2015 Ongoing MOTY List: BJW Big Boys Go WAR

Twin Towers (Kohei Sato/Shuji Ishikawa) vs. Ryuichi Sekine/Ryuji Ito BJW 10/29

ER: What the hell took me so long to watch this match? This was the best WAR tag since WAR, a total baton pass that gets every damn thing right. They got a lumpy guy in Ishikawa, they got two different guys who throw hard kneelifts to the stomach, everyone throws a hard lariat, Sato throws a tough piledriver, everyone lands hard on every suplex, and these guys all take shots to every single part of their body. This was 17 minutes of breathless heavyweight tag wrestling, no wasted moments, always somebody eating a nasty shot or getting their neck twisted or getting slammed with someone's full weight. I kept waiting for this to come up for air, but they never did. We get a couple nasty trips tumbling and sliding through ringside chairs (always with nasty follow up attacks), constant hard clubbing arms, omnipresent kicks to the stomach, those knees from Sato kept making me want to barf, just total punishment. Sekine is the smallest guy in the match and tries to make up for that fact. He lands full weight on a top rope splash, and always voluntarily goes toe to toe with the Twin Towers, even when that ends up poorly for him more often than not. The long finishing stretch is Ishikawa and him throwing each other into chairs in increasingly painful ways, with Ishikawa dropping him with a side slam into a set up chair, and Ishikawa eating a superplex onto a stack of them. But much of the run was Ishikawa punishing heavyweight ways: an over shoulder piledriver, a high as hell angle powerbomb, a big lariat used as a killshot, making damn sure Sekine wasn't going to kick out. This is the kind of regularly surprising beating that would hold up in any era, really made every guy look like a cult legend.

PAS: This was a really good Big Japan Heavyweight tag, although lets pump the breaks a bit with the WAR comparisons, these guys are all good, but none of them are Takeshi Ishikawa, much less Tenryu. I always dug Sato in WAR and he is still a guy who will kick your lungs out, and Ishikawa is lumpy and nasty. Loved Sekine in this, really great underdog performance, I loved the spot where he squirmed his way out of a piledriver, only to deadlift Sato for a powerslam, I could hear the hernia's forming when he was squatting Sato. I really didn't like all of the chair stuff, didn't look particularly good, a couple of times guys were holding chairs waiting to be hit, and when guys are hitting this hard they don't need RVD spots. Finish run was really nasty with Ishikawa smushing Sekine and Sekine dying on his shield. Good stuff.


2015 MOTY MASTER LIST