[1986-07-19-NJPW] Keiichi Yamada vs Nobuhiko Takada

[Jetlag]

NJPW handheld flood gives us Liger's first shot at the IWGP Jr. Title. Altough this is very different from the matches that would come in the future. Essentially young Yamada is a huge underdog against shootstylist Takada. During the early matwork portion Yamada is super cautious to avoid all of Takada's UWF submissions. Eventually Takada gets sick of this and blasts him with kicks. Takada goes for the Tombstone but Yamada desperately avoids that move aswell. Soon Yamada is selling big and the crowd is going bananas for every offensive move and counter he is able to land. Basic match executed extremely well and really fun to check out a way different Liger.

[KB8]

Have I perchance mentioned that young Liger was the fucking truth? To be honest I've been cold on him for years and Takada has never been my guy, so if I hadn't been watching all this stuff anyway I'd probably never have checked this out. Fortuitous then, as it was pretty awesome. What I really liked was how they sold their standing in the hierarchy. Yamada was frantic in going to the ropes whenever Takada would apply the legbar, while Takada was much more composed if Yamada managed to lock in a submission. The crowd picked up on it as well and were far more vocal when Yamada was the one in trouble, probably because they bought him submitting early more than they bought it from Takada. By the end they were red hot for everything and a big part of that is Takada's performance, which honestly might be one of the best I've ever seen from him. I thought he was legitimately great in this. He started to get a little more desperate as things went on, showed frustration after Yamada kept getting the ropes, shaking his head like "will this kid just go away already," sold a greater degree of danger for Yamada's holds, gave him more in strike exchanges as the match progressed. Maybe he'd been taking cues from Fujiwara because he really knew when to give and when to take. There's a cool example about midway in after Yamada made the ropes off ANOTHER legbar attempt, and Takada got up and immediately started throwing kicks. He'd kept those in the holster for the first 8-9 minutes so at that point you knew Yamada was getting on his nerves. He might not have been a veteran yet, but this was him in a position of more experienced worker, not necessarily having to carry someone but at least be in the driver's seat, and fair play to him because he was excellent.

Yamada was great as scrappy underdog. He held his own in strike exchanges and I liked how he would use things like lariats and dropkicks rather than the pure shoot style strikes of Takada, which if nothing else kept the line between New Japan and UWF halfway in place. Loved the bit where Takada refused to be whipped into the ropes so Yamada clotheslined him in the face a few times, then tried a wild dropkick and crashed hard. He also sold the struggle and the danger of not only holds, but of a few key moves, really in a way that not a lot of wrestlers two years into their career would (or at least not like this). Those legbar examples were obvious but so was the tombstone, where Takada tried it twice in quick succession and Yamada frantically wriggled out both times. Then there was the fight over the chickenwing in the back half where they were channelling Fujinami and Fujiwara, reversing the reversals trying to hook it in. That sort of struggle set up the payoffs for when Takada managed to grab the legbar in the middle of the ring. At that point I thought it was over for sure, and I think maybe the people did too, but Yamada made the ropes and the reaction was incredible. Then when Takada hits the tombstone - after Yamada hit one of his own - it lets him finally hook in that chickenwing. If that's not good build I'm not sure what is. This would've done really well on the 80s set if we had it, but I'm sort of glad we didn't because it's cool knowing things as good as this are still popping up. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. As they say (prolly).