[2019-05-06-BASARA] Royta Nakatsu vs Ryuichi Sekine

[Makai Club #1]

Royta Nakatsu (c) vs Ryuichi Sekine - Union Pro MAX Title Match

BASARA is a promotion that always has little bangers that go under the radar because it’s a niche within a  niche within a niche, but even this match blew away my expectations. This wouldn’t be out of place in a top-level company. It’s even better than a ton of the matches in those promotions, in my opinion. Ryota Nakatsu doesn’t look like much, a bit of a goofy look but he pulls in a pretty great performance in this match. The work on Sekine’s right arm is so good. The submissions look really nasty, and the other little things he does such as ramming Sekine’s arm into the post are just superb. Not just the work on the arm, but his overall performance was excellent - had tons of aggression in his offence and had a vicious demeanour about him. Sekine’s selling was really good, although it could’ve been sold better as far as arm movements go. But Sekine mostly avoided using the injured arm in offence which is greatly appreciated. The pacing was excellent too, I wouldn’t be able to tell you the match time as it went by so smoothly, helped along by the great transitions. Short snappy grappling early on followed by heated brawling on the outside blended so well into each other. Great match starts to finish. Hardly a dull moment in the match. The finishing stretch as great. The short builds for Sekine’s Combine submission (Elevated Capture Boston Crab) were really well done too. Excellent match. ****1/2

[aaeo_]

I thought this was way too long, but it was well executed. The teases of Sekine's finisher were solid, and it was a very entertaining modern Japanese title match. Admittedly, I can never get into Nakatsu's matches as much as I should because I find his strikes to be kind of weak and he relies on those a lot, but he had another pretty good title match with Fuminori Abe.

edit: Actually, now that I think about it, my favourite Nakatsu match was the Best Stretchman one, which was much sillier, but had a beautiful underdog performance in it. Nakatsu has been pretty incredible recently.