[2024-06-29-Tenryu Project-Green Heart Charity Pro Wrestling] Hideki Suzuki vs Keita Yano

[Ma Stump Puller]

You could have these two face off a million times and they'd probably still find a way to make this at least somewhat entertaining. Suzuki was much more energetic than in some of his other material (showing off with some cool Robertson-lite transitions that even Keita was stumped to deal with like that rolling Indian Deathlock!) and Keita despite his fucked up throat from years of trauma was game to do some rough and tumble amateur sprawling with the occasional wacky submission attempt out of nowhere. This really felt more or less like something you'd see from WoS, especially the way they get a ton of tension out of even the slightest big transition or suplex as a game-challenging problem to dodge around. Suzuki tries for a Butterfly Suplex around about in the middle of this and Keita immediately leaps to the ropes to prevent that from happening without even attempting to struggle or counter to highlight this alongside it being a neat callback to their first match together where that sudden attempt at a big bomb was the thing that finished Keita before. The first strike is really thematically important as it comes just as Keita is making a slow breakthrough with attacking Suzuki's arm with various different holds/attacks; eventually having Suzuki lose his patience and catch him with a elbow smash, happening as he was offering the bad arm to Keita during a lock-up and conceding the pure grappling side of this showing. There's a couple of sequences that are more or less there just to be blatant throwbacks to old Catch matches alongside Keita being his usual goofy ahh self by throwing in a random Tarantula spot near the end lol. The ending was especially uber based as Suzuki went into the Cobra Twist-cradle Osamu Nishimura used to throw out a ton, Keita kicked out but then in doing so got caught in a Banana Twist submission that cost him the match!

Anything that manages to somehow include an Banana Twist into the match in general is great, this being the actual finish was doubly so. Definitely a slow one to start off with (I mean with these two you expect a slowish pace anyway mind) but the pace is more protracted than intentionally boring on that front with tons of attention to detail. Suzuki felt significantly motivated to actually work and do stuff here compared to some of his other material (most of it being lay and pray stuff, not that fun to go through) with Keita's own knowledge in grappling pushing him to work more proactively instead of laying about. He was legitimately very good here and showed off some impressive stuff that you'd be hard pressed to find elsewhere done with such technical proficiency. The crowd also helped as they were actually respectfully silent (not the usual BS "oh they're being respectful" explanation for crowds who just didn't give a fuck about the match) popping big when major events happened and clearly being very impressed by the performances here. Keita is as he usually is, really smooth grappler who seemed a lot more focused here: probably due to the calibre of his opponent similarly also forcing him to cut the more eccentric spots he has a tendency to throw out in less strict conditions. I'm not complaining though as this version of him is still really solid, glad he's actually being able to do serious stuff like this instead of lingering in random indie feds his whole life.