2023 Ongoing MOTY List: Kingston vs. Ishii

 

Eddie Kingston vs. Tomohiro Ishii NJPW 7/26/23

ER: Eddie Kingston is in the G1 and that means we finally get to see Eddie Kingston and his litany of constantly progressing injuries take on the World's Oldest 47 Year Old Man. Ishii has the shoulder hunch and neckless profile of Perc Angle and the sprint speed of a 60 year old retired NBA Center and Eddie Kingston wrestles this match with one hand constantly holding an injured body part like it was the only thing keeping his body together. It's a match where both guys start out slow and injured and get progressively slower and more injured in each subsequent minute. It's 15 minutes of Kingston working a nearly immobile man who has shrunk 3 inches in 4 years and it is entirely made by Kingston's constant selling and staggering. When he starts with a front suplex and follows up with a double stomp, his back pain flares up like a factory worker who will never be able to retire, and the match becomes a war over who can hit harder without moving their feet at all, and who can best adjust their timing to accommodate an increasingly slow-moving opponent. 

Kingston hits a lot harder, welting up Ishii's chest, but Ishii has a much lower center of gravity due to his compressed spinal cord and that allows him to brick wall Kingston on shoulderblocks and take him over with German suplexes. Kingston's selling just kept getting better the longer the match went (which is kind of Eddie's whole thing), and while I loved him stumbling into the ropes and leaning into them for support, I also loved smaller things like how he pulled himself up to his knees by latching onto Ishii's ergonomic Proflex back support belt. Kingston's back means he can't get much spin behind his spinning backfist, so he just makes up for that by hitting his standing backfist as hard as ever, and when he hit two of them in succession I thought that was the end of Ishii. Ishii hasn't had a neck in years, which has only served to make his head more like a battering ram, and when he smashed Eddie with a headbutt and then dove horizontally into him with a second, I thought that was the end of King. Kingston kept losing steam on his shots, hitting something weak and then willing himself to hit a bit harder just out of self-disgust, whereas Ishii realizes he has no steam on his strikes so just hopes to get close enough to drop Eddie on his head. The brainbuster Ishii uses to finish off Kingston was a classic Murdoch brainbuster, the only difference being fueled by cortisone shots and pills rather than Coors Banquet. 

2023 MOTY MASTER LIST