[2022-05-08-Kyushu Pro] Soma Watanabe vs Hitamaru Sasaki

[corwo]

Sasaki and Watanabe are tied one to one in tag matches, but Hitamaru has a fall over Soma, and Soma's victory came at the hands of partner Minoru Tanaka. This is the rubber match. Sasaki has the superior mat game, so he tries to goad Watanabe into trading submissions early on. Watanabe fights back by lighting up Sasaki with slaps, but Sasaki weaves in and out of holds seamlessly, turning a leg lock into an armbar. Sasaki's top-notch ground game was further established when he caught a leg-scissors from Soma and turned it into a single-leg Boston Crab, causing Watanabe to use his first escape.

Sasaki made Soma scratch and claw for every submission, locking his hands to block an armbar attempt. A strike battle broke out, and Watanabe rocked Sasaki with a high kick, but he bounced back at the count of nine. Sasaki evened the odds with a kick of his own, and Soma spent the rest of the match fighting from the backfoot. The slap exchanges were resounding, like something you'd see in an actual fight.

Watanabe gets the better of a submission battle and evens the score at three to three. Sasaki locks in a gnarly Fujiwara armbar, but Watanabe once again makes it to the ropes, hanging on by the skin of his teeth. In a callback to their first tag match, Sasaki goes for a piledriver, but it was reversed, and he turned it into an ankle lock. Soma fired up and got a second wind, nailing Sasaki with a German Suplex. Watanabe turned a driver into an armbar, leading to Sasaki using one last escape. One final flurry followed, but Soma ultimately tapped to a sleeper. I loved how Sasaki's hubris almost cost him the match, as he seemingly underestimated Watanabe, and it was nearly his downfall. One heck of a match.