ohtani's jacket

This was a nice match. For a guy who is supposed to be the enforcer for Crazy Max, I was impressed with how well SUWA called this. Arai seemed a bit weedy at first but he had incredibly plucky offense and I loved that unique diving headbutt of his. I also loved how it seemed SUWA would put Arai away to send a message to Dragon Kid until Arai upset the apple cart. I also think more Japanese wrestlers should celebrate with sake. They usually have a cup backstage but Arai spraying sake everywhere was awesome. This was a well-booked, well put together bout.

I had no idea what the story was here and couldn't be arsed reading up on it. The beginning to this match was as heatless and rudderless as you could possibly imagine. I actually thought it was pretty terrible pro-wrestling. Then Tanaka woke me from my apathy by absolutely abusing Hayabusa and after that they threw some decent bombs. The match as a whole felt like a failure, though. I don't know what it is with Hayabusa. He aims for the sky with every single match and always falls to the ground.

I've always been fascinated with Mr. Gannosuke. I've read guys like Loss, Chad and Jerome talk about him but never taken the plunge. I'm guessing a match against Sabu isn't the best gateway to more Gannosuke since it was pretty generic and didn't give him much chance to show off his offense or character. But we'll see what other stuff he does in the early 00s.

For the database purposes, Khaos should be Kahoz. This was supremely weak. I would have LOVED a great minis match but all we got was some sloppy action followed by an angle where Kahoz and Espectro Jr turned on their Abismo forcing their regular-sized counterparts to get involved. Sagrada botching two spots in a row to end the primera caida killed this for me.

I saw most of the build to this so it's only right that I watch the match. I knew there was a chance that it would be bad. There's no guarantee that Perro vs. Caras would have been good in 1991 let alone 2000. I tried to concentrate on it being Perro Aguayo vs. Cien Caras instead of worrying about the match quality. That worked for a while, but goddamn was this match short. I think it may have been a single fall. The crowd was ecstatic when Perro got a cheap win, but it had to be one of the least earned apuesta victories in Perro's storied career. Afterward, Perro and Aguayo brawled in front of Caras while Cien was getting his head shaved. Then Pierroth showed up in a wheelchair, which finally explains what happened to him in the latter half of the season. Pretty shitty main event. I'm beginning to doubt whether the Universo/Perro match is as good as I remember it being.

Fun match. It was only a couple of minutes long but the crowd was hot and it was fun watching Regal sell for Austin. The finish saw Austin accidentally DQ'ed which he didn't take kindly to. He gave the ref a stunner and let Regal know he wasn't finished with him. The look on Regal's face at the end was priceless. He got some beer on his face but reacted as though he'd tasted his own blood. Similar to the Austin/Benoit match it was a bout that promised more in the future but it was cool to see two guys who'd gone up and down the road together in WCW having a match together on RAW.

Well, it all boiled down to this. I suppose the WWF deserves some credit for tying all of its main event storylines into a single match like this. If you enjoy WWF "Over the Edge" style booking then you'll enjoy this as it featured the usual twists and turns. Vince brought a truck to ringside to tear down the cage and managed to rip the door off before Commissioner Foley stopped him. The match sprawled out of the cage and for a while it was Hell on the Cars as they brawled on the PPV set. Eventually, they ended up on the roof of the cage. With Michaels and Foley setting the precedent that someone should fall off the cage or through the cage there was an expectation that something nuts would happen but none of the workers seemed like the type to take a crazy bump. Sure enough, they did a gimmicked fall where Rikishi fell onto the truck that Vince had commandeered. Austin's reaction was the best thing about it. After that, the guys left standing hit their finishers on each other and Angle fluked a win that let all of the heat out of the building. They were ready to explode if Austin or the Rock won the belt but instead the finish went down like a lead balloon. The bout was overbooked for my liking but the WWF had little choice in that regard if they were going to deliver on their own promises and the fans' expectations. Austin and Triple H deserve credit for working hard the entire bout and having a wilder brawl than any other pair. Their work here was better than their Survivor Series bout and it was a decent bookend to Triple H's PPV performances. Interesting too that Benoit and Jericho weren't involved. Instead, they were stuck in a pair of rubbish feuds. It feels like it would have been a more accurate coda to the 2000 WWF main event scene if Benoit and Jericho had been involved.

This felt more choreographed than your typical WWF main event. They all feel choreographed to some extent or another since presumably the road agent, or whoever was in charge at the time, maps out the bout with the workers beforehand to ensure its a match worth laying down your bucks for. Perhaps the Rock had a little bit of leeway the same way they allowed him creative license with his promos but he's a worker who excelled within the WWF formula so I can't imagine him deviating too much what Patterson or another production guy had to say. Angle clearly needed the safety net of a WWF match layout and it was mostly for his benefit that the match felt like color by numbers. The booking continues to be stale but I guess that's what happens when you don't have an offseason. I was surprised that Angle went over here. Even if it was mostly for storyline purposes he was still green and didn't look ready for the big time yet. They didn't exactly stick a rocket on him but he's come a hell of a long way in the six months since Wrestlemania.

Man, I have zero memory of the feuds that Jericho had in 2000 after Benoit and Triple H. Why are Jericho and X-Pac feuding? Why are they having a cage match? There can't have been much to this feud since JR was pretty tame on commentary. Decent midcard bout but it made zero sense to me why it should be inside a cage. Cages are meant to be used for blood feuds or feuds where there's been too much outside interference. This felt like they tacked on the cage match stip because they hotshot the match-up. The match was okay but despite their efforts, you'd be hard pressed to call it memorable.

Decent follow-up to the Austin/Benoit match on RAW but they don't escalate the feud any further.

The quality of the go-home shows in the WWF is declining along with the booking and matchmaking. Previously, they'd serve up a red-hot match before the go-home match, not some match that was cold before it reached the table. The angle at the end did lead to a great Smackdown main event but the show as a whole left me with zero interest in seeing Austin vs. HHH.

Some nice chemistry between these two but if it was meant to be the blowoff to their feud then it was pretty rubbish.

Austin cuts an edgy promo in Stephanie's face but the angle is still trash. Benoit does a decent job of delivering his lines and we have ourselves a match. Austin tries to outwrestle Benoit in the early going but he's a bit slow. I don't know if it was ring rust or the fact that it had been a while since he'd worked some of these holds. He was beginning to settle into a groove when Benoit took over and from there it was a regular TV bout without much focus on technical wrestling. There wasn't the same chemistry as Benoit's bouts with Rock, Triple H, and Jericho but it definitely had potential as a program. Too bad they ran with it. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Austin went over clean without any interference from the Radicalz.

This was meathead wrestling even with the little guys involved. Not bad if you like that sort of thing but no different from the New Japan heavies. They try to work in a bit of heelwork but Kikuchi being beaten up in 2000 is hardly cutting edge and Akiyama pinches most of his heel spots from Kawada. Still waiting for NOAH to blaze its way through the Japanese wrestling world.

Why were these two fighting in Puerto Rico? When did Bruce Prichard turn into a heel ref all of a sudden? Match didn't have the same vibe with the Puerto Rico commentators discussing JWA angles over the top of it.

Austin's back but I'm not sure he's been missed, It doesn't help that he's back with an absolute turd of an angle and having four-way promos that end with stunners. Rock vs. Benoit was good but the run-ins sucked. The set-up for Benoit vs. HHH was about as innocuous as it gets. The WWF feels like it's cooling off (product wise) and the monthly PPV grind is definitely a factor. I wonder how much better the WWF would have been if they'd cut out some of the bullshit B level PPVs that replaced In Your House. The last quarter of the year feels like they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for match-ups. The booking has also become stale. I guess they were coasting until the Royal Rumble build but the energy isn't the same as the first half of the year.

What is this? Bryan Danielson in a mask? Spanky? Is this part of Danielson's Blue Blazer period or something? The match was pretty good but it seemed to carry weight because it was early Danielson than being a legitimately good match from 2000.

This was some intense shit. I kind of wished the fans would shut up and appreciate the intensity of the bout but I guess that is all part of indy heat. I didn't really get the story stuff at the end but it didn't matter. These guys match up extremely well and bring an intensity to the simplest holds that you wish was true for wrestling as a whole.

I think the moral of the story here is that you don't dance when you defeat Chris Benoit for the Intercontinental title.

This was a fun match but it was too long and outstayed its welcome. Gran Apache was a badass motherfucker and I thought the Vipers were pretty cool too. Weak babyface team, though. Too disconnected from one another and no chemistry to speak of. I agree with Tim that it was too rudo heavy. The crowd brawling was fun though since the audience didn't have chairs and had to leave their belongings behind every time the wrestlers came barging through.

The WWF has really excelled at these go-home shows in 2000 but this one was a little hokey for my liking. I had a smirk on my face when the Rock lost it. It may have been all right if JR had called it but Cole sounded like a YouTuber. Good matchmaking but the execution wasn't there.

Yay, Rock vs. Benoit. This has to be the most unheralded feud of 2000. These segments were less about the match and more about the angle that set up Fully Loaded but it was all go and JR was hoarse by the end of it. Great stuff.

What a match. This is the type of Japanese wrestling I enjoy -- a beautiful mix of pro-wrestling brawling and UWF style submissions. I loved how Takayama would go for a submission after a strike and the simple, direct focus on the head and arm. I also loved how flat out nasty it was. There were times when Tayakama was working a hold and looked like a shoot style guy employing his strategy, and other times when it was straight brawling using the ring post or any other measure necessary. Kobashi gave a virtuoso performance and looked like the best wrestler in the world at this point. His knees were clearly fucked and he was about as slow as Taue, but his selling was beautiful. There was that amazing visual after he had tried to knock Takayama out where he was squinting through the pain and the sweat, desperately trying to catch his breath, and you wondered whether he was puzzled at the ref stopping the onslaught or Takayama continuing to fight. What impressed me most about Kobashi's performance were the choices he made on offense. We all know that Kobashi has a large offensive repertoire, arguably the biggest among any heavyweight to ever enter the ring, but this was a match that demanded a stripped down performance offense-wise and Kobashi was aware of that. He wasn't a guy with a lot of submission holds in his bag but he was able to do spots that looked cool like the Tsuruta tribute spot. And he was clever enough to use his good arm for body blows and shots to the head. He also relied on the lariat instead of throws. Really smart match that made Takayama look like a monster in a way that a standard All Japan match wouldn't have. In some ways, it was similar to Kawada vs. Albright except that Kobashi's star shone brighter than Kawada's. Definitely one of the better Japanese matches of 2000. In the top handful as far as the men go. Highly recommended.

After her negative six star classic with Ozaki, what can KAORU produce against Sugar? Whatever goodwill KAORU generated from the Aja match has quickly evaporated. I can't believe that in the old days when there were battle lines drawn over Joshi that anyone thought KAORU was better than LCO. Not even on LCO's worst day were they as bad as KAORU and that's saying something since LCO had some downright awful days. This wasn't as offensive as the Ozai match but it was still stupid. Why does KAORU even bother with these hardcore matches when she consistently loses? Don't you think she'd realize that jumping off ladders and crashing through tables wasn't paying off? Apparently not.

This match was fucking stupid and brought out the worst qualities in Ozaki. Stick her in a match with Nagashima and she's electric. Put her in a match like this and she's trash. One of the worst matches of the year for sure. It ended with KAORU stuck inside a plastic bag for Christ's sake. Negative a million, billion stars.