[2000-02-18-ARSION] Aja Kong & Mariko Yoshida vs Ayaka Hamada & Mika Akino

[soup23]

Aja refuses a handshake and we go right into the match. AKINO and Yoshida start out with some beautiful chain wrestling. The match never really lets up from there. There is a couple of brief clips but it doesn’t look like we miss much at all. Aja’s arm even gets worked over which I have to think is a nod to what happened in the KAORU match just a few days earlier. Hamada’s athleticism is on deep display here with her jumping from the mat to the ropes and then doing a full moonsault onto her feet. Her speed dynamic works wonderfully against the size and brute of Kong. Yoshida continues to be a wizard mixing together wrestling, submissions and strikes into a beautifully harmony. Watch her flip out of a powerbomb and straight into a rear naked choke in one wonderful fluid motion vs. Hamada. Hamada is even able to roll out a neat submission which gets reversed into a modified figure four by Yoshida. Things spill to the outside allowing Hamada and AKINO to both hit dives onto both. Match comes full circle with AKINO and Yoshida exchanging mat work and submissions again with a ton of anxious motion and desperation. Kong DESTROYS AKINO with a slap but she gets a 2.999 flash pin on Yoshida and then rolls that into an ankle lock. Hamada has Kong at bay on the outside too. The spider has an ace up her sleeve though as she complete twists AKINO into a pretzel submission and Kong is able to hang onto Hamada forcing AKINO out. Time of match is 24:40 so we only lost about 3-4 minutes with the clipping. AKINO wakes up and doesn’t realize what has happened. Great stuff. ****1/4

[Loss]

Wow, to the extent it's possible, Yoshida is even better at her style in 2000 than she was in 1999. This was a fantastic match. I loved all the chain wrestling with Yoshida against both Hamada and the still promising Akino, but also, Aja spends more time on the mat when Yoshida is around. She is still Aja and will uraken a fool but she isn't the same Aja Kong she was in GAEA just a few days earlier. This was a really terrific mix of mat wrestling and more traditional Joshi, nearfalls and credible submission attempts. I don't have that much to say about it except that it was a great match. ****1/4

[Laney]

Hamada and Akino do an excellent job of effectively double teaming Kong to keep her down. Some sickening counters to the double team offense here as she stops a springboarding Akino twice here, once with a powerbomb, and the second time by nailing her in the face. A lot of great matwork here too with a lot of cool armbar transitions. There's a monkey flip transition into an armbar that is quite the sight to see. This is Joshi and it begins to dabble in excess for a bit here, but it still turns out to be an excellent match.

 

****1/2

[ohtani's jacket]

I was excited to see this as it was an ARSION match I hadn't seen and a new Yoshida match for me. Turned out to be more of a regular tag match than I was expecting but I thought there were a number of excellent exchanges and I liked that they kept it in the ring instead of taking a tour around the arena. I'm so used to slow, grinding submission work in Joshi that's more of a wear down or dominance tactic (and borders on a resthold half the time) that it's fun to see zippy submissions worked at a Joshi pace. Yoshida was pretty great in this. I saw her live in 2004 and was really impressed by her talent then. It's kind of a shame that she didn't have a bigger stage to work on at this point but that's the way things panned out. Akino was a hard worker. I loved that frantic pin attempt toward the end. That was cool. I also liked the lucha influence that Hamada brought to the submission exchanges. I was never that high on Hamada but she was solid in this. Aja didn't stand out as much as she did in the KAORU match but she gave another good performance. I'm not sure the finish worked that well as Akino didn't really fight it enough and the camera angle wasn't the greatest, but the match was solid.

[Jetlag]

Speaking of the real ARSION: These 4. Total corker of a match, easily one of the best tags ARSION has ever done. It was kind of their „roll out of the bed match“ as no one did anything extraordinary here, but they put their stuff together beautifully. Hamada and AKINO faced their biggest test against the top 2 ladies in the promotion, so aside from the numerous cool exchanges and nifty reversals, you also had a story and a game plan going on here. Akino and Hamada had to work together aswell as target Aja's arm and use their quickness to avoid both the deadly bombs from Aja aswell as Yoshida's submissions. Akino may have had her finest performance so far as she matched up great against the veterans, holding her own with a few shooty submissions of her own, while Ayako once again relied on blinding athleticism. Aja worked stiff and Yoshida was demonstrating the top of her submission game, and the counter-and-avoid nature of the match kept it from drifting into overkill. I also really liked how they saved up the big dives for near the end of the match. Great stuff, the first really good ARSION match of the 2000s.

[TravJ1979]

Not much more I can add, but what an incredibly fun match.

[tbrett]

Didn't get into this one as much as I was expecting too based on the comments. I thought it was a fun match and had its moments but I never felt I was watching anything special. Might give this one another try when I catch up more.