[1998-04-04-NJPW-Inoki Retirement Show] Kensuke Sasaki vs Tatsumi Fujinami

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[soup23]

Cut to the finish with Fujinami winning in what I thought was a huge upset watching. This gets a great crowd reaction and feels like a victory lap championship win for Fuji at this point in his career.

[Zenjo]

One of those moments which gets a great reaction on the night and then completely sucks for the next few months. It was pure nostalgia on this evening as the washed up veteran wins the IWGP title for a record 6th time. He still joint holds the record until Tanahashi's next title reign.

[Loss]

Last few minutes. Fujinami wins the IWGP title in a huge upset but he just didn't have it anymore by this time. The crowd reaction is awesome though.

[PeteF3]

Monster pop for the title change even if Fujinami doesn't really have much anymore. Fujinami's IWGP title win in '94 raised an eyebrow with me--and now he's champion again 4 years later. Here they were trying to recreate the magic of Choshu's final chase for the belt in '96 and '97, plus I think the Sasaki push simply wasn't working. Hopefully--and I don't know the lineage at this point--this is just a transitional thing so we can get the title back to Hashimoto where it belongs.

[TravJ1979]

twenty enzugiri's later Fujinami is your nostalgia champ.

[MrMoonlight]

Nice match based around the clash of styles: brute force vs slick veteran, the selling of the leg by Sasaki is really on point and provides the match with this sense of progression. It’s a quite slow match by ’98 standards but the execution is tight and there's a strong enough layout to get substance behind every sngle second of this. Fujinami’s win is crazy in context (I was shoked when he won '93 G1 so the iwgp 5 years later, come on!), his look of disbelief with the 70.000+ crowd reaction on Inoki’s retirement night makes it really memorable. A very solid match with that special touch. 3.75*