[2018-04-18-SEAdLINNNG] Arisa Nakajima & Tsukasa Fujimoto vs YOSHIKO & Command Bolshoi

[Maciej]

I'm down for any Best Friends main event tag, but what got me really excited about this one was Bolshoi being involved; she's really terrific at everything and doesn't get in against Nakajima and Fujimoto very often. She's much less involved in this match than YOSHIKO it turns out, but does manage some really cool stuff. Her beginning with Nakajima is cool, with a relatively MMA-ish struggle after a mount and armbar that Bolshoi turns into a different armbar as Nakajima struggles. There's some of her more lucha-ish stuff later on too. Anyways, she's great.

 

The fact that a higher percentage of the match is focused on Best Friends vs. YOSHIKO isn't even disappointing, because there's so much creativity, and so, so many good dropkicks. Best Friends try a running dropkick to the corner and YOSHIKO jumps over them and comes off the second rope with a stomp. Big spots like that mix with smaller tag conventions being slightly played with: Nakajima actually blocks being slammed into the opponents corner at one point; YOSHIKO runs to hit Nakajima while the latter is on the apron and both succeeds AND is punished by Fujimoto immediately following up (I guess that in itself happens a lot, but here Fujimoto starts the run up early enough that YOSHIKO is convincingly caught off guard really quickly). That's a long, convoluted sentence for small examples, but this is a really great match with 4 wrestlers who are excellent at not wasting your time and filling the match with cool small details. It's really great, check it out.

[donsem43]

The underrated aspect of Best Friend tags is how they are able to interweave two different feuds into the same match. This match continues the long running Tsukka vs. SEAdLINNNG rivalry, while working in the then budding Arisa/Pure J feud as well. Everyone looked great here. This was one of the better Yoshiko performances of the last while as she worked as more of a bruiser, which is what she does best. I'm not a fan of the flash finish here but the match as a whole is yet another example of Best Friends being one of the top teams in all of wrestling. ****