desperate and imbues this midcard tag with a lot of drama. The Takagi hot tag is surprisingly good. He dragon screws Akito and Sakaguchi! I forgot he even did that. Sakaguchi is also a lot more spry here, and he gets a sick rear-naked choke on Takagi to stop his momentum. Sato doesn't sell the leg as well after tagging back in, but there's still a lot of drama when Akito sinks in the ankle lock on him. Sato wins with the armbar.