[1988-06-10-AJPW] Tiger Mask, Shinichi Nakano & Takashi Ishikawa vs Ashura Hara, Toshiaki Kawada & Samson Fuyuki

[fxnj]

I loved this when it first appeared on the VAP Tiger Mask II set that released something like 10 years ago, and I think I loved it even more rewatching it today. Serves really well both as a high mark of the 80's AJPW 6-man style and an appetizer for what was to come in the 90's. Even though Hara and Misawa are the top guys on their respective teams, the focus on this seems to be more on putting the captains up against the plucky underdogs on the opposing teams. That means Hara/Ishikawa and Misawa/Kawada feel like the main pairings we see in this match, and both carry the same theme of the lower ranked guy getting their moments but still clearly being the lower ranked guy. Misawa looks really good in the Tiger Mask role with mixing high flying offense and stiff kicks. There's also a moment where he seems to accidentally invent the frog splash years before Art Barr. Since it's an 80's match, they keep a fast pace of mostly strike based offense, and that leads to some questionable moments, like when Kawada hits a jumping tombstone on Misawa and, and Misawa gets up just seconds later to catch Kawada's follow-up top rope move. To be fair, Kawada didn't hit the move that cleanly, so it's not the end of the world, but still annoying. The crowd was really interesting for how they were initially dead but the guys seemed to win them over and they got really hot for the stretch run. There's something about the acoustics in Budokan that makes crowd reaction feel so "big" compared to a place like Korakuen.