[1998-10-18-NJPW-NWO Typhoon] Genichiro Tenryu & Shiro Koshinaka vs Keiji Muto & Hiroyoshi Tenzan

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Good match with typical TV clipping. They are teasing dissension between Muto and Tenzan and Muto ends up walking out on his partner before coming back. Koshinaka is terribly sloppy here. We get a big chunk of this and it does have a pretty hot finishing stretch. Tenryu and Koshinaka get the win and the NWO excess is now unavoidable. Kojima joins the group. Is it possible to escape this crap?

[soup23]

NJPW heavies is an odd complex in 1998. Old guys still at the top and they haven't found a way to really integrate the new breed (Tenzan, Kojima, Nagata) effectively IMO. Also, the NWO arc overwhelms everything else. This had some decent action mixed in but also a storyline I didn't care about with Muto leaving and then returning. Also, Koshinaka looked really bad here and reckless and Tenzan wasn't much better going for random moonsaults and stuff. This didn't make me want to go out and see much more heavyweight stuff from this era.

[PeteF3]

I actually thought the match was a ton of fun--I hate Koshinaka and he didn't bother me at all here, and Tenryu continued to look good in a strong comeback year for him. It ain't no Kandori/Hokuto tag as far as dissenting-partners matches go but the action and the crowd are hot and it had me guessing a few times. My only complaint is that Tenzan went down awfully easily as soon as Koshinaka made his comeback. I agree on the who-gives-a-fuck nature of the post-match angle, though.