[1997-03-23-AJW-Wrestling Queendom 1997] Aja Kong vs Kyoko Inoue

[Alex]

Kyoko is the ace of the company now, and she is defending her Triple Crown against the former ace here.  Despite being the champion, Kyoko is outsized and gets outclassed by Aja Kong early in the match.  Kyoko gets little bursts of offense, but even if she hits two DDTs, she gets two hellacious chair shots in return.  Kyoko is finally able to ground Aja after a DDT and headlock.  At this point the match feels more even, but then we get some brawling where Aja has a clear advantage and Kyoko eats a big pile driver to a table on the outside.  This leads to the stretch of big moves, which I think was not completely justified; Kyoko hits a frankensteiner and that fucks up Kong enough to allow her get shit in.  One power bomb had struggle, but all the others are rather easy.  Kyoko gets enough offense in to get a stalemate, Kyoko gets a lariat when both get to their feet, she misses another and gets suplexed to hell.  Aja messes up a superplex, which is the pretty much the last of her on offense in the match and gets bombed and slammed three more times to get Kyoko the victory.  This match was mostly pretty good title match, with some flaws and hiccups.

[Clayton Jones]

This had a lot of good stuff but a lot of issues. I think by working so evenly with Aja overall Kyoko did herself a disservice as the Ace, not effectively portraying her struggle and perseverance. The early stretch where it was worked more like you'd expect had me really hopeful and even some of the work outside was very good. But by the end transitions were sloppy, stuff happened just to set up the next sequences, nothing really flowed. Overall disappointing but not awful.