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NJPW G1 Climax 28, LIVE AT THE BUDOKAN! 7/14-8/12


Raziel

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Really does seem set up for Evil, who has had no real moment this G1, to spoil things for White, so that Okada can dismiss his draw syndrome against Tana. Okada/Ibushi would be nuts, with either a viable winner. But I’m not certain yet. Like @Tromatagon is suggesting, I could easily see White “helping” his faction mate, and “accidentally” ensuring whichever result he needs. (Or maybe even interfering if he loses, hoping to at least win the battle for CHAOS’ soul.)

Anyway, I’m glad I did watch today. Overwhelmingly simple, single arc matches, the sort of thing you’d call great tv matches if there were a Raw equivalent in Japan. Suzuki worked about the most compelling and generous match possible for a guy committed to taking zero bumps, and Page (again) got the crowd; Makabe can still thrive in a scenario where you really want him to club someone, and Jay is remarkably clubbable; Elgin is physically capable of whatever you want, and Tana’s a genius who kept things to one near fall (credit to Elgin for the selling @sevendaughters noted, however); I liked Okada and Evil calling back last year’s upset, with Okada ready to counter everything this time. This was a satisfying day of salad, lean protein, and black coffee after yesterday’s indulgence—not the sort of thing you crave but good and necessary. 

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Suzuki's hips have to be in such fucking horrid shape from the constant side bumps he prefers to take. That leaves me wondering if he prefers to constantly land on his hips (ouch), what shape his actual spine/back must be in... :( Maybe he's particularly beat-up right now but he's noticeably slower this year than he was last and bumping even less now. I mean, he's 50, I get it... but it's definitely a thing. When did he start only bumping on his sides? I just gleaned through some of his 2015 NOAH matches as well as the AJ G1 match and, boy, he rarely bumped even back then and when he did it was on his side usually. Holy shit, he was doing it in the 2012 King of Pro-Wrestling Tanahashi classic too. Tana hit the inverted dragon screw there as well and that set-up the rest of his offense focusing on Suzuki's leg. Fuck, that match is so great!

And totally agree with the both of youz, Ibushi/Okada would be the best final available but there is like a 5% chance (don't question my maths please) of Ibushi winning that match. Most interesting yet least compelling final possible if that makes sense. White/Ibushi would probably be a considerably weaker match than either Okada or Tanahashi facing Ibushi but a far more intriguing match because I'd think Ibushi would win to set-up the Golden Lovers rematch at the biggest stage, but then there's what Meltzer claimed on WOR the other day: an unwillingness to have somebody not under a standard contract winning the biggest tournament of the year. Do we know for sure he isn't under a standard contract? He's only worked for NJPW, ROH, and RPW this year and that's it. He's already been in 39 matches this year, which is usually what he works for NJPW in a whole calendar year previously.

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According to Wikipedia (yeah) Kota’s still technically a freelancer; that fits with Naito joking about “Professor Ibushi”, since the home “promotion” he created in 2016 is the Ibushi Wrestling Research Institute. It appears he and New Japan would be common law married, but he’s not willing to commit to a ring and a wedding. Maybe that does rule him out of any truly big wins, though I hope not.

The “reading WAY too much into things” worry I’d have about going back to Okada/Omega so soon is I don’t see why you do it unless Okada wins this time; and I don’t see why you do that unless Kenny’s actually debuting at the Rumble this time, and everyone already knows. He gets his title run, the biggest Ibushi match New Japan will allow, and puts (back) over the generational ace on his way out. (Also breaks the briefcase curse.) I’d prefer this not happen... though again... way ahead of myself.

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The Bucks were at the NEW baseball stadium show last night and were talking about doing All In 2 in NY. Let that calm your mind for the time being. Oooor is it a cryptic hint that they'll all be in "New York", as in what some professional wrestlers would call the World Wrestling Federation back in the day?! I'll have to continue my work on the matter back at the Ibushi Wrestling Research Institute's Vancouver branch! There's no time to waste, Robin! 

tumblr_okdsbhIYwo1toamj8o1_500.gif

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I have no idea why the Young Bucks would want to go to WWE at this point, essentially throwing away the infrastructure they have built to support themselves as Indy Superstars. 

Vince doesn't care about tag-team wrestling. Trips is probably a bit more into it, but they essentially look like 205 Live guys. There isn't really a spot for them on the main rosters.

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Yes, Okada/Ibushi sounds very obvious (teased it a lot during NJ Cup and even before Dominion) with very obvious outcome. But do we have any reason to expect something else? Lets not forget that during his entire career Okada was either the champ during G1 or won G1.

And he is fixing his past problems. Last two matches with Suzuki ended in draws, he won now. Last year Evil dropped him in Osaka, he won now. Previous two times he wrestled Tanahashi in G1 they ended both times with draws. This year draw is enough for Tanahashi to win the block so obviously Okada is going to win and show that he can beat Tanahashi in under 30 minutes.

After he wins G1 he will probably get a defence against White which will result in either White getting thrown out of Chaos or being put in his place. Loss to Fale probably won't be addressed because nobody cares and it was likely done to kinda keep them as "rivals" in kayfabe. At the WK he will avenge his loss to Omega and at the same time will break the G1 curse. In other words, Gedo's quest to make Okada greatest thing ever continues.

Thinking back to last year, asides of match quality in general being better, I think that what was exciting (at least to me) about whole thing was that it looked like we are going to get a shake-up with Naito's ascent. Except nothing happened in the end and it looks like this year we are going to get basically a confirmation that everyone is here only to make Okada look good. And I imagine nothing is going to change as long as business will be growing/doing fine.

And it sounds very depressing so I hope that I'm wrong and something different happens. I'd really love for something different to happen.

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Continuing your point: I voiced my dubious reading of the “Okada wins” tea leaves to a friend who is still a bit mad about Naito losing at WK, and his reply was, “It’s nice that you think they need a reason for Okada to win.” So, yeah. You’ve got a point that we perhaps shouldn’t expect anything other than the Guy Who Wins to win. 

If he does, though, I hope there’s more than just a return to form. Having a goofball balloon party over Summer Break, winning a bunch anyway, and then just winning more... I mean the matches will be great, and I’ll find a lot to like. But I’d like it more if there were real adversity and change.

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Meltzer and Alvarez are hand wringing over the dangers in Ibushi/Naito and Omega/Ishii. Alvarez has been on this train of thought for a long time now, so I don't really have a problem with that but Meltzer doing a half-assed 180 on this only after Hiromu damn near breaks his neck and then saying there wasn't much difference between Naito/Omega and Ishii/Omega in terms of quality is just (admittedly he did say, in the end, that Omega/Ishii was the match of the tournament so far)... Oh boy. Mouths get busted open all of the time in wrestling, especially when you're working snug and aiming to have a legendary match in this style. I had little to no problem with the physicality of that match. I do wish Ibushi would stop trying to kill people with spike moves and Naito to stop taking insane bumps so high on his head and shoulders though, so I get it. Alvarez compared the Ibushi German suplex landing to the Hiromu injury spot. Huh? It was an awful landing and not unlike the one at the gaming convention but nothing like landing directly on the top of his head.

I honestly do not see how anyone can compare the Naito match to the Ishii match straight faced. Like, not even in the same realm. I guess if you take the emotion out of it and just look at move execution? I mean, the man's shoulder was up! And they botched a leap frog!

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EVIL is the logical inheritor of Choshu-ism and there's nothing wrong with that. The boy is stocky. Watching him throw a Rainmaker better than any I've seen from Okada this tournament (side note: why does the Rainmaker look worse now) makes me wish he'd pick up either a lariat-variant finisher or something simple he can spam.

Maybe Papa Kojima can give him some tips on the ways of Main Event Lariato Puroresss.

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I was confused watching that match and how it finished. He was all ambiguous in his post-match interview from Saturday about how... HE HAD SOMETHING NEW FOR US. And then he didn't? Did I miss something? I wasn't really paying attention much to this show, admittedly. First of the G1 shows where I was completely disinterested. I'll give it a proper watch in a bit.

I know he's been talking about wanting to shift perceptions of faction leaders and so on, but I dunno. He's obviously a very smart worker but he is missing a few things, different things than SANADA, that keep him from having consistently excellent matches in my book. It's not his look, or just his look, either. Don't get me wrong, after that Okada match from last August, I am all aboard the King of Darkness Express (see below) but he's not quite there. 

King of Darkness Express:

Spoiler

Image result for gothic tour bus

without the Sabbath text of course.

Dream scenario: Shingo Takagi leaves DG and signs with NJPW as a freelancer. Shingo and Evil destroy the world (or just the tag division) as stocky short guys with funny hair while EVIL figures out what he's missing.

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38 minutes ago, Oyaji said:

. Oh boy. Mouths get busted open all of the time in wrestling, especially when you're working snug and aiming to have a legendary match in this style. I had little to no problem with the physicality of that match.

 

FWIW, my reaction to the end of the match wasn't "OMG" or "YES!", it was "yikes, that was a bit much" after what felt like downright dangerous strikes.  Kenny turning over with what looked like his lip torn kinda pulled me out of the moment, which is a shame as I was rather into the match (it was a pretty swell match) up until then.  It wasn't so over the top that I can't see why a different watcher wouldn't mind, but... yeah, it was a bit much and they should probably pull back a bit, it's not like the match would have suffered if he didn't stiff the fuck out of him at the end.

 

Naito should never let Ibushi german suplex him again, it just seems to go poorly more often than not.

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I didn't think Omega/Ishii seemed any more dangerous than any of those guys's other big matches.

Naito/Ibushi, on the other hand, was straight-up idiotic. Probably not all that much more idiotic than some other recent NJ matches, but still really dumb.

I mean, at a certain point you have to ask: if you're ALLOWED to just pick someone up and drop them right on top of their head like that, why doesn't every wrestler do it all the time? Why powerbomb someone on their back when you can spike them on their neck with impunity? Obviously that's not a New-Japan-specific question, but my point is that when head drops are done sparingly enough, you can ward that question off and suspend disbelief. A match like Naito/Ibushi makes that impossible for me. But I know I'm in a small minority on that.

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Unfortunately most of the Naito/Ibushi matches at some point devolve into scary bombfests. Which is rather unfortunate. And I'm sure that Omega/Ibushi will suffer the same fate.

Anyway, some other things that get little attention due to bigger things happening:

Kenny was very serious about his match with Yano. From what I understand he'd want something like Goto match where Goto just murdered Yano in 2 minutes. And I guess this might end up costing him the match because you can't really treat Yano seriously, but you can't treat him as a joke either... which sounds complicated, but Yano is complicated. On the other hand this might mean nothing at all since Omega sometimes talks stuff that doesn't really have much to do with reality.

Jay White was complaining in his post match interviews that there are no chairs and he has to sit on the ground. After victory against Makabe one of the interviewers brought him the chair. He thanked him, but ended up standing thru whole interview. Jay gets his character, like really really gets it. He just needs to make his ring work a bit more diverse and he'll be great.

Naito and Sanada bumped fists finally which resulted in short "indie standoff". I assume that this would have happened too if Sanada bumped fists on first night as well so Naito is probably happy that Sanada ignored him for so long.

After Fale/Yoshi match Tama put his hands on one of the fans. Initial assumption was that this was a plant to get more heat for Tama, but there were lots of claims that he wasn't a plant... which probably is a confirmation that he indeed was a plant. But time will tell I guess.

In Tokyo sports interview Naito hinted that if he wins G1 then he'd like to defend his briefcase against Jericho. Naito's chances of winning in my opinion are slim since it would require Yano over Omega and a draw between Omega and Ibushi and then in the finals beat the guy who just wins because he wins a lot. On the other hand Naito is their most popular guy so it probably can't be ruled out till someone else gets his hand raised.

I guess in theory this could work: KoPW Naito gets his win back from Jericho, Power Struggle Jericho beats Evil and at WK it is either Jericho/Okada or Jericho/Tahanashi for IC title. And I checked his Fozzy touring dates, he would be open for KoPW and PS. But as I said, very slim chance on that happening.

And if Naito isn't winning G1 then I think I'd prefer if Sanada won their match. At least that could go somewhere new.

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Jay manhandling the camerawoman Saturday definitely felt like it went too far, which I guess is the point. Glad to hear he did exactly what he should've when his demands were finally met though. 

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Naito as the jilted genius who the fans utterly rejected once before, so he now proclaims he doesn’t care, even while they adore him and he whispers under his breath “i would die 4 u”, and then he tries, again and again... on the one hand I find that incredibly compelling subtext; but on the other, it’s subsubsub, requires an in-text acknowledgement of bumping, and is stupid dangerous for a guy who couldn’t need to do it less. So, not worth it.

Ishii wouldn’t be Ishii if he didn’t work (and get worked) the stiff side of snug, on the other hand, and he’s clearly made his headbutts way safer, doesn’t murder anyone with his brainbuster, etc. Certainly wrestling him is not a healthy life choice, but I think it says something that Omega and others always single him out as a favorite to work with. Not that people can’t be self-destructive, or that wrestlers will necessarily select a style that perfectly balances safety and compelling violence—but for me, this scale tips the right way.

I still have zero clue what happens with Jericho. Maybe he’d be best against White, since they could actually trade English promos and a wild brawl would hide that neither is ideally suited for a 25-minute New Japan main event right now. 

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23 minutes ago, sevendaughters said:

just rewatched Kenny-Ishii. feel confident about top 10 of all time for me. the real pick-up spot is the build out of the bit where Kenny is repeatedly V-Triggering a kneeling Ishii, who hulks up.

At the risk of leading the thread a little off track (but we've got a couple days): What does the rest of that top ten look like?

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21 hours ago, Beech27 said:

At the risk of leading the thread a little off track (but we've got a couple days): What does the rest of that top ten look like?

oooh off the top of my head

  • Masakatsu Funaki vs. Tatsuo Nakano, UWF Fighting Square Hakata, 1989
  • Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart, WWE Wrestlemania X, 1994
  • Mitsuharu Misawa & Kenta Kobashi vs. Holy Demon Army (Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue), AJPW Super Power Series, 1995
  • Rey Mysterio Jr. vs. Juventud Guerrera, ECW Big Ass Extreme Bash, 1996
  • Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin, WWE Wrestlemania 13, 1997
  • Mankind vs. The Undertaker, WWE King of the Ring, 1998
  • Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, RINGS Fourth Fighting Integration, 1998
  • Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Minoru Suzuki, NJPW King of Pro-Wrestling, 2012
  • Katsuyori Shibata vs. Kazuchika Okada, NJPW Sakura Genesis, 2017
  • Tomohiro Ishii vs. Kenny Omega, NJPW G1 Climax Day 14, 2018

a few notes

i. yes, it is 1990s heavy. that's when i was watching the most live or those were the tapes i got from the bootlegger.
ii. i really haven't watched enough classic lucha libre to comment on the great matches. it's a huge blind spot and i think it's a future region to go in on.
iii. this is culled from about 40-50 matches that i would go the full five on. i don't want to bore you by writing them all out. there are a lot of the classic matches that people claim to be five stars (HBK v Ramon ladder, Kawada v Misawa 6/3/94, Kenny/Okada 2/3 falls) and some that people don't usually (Danielson v Doi from a random-ass DG USA show! Canis Lupus v Trauma from an IWRG show in 2016 where Trauma gets his head beaten in, loses his mask, and then proposes to his girlfriend! this one Dump Matsumoto tag match where she canes the cameraman!).
iv. whilst i am a fan/stan of a lot of the 2000s: Zero1, NOAH's classic run, Inokiism-era NJPW, early-split AJPW, the Smackdown Six, U-Style, Big Mouth Loud, etc., and have favourites from all these eras, I don't think anything quite cracks the 5 star mark.
v. most importantly of all, star ratings are inherently stupid
vi. like, how do I compare Tamura-TK to Mankind-Undertaker? they are as far removed as possible. all I can say is that they are the most incredible and powerful examples of their kind.
vii. also i mean it's a storytelling art on some level so i respect wrestlers who are not going for best match ever more than i ever did, wrestling needs Toru Yanos and George The Animal Steeles.
viii. as appertains to this thread however i think that the last 5 years of New Japan has a ridiculous amount of very very good matches and would go 5 for Tana-Naka G1 final, Ishii-Shibata 2013, Ishii-Tanahashi 2013, Suzuki-AJ, probably more besides.
ix. sometimes a match can provoke some really interesting thoughts in me without being this kind of high level match: two that spring immediately to mind are Hulk Hogan vs. The Genius on a Saturday Night Main Event which is an absolutely perfect example of what it is, and also Naoya Ogawa vs. Dan Severn from some random ass NWA show in Texas during Ogawa's title run. It isn't a perfect match but they sort of suggest a style of wrestling that could have been, like a rugged heavyweight shoot-style/strong-style hybrid? the kind of thing Timothy Thatcher is grasping for basically with less World of Sportism.
x. please share your thoughts and feel free to @ me!

 

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Another interesting thing, to me, that makes it hard to really pinpoint the notion of "best" (aside from the inherent difficulty in comparing vastly different styles employed to vastly different ends) is I find there's often a gap between the things I tell people are my favorite matches/albums/movies/books/etc. and those I go back to the most--and I'm not sure that there's any hypocrisy there. That is, most rewatchable isn't necessarily best, though surely it must count for something--which brings us to another semantic distinction, that of favorite/best.

And of course circumstance matters a ton. I watched more wrestling about a decade ago than I do now, wrote up basically all of it in a doc file and then argued in the old puro thread. So I've got a connection to those matches I pitched and voted for that might not exist otherwise--I wonder, sometimes, if there's anyone else on earth who thinks about Mashimo & Madoka vs Teioh & Shinobu at least once a week, for instance. There are matches like Williams/Kobashi and KENTA/SUWA that I consider basically perfect but also act as mile-posts in my fandom, quick shots of violence like Tenryu/Hashimoto that I'll just keep rewatching forever (Ishii/Shibata and Ishii/Omega belong here too), and then the self-conscious epics like Omega/Okada and Okada/Shibata. And that's without touching on totally euphoric matches I saw live, that include the first Taker/HBK and (I'm counting it as one match) Bryan's WM30 coronation, but also a "War Games" (one cage only) match in my local national guard armory, back when Lawrence (seriously) had a regular indie drawing a few hundred people. It was as nostalgically southern as I've ever felt (or will feel), watching slightly fat middle aged men punch and bleed for 25 minutes. After, the top face emerged in a very unhappy state (there was a turn!), his loyal friend down in the ring receiving medical attention. My friend applauded, said "great match!" The guy shoved him to the ground and started screaming about how he didn't care if it was a great match, he'd just lost a friend to betrayal and might lose another tonight in the hospital, before realizing what he'd done, extending a bloodied hand and blubbering an apology. It was a "it's still real to me dammit" moment I'll carry around forever, though I literally cannot watch it again. (And I don't think I'd want to. The match probably isn't, y'know, "good"--but it was perfect.) 

So, yeah. Kudos on having the discipline to put together a list, and I've got a few things to watch tonight, probably instead of Raw. 

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2 hours ago, sevendaughters said:

and also Naoya Ogawa vs. Dan Severn from some random ass NWA show in Texas during Ogawa's title run. It isn't a perfect match but they sort of suggest a style of wrestling that could have been, like a rugged heavyweight shoot-style/strong-style hybrid? the kind of thing Timothy Thatcher is grasping for basically with less World of Sportism.

x. please share your thoughts and feel free to @ me!

That was a fun time/era for NWA Southwest

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Tama Tonga's in trouble for his social media and other stuff for being too much of an asshole. We'll see if anything comes of that or it's angle stuff. They don't really do that kind of angle with official statements though.

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