Block A: Karl Anderson vs. Prince Devitt
Hey, this was pretty fun. Remember my review of the Anderson/Tanahashi match? Well, go back to that, replace Tanahashi's name with Devitt's, and have Anderson lose, and you've basically got my review of this match. The structure is pretty much identical, though Devitt brings more to the table in terms of nifty-looking offense than Tanahashi does, giving this match a slight edge over it's predecessor. And that's all I've got to say about that.
Block B: Yuji Nagata vs. Giant Bernard
These are two guys I like who underwhelmed me on Night 1. Tonight, they did a pretty good job of redeeming themselves, though things definitely were falling apart near the end. Match is set up as an "anything you can do, I can do better" sort of story, opening with Bernard doing a rolling sobat off of a rope break (yes, really...it wasn't the best you'll ever see, but I was amused by him doing it) and Nagata responding in kind. From there, it's all about armwork. Nagata looks good kicking the shit out of Bernard's arm, but when Bernard takes over, he is just king-sized. His Rocker Dropper to the arm ruled it, as did his headbutts to the arm. His headbutts in general are really good, which I haven't noticed before. Probably his best striking move. For a guy who was always talked up on commentary in the WWF as having a really big head, you'd think he'd have taken advantage of that more. Bernard ends up lariating a ringpost on the outside, which was appropriately nasty, and control bounces back and forth for a while. At some point, the arm work is largely dropped. Bernard gets Nagata in a Nagata Lock II, but Nagata counters into an ankle lock, and I have a Vietnam flashback. This is about where things started going awry, unsurprisingly, as it reverts to kind of a standard NJ heavyweight match. Bernard goes for a piledriver, and Nagata gets all the way up for it before Bernard has to let go because his arm hurts too much. Nagata tries to take the advantage with a high kick, but Bernard ducks it, and suddenly his arm doesn't hurt anymore, as he hits the Baldo Bomb without any problem. Nagata kicks out and into a jujigatame, which was pretty cool. There are some strike exchanges, and Bernard hits a crappy-looking Bernard Driver for the win, ending things before I totally lose interest in the match. Contrast it with....
Block B: Wataru Inoue vs. Go Shiozaki
....this match, which also starts out strong - stronger, in fact - but ends up wearing out it's welcome down the stretch. It's a real heartbreaker. I was all ready to tell you guys that the G1 actually had a match you needed to go out of your way to see, and then it up and dies at about the half-way mark. Like Anderson/Devitt, it retained the formula of one of the previous night's matches - in this case, Go's faux Akiyama "higher ranked dude whups on lower ranked dude who wants to show him up" match. The difference is that while Yujiro Takahashi was just kinda good as the lower-ranked guy, Inoue decides he's going to completely redeem himself after his shittacular performance against Giant Bernard by totally ruling it in that role. The bell rings, and Inoue just runs up and blasts Go with an elbowsmash. Go isn't taking that shit, and they have a brief strike exchange, but Inoue ends up winning that and sending Go outside. There, we get the awesome moment of Go briefly retaking control and trying to chop Inoue against the ringpost, but Inoue dodges and Go smashes his hand into the steel. Inoue takes full advantage of this as you might imagine. I dug him engaging in chop battles with Go, knowing that even with an injured hand, he wouldn't be able to resist throwing chops after Inoue chopped him. Go sells the injured hand after each chop, while Inoue does the great Ode to Tenryu selling the pain of the chop but smirking and brushing off his chest like it was nothing. Of course, Go gets the upper-hand in time. The injured hand story gets dropped, but not in a particularly jarring or unnatural way, and I'm too busy focusing on Go's beatdown to be bothered by it. Go tries to tear him in half with a series of abdominal stretch variations, drops him throat-first on the guardrail, and hits a nasty second-rope kneedrop, all while carrying himself as a total arrogant dick. Inoue starts to make a comeback, ducking a chop while running the ropes and coming back with an elbow that floors Go. And now things start to fall apart. Inoue gets Go in an octopus hold, grabbing one of his own feet to...ummm...alleviate pressure on Go's neck? And hey, strike exchanges! Not very good ones, either! Like the previous match, it builds me up with great implementation of one formula, only to fall back on weakly implemented generic NJ heavyweight STRONG STYLE in the end. Unfortunately, these guys have a bit more time to fill than those guys did, which makes it all weigh a bit heavier on me. Inoue performs the least likely takedown into a strangle hold alpha ever. On his back, he grabs Go's arm, pulls him down a bit, and then hooks his ankle over Go's neck to flip him over into the strangle hold. This might work in wrestling physics were it not for the fact that Inoue's ankle slips off of Go's neck before he flips over, Go stumbles a bit and fails to flip over when he's supposed to, or both, depending on how you look at it. However you do, it kinda exposed how silly a spot that Solar I and Negro Navarro could have done in their sleep was. Anyway, more strike exchanges, Go Flasher, next.
Block B: Yujiro Takahashi vs. Satoshi Kojima
Wait, did I say next? I was just kidding. Seriously. Please, go back to Go and Inoue noodling around some more.
No? Oh, alright. This match was ass. Like Wataru in the previous match, Yujiro wastes no time taking advantage of his higher-ranked opponent, rushing the ring and very gently placing the toe of his boot against Kojima's stomach. This proves a surprisingly effective strategy, giving Yujiro the upper hand. Kojima eats his mild beatdown well enough, I suppose. He works over the lariat arm and acts like a dick, but I've already seen enough people work body parts and act like dicks WELL in this tournament that Yujiro can't just appeal to novelty here. He cranked in the figure-four armlock well enough, I suppose. All of his strikes looked like shit, though. Speaking of shitty striking, Kojima goes on offense, and I think we may have to put him into the discussion of guys with the worst punches in wrestling today. He's definitely not the worst. He's not aiming six inches above his opponent's head like Abyss. But he is aiming just over, resulting in less of a punch and more of a very broad-stroked noogie. Other than that, he basically looks OK, but it's nothing to write home about. In fact, shitty noogie punches aside, I don't really have anything to say about the match once Kojima goes on offense. So let's cut to the finishing stretch. Yujiro no-sells a DDT for some reason. It doesn't quite work out for him, though. Then we get the one actual cool segment of the match, as Kojima goes to pull off his elbowpad for the lariat, but Yujiro leaps in from off-camera and spears him, and then hits a boss looking deadlift German suplex for a two-count. Then it's back to sucking for a little bit longer before Kojima hits the inevitable lariat (after struggling to pull off his elbowpad...I'm surprised Yujiro didn't manage to spear him again) for the win. Next.
Block A: Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Strongman
NO! NO! I DIDN'T MEAN IT! I SWEAR I DIDN'T MEAN IT! LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT! I WANNNA GO HOME!
*seven hours of open weeping and six minutes of watching this match later*
You know what's weird about wrestling as a medium? You know, besides "everything"? It's a medium that doesn't lend itself well to the whole "so bad it's good" phenomenon. It's probably because it's such a low artform (indeed, you may consider wrestling in it's entirety to be "so bad it's good") that to make it any worse than it's baseline level of quality inevitably makes it unbearable. But there are a few exceptions, and I would dare say this match is actually one of them. The match is structured alright. It's basically worked like the first Cena/Khali match. Unfortunately, Tanahashi makes for a really shitty Cena stand-in. He stops Strongman at the beginning of the match to challenge Strongman to a brief pose-off. It's a good stock spot that should be funny, but I get no laughs from Tanahashi's delivery. But then Strongman gives his own pose in response, and I laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and come to the horrible realization that my enjoyment of this match is going to be entirely in his hands. Seriously, Tanahashi contributes nothing but a warm body here. He really falls flat playing Cena. But Strongman as Khali? Well, he's more mobile, and he has better looking offense (at least in this match), but whereas Khali still can come off as imposing and scary, Strongman is just absurd. Usually, that absurdity drags his matches down, but here, it actually elevated it to "guilty pleasure" status. The match is mostly just Tanahashi bouncing off of Strongman while Strongman yells things and makes funny faces. The action is pretty bad, of course. Everything about this match is pretty bad. But Strongman's badness is spectacular. I love how the first part of the match is just him pushing Tanahashi and sending him flying across the ring everytime he charges him. I love his ludicrous wobbly selling for Tanahashi when he starts to gain an advantage, made all the better as Tanahashi takes his sweet time following up, forcing Strongman to just keep doing it forever as he tries to figure out his next move. I love his expression of severe constipation while he's being pinned after the High Fly Flow. None of this is any good at all, but I would rather watch Strongman's nonsense here than Tanahashi against a lot of other shitty workers or dragging down better ones. Strongman as the Torgo of professional wrestling is something I can get behind.
Block A: Togi Makabe vs. Toru Yano
Now here's a match that was so bad it was just really, really bad. In the previous show, I called Yano a poor man's Togi Makabe, but he may have actually outworked the real deal here. Well, "outworked" is probably the wrong term. Yano was better than average, which is still pretty bad. Makabe just happened to be worse than that. This is the third match of the night that started with one guy rushing the other at or before the bell. It's a good way to open a match, but three times in one night? Yano did a better rushing job than Yujiro, but Makabe was a really shitty rushee. Posing on the second rope, he gets elbowed in the back, carefully climbs down, and then slumps over. I guess he's all healed up from last night's internal injuries. Then absolutely nothing of interest happens pretty much until the end of the match. There is a cute spot where Makabe is going for a German suplex, and Yano grabs the ref by the belt, but the ref slaps him in the face to break it. Of course, Yano already had the ropes before that. Not sure why he thought the belt would more likely get him the break, but there you go. The ref gets knocked out near the end, and Yano tries to bonk Makabe with a chair, but Makabe blocks it by lariating the chair over Yano's head, which still puts him down somehow. The ref gets back up too late to count the three, so Makabe hits a few more lariats - ones which actually do connect - before Yano ducks one and grabs some kind of cradle for the fluke win. Yay.
Block B: Hirooki Goto vs. Shinsuke Nakamura
By this point, the show had a lot to make up for, but they totally did. For whatever else you might say about the man, Goto's robe is pretty choice. Nakamura looks like he's strung out on something, but unlike last night, he didn't wrestle like it. Perfunctory opening matwork was perfunctory, but at least it looked good. Looked like guys actually fighting to gain an advantage instead of dispassionate chain wrestling for the sake of chain wrestling. But then they start brawling on the outside, and the fight begins in earnest. Also beginning in earnest: Nakamura kneeing the fuck out of Goto. Nakamura proved in the Nagata match that the Boma Ye can look good even when he's working on auto-pilot. Here, he's actually into the match, and he is just killing Goto with these things. Goto makes his comeback, and we eventually get a token strike exchange. It's not bad, though it's about as unremarkable as most New Japan strike exchanges, but the way they get out of it was actually really cool and made it worthwhile. Goto comes out on top after a big lariat, then tries for another one, but Nakamura boots his arm and tries for a rolling jujigatame. They fight over it, but Goto pulls a Michael Hayes and stomps Nakamura in the face to keep him from locking it in, which was awesome. The match is basically a great back-and-forth fight from this point out. After some of the previous matches, I was kinda waiting for this to just break down into a mess, but it never really happened. I think the closest it came was a spot where Nakamura escaped a suplex, booted Goto in the back of the knee to hobble him, and then Boma Ye'd him in the back of the head. Goto sold the hit to the knee pretty well, but once he was on his knees, he had this sort of unremarkable look on his face, like he felt fine and was probably aware enough of his surroundings to not just stay there on his knees while his opponent was right behind him, poised to strike. But that's a bit of a nitpick, and the Boma Ye to the back of his head did look really nasty. And I'd be remiss not to mention the finish: Goto tries to suplex Nakamura, Nak knees him in the head to escape, throws a high kick, Goto catches it, and then debuts his newest finisher, taking him down into a cross-legged stepover toehold, rolling it over like Charly Manson's finisher, and then rolling it over again into a pinning combination to score an unexpectedly luchariffic win. And well, "unexpected" kinda sums up this whole match. I'm not really a big Goto fan, Nakamura totally dogged it the previous night against Nagata, and every other half-decent match tonight died on the vine or at least started dying before it was over. But this was a legit great match, and a great way to close a show that was all over the map pain-wise.
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