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[2008-10-25-NOAH-Autumn Navigation] KENTA vs Naomichi Marufuji


Loss

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  • 3 years later...
  • GSR changed the title to [2008-10-25-NOAH-Autumn Navigation] KENTA vs Naomichi Marufuji
  • 4 years later...

I expected to either love or hate this match, but ended up with a middling reaction. There's some creative offense here and some nice callbacks to their 10/06 match, but it suffers from filler and parts where they're moving in slow-motion to fill time. It felt like they took the layout for a great 30 minute match and tried to find ways to stretch it out to 60. It also suffers from bad production with several key spots not being shown very clearly due to bad camera angles, and I had to rewind just to figure out what happened. I think my enjoyment peaked around the middle section, where we got some brutal looking neck work from Marufuji that included a brain buster on the guardrail and KENTA even selling the neck during their strike exchanges. Earlier in the match Marufuji seemed to have trouble keeping up with KENTA in an elbow exchange, so Marufuji being able to win the exchange after the neck work was a nice bit of cleverness. There was a funny moment where Marufuji seems to get his shoulder up late on a Tiger Suplex near fall, though they try to mask it by using a camera angle where you can't see the ref's hand hit the mat. Match predictably collapses during the last few minutes when they alternate between doing epic war exhaustion selling and blowing it off so they can do their big spots. Both guys also do a really good job of killing each others' finishers at the end.

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