11 years later, I’ve gone through every NJPW match on tape from 86-here including ones we’ve just gotten in the last year or two and here we are:
I've been looking forward to this forever. Despite that, I really did wonder if the added context would help at all. It's a very straightforward match in some ways. Liger gets an early advantage. Sano takes over. He rips the mask. He bloodies up Liger. Liger fights back a couple of times but gets swept under. He finally comes back and wins. Post-match, he throws the belt around because the mask got ripped. Right? Really straightforward.
But I do think I got a lot more out of it with the context.
Sano holds out his hand to Liger at the start. Why? Because Sano's mellowed a bit since summer and no longer has the chip on his shoulder? Since Sano is up in the rivalry and has less to prove? Because Sano and Liger have both been dealing with the Blond Outlaws so maybe they had common cause? Remember, Hashimoto and Chono put their animosity behind them just in the last week or two.
Liger, however, does hold a grudge. He came into the summer match with a shoulder pad on and Sano dismantled it and targeted the shoulder. Liger was a bit of a jerk himself. He just started the match vs Owen by slapping him in the face. And he had way less of a grudge than he has here. So Liger slaps Sano and then starts in on him with the palm strikes. He knocks him to the floor and hits his leaping seated senton. I knew that was coming when he got to the apron since he used it so much recently, but that's not the same sort of context as the character motivations.
Sano came back in pissed (he had slapped the mat in anger before coming in), jammed Liger's palm strikes, tossed him down, and started in on him. He tossed him to the rail and then, back in the ring, started working on the mask. A few things here. First, this was shocking, but primarily because Liger's mask is so different from anyone else's. It's so much more stylized. In general, there wasn't much mask ripping in New Japan. We had one Vader match a year+ before which was striking, and then of course, the big one, which I'll get to in a second, but this is rare. With Liger's mask, however, it was like a second face of his. You didn't even get the sense that there was a person underneath, not like other masks. So to see that revealed was visually strange and offputting, as if he had two faces and you're seeing them both at once, one beside the other. Of course, I can't imagine possibly understanding this match without realizing it was happening the exact same time as the Super Strong Machine angle, where having his mask torn off by the Outlaws in a match was enough to make him go beserk and turn on Choshu. They had built this up as something hugely important the very month this was taking place. Was this about revealing Liger as Yamada? I don't think so. The commentary from his first few matches as Liger, less than a year before, invoked the name Yamada as a possbility and they had similar moves, like the Shooting Star Press that no one else did (I get the idea he had been holding it back but commentary references it mid match here saying he was like Pinocchio who was wishing on a shooting star to save Geppetto).
The mauling is brutal. Sano posts Liger both outside and inside of the ring, including moving the corner pad back to do it. He pile drives him again and again. He kicks him over and over. He hits a suplex and a superplex. He wrenches him in a crab as Liger bleeds all over the mat. Meanwhile, Liger's selling is amazing. He's barely able to stand, barely able to move, just ragdolled around the ring by Sano, as if he's barely even alive, barely conscious. Sano will lift him up just to smack him in the face and watch him fall.
Liger had been coming back in matches around this time with headscissor takeovers out of nowhere (a bit more context here), and he managed one out of the corner reversing a whip in. He followed it up by hitting the craziest flip dive on Sano, crashing over the rail onto a table. He was able to press his desperate advantage here, but after a tapitia simply crumbled, Sano falling out of the hold and taking right back over. It wasn't a cut off so much as Liger's own body giving out on him after all that happened. It was incredibly effective nonetheless.
Sano followed up with awful contorting holds. Liger flails about, pulling himself up with the referee's pants only to get tossed over with a fisherman's suplex and then a German. Sano couldn't put him away though, not with another hold, not with a Dragon Suplex, and Liger's resilience was clearly starting to weigh upon him. Liger was able to reverse a whip and clothesline Sano over (just barely). He tried for a handspring but crumbled again and Sano took back over compacting his skull with a corner dropkick. Liger managed to reverse another whip into the corner but he couldn't hit the kappo kick clean after Sano backflipped over him. However, it was enough attempts to fight back that something finally was bound to stick. He hit his frequently used headscissors takeover counter clean off a whip and it looked like he'd finally turn the tide. He would not. Sano was able to counter a charge into back body drop over the top and follow it up with a dive to the floor from the top turnbuckle.
Sano continued to press. He hit a double arm trap suplex. He went for another superplex. This time, though, the tide did turn. It was to the well once too often and Liger landed on him on the way down. Sano turned Liger's bomb into a rana. He hit a tiger suplex. Liger landed on him on a belly to back though. It wasn't that Liger was fighting back. It was that he was fighting defensively. That he was hanging on and forcing Sano to try anything and everything. Sano successfully flipped over Liger on a whip, but Liger caught him on another 'rana attempt and hit the Liger Bomb. Sano kicked out (and no one had really kicked out of that since it became his finisher), but it was the beginning of the end. Liger hit a tombstone and managed the shooting star press, his face a bloody mess, his mask shambles and won.
Post-match, he tossed the belt repeatedly, furious at the mask ripping and it again invoked the memory of Super Strong Machine's recent turn as much as anything else, putting over both this moment and that.
A match as good as its reputation, where the consequence of Liger's wrath and then the damage done to him, truly did permeate throughout the entirety of the match. Amazing jerk performance by Sano (though maybe he had a point). Outstanding selling from Liger. You felt every iota of what he'd been through. And yes, all the better for the context. This is why I am doing this as much as anything else, to live and breathe within this footage in ways you could never do if you just jumped in and out. And right here? It was absolutely worth it.
