GLEAT Experimental Match Series 1

Mitsuya Nagai vs. Soma Watanabe 12/3/20

ER: This is UWFI rules, and very one-sided, as the 52 (!) year old Nagai keeps forcing rope breaks to chip away at Watanabe's points. Nagai is aggressive and goes for takedowns that end in immediate submission attempts, forcing Watanabe to get to the ropes on a kneebar and again on a can opener, and other times just pressing his forearm into Watanabe's throat. Nagai lands a couple of hard right kicks that Watanabe takes on his ribs and arm, technically blocked but definitely absorbing them. When Watanabe is on his final point he goes for broke, throws open hand strikes and a solebutt that drops Nagai, then deadlifts Nagai with a nice back suplex. Nagai decided to not leave any more openings after that, getting up and literally dragging Watanabe to the mat with a guillotine. 

Yutaka Yoshie vs. Takanori Ito 12/10/20

ER: This is a series really made for Segunda Caida, where a Japanese fed brings back cool old guys who were the guys we liked back when we were still tape traders, and having them maul newer shootstyle guys. That's a great formula! I watched Japanese wrestling more than anything else from 2001-2006, and those days seem like an eternity ago. This was not UWFI rules like a lot of matches in this series, it's a pro style match, and it really showcases a 46 year old Yoshie as an incredibly tough guy with a crazy gas tank. He hasn't lost a step since I was last regularly watching him 15 years ago, it's amazing. His belly hangs lower, but the speed and agility are there, and I honestly don't know if there's a current wrestler whose offense lands harder. This match was 13 minutes, and I don't know if Ito was in control of more than 1 of those minutes. Yoshie starts attacking Ito's knee, locking in painful crabs and a legbar, landing full weight on a splash, kicking the leg in the ropes, and then he just moves into overall CRUSH mode. 

Ito occasionally gets a front kick to the face - a couple very nice ones - but Yoshi mostly brick walls them and lands some other devastating shots. Yoshie's elbowdrop has to be the best elbowdrop in wrestling right now, his Thesz press is great, his right hand is great, he's a more interesting elbow exchange striker than most modern Japanese wrestlers, and he DESTROYS Ito with the most organ crushing senton I've ever seen. Kaz Hayashi can't stop laughing on commentary after Yoshie lands the heaviest possible senton, just cry laughing at a flattened man. For the finish Yoshie absolutely flattens Ito further with a top rope splash that looked like someone pushed a recliner off a roof. Yutaka Yoshie is the asskicker pro wrestling needs. Too bad we never got Yoshie/Finlay. 

Kaz Hayashi/Daisuke Sekimoto vs. Takanori Ito/Soma Watanabe 12/17/20

ER: These veteran mauler matches are a great idea, but a much less interesting idea when the veteran is Daisuke Sekimoto. He can be a real boring control guy, and I thought his parts of this dragged on for too much of the match. Hayashi is still tremendous at 47, one of the most gifted juniors ever. He moves with really similar mechanics as Muta, only works at Burst of Energy Muta speed the whole time. The energy Muta puts into the corkscrew elbow, is the energy Kaz Hayashi puts into everything. Jamie Noble might be the closest American comparison, and that is the kind of style that will age well. Sekimoto has a couple of cool things, like a painful backbreaker, but a lot of this is him working more like Nikolai Volkoff than the brutalizing heavyweight offense that Yoshie filled way more time with the week before. 

The Wrestle-1 guys were much more interesting than Sekimoto in this. Hayashi had a couple cool fast juniors exchanges with Watanabe, with a great headscissors and some quick rope work. Kaz even breaks out some cool wrist control matwork on him, and his work with Ito is good too. Sekimoto and Ito aren't a great match, giving us some middling forearm exchanges, and Ito is 0-for-2 in this series when it comes to missing high on his KO high kick. His spinning heel kick lands with the best force of Minoru Tanaka's similar kick, but his KO kicks that are supposed to put the exclamation point on the end of a combo have been sequence killers. But there was definitely some gold here, like Hayashi running across the ring to elbow smash Ito far off the apron, Ito hitting an awesome fallaway slam on Sekimoto, and the pulverizing lariat that Sekimoto laid into Ito. Definitely not a miss of a match, but my least favorite of Series 1.