bigyellowsinglet

Time to bring Choshu back to save this dying company.

One thing which I think diminishes my opinion of Misawa compared to the other pillars is his selfishness and/or awkwardness when working with new or unusual opponents. His later-period singles matches against Fuyuki, Koshinaka, Chono, Kojima, Hase and Tenryu are all major marks against him. They are remarkably bad performances from someone who was still capable of having good matches.

He has only worked one match this year and a handful last year, but pre-covid the Fuchi 6-man tag was a standard attraction at nearly every All Japan Korakuen show.

Even without his pre-split work, Fuchi was tremendous working against New Japan guys through 2000-01 and is currently the best active comedy wrestler doing the only good version of comedy wrestling, old man who illegally punches people then convinces the referee that he didn't. He is still able to rise to the occasion once every few years when asked to (like in the jr. title match against Aoki in 2014) and even if the matches aren't exceptional, his performances are consistently impressive given his age.

Easy top 50, maybe top 30. A similar candidate to Akiyama in a lot of ways as he has basically been good non-stop his entire career but never truly succeeded as a promotional ace. Still, he's great as a fiery underdog junior, a prick heel during early Zero-1 interpromotional matches and now an elder statesmen who just had a really solid run in the Champion Carnival cut short by an injury.