SEGUNDA CAIDA DECLARES WAR!!! NJPW 10/23/92

This card was the beginning of the WAR v. NJ feud and had the frantic riot feel that you would want an inter-promotional blood feud to have.

Akitoshi Saito v. Masao Orihara

PAS: This is a young gun v. young gun match to open the feud and was a total barnburner. Saito will always be known as the guy who killed Misawa, which is a shame because he has had a great under the radar resume of matches. The crowd is a GOP Debate audience (pro-WAR..yeah daddy I gots the jokes), and they want the heads of the karate army. It is worked kicker vs. grappler and both guys do an amazing job of getting that across. Orihara is desperately grabbing for leglocks and suplexes, while Saito is kicking his lungs out. They never seem to be fulling cooperating with each other which adds to the match, I don't want good execution, I want this to feel like the end fight of a kung fu movie. Great in ring acting from both guys, Orihara comes off desperate and bought in, this is life and death for him, while Saito is great as the emotionless killing machine. Wrestling rarely has this kind of intense sentiment from a crowd anymore and it can make an average match great, and a good match epic. The same match hold for hold would have been a nifty undercard match on a WAR card. You put it in this Korakuen, on this night and it is a truly memorable piece of history.

ER: Damn Saito has just always been this size, hasn't he. He probably weighed 240 as a 12 year old. Both men are shaved head punks here, Saito yet to grow out his bleach blonde mullet and Orihara yet to disgrace his family by becoming a yakuza button man. And I love this type of match, where some shots miss, and then other shots hit so hard and so awkwardly that you swear it's real. The crowd is crazy hot for this, at one point cutting to a tiny man angrily flipping off the ring, which is not something you really see in Japan. I love these types of matches, they feel like they could end at any time. Every time Orihara leaps on Saito with a sleeper, or Saito plants his heel into Orihara's dome feels like a potential ending with legions of jogging suits and karate gis waiting to swarm. Inter-promotional stuff with karate guys always seems to add even more of an edge, as you already have wrestling promotions feuding, but then it adds this whole new level of wrestling vs. "real" fighting and the fans always seem to get up in an electric lather for all of it.

SEGUNDA CAIDA DECLARES WAR

Read more!

MLJ: Cavernario vs Titan 2: Cavernario, Euforia, Mr. Niebla vs Máximo, Titán, Valiente

Aired 2014-07-19
Taped 2014-07-15 @ Arena México
Cavernario, Euforia, Mr. Niebla vs Máximo, Titán, Valiente

If the trios with Blue Panther and Cachorro leaned gallant, this leaned goofus. It was the following Friday from the previous match with Felino subbed out and Euforia subbed in. CMLL does that all the time, just mixing and matching their rudo factions, but it felt particularly odd here. To be honest, Euforia didn't really do much so it hardly mattered (which was especially damning since he and Valiente got the focus of the finish).

Structurally, this actually had a lot going for it. There were two heat segments, one in the primera with a cut off with a comeback that let the tecnicos go over and then from the end of the segunda into the tercera which lead on towards the finish. Despite Cavernario's intensity, and Maximo and Titan generally being sympathetic, it was hard to take any of it seriously though. Matches with Niebla spanking Maximo are generally not the ones to utilize a double heat format on. While double heat generally means double comebacks as well, this was a match that needed much more in the way of shine.

Instead, it started with a rudo ambush, including Zacarias doing the 619. Cavernario's great in this role. He charged in with his staff and stomped away. It's also not a bad role for Niebla. He's good at crowd control and has those big, broad strikes. It's just when he does anything else that any possible meaning gets pissed down the drain. The comeback came with a Maximo butt spot, one of Valiente's huge Jim-Neidhart shaped topes, and Titan doing the handstand backflip headscissors cradle, again. Twice in two weeks was probably a bad choice for that move. It's just too contrived to do too often.

We did get some of that shine at the beginning of the segunda, with the tecnicos going vs the world. The crowed wanted absolutely zero of it though. Even Maximo, who was usually over, was getting boos. Niebla was more than happy to do the cheer-off with Titan and this time, there was no Blue Panther to turn the crwod back. Instead, Titan did some backflips, a headscissors, and then a pose, and the crowd booed the hell out of him. Maybe a pose wasn't the right move there.

What was the right move was this really cool reverse monkey flip backflip thing. That was pretty cool:

Which leads us to this apron ddt spot, which (and hey, maybe Titan and Cavenario do this a dozen times and I just don't know it yet) would be one of the spots of the year, easily, if not for the fact it didn't even end the frigging fall. It was too big a spot to use in the middle of such a throwaway match like this. At the least they should have saved it for their title match. Geez:

After that, Niebla would pull Maximo around by his hair and spank him. Great tonal cohesion there. A submission on Maximo followed shortly thereafter, with (of course) Cavernario back up to beat on Titan. I'm pretty certain Titan was double crotched on the outside by Niebla and Cavernario which led to him being counted out.

I do think that Niebla helped Cavernario a lot one with one aspect of his game, namely the playing to the crowd. Cavernario is so over the top and into his character and if I tried to capture all of his flourishes and temper tantrums, we'd have twenty gifs. There's a limit to the effectiveness of this though, and Niebla doesn't know the first thing about limits.

Instead I'm going to post a couple of gifs from the tercera, which had some of the fun, tecnicos heavy spirit that the match should have had more of (after Cavernario missed a corner charge which let Valiente come back).

This great monkey flip:

and this pretty clever Kiss of Death:

All that led to tandem topes by Maximo and Titan, which was to set up Valiente vs Euforia A blatant (frustrated) foul by Euforia led to the mostly unsatisfying DQ. It led to a trios defense and a singles match, but the focus was off earlier in the match to make it mean anything here. Titan was fine, dynamic, with the apron DDT being an amazing spot (albeit one that wasn't worth nearly as much as it should have been), but he sure was illiterate when it came to reading the crowd.

Read more!