Just got home from the show, some thoughts from being there live:
-Shota is gonna be great. I'm sure this is a thing with the young boys, who wouldn't dare "go through the motions," but his fundamentals are so good. His lockups, the way he hits the ropes, and he's got some good fire. Crowd was definitely into him, and I fully bit on that 2.9 he got on Sho.
-I want to like Zack Sabre, I really do. He's just such a GEEK. He's the epitome of a guy playing at being a wrestler. The first time I saw him was in the CWC, and I was excited to finally check him out, and I came away thinking, "Him?" 2 years later, despite the push and having TAKA doing this amazing intro, he still does nothing for me.
-Amazed that they did literally nothing for almost 10 minutes in that 6-man and had the crowd in the palms of their hands. The only negative was that the GOD managed to beat down 6 guys. Yuck.
-Elgin/Makabe: Makabe can still deliver. I'm not necessarily the biggest Elgin fan, and it seems Gedo has cooled off on him, but he was fine tonight. Like sevendaughters said, I was just waiting for them to start throwing bombs, and they had some nice ones.
-Yoshi/Page: Yoshi-Hashi is--a guy. Out of the seemingly infinite members of Chaos, he's easily the least interesting, and desperately needs a refresh. I really don't see what him going over Page does for anyone. As for Page, this was my first time seeing him live. The first few times I saw him, I wrote him off as a black hole of charisma. Recently, I stumbled upon the footage of Bullet Club invading Bar Wrestling, and as hokey as all the Joey Ryan stuff is, I remember thinking of Matt Striker/Stryker and wondering if there were two DIFFERENT wrestlers named Adam Page. Just night and day from everything I saw before that. This got me to start watching BTE, and I've been enjoying him showing some personality on there. I think the tricky thing about trying to judge the WWE viability of gaijin wrestlers in NJPW is the fact that they don't have that many opportunities to have singles matches, or to cut promos. He's definitely delivered in his first G1. There was a short segment tonight, where he had Yoshi down and was sort of kicking/toying with him, but live it came off more like he didn't know what to do, and they definitely lost the crowd for a moment. So--he's still putting it together, but I think in another 2-3 years, he'll be a better version of Seth Rollins.
-Suzuki/Fale: They lost me here. What's the point of having a faction, when you're facing a group whom you KNOW is going to cheat, and your other 2 boys who already had their match earlier in the night don't run out to prevent a 3 on 2 beatdown? Ridiculous.
-Evil/White: Both guys continue to grow on me, and this was cool up until the end. Evil came off like a dope when he got the chair from Jay and teased using it. Yeah, he was mathematically eliminated, but he was playing spoiler to Jay. Why would he risk getting DQed?
-Main event was a good one. This was my second time seeing these two face off live (first was Wrestle Kingdom 9). The crowd was nearly unanimously in support of Tanahashi. I feel like Gedo must be in denial, which is why he wasn't at ringside. The story I took from it worked, though--Tana only needed a draw to win the block, but the Ace doesn't go for a draw. He aggressively pursued a win--Okada coming out and sort of big-timing Tana, combined with the 30-minute time limit, made this a real uphill battle for him. I think this was the best way to get Tana to the finals without hurting Okada. Side note--Red Shoes is HORRENDOUS. I was having flashbacks to early ROH Sean Hanson. He's not as bad on TV, where he's not in every shot. But when you're there live--there were times in the match where it was impossible to follow the action because he was just so distracting. I don't understand how he's still a thing.
For those who enjoy looking at ticket sales: I bought tickets for tonight's and tomorrow night's shows just this past Monday. I was able to get A block seats in the 7th row of the 100 level, just to the side of the hard cam--terrific seats. For B block, I was only able to get 200 level standing room tickets. Sunday show was completely sold out. Saturday seems like it will be as well. Tonight, though--the floor was full (although they could have easily put down another 3-5 rows of chairs on all each of the 4 sides), but there were 3-4 entire sections upstairs that were 100% empty. Also, the last 4-5 rows of EVERY 100 and 200 section were empty. Nowhere near a sellout tonight. Granted, it would have looked better in Kokugikan, where there are 3,000+ fewer seats. But I'm not sure how much the difference has to do with Friday vs Saturday, or the weak A block vs the stronger B block. Just something to chew on.
