[2008-02-24-Sendai Girls Pro Wrestling-Sendai Girls Live Vol 18] Carlos Amano vs Ryo Mizunami

[Ma Stump Puller]

This was pretty great and a good example of Amano making a relatively basic rookie/vet squash look tangibly fun with her cocky attitude and beatdowns before inevitably paying for it with some heated counters back at her. Mizunami isn't the most seasoned (shown very easily by the pair struggling to set up a superplex, of all things) but she gets the standard fiery upstart formula pretty easily helped by Amano directing the action with awesome grappling and some stiff shots being thrown out; knees to the head, headbutts to the back of the head, mean suplexes, all that and some more. The offence here is generally convincingly stiff enough despite being relatively low-risk. The crowd heat is palpable in this one and gets better as they work through the match and keep building up to Mizunami's big breaks when they come. Her stuff is incredibly basic: scoop slams, leg drops, all that stuff, but her energy while doing them is frantic enough that you do buy her offence a lot more than you really should in a situation like this. She goes at about 100 miles per hour doing almost everything. 

It helps that she does on occasion do something unexpectedly sick like a shoulderbreaker transition into a head/arm choke that catches you properly off-guard when stuff like that happens. With the added background of Team OZ having won all of the other matches on this event by running through the rest of the native talent and the fact that Amano wasn't exactly the most protected out of the four (especially compared to someone like Ozaki or Kong) it does provide just that extra layer of suspense to the outcome despite it being rather obvious: there's that small part of doubt as to if Amano really will actually just win this or if there'll be a last second upset. Miz near the end even gets *really* close to a 3-count (especially for the stakes of such a match like this) but her need to try to beat Amano in headbutts opens her wide open for a really nasty running one to the face. The last sequence where Mizunami is throwing all of these super slick rollups to avoid the equally sick huge nail-in-the-coffin bombs was the icing on a really good barnburner that cooked even better when they were doing submission counters instead. Miz gets the crowd incredibly loud with a cross armbreaker/triangle armbar transition bit, Amano responds with a sliding Fujiwara that she then kicks Miz in the face after she manages to escape.

The finish is also really simple; Amano going for this really unique rope-hung transition into her cross armbreaker where she basically slingshots off it after grabbing her opponent's shoulder. The kicker comes from how they tease it almost being broken by the leverage being peeled away....before Amano springs back into the full thing and that conclusively ends it. It's kinda weird how great Mizunami was as a youngster compared to her later years when she's been nowhere near as energetic/mat-focused like she was here. Maybe that's just due to her wanting to slow down or focusing more on longevity with her shtick, it's just a real shame we don't see this version of her going forward because you really got the notion that she was one of the next big things from how she worked here. Super energised throughout, bumped and sold super well, robust fundamentals and mat-work, etc etc. She had essentially most of it figured out for someone who was still relatively inexperienced. Amano is the guiding force of the match and is as great as always: big bombs, lots of little character bits to get the most of the crowd heat with her outrageous taunting, using some bait and switching to get their expectations flipped around, etc. She also really gave a lot given how relatively low on the totem pole her opponent was by comparison. She could've easily big-leagued and made this into a pure squash match, thankfully that wasn't the case though.