AEW Five Fingers of Death 12/30 - 1/5

Stardom New Year Dream 1/3/25

Athena/Thekla vs. Mina Shirakawa/Tay Melo

MD: Pretty fun attraction tag here with a lot of moving parts. You had Athena debuting in Japan, her first time teaming with Thekla, her first time facing Mina, Tay's first match back in forever. Lots of interesting stuff. Athena was absolutely herself here. There was a moment relatively early on when Thekla was taking it to Tay on the outside where Athena seemed to be just soaking it all in and Thekla yelled at her to go after Mina, but other than that, the full Athena experience. She didn't adapt her act, but then she didn't have to. The stuff early on where she was able to react to Mina in her natural element was excellent (and I get the idea that Mina is thought to be underutilized relatively in Stardom, but she also felt entirely natural and confident here; more on that in a second). Since not that many people saw this, they can easily play this back in the states to high effect. The bit where Mina had Athena trapped and forced her to clap to We Want Mina was a great bit I'm not sure I'd seen out of her before and of course Athena's facial expressions during it were gold.

I really liked Thekla here too, incredibly vocal, always talking to Athena, to her opponent, to the ref, to the crowd. I'm not entirely sure it worked but I think a lot of that wasn't necessarily her fault. Just match card placement and lack of familiarity maybe. Tay looked good coming off such a long break. I don't think they nearly tapped into what they could have with her as an over the top heel, but she has a natural likability that mixes well with the MMA stylings. She'll be a fresh opponent for Athena if they wanted to go that route, but one great thing about Athena is that she came out of this with natural, organic animosity towards everyone anyway, even her own partner.

WrestleDynasty 1/5/25

Athena vs. Momo Watanabe vs. Willow Nightingale vs. Persephone 

MD: Honestly, this was one of the most enjoyable four-ways I've seen in forever. Usually they're a doomed sort of match because of contrived spots, nothing resonating, people acting completely out of character to make things work, and wrestling physics getting thrashed, plus lots and lots of people laying outside the ring. This had some of that but not much at all.

What made it work was that everyone stayed true to both who and what they were. There was a sort of different styles feel to this at times and there were mini stories within and then individual moments that both played on them and happened around them. Persephone worked well with Willow as a base but she also seemed absolutely intent to run gutsy strength spots against her and she managed around three throughout the match each one hitting better than the next. While I don't think Momo was the biggest presence here, she had a strong heel vs heel standoff with Athena. 

Then you had the moments. Athena, Willow, and Persephone reacted so well to everything that happened around them (with Momo not quite getting the same opportunity to do so that I saw). Athena would nail Willow with a forearm in the corner, the biggest most natural and organic smile and turn right into a shot from someone else. Likewise after Willow snuck in to make a pin or Persephone realized she had and opening. They were feeling the moment and riding the high of it all. Nothing (not even the dives) felt overly contrived. The finish was not just clever but played off the previous tag and was gripping visually. It looked like Watanabe took Athena's head off. Definitely one of the best 4-ways I've seen in ages. It just worked (and that is no small thing).

Dustin Rhodes/Sammy Guevara vs. Sho/Yoshinobu Kanemaru

MD: This is a fun bonus to 2025 that you would not have predicted, maybe ... well, ever. Just a fun pre-show match where Sammy really got to shine. That meant the big moonsault early, a nice face-in-peril performance including absolutely sailing across the ring on a back body drop. I was kind of sort of wondering how many more chances he'd get but maybe he deserves one more to reframe himself as a big-bumping upper mid-card heel (a la 1989-90 Mr. Perfect) who can make the up and coming babyfaces look great. Down the stretch you got Kanemaru/Dustin shtick which is really what you wanted in the first place and wouldn't mind seeing again. I liked the bit during the heat when Sho stepped on the belt too. You don't see that specific jerk move often. This hit the right marks.

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I don't repost every twitter notepad essay here (so if you want to see them all, give me a follow: https://x.com/MattD_SC) but I think this one maybe deserves it.  

The Emperor and his Clothes: Will Ospreay Coming off of World's End

Kyle Fletcher had an amazing Continental Classic. Coming off of Full Gear, he was that rarest of beasts in 2024, the heel who actually had heat. On that first night against Shelton Benjamin, the fans let him know it. Both he and Shelton leaned hard into the opportunity and they had maybe the clearest, sharpest heel vs face matchup AEW offered in ages. He went on to have similarly remarkable matches against Okada and Briscoe before ending the round robin section against Garcia in a match that felt like a prelude to a bountiful, vibrant future before us.

It all led to the semi-final (re)match against Will Ospreay. If you had asked me a week and a half ago, I would have told you without hesitation, without doubt, that AEW had to strap up Will Ospreay as soon as possible. He had to be the guy to lead the company, the hot hand. The Death Riders experiment stumbled because of a lack of commitment by the company to let it be a true central focus. Now with the soft reboot onto MAX, they should run with a hot babyface and push him hard. I like Ospreay as a personality even if he's not my favorite wrestler. He's earnest and warm and amiable. He can obviously make a splash with his physical prowess.

And they had assembled a sort of Ospreay-verse of suitable opponents over the last year: Fletcher, Ricochet, Takeshita, Okada, guys who had that extra gear to keep up with him. Even better, all four of them were starting to stooge and stall and play to the crowd differently, so not only did they have that extra high gear, but the low gears they needed to serve as contrast and get under the skin of the fans so that it wasn't all fireworks all the time, so that the fans weren't just glad to be there and witness Greatness but that they also wanted to see Ospreay triumph and the heels fail. It seemed like a pretty solid engine for success, even despite my own misgivings.

After World's End, I have second thoughts. As spectacular as he is, I just don't think Ospreay has the wherewithal to be the sort of breakthrough ace they need. He can make a splash, but to diminishing returns. It's all because he leaves so many narrative opportunities on the table in his matches. He takes up the air in the room so nothing can breathe. It's fine with an attraction. It's fine with the International Champion there to have matches like this; it's not fine on the guy you want to build the company around. Not as he is now.

The Fletcher match started out well. Ospreay shined early and Fletcher, scoundrel that he was, retreated from the ring and stalled to force it to breathe a little,  to give it weight and contrast. This built to Fletcher catching Ospreay on the floor and lawn darting him into the barricade, opening him up. From there, it was lovely pro wrestling, Fletcher working the wound meticulously, wretchedly. Eventually, he savored it too much giving Ospreay a hope spot, which Fletcher cut off with another lawn dart into the turnbuckles.

All of this was to set up the big counter spot to send them into the finishing stretch, a third lawn dart attempt turned into a poisonrana. All well and good. The problem is that in between the cut off and the comeback, Ospreay had an extended 50-50 segment with strike exchanges and escalating counters. By the end they weren't booing Fletcher (unlike every other Fletcher C2 match despite him being more vile than ever) but instead cheering the match.

Likewise, in the Okada match, Ospreay, coming in damaged, survived a first round of heat only to get caught up in the ropes and hurt his leg. Okada started on it but it was just a tease as they went into 50-50 for the entire second half of the match.

There isn't one right match structure. There isn't one right way to tell a story. But if you're going to run with a babyface ace, there may be a best way. There are human impulses that manifest in most fiction. You build up emotional pressure. You pay it off. For some reason, Ospreay seems mostly disconnected from this notion.

Vs Fletcher, it would have worked so much better if Ospreay, despite brief moments of hope, didn't get to come back and stand tall until after that third lawn dart attempt. The pressure would have built far more and they could have done strike exchanges and everything else down the stretch to greater effect. Vs Okada, they wanted to mimic the NJPW tournament final style, but they could have still done so much of that after Okada worked a second round of heat. He was losing and he would have more protected him more after gutting through two heat segments.

I'm not telling you you're wrong for loving these matches. They are spectacular and exciting, but these great things can be even better if he stayed focused on letting them build without throwing in a bunch of counter sequences mid match. He jumps to sensation too soon and leaves emotion on the table. Without realizing that (or having someone that understands the ebb and flow of wrestling matches help him with it, be it a coach, someone like Jake Roberts who has spoken about it at length and in the most wonderfully vulgar ways, or TK himself who I know gets it), I don't see how he can possibly be the babyface ace they need.

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On Brand Segunda Caida: Late 90s Kawada!

Toshiaki Kawada/Masao Inoue vs. Kenta Kobashi/Yoshinobu Kanemaru AJPW 1/2/98

ER: I love these Kings Road hierarchy tags, where there's typically no doubt about who is eating the pinfall, the veterans appropriately sell the young upstarts' offense (i.e. not much), it's always fun to see how the vets work their young charges into the match, and the crowd ALWAYS responds to them in big ways. This is not a great match, but the crowd is on fire by the end of it, fully invested in seeing young Kanemaru get more offense in a match than he'd probably ever gotten at this point in his career. The meat of the match is Kawada and Kobashi throwing heavy leather: boots to the face and heart stopping chops; but the fun of the match is seeing Inoue and Kanemaru get involved, seeing them get minor success against Kobashi and Kawada. Kanemaru isn't quite good at this point of his career, but I like that he tries a lot of things. A lot of it lands pillow soft, soft moonsaults, light crossbody, diving lariats that we all know were supposed to be lariats but would have a hard time explaining to non-wrestling fans who don't know wrestling body language. But he busts open Inoue's mouth with a missile dropkick and that only makes Inoue's inroads look more awesome. If you're ever triumphantly yelling about something, it's going to look exponentially cooler if you're doing so with a mouthful of blood, darkening your teeth. Minutes later, when Inoue throws a couple of hard lariats into Kobashi's neck, blood dripping down his chin, it adds so much more to those lariats. This whole match is such a simple formula, and this kind of All Japan match is something I'm always going to be in the mood to watch. I mean, just look at Inoue snap off that Argentinian backbreaker on scrawny, barely adult, mushroom haircut Kanemaru. It's the stuff that joy is made from.

Toshiaki Kawada vs. Yoshihiro Takayama AJPW 7/17/99

ER: In retrospect it's weird how more of us weren't big fans of Takayama until 2003 or so. He was a guy who worked UWFI and All Japan during a really fun era, but he really wasn't spoken about nearly as much as his peers. Then he got his face turned to lumps by Don Frye and suddenly does a G1 and we all loved him. Going back and watch a lot of these underdiscussed late 90s AJ guys and it's pretty clear we took a lot of their skillsets for granted. Now that puro isn't something I actively seek out the way I did in '98-'08, it's shocking to see how much better 1998 Jun Izumida looks than many Japanese wrestlers who get a lot of hype today. I was there when people really started talking up Takayama, and nobody was into Takayama in 1999. See Honda, Tamon. These guys were hiding in plain sight in the promotion we were all getting tapes of. Maybe it was Takayama's lumbering horror movie monster awkwardness that made him invisible, but this match is the kind of gem you hope for when you click on a link. This is a 7 minute slugfest that sees these two throw the gnarliest knees to the guy you've seen and ends with Kawada kicking Takayama's ass so hard that he falls to the floor and gets counted up, and it feels like an appropriate ending. It feels like I really wouldn't have to write more than that last sentence to convince anybody who was GOING to watch this match, to watch this match. Takayama gets a cool showcase for his horsey lumpishness, and his kneelifts are truly all time great, here and after. Every one of them looked like Kawada would get his feet lifted off the mat, and Kawada did a great job of conveying some actual concern that this big goon was going to smother him. So we had some good grappling and good struggle, and it wouldn't have been a stretch to see some insane Takayama upset here with how effective Kawada was selling for him. We even got a great moment where Takayama punches Kawada right across the cheek and Kawada plays the greatest hit and drops down to his butt in pained disbelief. You knew Takayama wasn't coming out on top here though, and soon enough Kawada is throwing his own knees and kicking Takayama's ass to the floor, dropping him with a heavy as hell backdrop suplex and throwing more strikes, and Takayama ends it with this great awkward corpse bump, rigidly falling onto the bottom rope before spilling to the floor. This is great, one of the coolest sub-10 minute matches around.

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All Time MOTY Head to Head: Ishikawa v. Ikeda V. Captain's Fall NOAH

KENTA/Naomichi Marufuji/Kotaro Suzuki/Ricky Marvin vs. SUWA/Makoto Hashi/Takashi Sugiura/Yoshinobu Kanemaru NOAH 4/17/05

ER: Well, this stunk. And it stunk differently from the typical bad match stink, because this stunk AND lasted 50 minutes. That's just cruel. I remember really liking a few of these NOAH Captains Fall matches. This must not have been one of them. This match was all over the map, paced poorly, structured oddly, and just not very good. It was long. And I can't for the life of me understand why it took 50 minutes for them to accomplish what little they did. At minimum, it was a masterful SUWA performance. Everybody looked their best against SUWA, even when he had to wait eternities for Marufuji to set up his horrible offense. SUWA made some little things mean more, took offense like he and few others can (that dragon rana that Marvin pinned him with, yeesh), and just looked like a boss. Sugiura feels like a guy who got really overlooked during this era, and during his career, as I liked all of his contributions here. Whereas KENTA would be breaking up pinfalls with weak ass stomps, Sugiura would come blazing in with a vicious spear. All of his spears looked like the best version of any spear. Hashi really didn't blossom until a couple years later and peaked in FUTEN, but he still has some fun contributions, and he's a certified psycho for all of the damage he's no doubt doing to his body with those diving headbutts. But man that babyface team was junk. Marufuji is arguably the worst wrestler of the last 15 years that anyone thought was "good". He's terrible. He's super klutzy, his selling is out the window (watch him sell a brainbuster from Kanemaru by just standing up and slapping him in the side before getting the pin with a roll up) and his offense looks convoluted and weak. He's so, so terrible. KENTA looked slow and weak in a lot of this, with him finally getting inspired to throw some full force slaps in the midst of his awful combos and overly rehearsed junk. Marvin had some beautiful flash and I always liked him. His fast flip moonsault with his knees hitting face was amazing. Suzuki is a weird guy, as his offense always kind of blew, but he knew how to sell damage better than most of the other babyface juniors. Watch him lock on an octopus, get clonked by a Hashi headbutt, and then crumble to the mat out of his submission. There was also a lot of questionable reffing, as many times he would prevent the faces from making saves while the heels ran wild, and that never made sense. And right out of the gate the heels were the underdogs as Kanemaru got beat first. Who ever books a multi man match and has the heels outnumbered!?!? I am normally one to piss all over quick eliminations, but this really could have had 20 minutes lopped off and benefitted so much more. But I really, really disliked this.

PAS: I didn't mind this, it was way too long, there was about twenty minutes before the first elimination, and while there was some OK stuff, it really dragged. I also don't get the psychology of having KENTA and Marufuji v. Sugiura as the final guys in the match. Sugiura team was working the match as heels, so having the heel fail to fight off two blowjob babyfaces is odd, you didn't see Arn taken to the back, while Tully valiantly fought off Ricky and Robert. I am always happy to see SUWA and he was pretty great in this, SUWA was Toryuman trained so he had lots of experience working with pretty boy flyers, and every time he was in, his opponent looked awesome. He absolutely slaughters Suzuki with his John Woo dropkick, and the Ricky Marvin dragon rana was about the slickest I remember seeing.  I also really liked KENTA throwing shots with Hashi (who has a lifetime pass for me based on his FUTEN tag) and Sugiura. Enough good stuff in this, that I basically enjoyed it, although it isn't anything I would strongly recommend.

Ikeda v. Ishikawa review

Verdict:

PAS: I didn't hate this as much as Eric, but it doesn't even come close to Ishikawa v. Ikeda. This is a wire to wire win for FUTEN

ER: I thought this stunk. Killer SUWA performance, but no moment in this even came close to sniffing Ikeda/Ishikawa.

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Masashi Aoyagi is Lean Mean Big and Bad Lord Pointing that Gun At Me

Masashi Aoyagi/Ryuji Hijakata v. Masa Fuchi/Yoshinobu Kanemaru AJPW 8/13/14- FUN

Really cool to see my man Aoyagi show up in 2014. He is a guy like Fujiwara who always looked old, but hasn't looked like he as aged. He looked 60 when he was 30, and still looks 60. This was a pretty disposable undercard tag, but had plenty of enjoyable moments. Fuchi was really great here too , the young guys (sort of young guys, Kanemura has to be pretty old too at this point) did some juniors stuff, but the match really pick up when it became an old bastard off. Aoyagi was knotting up thighs and Fuchi was poking eyes and it was a blast. Really liked the finish as Kanemaru put on a cross armbreaker which Fuchi countered only to be met by an Aoyagi kick in the mush, knocking him back into the submission. Not anything I will remember in a week, but a perfectly nice bit of business.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE AOYAGI

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NOAH 1/24, 1/26/03

1. Tsuyoshi Kikuchi/Kenta Kobashi vs. Yoshinari Ogawa/Mitsuharu Misawa:

This was during Ogawa's slimy greasy shitball punk phase, which was one of my favorite wrestler characters ever. Kikuchi looks roughed up before the match even starts, with a back brace, scratches, bandages on his wrist and arm, and grisly bruising on his neck. He looks like a rape victim extra on CSI. The match itself was a formula NOAH tag, which I took for granted at the time, but 10 years on seems so much better than most things we get now. Everybody here matches up nicely, and the Misawa/Kobashi sequences are really eye-opening. We've spent so many years watching shrimps in kickpads do these same sequences and falling badly on their faces, that when you see them done by the real deal, pre-crippled, powerful stars, it's pretty awesome. Just watching simple exchanges between the two is like two great guitarists taking turns every 8 bars, or like Jordan and Pippen running circles around people, or like how Mother Teresa must have been in her 30s. Ogawa was full on snivelly punk, trying to take Kobashi down with ineffective punches (which got no sold) and then always falling back on eye pokes, but then busting out a bunch of cool knee work (including a ring post figure 4 that bent Kobashi's knees at all sorts of horrible angles). This whole thing was just a real fun way to waste 20 minutes of your day, even if every single minute went exactly as you expected it would.

2. KENTA/Kenta Kobashi vs. Naomichi Marufuji/Mitsuharu Misawa:

This was not as good as that. Marufuji threw all sorts of thigh slap offense that didn't hit (including a couple kicks to the back of KENTA's head, but since they made zero contact KENTA didn't realize he was supposed to be selling) and KENTA took forever and a day to set up all sorts of convoluted offense that occasionally looked good. Misawa looked great in the match, and was doing all sorts of subtle heel things to try and lift up the match, and Kobashi chopping Marufuji over a rail was awesome, but overall Marufuji was just too lousy for this match to recover.

3. Jushin Liger/Koji Kanemoto vs. Tsuyoshi Kikuchi/Yoshinobu Kanemaru:

Liger is wearing his all red outfit and it looks totally badass. Kikuchi looks like he just got jumped into (or out of) a gang, then had to jog to the arena for his title match. This match is pretty darn terrific, and has the rep of being maybe the best NOAH juniors tag ever. I'll have to watch the others before I go that high, but this was a damn good time, and one of the greatest Kikuchi performances ever (them Liger and Kanemoto fellas ain't bad either). Kikuchi starts this thing off as fiery asskicker, but this match pretty quickly went right where you and I and everybody else knew it would go, and wanted it to go: Kanemoto and Liger taking all of the frustrations and anger out on Kikuchi's poor, poor scarred and battered body. Kikuchi makes the greatest "Fuck my life" facials in the biz, and Kanemoto just throws all sorts of brutal kicks at him. Kikuchi's little comebacks were all awesome, really coming off like a pro-style Yuki Ishikawa a lot of the time. He'd take a bunch of kicks, occasionally catch a leg, and then attempt to cave in Liger or Kanemoto's skull with a headbutt. Fans were way behind his fighting spirit and it really was impossible not to get behind him in this. Just a classic performance from a great wrestler. Liger looked insanely great throughout as well, busting out a nasty piledriver and an endless supply of great palm strikes. Kanemoto looked hungry and vicious, too. All three guys looked like top 20 in the world guys. This had the build, it had big moves, it had great nearfalls, just a super fun match. Yoshinobu Kanemaru also participated.

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