2023 Ongoing MOTY List: Sabre vs. Ospreay

 

Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Will Ospreay NJPW 10/14

ER: It's tough to get me excited about a 30 minute long New Japan main event for one of their couple dozen different title belts, but Zack Sabre is a guy who can still engage me within a style I don't care for. I'm a Sabre Guy and I think he's a great opponent for Ospreay because he forces honesty out of him. If you put Ospreay in with a guy who is a lot like him - and Wrestling Like Ospreay seems to be the style that is omnipresent on the Indies and Japan and a lot of wrestling TV right now - it can inform his worst tendencies, and then he welcomes his opponents' worst tendencies, and then you eventually realize the match shot at least 10 minutes beyond its best finish line. I like big Sabre main events because Sabre matches don't tend to veer into any of the same kind of overkill as Ospreay vs. Ospreay Replicant, as Sabre matches always just devolve into different ways for him to twist his opponents' neck or limb joints, skipping past a lot of shocked face finisher kickouts in favor of sudden panic when a kickout leads to an unexpected submission attempt. This went 30 minutes and Sabre's honesty and build through the match really made this peak at the right moments, and the fact Ospreay lays a lot of his offense in and Sabre is dumb enough to lean into all of it just makes it better. 

They got the stand and trade elbows out of the way in the first third, as a way to actually establish the potential stiffness and introduce it into the match, Ospreay allowing Sabre three free shots and Sabre rattling his jaw on all three (especially the middle one), before leveling him in one shot in return. Sabre will have to hit harder or avoid being hit. The stand and trade letting your opponent hit you stuff works much better as a transition out of opening matwork, than as an end of match We're Having a War spot, and it's one of many great choices they make.

Sabre's submissions are really disgusting and any criticisms of the past saying people need to hold still for him during matches seems even more misguided and out of place than it did then. His matwork is honest - there's that word again - and his dumb guy face really does just fool people into thinking he's a phony. His figure 4 stump puller was incredibly nasty and we would have loved Minoru Suzuki in 1989 UWF doing that while making the calm smug faces Sabre was making here. Zack Sabre Jr.'s rosy cheeks make him look like a San Francisco Giants World Championship Run middle infielder and people hate that his rosy-cheeked softbottomed matwork looks fucking tough. He looks like a right wing tech blogger who got Actually Good at tricked out submissions and he's one of our greatest ever Gotta Hand It To's.

Sabre is impressively untelegraphed. You go through your days watching an ungodly number of Dean Malenko matches and you can see all the awkward pauses and frozen leans while waiting for guys too early, setting up the sequences while visually thinking of every step. You watch enough of him and you can see where everything is going, even if it is going fast. Zack Sabre Jr. still surprises me, which was something I didn't expect when I first saw a Sabre match 12 or 13 years ago. He still has new tricks and new ways to get to a destination, and he's really good at them. I wish we got even more of Sabre going after Ospreay's arm, because I was into every single part of it, culminating in Sabre headbutting Ospreay's arm and throwing a Kikuchi level headbutt to sit Ospreay down on the top rope, before flinging both of them off the top rope with a sort of Spanish Fly-ing Armbar that would look insane in any video game. 

Ospreay has some cool stuff, and he also has some dumb stuff. He is a Dumb Guy, and he will always do dumb things. The turnbuckle head tuck is a really great Dumb Guy spot. It's like a sadistic game an 8th grader with a bad home life would come up with. It doesn't have to make any sense in a logical way, because there's no good way to organically get a guy tucked into his own asshole while standing on a turnbuckle. Instead it's this Dumb Guy game where a guy sees how much he can work a kick at a guy's firmly prone head. Sabre winds up taking the first and third fully to the face and head, while the second kick is a true miracle worked strike, Ospreay's boot showing no light against Sabre's chin mouth and nose while also clearly not budging him in the least. Looks like we found another Gotta Hand It To. 

Relative to nothing, John Morrison would die if he hit a Skytwister Press as flush and smooth and well-placed as Ospreay's. He would just explode into Axe body spray dust. 

Finisher trading is something that you just have to expect with this style of Strong Style Main Event wrestling, so dragon suplexes are going to give people the power to throw their entire body into a back elbow attack, their eyes going white as they blackout dealing deadly versions of year 2000 EZ Money offense. But I don't think they ever tipped into overkill and I don't think we got any ridiculous kickouts. When Ospreay shut it down, he shut it down. When he started bowling through Sabre's neck with elbows and finding new ways to drop him on his face, that was it. Sabre could be the King of Stupid Faces if he really wanted to be, but he is somehow miraculously not, as the most we ever get is his actual dumb face looking dazed as Ospreay finds ways to drop him on that face. I thought this was really great, and it feels weird to say that Zack Sabre Jr. has been one of my favorite guys to watch over the last decade, but it's impossible at this point to avoid the allegations. 

2023 MOTY MASTER LIST