[1990-01-30-NJPW] Jushin Liger vs Owen Hart

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

This was just not at all as good as I hoped it would be. Owen has great highspots, but isn't really aggressive enough to have a good match in New Japan. He was an amazing athlete, but so much of what he was doing felt overly acrobatic and too graceful. Liger ceded most of the match to him, so the end result was really a soulless exhibition.

[PeteF3]

I think the soullessness is attributable more to the dead crowd than anything. Okay, maybe that's on the workers, but sometimes a dead crowd in Japan is just dead, especially when the juniors are involved. This wasn't Owen busting out pretty spots for the sake of it, though a lot of them did have that aesthetic element--but they also looked like he was out to fucking hurt the guy. They did a good job of building up to the bombs-and-highspots-fest at the end with some flashes early on, and Owen was not exactly Dynamite Kid but still at least more aggressive than he was showing most of the time in this pre-King of Harts phase.

[soup23]

I would say the match just didn't have any substance or a contained story between the highspots. All of the matwork felt aimless and was not intriguing at all. Pretty disappointing to me as I was hoping for a good story match to go along with the highspots.

[Kevin Ridge]

Feel like I've seen better Liger/Owen matches. I like some of acrobatic reversals/moves early but agreed that the submission/mat work wasn't that appealing. Owen does a sharpshooter! Was Bret using that move by then? Disappointing match overall.

[Cox]

Pretty cool to see Owen bust out a Sharpshooter a year before Bret starts using it in WWF - or before it was even called the Sharpshooter. I was kind of bored and falling asleep during parts of this. I wouldn't call it bad, and I think the bad crowd hurt it a lot, but I don't know that they were doing enough to engage the crowd, either.

[JerryvonKramer]

Dave Meltzer's "best worker in the world" from 1988 takes on Jushin Liger. Owen looks kinda pudgy to me, Liger does too actually.

 

Crowd are really sitting on their hands here.

 

At times this resembles open-floor gymnastics rather than wrestling.

 

Matwork was listless and bored me to tears.

 

Suplex! Backbreaker and a nice one! Gutwrench suplex. Chinlock. Nice execution on the moves, but there's no real focus here from Owen.

 

Sharpshooter looks way too close to the ropes. Why doesn't Liger grab for them? Owen's dragged him to the centre now, but Liger should have made an effort to get to the ropes. He just lets the hold go anyway.

 

Liger's flippy flippy splashes look both silly and sloppy.

 

Nice German suplex! Nice belly-to-belly. Nice butterfly suplex! Owen has quite a lot of different stuff in his offensive locker. Tombstone!

 

Liger has taken a shit ton of stuff now, why isn't he dead? Why's he just getting up from 4 high impact moves like that as if nothing had happened?

 

Superplex, powerbomb and it's over.

 

Aspects of this match annoyed me: Liger's empty flashiness, Owen's unfocused matwork, Liger's lack of real selling.

 

Owen looked really good delivering the bombs, but they were bombs in a vacuum -- no impact, no place in an overall story.

[Zenjo]

Passable, though nothing much here. Owen looked good athletically. Liger was a bit below par and probably had his mind on the following night.

[Laney]

First look at NJPW on this set. Owen Hart was very athletic here and looked impressive, but overall this match seemed to be lacking a cohesive story. Nice to see that the sharpshooter was truly Owen's move.

[ajtroma]

I didnt think this was THAT bad. I was hoping for more though. I did love the two armdrags and that armbar that sounded like it just SNAPPED Liger's elbow.

[bradhindsight]

The hold work was admittedly pretty boring here and it doesn't go anywhere. I did like Owen's flashes in the middle of the match. The sequence where he held up on the dive and then hit a dropkick to the outside was pretty sweet. Then roughing Liger up into the barricade as well.

 

Then we get into some solid bomb throwing the rest of the way. Owen definitely looks like the better wrestler. Some good roll-up sequences with hot nearfalls. They got the crowd kind of into it by the end. I was real underwhelmed early but the second half salvaged this.

[garretta]

I was much more impressed than everyone else, I guess. The story was simple to me: Each of these guys want to be the number one contender for the junior championship, and the other guy is in the way. I liked Owen's aggressiveness here, and Liger's whole game is acrobatics, so it wasn't out of place. Liger undersold the tombstone, to be sure, but that was the only really noticeable gaffe. Owen did a fine job selling the superplex/powerbomb combination that ended it. I also agree that it was nice to see a Hart use the Sharpshooter before it was the Sharpshooter, so to speak.

 

Looking forward to the Liger/Sano title bout that this match sets up.

[drew wardlaw]

I watched this right before the Sano match, and boy what a stark contrast. Really shows Liger's versatility and how good of a mat wrestler he is, but this had no juice, literally or figuratively. Owen's highspots are really gnarly, slamming onto the floor after the drop kick and into the guardrail after the dive.

[Stiva]

This feels like a match with a hot finishing stretch but nothing that preceded it has any bearing on that hot finish. Liger is obviously saving himself for the later round and Owen hasn't knitted everything together yet. Though, the fake out dive into the dropkick shows that he had an eye for memorable spots as early as 90. Despite the flaws and despite Ownn's erratic offense, I think this is a perfectly fine match in the context of the tournament. Early favourite Liger gets into a tough match with an unexpected opponent, advances but is given a great match. A classic story,

[Badlittlekitten]

This didn't do it for me. New Japan Junior's I've always struggled with for some reason, more than any other genre. I often feel like I'm watching modern New Japan in that it's several minutes of aimless time-fill and stuff happening before anything of substance grabs you in.  It was cool to see a young Owen. His flip over the ropes and the flying dropkick were a thing of beauty. But the ebb and flow of this stuff is awkward to me, every time some electricity builds the rug gets pulled out for more noodling. 

[Calvin]

I can't put my finger on why this match leaves me feeling cold, but maybe it was just the lack of any crowd response. There's some decent mat-work here, and Owen showcases his cool high-spots -- including an awesome crossbody tope suicida into the guardrail -- but it never really amounted to anything compelling.

**1/2