Jiji

If some schmuck can see how exposed her chin is, how the fuck does her team not? How hasn't that been corrected? Brutal. HONDA HOUSEY! Portuguese is the best, man.

That face solemnly says "I regret everything..."

Oh, man. That Barboza/Felder fight lived up to the potential. So many spins! Beautiful body attacks from Edson. I'd love to see Eddie Alvarez as Edson's next fight.

lol, everybody off the Gian Villante hype train. The "WHY YOU STOP FIGHT!?" as the fighter falls over themselves is always something.

Like Virgil!

only in dreeeaaams.

Day 4 was a very good show. Anderson/Goto was way, way better than expected and a solid, fun match. They countered a lot of each other's offense and that can go back to the constant tag matches they've had over the past half a year plus. Kojima/Elgin was good. Eglin's simplified his offense into power moves to exhibit his strength and it's working really well. No overkill or unnecessary no selling, leaving behind the makings of a pretty darn good wrestler. Nakamura laid it in on Nagata's gut and that was the third really good match in a row. The crowd really started to get engaged in the finishing stretch leaving them nice and warm for Okada/Honma. There were a few sloppy moments but overall this was borderline great. I'm a Honma mark and while I think it was never too much in doubt who was going to win, it was still highly enjoyable. I hope Honma gets some victories, as this doesn't seem like one of those instances where the crowd will stop cheering a wrestler when he graduates from the lovable loser role. I think if they gave him a nice winning streak and a serious shot at the IWGP title it would do very well and it would be a breath of fresh air. He's had better matches with Ibushi, Ishii, Shibata, and Tanahashi though.

The heel in "WWE style" has a slightly different job than in traditional rasslin' psychology. Jericho talks about it in his second book. In WCW, you sold the babyface's offense consistently, whereas in WWE you get up and feed far more regularly and not just for comebacks and transitions. The heat in a great many WWE matches has been so oversimplified and dumbed down that it's basically a 2-5 minute chinlock segment. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's treated as a rest hold in WWE. The chinlock was the match in that awesome Windham/Murdock match that was rated either #1 or #2 on the UWF/Mid-South '80s set. They told a story based around the chinlock for ~25-30 minutes and it was fascinating! Wasn't a rest hold at all.

http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/8/3/2341786/youre-fired-golden-glory-fighters-cut-from-strikeforce-and-ufc Alistair Overeem was given a UFC contract soon after though. Thanks for that. Doesn't really say much other than alluding to possible contract demands. Seems silly to have one of the better fighters in the division on the outs because of a shithead agent dispute from 4 years ago. I can't watch those embedded/beyond the series things anymore. I can actually feel the loss of brain cells watching people talk about themselves and say the same stuff over again. If they have an interesting story, write an article and I'll read it. Even the McGregor videos were dull. "I'm going to go buy stuff. I can get used to this" x1000.

What's the Golden Glory thing? Coenen always impressed me. She has an immense chin (both Cyborg fights, holy cow), is competent enough on her feet to not lose fights against all but the very best, and is a damn good grappler/submission fighter. Shame she's wasting away outside the UFC.

Yep. Another small thing is get secondary finishes over on lower card guys. Submissions as well. Anything to build more drama into big matches.

Bad Luck doesn't strike me as the goofing around type. Doc should order him to lay down and Fale should refuse.

Kianzad's built like a brick shithouse for the division and looked to have good speed and agility on top of her power. She was able get easy take downs and maintain decent top control. She needs to work on being more effective with strikes from the top though. Her standup looked pretty raw but she has enough instincts that she's probably better than most. I mean, as I was doing a binge watch of fighters the past few weeks, I checked out Bethe's 3 UFC fights. She was taken down easily by Jessamyn fucking Duke with a few judo throws and while her standing technique isn't bad, it took her a while to put down Baszler, who's basically a walking concussion at this point, so she doesn't have a tonne of power. The Rousey fight will last all of 30 seconds. I honestly don't see how she can win unless she lands the perfect punch. That division is such a joke and so badly needs Cyborg. I think the biggest fight UFC can put on right now after Aldo/McGregor (UFC's claiming 1 million busy for 189 on McGregor's bio btw) is Ronda vs. Cyborg after Cyborg devours a few ladies and they build the hype train. I can see why they're hesitant with Cyborg due to the weight cutting and past issues with PEDs but that could do huge, huge numbers and it's my most anticipated possible (semi-possible?) fight right now.

Yeah IWTV was not very good. I think I tried recording that shit to VHS back in the day, lol. I wish their archive was more expansive. It seems like they took footage from one of their NJPW Classics series and uploaded a bunch of singles matches. They have a good number of full shows going back to 2012, and about 15 partial shows per year for the period before that. It seems like most of the Tokyo Dome shows are complete. '95 seems to have quite a few matches, including the UWFi stuff. Back to the G1: I do not like Yujiro one bit. He's boring, his matches suck, and he's pretty dangerous at times.

I think there was an Adam Cole vs. Kevin Steen match a few years ago that was more or less Exhibit A in what you're talking about, Jingus. Steen hit him with what I think were four apron powerbombs and a bunch of goofy indy shit then drops the fall after a super kick and a roll-up. Just no psychology at all. I want to get into post-2005/06 ROH but every time I try, there's just so much move spamming with such little thought put into it. As far as things clearly escalating within a match, Japan's usually been really good with it to the point that modern New Japan can get pretty tedious because they tend to follow it religiously. Start off with some chain and mat wrestling, somebody hits somebody with a stiff strike, bringing us to the heavy strike section, then they go outside for a bit after hitting some of their mid-range moves, they then come to a double down and that leads us into the worst of all things puroresu: the lame strike exchanges, then you get the finisher reversal spam and the fall. All Japan probably had it best in the post Choshu invasion era up until Kobashi and Misawa killed the style off with their over-the-top shit by around '95/'96. It always felt like a competition and/or a fight but you had clear stages to the match, layered storytelling relying on both the personalities of wrestlers and their past, and had some of the most thrilling finishing stretches imaginable. When modern New Japan is really on, then they can bring forward a lot of these best qualities with them. I think part of the reason why I love Stan "The Man" Hansen so damned much is that he was chaos personified. His matches rarely felt the same and things could happen at any time. Dean Ambrose spoke to something similar on Jericho's podcast, in that things shouldn't always have to work out the same way all of the time. Maybe you take something that's traditionally used in the finishing stretch of a match and use it at the very beginning. I feel like he's gotten away from that in the little I've seen of him in 2015. Part of that is likely due to WWE's insistence on everybody getting their shit in for every single match. Part of the reason I may have a hard time getting into lucha libre (though I loved a lot of the early '90s stuff with El Dandy and Negro Casas from what I've seen), is that momentum changes can come so quickly and suddenly, that the shifts in the match from gear to gear happen almost randomly. The slower, mat-based grappling of the early '90s was phenomenal though. Absolutely. NOAH did this back in the day with Jun Akiyama finally winning the GHC title and then losing it to that rat shithouse Ogawa via a rollup. It was the wrong time and place to do it but I think the idea of a main event or title match ending abruptly adds a lot of drama to future matches.

Re-watching and watching for the first time fights of people featured on this card the past few weeks and, my God, how hasn't Jessica Eye been knocked senseless yet? Her chin is so high up, just asking for an upper cut and she charges in with her head perfectly centred. Just a trainwreck waiting to happen but the rest of the division is so, so bad and she's pretty agile (I guess agile enough to not get caught often). I really hope we get more skilled women at 135 soon. Eye would make for the ideal Cyborg fodder though, if Cristiane ever makes the jump. Tate's no world beater but she should be able to land enough or take her down to win on points. I'm hoping Barboza wins but I could see one of Felder's high risk, flashy strikes putting Edson on his ass. Barboza gets caught too often and we all know that jaw can't take too much punishment. Should be a fantastic fight.

World is a fantastic value if you have the time and inclination to watch New Japan. Highly recommend it when you have the funds. I hope they follow through on that idea floated about them purchasing other promotion's libraries, particularly FMW, baybay! How much did NJPW charge for the uStream service of G1 Climaxes of years past? Wasn't it triple digits USD?

Totally agree on YOSHI-HASHI. He's the Taichi of the heavyweight division. At least with Taichi I can see why'd you keep him around for his looks but YOSHI-HASHI brings absolutely nothing to the table. New Japan ought to raid some of the indies or absorb NOAH to fill out their junior and tag divisions as well as the general heavyweight undercard. Like, how fucking rad would it be to see Daisuke Sekimoto and some of the BJW strong style boys crush Okada on a regular basis? If Nicholls and Haste didn't sign with WWE (has there been an update on that?), they would be a tremendous addition to the stale and boring tag division. I'm excited to see what Omega does when he graduates to the heavyweight division too. Also, I enjoyed the old school projector in the middle of the aisle from yesterday's show. I'm surprised the Bullet Club guys didn't fuck around with it.

True. Also when we get the obligatory STARE DOWN as people awkwardly walk backwards up the ramp after winning a match or saying something sassy or attacking somebody they dislike strongly.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it awesome but I'm definitely enjoying Naito's mannerisms. Did he bum the black mask get-up from La Sombra? I'm so damned hyped for tomorrow. We get HONMA vs. okada in the main event. Hopefully the crowd is more like today's crowd and less like yesterday's. Sunday's a bigger show in Hiroshima and features Ibushi/Styles, Tanahashi/Naito, and Makabe/Shibata. Before that, we have to see the world possibly implode with Doc Gallows vs. Bad Luck Fale. What have we done to deserve such a cruel fate?

Would Dunn still have any pull once Vince is gone, or would HHH and Steph kindly inform him that his input on creative is no longer necessary? From the sounds of da rumbllinz, it's more like they'd tell him he's not needed at all. Maybe we could have a camera shot last more than 3 seconds. Maybe.

I had no idea what was going on in that but it was awesome. So many burly dudes looking to take out their aggression on other burly dudes.

Celebrities are sexier. Even Hogan, with his wrinkled, orange balls. Pretty much. If there's a mainstream scandal of any magnitude, they'll go full bore. Why cast eyes on deep institutional problems when you can focus on celebrities doing stupid shit!?

I liked it better when it was Setanta. They had the best elevator music to fall back to sleep to after waking up at like 4AM to watch Liverpool lose. So soothing.

I was excited until the SN World idea popped up. Fuck 'em.