[1997-01-06-BJW] Shoji Nakamaki & Seiji Yamakawa vs Mitsuhiro Matsunaga & Great Kojika (Barbed Wire Spider Net Scaffold)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Kind of an odd setup. The scaffold is much lower than in your typical scaffold match, but it's also draped over a barbed wire in a spider net formation, so take that! Crazy spots, including a senton bomb off the scaffold onto the wire. This is all about stunts with the barbed wire and highspots, and I had a real disconnect with this match overall, especially in the afterglow of Kudo vs Kandori. Notable for being the yearbook debut of Big Japan though.

[soup23]

Decent garbage style brawl but it did look unfavorable in the context of the yearbook coming after Kudo/Kandori and there was a lot of "let me grab you and we will meander around" going on in this match. Still some nutty spots especially the superpowerbomb from the scaffold at the finish. Not the worst intro to Big Japan for the yearbooks.

[Kevin Ridge]

Oh this looks bad and right away someone goes flying off the scaffold into the barbwire netting below. Everyone else takes a dive after and we randomly transition into a match in the ring. They seriously need to precut these tables in Japan as there so needed to be some give on that powerbomb through the table at the end. Wow! Dude just bounced off it.

[Grimmas]

I wanted to like this, but when they got away from having a scaffold match and it turned into a sprawling brawl I was not happy. Matsunaga could not even save this. It was alright and all and a nice change of pace.

[PeteF3]

Absolutely fucking horrible. Take everything El-P said in the WWECW thread about Flair and Foley working garbage brawls and it applies here. Kojika, who was an AJPW mid-carder of the 1970's, sports a ridiculous bright red dye job and looks about 65 years old, and it feels like we're seeing less of a grizzled veteran than a sad old man going through a mid-life crisis. He does nothing except throw horrible punches and bleed for no discernible reason. Matsunaga is the only one of these four who can actually work worth a shit, and the biggest highlight of the match comes in the first 3 minutes with his somersault senton off the scaffold into the barbed wire nest. This is a total extended squash with Nakamaki & Yamakawa getting in basically no offense. Finishing spot was crazy but wasn't built to because at no point was Matsunaga in the slightest bit of danger of losing. I guess I sort of get the geek show appeal but there are better examples in the '90s than this. Worst Match of the Year candidate early on.

[KB8]

I didn't outright hate this, probably because I had no expectations of it actually being any good in the first place, but yeah, this wasn't much. Kojika is dressed like my 90 year old grandfather and moves at about the same clip. I can never be too critical of the old fogies trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle but he sure wasn't good and his opponents never really helped matters. I wasn't sure where they could go after the crazy scaffold senton into the wire at the start and the answer involved much walking around while lightly directing a designated partner to various walls so they could leave blood prints. I'll give them one thing, though -- that finish achieved what not a whole lot of deathmatches achieve and that was cap things off with the absolute craziest spot of the match. That was just absurdly brutal.