Matches from NJPW G1 Climax 7/6/19

I didn't really plan to write this up, and likely won't write this up in full, but there are a couple intriguing on-paper match-ups that I might give dashed off live style reviews to.

Jeff Cobb/Ren Narita vs. Tomohiro Ishii/Shota Umino

ER: I don't think I've seen either Young Lion, but thought they were fine. Narita threw an unexpectedly nice belly to belly. Are Young Lions still only allowed to do dropkicks and elbows and boston crabs? It felt like these two did a lot more than that. Ishii looks really small here, and Cobb looks bigger than he's been. Ishii looks a little softer too, and it wouldn't be too shocking to find out he's got a zillion built up injuries that make intense workouts tough. Cobb's stop motion reverse back suplex is one of the most spectacular moves in wrestling. A lot of this doesn't quite work as Cobb/Ishii do several of their "we're standing and hitting each other hard" moments and Ishii just doesn't look like a guy hitting hard. This would have been more fun as two singles, give the young guys each a 5 minute match against a vet.

Lance Archer vs. Will Ospreay

ER: Archer is now cosplaying Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and his decades old bad lower back tattoo is slowly but surely morphing into just a full black backpiece. This match would have made for a really exciting series of GIFs, but I sadly had to watch the thing in real time. Archer is apparently a guy who moved tickets in the Dallas area, so this is his showcase match, and he showed me that he's still a guy who is really awful at getting into position for offense and still just stands their motionless waiting to receive offense. This happened the entire match, and it looked awful each time. There were a lot of cool moments, Ospreay is always going to have cool moments. But a ton of the moments required Archer to suddenly not be selling any kind of big move that he had just taken, just a constant stream of Archer popping up from a big move right away only to then stand still in place waiting for the next move. The timing is all sorts of wonky. Archer hit a boss chokeslam through a ringside table (killer height by Ospreay), there were a cool Ospreay code red in the aisle, Ospreay's springboard dropkick to Archer's face as Archer crawled back into the ring was awesome, and that's the thing: a lot of these moves looked awesome as long as you forced yourself to not think of the inorganic set-up. It would make for a sick 2 minute YouTube comp, if people still make those. Included in that compilation would be Ospreay making the dumbest "He kicked out at 2!?!?!? G-G-G-G-Ghostssssssssss!" face. What a goober. Archer won with a claw in Texas, and I will give them credit for that being cool. But I don't think even the claw is cool enough to make Archer look cool.

Bad Luck Fale vs. EVIL

ER: I am arguably the biggest fat guy wrestler torch bearers on the internet, but Fale is really a guy I struggle with. He is a not as good Kareem Muhammad, just an impossibly boring big fat guy. Here he's a giant fat guy who tries to win by count out (which is an amusing giant guy heel tactic) and tries to use chairs, while being the third most important and interesting person in the match. When you're less interesting than Marty Asami and EVIL, you done messed up. Asami is weirdly the focus of the entire match, as every spot is merely a set up for him to do some big bump across the ring, on the floor, or to the floor. Asami even refs the very next match, and doesn't oversell any of these actual attacks the way most refs do, so it literally just felt like a showcase for some of the big bumps Asami learned. EVIL hits a bunch of nice hard lariats and a cool headbutt, but Fale kind of only knows how to sell lariats by standing there and lightly swaying like a less impressive Giant Gonzalez. Not great.

Zack Sabre Jr. vs. SANADA

ER: Sanada is a NJ guy I really liked 2-3 years ago, whose stock has fallen the higher he moves up the card. He's a guy I liked in multimans and a guy I like much less in singles. But this one still jumped out on paper for me. It just didn't really live up to whatever hype I had for it. I think I fell for Sanada when I saw him in more multimans, when he came off like a throwback big bumping UPW wrestler. A guy without much offense but could take a couple bumps that looked heavier than they actually were. This was just him doing a bunch of mirror sequences with Sabre while Sabre mocked him in between mirror sequences. Don't get me wrong, I laughed several times at Sabre mocking him. But that's because Sanada looked like someone that should be mocked. The only interesting part of this was one of the stand and trade sections, where I thought all of the "fighting out of a straitjacket" submission stuff looked really great. The rest felt like Sabre leading Sanada through the same sequences that look better with other opponents. There were a couple cool reversals (I like uppercuts reversed into backslides, and I like backslides a lot in general), but the subs never went anywhere interesting and the finish felt like Sanada fell into a victory. Sabre was funny throughout the match, I liked him waiting to roll back into the ring at the 19 count, but it made Sanada like like a punk and the match didn't have enough good to override that.

KENTA vs. Kota Ibushi

ER: KENTA is not the guy people remembered from 10 years ago, and he was a flawed wrestler 10 years ago. Now he's a step slower and could still act like a dick, but he's never going to come off cool like Masa Fuchi, he's just going to come off like a junior who isn't as good at doing his same set of moves. KENTA looked out of shape and slow, and that's not a super interesting thing to see. Ibushi had some real nice sells of KENTA's stuff, he can really class up a Go 2 Sleep, but KENTA seems totally washed to me. There's still upside to a lazy asshole gimmick, but his needs work. He did stomp an big old hole in Ibushi's guts, really didn't seem to pull back in any way off the top, and that's something. A lot of fans are really hyped that "KENTA is back", the problem being this guy was never the guy they thought he was even in his prime, and that prime is looking streets behind at this point.

Kazuchika Okada vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi

ER: I can never quite put my finger on it, but something about Okada always reads "water polo dick". I didn't watch this. I later saw a GIF of Tanahashi's high fly flow to the floor, and those always look great. I hope the people who watched this got what they wanted out of it.