[2003-05-09 NOAH] Kenta Kobashi, Tamon Honda & KENTA vs Yoshihiro Takayama, Daisuke Ikeda & Takashi Sugiura

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I love and hate this match. Love because it's amazing, but hate because it was one of the first prime NOAH 6-mans I saw, and it doomed me to be disappointed by no other NOAH 6-man being nearly as good. The match is awesome from the ring intros with Tak and Kobashi lording their belts over each other, and then they give the fans what they want by starting out the match and doing a great lock-up sequence. From there we got some fun and creative double team submissions that both sides use to troll each other. Things soon move into a heat section on KENTA, and this would usually be where things start to drag with these NOAH tags, but instead the match just keeps getting better. It starts out with chaotic outside brawling that sees KENTA eat a pile driver, and then we get some really fun stuff with Ikeda and Takayama competing to see who can kick KENTA harder. For some reason this was one of the few NOAH matches where Ikeda was allowed to be something resembling his BattlArts self, and he brings it. It also has one of the funniest spots I've seen when Sugirua counts a Takayama pin on KENTA, and then him and Takayama celebrate like they've won. I love how Takayama taunts Kobashi as much as possible. It's here that the match starts to feel like a showcase for Takayama's side, and I'm ok with that. As has been said about other matches, there's nothing wrong with stepping aside when someone else is giving a brilliant performance. To be fair, KENTA deserves some credit here for being willing to eat some really hard shots, and he also does a good job milking the hot tag to Kobashi. The Kobashi tag is as hot as you'd expect with the crowd getting huge into his machine gun chops. Then the match throws one more curveball with giving us an awesome Sugiura/Honda stretch run with Sugiura trying to up-stage Honda by showing off his own dead lift suplexes. Match goes 24 minutes and I was sad to see it end, which is a big rarity for me and NOAH tags.