2024 Ongoing MOTY List: Sabre vs. Shingo

 

1. Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Shingo Takagi NJPW 11/4/24

ER: "Wow," he thought. "A Shingo Takagi match, finally getting discussed on Segunda Caida." That's not true of course, because Matt is a psycho who covers so much wrestling that obviously he hit the AEW appearances of Shingo, but he's a big name whose acclaimed work has never quite connected with me. His career has been long and successful and I'm sure there are plenty of matches among his thousands that will connect with me, but this is the first I've seen that felt just right. I fell in love with Michinoku Pro and still love it as much as ever, and I was there for the Toryumon tape trading and fell in love with a new generation of guys, and then I was older and out of college and had a job and a live in girlfriend and didn't connect with Dragon Gate the same and had less time to watch wrestling and so now I'm writing about Shingo Takagi for the first time on Segunda Caida. 

But this is a Zack Sabre Jr. review. Carry job is an insulting term that I don't really like using and this was not that, but Sabre's constant interruptions of Shingo's well orchestrated timing based wrestling made this dynamite. Dragon Gate at its best had exceptional speed with exceptional timing. The best of their multimans are undeniable. The timing and flow was real important to the style and Zack Sabre is amazing at working with the same timing to purposely monkeywrench the steps. He hits very hard and seems to enjoy being hit very hard. Sabre, over the last decade, has transitioned from a guy formerly accused of being a beanpole who needs people to hold still, to a deceptively sturdy guy who works as stiff as any of the BattlArts legends. He's a disruptor, he disrupts with surprising pop, and he seems to have this insistence on being hit just as hard and just as much. Unlike guys who make that their entire personality, whether they're actually stiff workers or just mimes doing bad stand and trade, he does not make it his personality. The stiffness and abuse are all part of the methodology to get to his submissions, which are also applied stiffly and forcefully. There's never any overwrought Hit Me Harder faces in sequences that stop a match dead, it's all stiffness that's intent on finishing. 

Sabre never seems to look for one answer. He has a shocking amount of depth and knows how to go several directions from established positions, making his method of attack always feel like his own while always surprising me. His willingness to lean into punishment to lean timing allows Shingo to work at his stiff best, getting to land full force clotheslines that occasionally get caught and twisted or beaten. But it never becomes an arm match, or a neck match, or a leg match, even though Sabre runs through sections of working on all of those things with the intent to finish, to wound, to slow. He can crank Shingo's neck with his legs, dropping his weight to drag him into the ring, without going back to a neck attack until the attack presents itself. When Shingo takes a second too long attempting a Gory Special, Sabre is there with a side headlock clutch that moves quickly into a disgusting octopus hold. If the neck presents itself, it becomes a neck match. As a disruptor, he allows Shingo to work his timing and takes every torso extension that presents itself. Sabre understands the weight of his offense and how to make submission applications and submission set ups look and feel as real as possible. The way he can straight an arm - quickly, slowly with pressure, working against resistance - and make it look like straightening an arm away from a man's body is requiring full strength from both, keeping that weight and gravity always present. For me, it adds meaning. Shingo looks like he's struggling to keep his head up at spots and it gave his responses frantic importance. 

Sabre is adept at catching Shingo's Actually Fast stuff, like the way he catches a few of his lariats and twists them into something dangerous, catching one and throwing uppercuts at it once he traps the arm, kicking at it another time. It's an all out attack and he commits just as hard to each attack, knowing one of them will lead to an ultimate opening. The weight made this into a match that could have ended satisfactorily at 15, 20 or 30 minutes. The survival felt earned but the attempts to finish felt real. Sabre's match long wear down was made even better with Shingo working 30 full minutes of body degradation. The final straw came down to Sabre throwing several short mule kicks at the inside of Shingo's knee before Shingo pulls off the Shingo Driver, causing enough of a delay in the pin attempt, and the way those kicks and the other knee and body attacks culminated in Shingo's slightly slower step down the stretch, his inability to get his legs underneath him on more than one occasion, and the way it was all done with no overacting, captured the best of this style. 

2024 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 6/24 - 6/30

AEW Forbidden Door 6/30/24

Bryan Danielson vs. Shingo Takagi

I was away the last few days and am just playing catch up now. I saw there was an aggravating discussion about bumping and selling going around though. It's probably a little bit overblown and not what anyone who comes here needs, but let me offer a framework nonetheless, as it's relevant to the match in question. Bumping is a truth framed by lies. Selling is a lie framed by truths.

And does Bryan Danielson ever love to lie. Look, I don't know the state of his neck (in this case, the truth framing the lie). Maybe it's hurt due to something that happened in the Ospreay match (Tiger Driver or otherwise) or one of the Forbidden Door TV multi-mans. Maybe it's not even hurt at all! But he's visibly taped up and talking about it in media appearances. It's remained an underlying plot point in Ospreay's journey. And now, with this Shingo match, it's become a centerpiece in Danielson's tournament.

When he faked the injury in the Okada match last year, it was because he was otherwise injured and had to cover for time, up the stakes, find another way to draw in the crowd since he couldn't perform at the level he wanted. He's done it after matches, in between matches (speaking of in between, he had his leg caught in between two rings for the hell of it; remember that?). This time, however, it was built directly into the blueprint of the match, into its very DNA. The lie was the driving force, the original sin that birthed the match's structure and meaning.

At the end of the early feeling out process, Shingo hit a draping, twisting neck drop onto the floor and the trainer checked on Danielson en route to him barely beating the count. Shingo pressed the issue, hitting a series of suplexes (and superplexes), all working towards the big, dramatic kickout with Made In Japan. It should be noted that Shingo, knowing that he should win a battle of attrition due to Danielson's damaged neck, chose moves that took a toll on his body as well. It was a calculated risk and looked like it would pay off towards the end of the match as Danielson could barely get back to his feet.

Bryan Danielson the person and Bryan Danielson the character both love to lie though, and that stumbling, fumbling, spasming sell drew Shingo in so that Danielson could reverse a kill shot into a shifted balance of advantage and momentum that Shingo would not be able to overcome. He did get to kick out of the Knee, a parallel to Danielson surviving Made in Japan, but the match was truly lost the moment that Danielson took a grain of truth (in this case fabricated truth, which may or may not have sat on top of real truth) and lied to his twisted heart's content.

On some level, he has been the boy who plays wolf, but with this match, it's shifted even further. There's a sense of premeditation here that I didn't feel before. It's gone from manslaughter to outright murder of the fans' trust to create a dramatic effect. And deep down, we love to hate and hate to love every second of it, because in a day and age when we know how every trick is performed, when the performers go out of their ways to show us the strings so that we can marvel at how impressive they are and how many stars they deserve, Danielson's looking us right in the eye and lying to us. The absolute bastard. What a guy.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death: Week of 6/20 - 6/26

AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 6/26

Chris Jericho/Sammy Guevara/Minoru Suzuki vs. Eddie Kingston/Wheeler Yuta/Shota Umino

MD: Hot crowd, some real stakes, a lot of personal issues, and guys stepping up, so there was a lot to like here. The biggest issue was Eddie vs Jericho, obviously, but Eddie had reasons to get his hands on Sammy after what happened to Ortiz and Suzuki was in the match to be the anti-Kingston weapon (to great success as we'd see). So they delayed Jericho vs Eddie until the time was right. The AEW house style is all about setting up spots and paying them off later, or alternatively, hitting spots and then inverting them on a second attempt. Here, after Yuta started off with Jericho giving him a ton of shine (albeit shine leading to an easy enough kick out for him) and the subsequent brawling around the ring, they gave the crowd a Kingston vs Suzuki chop off. Suzuki walked into the machine gun chops, completely negating them. He took the advantage and Jericho came in to take advantage of that, only for Kingston to comeback and then hit the machine gun chops on Jericho, who sold all over the place. That, right there, was a nice little bit of set up and payoff. Suzuki was able to get Kingston's arm as he tried to knock him off the apron, though, and that gave us a bit of a heat. Just a bit though. 

The match would break down shortly thereafter and stay broken down for the rest. It worked more often than not and most often when there was a big character impulse driving it, like Umino getting Jericho in the Crab and then enduring shots from everyone or when the hit the dive train with Suzuki teasing his or the triple submissions or, I suppose when they hit one rapid fire spot after the next ending with Sammy's cutter and Yuta's splash, though that last one felt more choreographed than opportunistic. Some of the choices between break-ups and nearfalls towards the end were a little dubious, most especially the tornado DDT/brainbuster combo. The dynamic between Kingston and Suzuki, where Suzuki kept getting in his way and slowing him down but not ultimately stopping him from getting a shot in here or there was effective. Yuta and Umino stepped up appropriately; no one can say that Yuta isn't taking full advantage of his opportunity. Sammy looked like he belonged in there. I'd say the finish followed from the story of the match well enough too, as the cumulative damage was ultimately too much for Kingston's side. I would have maybe liked more extended heat before everything broke down though. 

Bullet Club (Young Bucks/El Phantasmo) vs. Dudes with Attitudes (Sting/Darby Allin/Shingo Takagi)

MD: By the time this match started, it'd been non-stop multi-wrestler action since that little heat segment on Kingston's arm, with maybe a small respite when Clark Connors was getting beaten on. The action was good and I'd argue even at times smart, but it was all a little much. If they had shuffled the Ospreay/Cassidy match earlier on the card maybe? On paper, a match with a bunch of comedy spots would have been a good palette cleanser but it was still a multi-man spot-laden thing, so while being different in one way, it was more of the same in another. That said, in a vacuum, all of these things worked. Sting hit the big dive to start and then got to hit his first ever senton. Darby unsurprisingly fed into all of the Bucks' stuff well and they fed for his comeback. Sting got to get a bunch of superhero moments and the crowd went up for all of them. When everything really went crazy at the end it occasionally got a bit disjointed, which sometimes makes things feel more organic but maybe not here. I thought the finish felt a little flat maybe because Shingo had a bit too many things and the fans weren't as familiar with them as they might have been? Or maybe it was because it was a bit of an anti-climax due to the couple of minutes before it. Still, it's amazing how natural and meaningful Sting felt on this card, which is a testament both to him and his opponents.

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