[2000-12-09-AJPW-Real World Tag League Final] Toshiaki Kawada & Masanobu Fuchi vs Steve Williams & Mike Rotunda

[ohtani's jacket]

This is the type of match I would usually skip but since it was the final of the Real World Tag League I felt obliged to watch it. And yes, there was an actual final in 2000. 

Kawada spent a large chunk of the opening 10 minutes working with Dr. Death and Mike Rotunda. He spent such a long time in the ring that when the Americans took over he was worn down from being on offense for so long. I'm not sure what the logic was in not tagging Fuchi. Perhaps he was trying to soften up the big foreign dudes so that Fuchi stood a chance, but you've got to trust your partner. The team had made it this far so I didn't see the point of hiding Fuchi on the apron.  In the end, the Varsity Club's power moves were too much for Fuch, but the key moment was a huge spike piledriver on the outside that left Kawada incapacitated. The match was decent considering how washed up Williams and Rotunda were. Williams, in particular, was a battered war horse and struggled to get in and out of the ring,  But the booking was odd. It wasn't a match-up that anybody wanted to see at Budokan and Wiliams and Rotunda winning didn't have much upside. The original plan was for Tenryu to tag with Onita and I guess that would have made a better final. Kawada looked pretty good in the ring continuing his second-half surge up the worker leaderboard. He's now approaching the likes of Delfin, Togo, and Ishikawa for Japanese worker of the year and there's still the big tag match to come. Stay tuned folks! 

[soup23]

Interesting match where from the semi final earlier in the night, Fuchi is wounded. As a result, Kawada takes the first 50% of the match. I think the resurgence of Doc is on the downswing as he was fine here but did look dated. Rotunda looked worse and I kind of wish Barton and Doc would have teamed up. The t-shirts and triangle new varisty club shit doesn’t help. The ending run was well done and I was surprised to see Doc/Rotunda win. RWTL final matches have a knack for being some of the better AJPW matches of the year. This was a very good match in spite of itself but certainly not a classic like in years past. ***1/2 (6.9)