[1996-06-01-World Wrestling Peace Festival] Jushin Liger vs Great Sasuke

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Obviously, Liger is awesome, but I'm a little detached from him by this point. It feels like he wins too much and while he delivered a good match here, I think the U.S. fans kept waiting on him to do some crazy spot that never came. Liger's matches lose suspense for me sometimes during this period because he doesn't really lose. I compare this to the tag match on the same show, where the guys felt compelled to do a showcase match because they knew they might have a lot of fans watching them that don't follow them regularly. Liger and Sasuke didn't really do the intro to New Japan juniors match that you'd expect.

[Tim Evans]

I liked this more than Loss. It wasn't a great match like the tag but it was fun and Sasuke's dive looked really great.

[PeteF3]

Funny how perspective changes things. My criticism of Liger watching these Yearbooks is he loses TOO much--he spent so much time trying to make rivals out of Honaga, Nogami, and others that it tended to undermine his ace status. Still, I was disappointed to see this was an extended squash, with Sasuke getting a run of offense that lasted like 30 seconds before being decisively put away, with not even a few token kickouts.

[soup23]

I liked this a good bit too and it was only a slight step before the match before. This felt like more of an exhibition and a showcase for Liger than the great matches these two have produced against each other at times. LIger is still one of the best workers in the world for 1996 so far from what I have seen and this show overall is interesting to watch from a concept perspective.

[tim]

This was a really good match. They do some pretty good matwork in the beginning, working a nice little segment around a headscissors. They don't wait too long to get to the meat of the match though, and most of it is just fast-paced juniors action throwing out big moves and a couple nice dives. Great match to put on for the crowd.