[2006-10-13-NOAH-Autumn Navigation] Mitsuharu Misawa vs Kazunari Murakami

[KB8]

Not really the wild or awesome spectacle you'd hope for, so in that sense I suppose it's a touch disappointing, but it still had enough Murakami horse shit to be fun. Unfortunately Misawa didn't seem all that interested here. On the one hand it was pretty amusing seeing him act above engaging in Murakami's antics. Murakami would try and get a rise out of him by throwing dickish jabs and gloating, outright standing on his face while Misawa lay slumped in the corner, stepping onto the ramp and beckoning Misawa to follow, but by and large Misawa played it by the book. A couple times his composure cracked and he drilled Murakami with some elbows, but if that had been Hashimoto in there he'd have taken Murakami behind the woodshed and slaughtered him. Murakami getting cut open and rising from the grave like a sneering zombie ruled though, even if this was one of those NOAH crowds that was more likely to respectfully applaud than bay for blood. And if you're not there rooting for Murakami to wreak havoc then what's the point? 

[Ma Stump Puller]

This had much potential going into it, especially with the crowd reactions between them for the tag match they used to build this up a week earlier. Sadly Misawa is in one of his moods where he sells nothing, sits in holds while awkwardly trying to work some weird shoot-style that he's clearly not comfortable with, and generally just goes though the motions. I do kinda get the story about how Mura is trying to make Misawa crack and he just isn't quite hitting the mark, but it's done in such a dull manner where Misawa just directly no sells punches to the face and makes Mura look like shit so there's no tension to be really found. There's no real "oh shit the match starts NOW" or Misawa cracked, it just felt like he was here to do the work and go home so the match is consistently on the backend with nothing much happening.

Perhaps that's a side-effect of his ailing body at this point, maybe it's just disinterest. Either way, Mura gets in some great stuff on his part and tried to make this interesting, but it just wasn't happening and the deflating finish of Misawa just hitting a few running elbows to essentially job the lad out didn't help things much. You can really tell who was actually interested here.

 

 

 

[fxnj]

Man, what the fuck was this? After a fun start with Murakami rushing Misawa, it seems they had no idea what to do. Misawa spends some time pretending to respect Murakami with lots of boring circling and weird start-stop matwork. Murakami eventually throws several shoot punches at Misawa which he completely no-sells, and then comes back to wreck him with elbows. They go to the outside and Murakami blades off an ultra-safe looking ringpost shot. As he slowly rose up to reveal the blood, I expected a comeback, but instead they just go home after a few more elbows. I liked how Murakami bumped on Misawa's elbows and it was cool how he sold a leg kick from Misawa like death, but that's about it. Really weird performance from Misawa here. Have to assume his mind was on something else during this match.