[1999-02-13-AJPW-Excite Series] Hayabusa & Jinsei Shinzaki vs Tamon Honda & Jun Izumida

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Last few minutes. I thought this was a very good match when we screened it, but the January match seemed to be the better of the two and we didn't have room for both. We still needed to include the finish of this one since it's a title change with Hayabusa and Shinzaki winning the All Asian tag team titles.

[Tim Evans]

That Phoenix splash to Honda that had Hayabusa land his knees right into Honda had to hurt. This seemed good from the little shown. Is this the first "outsider group" to win All Japan titles?

[soup23]

Want to see this one in full again as it looked at worst a small step behind January. Busa has been on my good side so far in 1999.

[Jetlag]

I watched the full match. Haven't seen the previous match in a while, but while this didn't have the blood it felt shockingly great. Izumida looked great as a tough bruiser cutting off the flying team. Him and Honda trying to crack Shinzaki's skull throughout the first half of the match was great, loved his ultra stiff bicycle kick and diving headbutt. Builds to a really great finishing stretch with some extremely well timed spots and a slightly different structure than tag matches usually have, Honda's selling was just amazing and his suplexes were killer, but that's not news. Hayabusa was a little annoying but mostly relegated to hitting high spots which he does well. That Shinzaki feint leading to Hayabusa hitting a springboard moonsault across the ring was one of the best I've ever seen. Nice symmetry finish to conclude their feud.

[PeteF3]

Fun closing stretch--Shinzaki is still the better all-around worker of the group but I can take Hayabusa in these settings, working off a hot tag. The previous match had blood, this one has two "outside" natives winning an AJPW championship. Yep--we're in a post-Baba era.