[2024-08-23-Evolution] Dan Tamura vs Tyson Maeguchi

[Ma Stump Puller]

Who thought we'd get some actual cool Bati-Bati antics on a super mid C-show brand? Dan Tamura's look is incredibly unflattering and Tyson Maeguchi is truly apart of a misguided generation of guys who really needed a Ikeda/Ishikawa mentor figure to be truly great; that said, I think combined this was fairly decent for what it was. They worked this like a conventional 90's striker/grappler match you'd see out of Fujiwara Gumi so Maeguchi was consistently abusing rope breaks while Tamura was throwing out double legs and tackles as soon as any strike was being fired out, bringing in a fairly smart gameplan on both sides that was respected enough to stay basically in that same formula for the entire duration of the match give or take. Maeguchi scrambles out of a couple of toe-hold attempts and seemingly is in a lot of trouble until he gets in a nice kick to the side of Tamura's stomach, staggering him enough that he can go fire off some equally nice leg shots. Tamura's weird stumble-selling was definitely way overboard (the kind that really should've been ironed out years ago if AJPW were bothered about making strikes as important as their finishing stretches, anyway) but you got the point that it was a weak point that had been opened up. The second half is a lot more scrappy as the two settle for back and forth stiff slapping exchanges while having the occasional mind game around Tamura baiting leg kicks on his bad leg to try to then counter and catch said kicks mid-swing for a big takedown or two. 

Match drops down significantly when they decide to do lame ass forearm exchanges for the millionth time for no real reason but makes up for it by Maeguchi going right into some beefy kicks, ending with a kneeling head kick for the first and only near fall of the entire match. Actual finish is super cool as Maeguchi gets his running knee blocked twice, Tamura getting the pin off a crumple-powerbomb and really awesome standing Kobashi-lite Burning Lariat was definitely abrupt, sure, yet it was a confident book-end to a fairly physical fight where they established that any big blow could take the whole thing; it concluded and respected that logic here by simply pushing it as far as possible, simply put. 

This obviously has some issues in regards to the pacing being a bit too slow at the start (this suffers from this bizarre expectation that matches like these have to start painfully slow and uninteresting under the guise of "feeling out" a sad myth caused by a decade of wrestlers believing that the only thing you could start with was shameless bloat and bluster) and a couple of small things that I think I can just equate to the pair being somewhat green (especially to Tamura who's mostly been actively wrestling in the stop/start COVID years) all in all I thought it was shockingly fun for something like this and could've easily been seen on some crappy 240p 2008/9 Battlarts tape that's barely watchable, it's THAT good. Definitely worth the look.