80s Joshi on Wednesday: Lucy! Kumano!

Disc 1

9. Lucy Kayama vs. Mami Kumano - 5/80

K: The Lucy Kayama vs. Yumi Ikeshita match that we covered a few weeks ago was always going to make the set, I think this is a good companion piece. Mami Kumano is the less technically impressive than her Black partner, but she has a feral raging energy of her own that she works into her matches well. It's also rare that we see her in a singles match, so let's check this out.

There's some noticeable editing in the early portion of the match where they're exchanging holds and we don't see much else, so hard to draw any conclusions from it other than they were going long so kept themselves plenty of places to go in the time they had to get through. They mainly seemed to be going after each other’s arms. Of course things escalate when Mami Kumano starts incorporating her cheating antics and creating a bit of chaos. She does things by throwing in some hide-the-weapon action and, one of her specialities, very uncivilised biting. There's one memorable moment where Mami has Lucy's arm in her mouth, with no hands! She's just standing there gripping it with her teeth and it looks very savage. She also counters an attempt at leg lock by biting Lucy's leg to force her to break it.

She did a lot more hiding the weapon though, probably overdoing it. The crowd does laugh at one point at the referee's ineptitude for repeatedly missing Mami pulling her weapon from inside her top, which probably isn't the reaction they were going for. Mami's cheating and the referee's uselessness enrages the babyfaces at ringside so much that they grab Mami, by the ankles and yank her out of the ring for Lucy to hit her with a big dive. This moves us forward and the match turns into a war from here on.

It's interesting that Mami actually threw a jumping kick. Not a very good one, it's just that you almost never see anyone throwing kicks in pre-Crush Gals Joshi so it stood out to me.

They build and build up to the time limit finish, by which point they're just clobbering each other with strikes looking barely aware that they're out of time. This probably overachieved for a singles match between the two less pushed members of two tag teams currently feuding.

***1/2

MD: You’ll be glad to know the commentary is still calling her Mt. Lucy (or maybe you won’t be). I miss Kumano’s cool one-arm-cut-off leather jacket but she has a cape and a splash of red in her hair now. And as you can imagine this turned into a wild scene. I get the sense it was clipped somewhere along the way and went to a 30 minute draw, but I’m not entirely sure where. 

Lucy was able to outwrestle Kumano early, having an answer for most things, including attempts to cheat by pulling the hair or throwing a shot while in the hold. Kumano’s answer to that was to toss her out and then, as the match opened up, to hide a spanner and attack her with it. I also get the sense she had a taped up thumb she was using but I’m not sure. 

We’ve seen hide the object before but what made this work were the bits of hope and comeuppance. At one point Tomi grabbed Kumano’s leg and dragged her out allowing Kayama to get a queen rocket through the ropes upon her. She started one comeback by isolating the spanner and grinding her foot into Kumano’s hand. Kumano hit her seated senton off the top relatively early but when she went for it later in the match, she got tossed off by Lucy. All of this was full of struggle and intensity. There was a crazy moment where Lucy put Kumano in a figure four only for (I think) Tomi and Masami to run in and do the spot in unison. Later on when it seemed like Lucy had a real advantage, Ikeshita ran in as well. And they finished it off as the bell rang just throwing wild shots at each other. The big difference so far between the 79 and 80 matches, past some callback spots giving everything a bit more weight and meaning, is that the babyfaces are able to hold their own more (and not just Jackie either). It honestly makes a huge difference.