[2015-04-03-Tenryu Project] Dragon JOKER vs Yoshinari Ogawa

[Ma Stump Puller]

Other Deep Dive stuff

Link to based match

Probably the match of the night, to be honest. JOKER and Ogawa spent all of the first five minutes just rolling on the mat and doing slick technical work until Ogawa started pulling out his old Rat Boy tricks to work on the arm, then we got some brawling, turnbuckle smashing, and Ogawa being a dick by stomping on the exposed shoulder of JOKER with some nasty targeted work. There's some cool little bits like Ogawa using the ref to balance himself during a sunset flip attempt or doing a weird reverse key lock with arch that I've never seen someone do before. They got a ton of mileage out of Ogawa doing his usual control sequences, namely with a lot of motion, action, and never sitting in one hold for too long. You see JOKER closely get edges (a few strikes here, a counter there) until the big explosion of offence with a masterful spinning heel kick out of a front roll which got a big reaction. JOKER gets his own back by grabbing on a corner rope-hung armbar in the corner on Ogawa, and we also get a ton of really frenetic back and forth stuff as Ogawa keeps pulling for the arm submissions to try to keep control of things, but then getting screwed because JOKER now also had his own counter holds, etc etc. Despite kicking out of two big backdrops, JOKER quickly gets caught in a sneaky armbar that he simply can't escape from, forcing the tapout.

This was a pretty simple structure, but I think it really held up, with the change of scenery helping with a fairly compact crowd really getting behind this. No small part to Ogawa, who works a masterful job making most of the grinding and fairly unimpactful technical stuff look fantastic, while JOKER also does his part to make this solid with his fluid bumping and incorporating that arm work into his own stuff later on as well. No shock that we'll see this guy in NOAH a few years later as a day 1 Stinger ally, this time unmasked. Watching this makes me wish we got more of Ogawa outside of NOAH where he could have fresher matches as an actual big deal as opposed to being simply a wheel in a bigger promotion. As it is, really underrated indie bout with two very overlooked guys.