[2002-10-20-AJW] Kaoru Ito vs Momoe Nakanishi

[ohtani's jacket]

Sad to see so many empty seats for Momoe's big moment. The match followed a similar pattern to their previous matches. Ito threw Momoe around like a ragdoll and all Momoe could do was hang in there and hope to hit a reversal. Momoe was great at bumping and selling, and she brought a lot of energy to her reversal game, but I was hoping for more from this. Momoe basically won the title with a botched reversal that she was able to hold onto for a three count. The fact that it was messy didn't bother me. It was the overuse of the reversals that made the finish anticlimactic. She kept trying the same thing over and over again until one finally stuck. Instead of overcoming the challenging of Ito, it came across a fluky win. I don't know if Momoe had anything in her arsenal that could have put Ito away convincingly, but I am pretty sure they had better matches in their JGP encounters than they did here. I'm not sure if Momoe winning the title was the right choice, either. From a business point-of-view, it didn't really matter since AJW was in the crapper anyway. Ito was fine as champion from a diehard's viewpoint, especially folks who had followed her ascension after the AJW exodus in '97, but she was never going to draw in the way that past champions had. Momoe, however, was the type of worker who would have never had a sniff at the Big Red Belt in the past. If you think about the talent that never got anywhere near the tile it's surreal to think that Momoe wore the belt. Girls like Momoe are great as chasers, but I could her struggling more than Satomura or Hamada in The Woman role. From memory, this isn't their best match. I am pretty confident that the Ito vs. Momoe dynamic worked best in those JGP matches.