[2000-04-07-NJPW-Dome Impact] Jushin Liger vs Kensuke Sasaki

[soup23]

All of Liger’s run through the juniors has led to this. Sasaki has been on a role in 2000 but this was probably my least favorite performance of him as I didn’t think he did much of anything to make Liger feel like a threat. The booking on this show overall was really atrocious. Much like Fully Loaded 3 months later, they are trying a 3 match series of the young guys/ juniors going against the established guard. Much like Fully Loaded, the younger group goes 0-3 and it stunts a lot of their momentum. Thinking back to the Chono vs Sasaki interactions, I wish they just would have ran that match here and hey Liger vs Muta isn’t a bad matchup on paper either for the undercard. Sasaki kicks out at 1 of the brainbuster and then Sasaki runs through his finisher combos and finishes Liger off with a brainbuster buster with little reaction. Really disappointing. ***

[Loss]

All that Black Liger squashing for this? This is a solid match, but I hate it anyway, because the tradeoff for getting it was so disproportionate. They really went out of their way around this time to emphasize how useless smaller guys are. If there is a bright side, maybe it means this is all in the past? We'll see.

[AstroBoy]

I watched this right after Ohtani vs. Kojima and just. . . what's the point? Liger being made to look like such an underdog here just undermines how he's been presented in every other situation.

 

I love how Liger fires up after his initial flurry fails but after that this largely settles in to the same sort of tropes that Ohtani/Kojima had. Liger shows some hope, runs through some of his big moves, Sasaki shrugs it off and just pins him. Fine.

 

This was disappointing.

 

**1/2

[Moonsault Marvin]

After months of black suit Liger dominance, this was just sad. Liger got some offense in the beginning, but Sasaki took over and squashed him. We've seem some really good matches out of Sasaki in 2000, so it was disappointing they didn't have a great competitive match.

 

Average match.

[Robert S]

This really was too easy for Sasaki. This was not even a title match. Typical Choshu booking. I was also surprised that Liger (apart from the opening dive) did not rely on junior heavyweight offense at all, which should have been the story of this match.