By Request: Shotaro Ashino vs. Seigo Tachibana

Shotaro Ashino vs. Seigo Tachibana Wrestle-1 6/2/19

ER: I'm nowhere near involved in the current puro landscape as I was a decade ago, partly lack of time, partly my favorites retiring/dying/getting old and not being replaced by people I like anywhere near as much. So I always appreciate recommendations for things like this, something I assuredly would have never seen. And while I think it narrowly misses our Match of the Year List, there were plenty of elements of the match that made it a contender for the list all the way through. In some ways it was a fun throwback 2002 "Sell the Arm" kind of match, with Ashino muscling Tachibana around early, hitting a hard snap German, throwing him through chairs, and - in probably my favorite spot of the match - hitting a killer overhead belly to belly on the floor. I love how the belly to belly was set up, Tachibana charging into Ashino and then hitting a brick wall - that THWACK Tachibana made when he ran straight into Ashino and stopped dead - and then getting chucked. I liked the focus once Tachibana shifted to working the arm, and loved how he set it up: He kept slamming Ashino's left arm into the mat and their holding it for a pin, and after trying that a few times and maneuvered smoothly into an armbar. The threat of a good armbar added more to this for me, and Ashino did a mostly nice job of selling it. It was cool seeing him work off balance, not able to throw as much weight behind his great uppercuts, his rhythm thrown by this swinging dead weight left arm. When he would fight through and use the dead arm, his shots would land harder but the recovery would take longer, leaving Tachibana openings.

That kind of simple acknowledgment could have really taken the match the rest of the way, but they wanted to do more things, limbwork be damned. I think Eddie Kingston might be the only wrestler brave enough (Brave? Dedicated? Smart?) to work a match with a bad limb, but not be tempted to get his shit in. Not everybody is Eddie Kingston, and he has the charisma and knowledge to work a compelling match with any restrictions. Shoot, lets make some sort of Dogme 95 list but for wrestling mat restrictions and see who can make the most compelling match within the parameters. And I like how Ashino uses that dead weight arm to his advantage, but also flipped when Tachibana caught him in a straight armbar or Fujiwara. Things got a little muddled when he started working ankle locks on Tachibana. I don't think the match needed dueling limbwork, and Tachibana really had no real interest in paying attention to it, screaming nicely while trapped in them, but not long after doing deadlift squats to get Ashino up. Some of the reversals around the anklelocks were nice, and some of the slams by both were good, but we also got a standing exchange that went too long, and some questionable things like Tachibana taking three Germans and selling them by grabbing an armbar. And that stuff wasn't bad, but it felt very predictable, and that was much worse to me. It was worse because they felt like they were moving to their own path, carving out their own fun armwork story, and then at some point it became clear we were going to get more 2019 tropes because it's 2019. I liked much more of this than I disliked, and also appreciate that they kept it a tidy 15 minutes, but an interesting Act I and II moving into a somewhat unrelated and muddled and busy Act III won't usually make list.