MJH

I've always had a soft spot for Yokozuna - his "fall through the ropes and stagger into the post" is one of my favourite stooge bumps up there with Adonis' where he'd go backwards over the rope and end up being tied up in them. His offence obviously looked killer and he'd milk the "tim-berrrr" bump for all its worth. I actually really like the Rumble match with Taker as it's a proto-TV match before the palaver. He's fun in moderation but surely too limited to make my list.

But you can say just about every wrestler didn't need to do most of their spots, really, if you go by some "you only need x, y, and z to have an solid/good/effective match"; the point should always be whether a move was used effectively, not whether it was "necessary". For better ("artistically" or however you want to phrase it) or worse (long-term physical health, obviously) the AJ guys in particular were not about doing as little as possible, but were about pushing/expanding/developing both in terms of moves/spots, structure, "story", etc. Certainly there's something to be said for "keeping it simple" - although "less is more" is as hollow as it is overused - but having greater ambition (and, more importantly, pulling it off) is what separates the great from the good in anything.

There's plenty of nice little matches he was involved in, and his moveset did make him stand out, but I'm amazed so many people see something other than a thoroughly Kobashi match in his most famous one. That or crediting staple Race spots to Lawler is the most egregious piece of misattribution online.

It was Wakabayashi (with Baba and Takeuchi). The commentators are always listed on screen at the start of the match/footage and it's easy enough to memorise/differentiate the kanji (Fukuzawa shares "sawa/zawa" with Misawa, for instance (again, I can't c&p but...)) if that's important for you.

It's aided by Kikuchi being utterly insane, but Hansen's match with him in early 92 is a work of beautiful brutality.

Misawa/Kobashi haven't been nominated yet (somehow). I still can't c&p into the reply box for whatever reason, but let's say 11/93 vs. Baba/Hansen // vs. Doc/Boss Man, and 3/95 vs. Doc/Ace as opposed to vs. that other team. All are in the Yearbook folders.

Re-watching it today, I think this is the best worked match I've ever seen. Not The Best - there're other All Japan matches where the "work" is almost at this level and have much more of a "story" to them; but this is, in a sense, the best New Japan match ever, only nobody in New Japan has been able to work at this level. If there's a problem - and I use that word loosely - with whatever "classic" AJ match from the '90s you choose, it's that they're so well put-together, so well-composed, that the work almost predicts itself (obviously the "mirrors" structure of 10/21/97 is the most notable one for this); though, of course, because the matches are put together more complexly, it's less of an issue than your standard shine-heat-comeback/finish structure (and again, even if it's an issue to begin with). But because they essentially work this on a more aesthetic level - sure, Kawada takes most of it, you're rooting for Kobashi to fight through, but it's hardly the most involved match for either guy - there's a, not unpredictability per se, but a lack of predictability, an organic-ness, a [...] that those other matches lack. And above all else, the work is just incredible. It might be Kawada's best ever performance - and it's certainly more of "his" kind of match - but both guys are, for execution, for struggle, for "this is a war", for selling both in-the-moment and long-term body language, for every "surface level" facet there is in wrestling, simply sensational.

Well there's at least three matches vs. JBA on the first Classics run alone. There's the various tags vs. Dump's army, and the draw with Jaguar/Devil. And, of course, RnR never made the girls scream 20% of what Crush did.

Well, I think the '94 match with Mita/Shimoda climaxes with the second fall (IIRC) and falls apart afterwards, but it's pretty great until then and easily the best match LCO had had to that point. The TLTB'92 Final vs. Aja/Kyoko is great, and I recall enjoying the Malenko/Hasegawa tag from that tour too (obviously the '93 one is what it is). The 1/93 tag vs. Aja/Bull is super. They also have various TV matches that range from good upwards. Their last notable tag is probably 10/94 vs. Kyoko/Takako. What one has to remember, too, is that a lot of Tag League pairings were odd... of course the '93 Final is fantastic and better for having Hokuto in it, but you figure Toyota teaming with Yamada has a lot of good matches there too, etc. And it was the same in '94, with Toyota paired with Takako and Yamada with Hotta.

After Childs mentioned this in the Kobashi GOAT thread, I decided to re-watch it last night. It really is a super match. The balance that you spoke about is absolutely great. I'm sure some people will take issue at Kobashi's big offence early on (half-nelson on the floor, etc) but I thought that as a way to put over the precariousness of his injury it was a great idea, and, of course, it had to come before Jun's main attack on the knee so as to put the drama in there. The pop-up sequences were well done too, I thought, what with Jun popping up the first time so as to get one last shot on the knee and give himself time to recover, how he later dropkicked the knee as Kobashi lay prone, anticipating the pop-up, etc... and what also needs mentioning is that, in spite of Kobashi giving Jun so much, this being an addendum to Loss' point, they left themselves plenty of room with which to develop the feud: Kobashi's aforementioned early run of bombs, the vigour with which he chopped the hell out of Jun on his comeback, I was left with no doubt that a healthy Kobashi could've creamed him. They also left the Exploder '98 un-hit too. And as a last point, which scarcely needs stating with these guys, perhaps, is that the execution/etc throughout was fantastic, from the half-nelsons and dragon suplexes, to the standard Kobashi vertical suplex where he too takes a bump on the way down thus emphasising the impact (which is a touch more people should adopt - compare that to, say, Davey Boy's delayed vertical and compare the impact). So, yeah, a great match, third for the year behind Kobashi's TCs against Kawada and Misawa.

I've just watched one of the Hansen/Colon matches (from '86, goes ten-minutes). For being so short, it's a hell of a match, with Hansen maintaining control from the bell, gradually building to the comeback, and then when Carlos gets control back he immediately fires off a bunch of payback spots before a weapon-assisted lariat knocks him out. That said, seeing the first lariat used so flippantly was bizarre (and I think you're clutching at straws to argue "well it highlighted the interference and weapon later"), Hansen begging off felt forced in a "this is how you bump the comeback" sort of way, and, of course, Carlos is guilty of selling only his fire when he makes said comeback (granted, what babyface will we not be penalising for that?). It's a terrific small slice of how great Hansen was though, absolutely.

Just to isolate that match for a second, I watched the 5/97 Kobashi/Ace vs. Kawada/Taue match. It's a good stretch without being anything out of the ordinary for them, but I don't see what you mean about Kobashi "over-doing fighting spirit". I kept waiting for a massive string of no-sells that never came. He fires up off the trip-nodowa to hit the lariat for the finish (Kobashi firing up off the trip-nodowa being a pretty staple spot for those two), but I found nothing egregious in that and in the grand scheme of babyfaces firing up it's really nothing at all, especially with him lying flat on his back exhausted after getting the pin.

Whilst it seems a somewhat simplistic answer to your question, I think Vader "maintained his aura" simply because his offence looked so good. I don't want to write too much on it now as he's definitely a guy I'll be going back to for the project as I've been down on him more than most (whilst still considering him pretty/close to great) but it's a pretty simple rationale: the better you look on offense, the more ass you can show on defence without looking like one.

I'm sure that's a point we (and others) will be debating over the next 18 months (not that people haven't been discussing it about Kobashi for, what, twenty years? I'm assuming it started with the Doc match/es). I've always seen Kobashi as a "layout" guy, rather than a "moves" guy, even though he has the largest move-set of any wrestler I've ever seen. Even "Chopbashi" had more variants on them than most guys have moves (though the suplex into a chop was, yeah, a bit too similar to the Orange Crush for where he used it, true). Taue, for instance, I see more as a moves guy - I've said countless times that, for me, a "Taue match" is him throwing/building around his bombs, essentially working a sprint; he's not a "cerebral" worker at all. Nor have I ever really considered much of Kobashi's output as overkill in the way others have, maybe some of the Akiyama matches (though you have to take the setting into account for the '04 match). The Sasaki match in '05, for instance, I've always seem as an impeccably laid out "mirrors" match, though certainly a distant relative to the 10/97 Misawa match. Could the chop exchange have been shorter? Sure, but that's both the point and, again, The Dome. Had he worked that segment with, I dunno, Shiga (to be as ridiculous as possible) yes, but he worked it with Kensuke Sasaki. 10/98 vs. Misawa is a beautifully laid out match (I'll go into more detail when I do a full breakdown but IIRC the opening 5-10 is as perfectly-worked an "establishment" section as you'll see, it's far from "all about the moves"), 3/03 (for the signs of their age/breaking down) is too. I really wouldn't harper on about mat-work though; you could count on one hand (well, maybe two) the number of times the NJ guys actually established anything with it; whilst AJ starts were, aesthetically, much faster, "hotter", more involved, they'd also use it to establish the roles, set up the story, etc, and actually starting building the match asmore than just a guise of doing so.

At the time I thought Joe's ROH run was massively overrated (whilst having some qualities - my issues, IIRC, were with the match structure/layout, as it usually has been for big, ambitious ROH stuff; it was the same with Bryan) though I'm certainly willing to go back and see how much of that was in lieu of the hype machine. I never actually got around to watching the second Punk match incidentally, essentially because of that; it'd be interesting to hear guys' thoughts long after-the-fact.

Combing through the original Classics run, there're a few Bull matches from '87, but then, regrettably, nothing until 4/89 (w/Aja vs. Yamada/Mita). It's worth pointing out that, in '88, she won a lacklustre-looking JGP, dropped the AJW Title to Yumi Ogura in January and had two runs as WWA Tag Champ (w/Condor Saito 10/87 - 1/88, w/Grizzly Iwamato 2/-7/88). I've seen these matches listed on Lorefice's list (they aired, edited, on the most recent run of Classics - as did a 4/88 match with Chigusa for the White belt that I'd love to see) but I don't own them myself and the VQ is listed as, well, a throwback to an earlier time... there's also a match with Asuka from 5/89 (Korakuen, shortly after Chigusa's retirement) that's only aired on the recent, edited, classics show... Of those '87 matches, there's a singles match with Devil (4/27, or the show where Hokuto breaks her neck - episode #60) that is going along nice enough but ends abruptly when Devil drops Bull backwards off her shoulders whilst Bull is choking her with the nunchucks. Bull appears to hurt her neck/shoulder and Devil just pins her off it. There's a longer match for the AJW Title from 2/26 vs. Yasuko Ishiguro (underneath Chigusa vs. Asuka) that on a re-watch tonight has Bull selling well and some strong work turning the lateral press into a near fall in itself (which only the rookies would do later but it works well and the crowd react big for it). I'd have to re-watch more stuff from the time to see if it's a Bull thing or a company thing, but my gut says the latter. The third (7/20, on the same episode as the previous match - #38) vs. Hotta, which goes to a 30:00 draw. With Bull positioned as the dominant heel there's, again, hints at what she'd be a few years later, but 30:00 is at least twice as long as it needed to be and they repeat themselves enough to make the Fuji TV editors' job a doddle. Then again, said editors were fantastic and no doubt deserved a night off. Basically, Bull was still developing at the time. Had the Devil match gone longer there'd be something worth watching, but neither of the other two matches were really set-up in a way for her to impress/are not worth the non-completest checking out. If more of that stuff mentioned in the first paragraph aired on the original run (i.e. in full) it would be different, but with what we have available Bull's "candidacy" rests on her run carrying the company and various matches after.

Yamada is a weird one. She was really good but after a while she just kinda... blends in. That era in AJW was full of attention-grabbing workers and she just wasn't one when compared to the girls around her. "A poor girl's Chigusa" is both a tad harsh and very true. I actually think Kyoko was Toyota's best opponent (she could match her move for move and there was a greater discrepancy between their offence and characters). I recall her having a better match with Hotta than anyone else did in '91-ish but aside from that, I'm struggling to think of a stand-out singles match other than what you're already very familiar with.

Well then fair enough - that's where a commentary track would have helped. The only info I was able to find on him was that he came out of APW in 2005 and uses "British Messiah" as a nickname, hence the presumption. An announcer billing him as "the final student of Billy Robinson" would've taken much of the cosplay feel out of it, though, as Poc said, I could also have done without the striking and the gut wrench into the buckles. I'll give the Masters match a go, but whereas Busick was playing along with him essentially, I think that gimmick would work far better against guys who don't just grapple with him: if Thatcher's heel, maybe a smaller, faster, more flying type; or Thatcher as a face against a more brawling-type heel who gets out-wrestled and then refuses to play ball with him.

I'm torn on the Busick match. On the one hand, Thatcher does what he does very, very well. On the other... there's just too strong a cosplay element to it for me. Were he from Wigan, say, billed as the last of the Snake Pit lineage, that's fine. Doug Williams just about got away with doing the old World of Sport stuff because he's old enough to where he grew up with it. But anyone under 35, ie too young to have grown up with that style short of the vaguest of early-childhood memories sat on their (gran)dad's knee, it's too consciously nostalgic for me to truly buy it as being (in this case Timothy Thatcher). I mean obviously all guys ape the shit out of x, y, and z, but with old British stuff, it's too distinct from standard American wrestling and thus draws attention to its influence far more. Now, I've only heard his name in the last year or so, and were he just starting out I could take it as aping his idols before he finds his own style/persona/etc, but a quick Google search says he debuted in 2005? which makes him well past that point. To re-iterate, he's really studied that shit, and is really good at doing it, but it's another Quackenbush "we do Lucha now!" thing to me.

The problem with "2.9!" to me is that in almost all cases nowadays they work it as its own segment, and it's "your-turn-my-turn". Shawn/Taker at Mania is most obvious because they use the dives as reset spots (I remember Atlantis/Villano being similar in that regard), but what happens is the drama is purely in the kickouts, nothing else, whatever "story" the match had is often forgotten at that point.

Brock's heart keeps Heyman off TV how exactly? They didn't have the next angle for Brock down (probably nixed what they had originally written), so he (or more likely Paul) wasn't on Raw. End of.

Is not the problem, Loss, that, at this point, people have to argue Flair out of the #1 spot (well, certainly out of a Top 10 spot, though I'd imagine most people will have him at least that high) rather than for it?

The issue shouldn't be the moves (they're dangerous, not convoluted/ridiculous) but rather how they're used. As I remember the 1/99 match, it's an inferior retread of the Misawa/Kobashi match three months earlier, with the Ganso Bomb in place of the Apron Tiger Driver, and I don't recall Misawa doing anything offensively afterwards. I also don't recall the Burning Hammer being used as anything but Kobashi's Ultimate Death move nor it having ever been kicked out of. There've been plenty of equally risky or even riskier bumps in wrestling, many of which purely for shock value. These guys aren't Vic Grimes.

I love MX/R'n'R as much as the next guy (well, maybe), but the best All Japan tags are on a different level altogether. Misawa/Kobashi were the better team when they were together, but Kawada/Taue being together thrice as long and having the Misawa/Akiyama tags, even the Kobashi/Akiyama tags, etc swings it comfortable their way. 12/93 and 5/94 are perhaps more important for this poll than the later ones, too: the structural similarities/comparisons are much more evident, and then of course in how they take those forms and take them to a different level. For me, the only argument for anyone else in the top spot is "well, they weren't really a tag team"...

What Will said. To use the same comparison as Dylan, Hogan has a shot in the lower part of my list, Dusty doesn't.