[2019-02-17-DDT-Judgement] Daisuke Sasaki vs Konosuke Takeshita

[nivvad]

Daisuke Sasaki defends the KO-D Openweight Title

Takeshita in a big match situation never fails to deliver. The only real complaint I have is the same complaint about other big puroresu promotions too, and that is needing every big match to go half an hour (or more), especially when the first 10 minutes are full of nothing like Sasaki's leg work because everyone knew Takeshita would no sell it a few minutes later (which he did). Besides that, it eventually got really good with Takeshita and Sasaki destroying each other with bombs and weapons in and out of the ring. Some overbooking with the ref bumps, but it never got to the point of annoying and actually added to the story. I don't think this hit the MOTYC potential that I thought it would have, but still an excellent main event all things considered, ****1/2.

[aaeo_]

Much like the 2012 Omega-Ibushi Budokan match, I think this is too long and kind of a mess, but they also do some incredible stuff. They just take several very dumb bumps, starting with Takeshita catching Sasaki's suicide dive and doing a brainbuster on the apron. I also loved Sasaki's elbow drop to the outside. More importantly, Takeshita does Antonio Honda's bionic elbow, which I always find very endearing.

They thankfully drop the leg work very early on, so Takeshita's weird selling is not something that taints the rest of the match but it's still lame that they had to fill time with that. Sasaki's matches almost always have ref bumps, but I thought the first one here was actually really bad because Takeshita climbs to the top rope, Sasaki grabs Matsui, Takeshita pauses and goes like "oh no", and then crossbodies both of them anyway.

There's a lot to like in this match, some great offense, very good selling from Sasaki, a few good character moments. However, I find it hard to get into big sprawling main events if there's not enough of a cohesive throughline in them, and I think that's lacking here.