70s Joshi on Wednesday: Victoria! Day!

47. 1979.08.XX3 - 02 Cheryl Day vs. Victoria Fujimi

K: Cheryl Day starts this match with a strange leaning back a few inches more than you’d expect pose like she’s about to start doing the limbo. Whatever this tactic is it doesn’t work as Victoria takes over the match pretty quickly with one of her typical flurries of screaming offense, only to get over-zealous on one of her flying crossbodies and crashes and burns.

The match then follows that basic formula through to the end. Cheryl Day continues to aim for the throat in much of her offense, but there’s not that much malice to it really and she just moves a bit too slow for it to feel like she really beating Victoria down. I get leaving space between moves to ‘milk’ things but it wasn’t effective here. I did think it was a little bit interesting that both of Victoria’s comeback moments where basically her being on the outside and then storming into the ring throwing everything she had at Cheryl. It’s not a comeback I remember seeing very often yet she does it twice her, the second time Cheryl was unable to turn the tables on her and she got the win with what the announcer called a ‘Manji’, but really was an Octopus Hold.

But overall, not a memorable match at all. Looking forward to the next two matches we have from this card though.

**

MD: We’ve seen almost 50 matches now and this is one of the first ones where I came in thinking that we weren’t going to learn much of anything from. And that was more or less true. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t competent. Day was very good at controlling the pace and her stuff absolutely looks credible. She has a lot of different knee shots, single and double. Her stuff looks consistently good but even when she’s causing havoc on the outside, it never quite transcends in the way the Black Pair do, for instance. There were good and even memorable bits here, the two of them standing up and slugging (and Day’s slip under armdrag), Day basically flipping a table on to a heavily selling Fujimi (helped by Kumi) on the outside, and the two big comebacks were Fujimi rushed in from the floor with big fiery flurries. That included the finish where she hit a really nasty gourdbuster more or less stopping time from the impact, before finishing Day with maybe the first Octopus Hold we’ve seen in the footage. I don’t think the sum of the whole was greater than any of the parts here. Both Day and Fujimi are better as role players for someone else’s story maybe?