[1999-06-20-BattlARTS] Yuki Ishikawa & Mohammed Yone vs Daisuke Ikeda & Ikuto Hidaka

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Always good to see Ishikawa vs Ikeda, but the junior partners brought this down quite a bit. Hidaka did that pointless Asai moonsault at the beginning of the match that had nothing to do with where the match went or the style that was being worked. Ikuto Hidaka doesn't seem like a bad wrestler, but he doesn't seem like a BattlARTS wrestler. He wrestles more like a New Japan junior, and everything he does is very pro style. As a result, this was my least favorite BattlARTS match so far. I'm still comfortable calling it a good match, but it doesn't really hold up as much more than that.

[tim]

I liked the moonsault in the beginning. Battlearts does a lot of stuff that you could say shouldn't "fit" into the style, but what's great about Battlearts is it's open to fitting in different stuff like that. Also love how it came right after a ridiculous entrance-way running knee strike, just about the last thing that makes sense in a style that's supposed to be based around realism. But it's all done in a good and fun way. Agreed that this is the least of the Battlearts matches but it's still pretty good, if too long. Ikeda was my favorite guy in this match, there were some greart moments with him laying it into Yone.

[soup23]

I liked the young guys being in there a good bit and actually thought this was some of the better Ishikawa vs. Ikeda sequences we have gotten this year so far. Hidaka seemed to hang better than Yone to me because he could mix in his more junior flying aspects that created a nice contrast. Again like the MPro tag a few matches before this, this wasn't high end but shows how great Battlarts was overall in 1999 when this can be viewed in some ways as a disappointment. ***1/2

[Tim Evans]

Hidaka looks so young. Less than a year later, he'd be in ECW. Not a bad match but nothing very intersesting. Yone looked good on the match but Ikeda/Ishikawa were on a different level.

[G. Badger]

Well this was another awesome Bat Bat hybrid style match mainly because you had Ishikawa & Yone going up against all around grump Ikeda & the well under-ranked Hidaka. So you know Ikeda was going to have to really go at it against his arch-rival & Yone...that MFer who's coming up the ranks and isn't backing down. Great match or perhaps a hidden gem classic. See some other BA matches of the time to fully appreciate this.

 

Yone was never more awesome than in BattlARTS...believe it. Why he & Ikeda were wasted in NOAH is still a mystery to me.

[PeteF3]

BattlArts continues to kill it. At times it feels like a Yone-Ikeda singles match with two junior NPCs, but the action is still terrific as they take us on a roller coaster ride of momentum swings.