Board 8 > Board 8's Match of the Week - Some More Good Matches [MOTW] [APWT]

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Welcome back to our not even close to weekly, weekly wrestling match series where myself, @NBIceman and @Bidoof recommend matches to each other and give our best pitch for them.

Last week we reviewed some classic Match of the Year Candidates.

This week we have no theme - Just Good Matches.

This week I break from my pattern and recommend some puro!

Satoshi Kojima vs Kazuchika Okada (c) at NJPW Destruction 2013 (9-29-2013)
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV17J41137dy

The story of this match is one Gedo likes to tell - Kojima beat Okada in the G1 and now is getting his title shot against the champ for having done so. What made this one special is the way Kojima did it - he used his own short arm lariat, a version of the very same move Okada had been using the fly to the top of New Japan. So this match the champ was not only trying to defend his title - but the supremacy of the rainmaker over Kojima's own lariat.

It fucking rules hearing a crowd going nuts for Kojima. He's my favorite of the New Japan dads and before he was the Bread Club guy he was one of the best ass-kickers in Japan. The match features a lot of "body part" wrestling as both men try to deprive each other of their lariat and then slowly builds and builds to a fever pitch leading to one of my favorite New Japan match endings. Just a starmaking performance by Okada - it was here that I knew he was truly special and not just the beneficiary of having worked with Tanahashi.

Also as a note - don't be intimidated by the run time there - it includes the pre-match promo, the match, the post-match afters and the press conference after.

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Iceman's Match of the Week

Monster Express (Masato Yoshino and Shachihoko BOY) vs Jimmyz (Jimmy Susumu and Jimmy Kagetora)
Dragon Gate
Gate of Passion - April 9, 2015
Match Link: https://vimeo.com/125997656

My favorite Dragongate unit of all time defending their newly-one Twin Gate titles against my second favorite. The result is quite possibly the best 2v2 match to ever take place in the Toryumon system, and while thats a hell of a big statement, its not at all unfounded.

Yoshino and Susumu each have a lot of fans that would make the claim theyre the best wrestler in company history, and Kagetora is well known as a guy who will literally always step up and deliver in the big matches even if he takes it a little easy when hes lower on the card. They each turn in some of the best performances of their career here. Yoshino is his fiery and blindingly fast self from the opening minutes on, bringing all his best impactful stuff and defiantly refusing to ever stay down no matter what the Jimmyz throw at him. Kagetora is the picture of smoothness, and he gets the chance to show off the full breadth of what is probably the coolest moveset in modern wrestling. Susumu puts in an absolutely masterful selling performance after his arm gets worked over at the beginning - he can still use it to throw his onslaught of lariats, but their effectiveness is decreased just enough that his opponents can survive one or two more than they normally could, and hell, he even remembers to wince when high-fiving his partner once. Thats the exact kind of selling I love in wrestling; if other pro athletes can compete with heavily damaged and legit broken limbs, why do some people think wrestlers have to act like amputees after a couple of arm wringers?

But I digress. Its no surprise that those three names are awesome. But by the end of the match, its the unassuming underdog in Shachihoko BOY that turns out to be the biggest star for one night only. See, this was pretty much the peak of his rollercoaster career. There were ups and downs all over the place for him, especially around this time period (and sometimes even in the same match), and most of the ups came as a result of him being Yoshinos best friend. Still, he was the designated pin eater for Monster Express and had previously only been a Triangle Gate champ, so the fact that he and Yoshino managed to win these titles in the first place was a bit of a shock.

The challengers were odds-on favorites heading into this match, and all of that leads to the incredible closing sequence. Shachis been isolated, taking every finisher in the Jimmyz book, but Yoshino manages to just barely save the day every time as the crowd goes absolutely bonkers around him. He cant keep it up forever, though, and eventually the underdog has to dig down as deep as he can to try and pull out the miracle. He knows this is probably the only time hell ever get to be a Twin Gate champion, and he desperately wants to hold onto that. But more importantly, Monster Express was a unit explicitly founded on the values of fighting with everything you had for your friends, and hes determined not to let down his best pal.

Does he succeed? Guess youll have to watch to find out.

Really, this match would have felt right at home in the last topics theme, but considering theres a fair argument to be had that its not quite even the best Dragongate match from 2015, I elected to steer clear of it there for my own self-imposed dumb logic.

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Bidoof's Match of the Week Recommendation

Tyler Breeze vs. Tyson Kidd vs. Sami Zayn vs. Adrian Neville (c)
WWE NXT Takeover: Fatal 4-Way (9/11/2014)
Match Link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4is242

This was only a little over six years ago. Ponder that for a moment.

It was also the main event for the second-ever NXT Takeover. I don't believe at the time anyone could have predicted what NXT was to become over the next few years but this was kind of the starting point for the "super indy" period. It starts off as a pretty typical WWE multi-man but I feel the storytelling is better done here than it is with most especially when it comes to giving moments for each participant to shine. Kidd, the one who honestly felt like he needed the most, got it in this match and showed some great aggression as he worked over Zayn while keeping the other two out of the ring. Oddly, I feel like the champion Neville might have had the least shine of all four but that kind of helps add to the story of him being in over his head as a champion trying to fend off three challengers. It all culminates to the moment everyone remembers the most about this match - Neville, in a moment where it looked like Zayn had Kidd beat, yanking the ref out of the ring. Neville's face sold it all so well, a combination of "I can't believe I did that" and "I can't believe I had to do that".

Remember when watching NXT, you were seeing what could be the future of the WWE rather than another cog in the machine? Remember that hope you had watching performers like Zayn, Neville, and even Breeze going out and delivering on these shows? Remember when you used to get excited when it was announced someone had signed an NXT deal? I could go on forever about how much was squandered in this match alone. Instead of getting another angry rant about how much WWE sucks these days, I'll just leave it there.

Gonna try to get these in tomorrow.

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Bumping this because I finally got my moment to watch these matches again. My apologies on slipping up on the already loose schedule here; just had a ton of different things going on that kept me from being able to give these matches the proper focus.

Anyways, thoughts should be posted soon.

NXT 4-Way
The longer I watch wrestling, the less I like multi-way matches, especially the way modern WWE does them. There's an honest-to-God minute-long rest hold halfway through this match. A rest hold! Neville and Breeze are laying on the ground outside of the ring and Kidd has Zayn in a rest hold. There's just no reason to do things like that in a match with four wrestlers - despite what a lot of dumb Twitter weirdos will tell you, headlocks are not inherently good storytelling simply by virtue of being headlocks.

The match definitely picks up from there, though. Kidd plays a pretty good heel for the first bit and gets the benefit of being the smart one dissolving the temporary alliance with Breeze as soon as he recognized it was getting contentious. It's not a hot take to say his career was really on the upswing at this point - it's too bad he had to retire so soon afterward. Sami Zayn is and always was the consummate underdog. It's too bad he's retired now too. Breeze is a guy who was probably never as good as a lot of people claimed but was certainly much better than he's gotten to show in the years since this run, and he had some fantastic flurries down the line. Like Bidoof said, the most unassuming participant is the champion, but that's obviously by design, as his slow-burn heel turn finally starts coming to a head when he pulls the ref out.

Ultimately, a very good match with a lot of moving parts to work with that mostly manages itself well. It's held back in my mind a bit by the fact that multi-man matches have a bit of an inherent ceiling for me and that general WWE malaise has me looking back on even good things like this with an attitude that's not exactly conducive to enjoying myself to the fullest. But yeah, there's a lot of nice stuff there.

PS: If I'm permitted a quick aside rant, there are few things more annoying to me in wrestling commentary than someone trying to sell something that happens literally all the time by saying something like "I've never seen anything like that before!" That happens in this match with a Tower of Doom spot. Literally, it's a spot that happens so often that it has its own name, and we've got supposed experts screaming at us about how insane and unbelievable it is. It's such a credibility undermining thing - how little wrestling could you possibly watch if you've never seen a Tower of Doom before?

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Okada/Kojima
7-8 years really is an eternity in pro wrestling, isn't it? This match really feels like it happened in a completely different era of the entire wrestling world, not just New Japan. But damned if it doesn't still hold up. I haven't watched it in quite a while, and I'd forgotten just how many moments in it I love, particularly from Kojima's end. The lariat off the top rope. Pulling out some of his old moves and even some of Tenzan's (I can't imagine a Mongolian Chop has ever gotten a bigger reaction than the one it did in this match). And there have been many, many Rainmaker counters by now, but Kojima pulling Okada straight into the Western Lariat remains one of the absolute best.

It's easy to forget that we weren't super far removed from Kojima being the IWGP Champ going into WK5 at this point. He was clearly being cycled down the card, but it wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility that he could come out of this match with his arm held up. It was unlikely, but within the boundaries of imagination. And there's points in this match where the crowd really starts to believe in that, which is a hell of a testament to what these two put together. Okada was already a genius at laying out and structuring big title bouts by this defense, and I would be inclined to argue that outside of the obvious Tanahashi series, this is the one that went the farthest toward legitimizing him as someone who could be counted on to deliver anytime he needed to and as a serious main event star. There's nothing groundbreaking about the match itself, and yet they still manage to pack it full of emotion and things that surprise you and make it memorable. That's a true less-is-more approach in pro wrestling, not side headlocks in a four-way.

It's weird to think that this was the last match of any real importance that Kojima was ever involved in, especially when even now, he can still go at a higher rate than a not-insignificant percentage of the roster. And that's not even a slight on them - Cozy is just that good. Which reminds me, I really need to make time for that Ospreay match sometime soon.

Also, I didn't realize how much I kinda miss Gedo being in Okada's corner until now. Both are still great without the other, obviously, but hearing "Come on, Rainmaker, COME ON!" and seeing them do the pre-match handshake and then the Rainmaker pose in unison later on was definitely a nostalgia hit.

Anyway, yeah. Everyone knows this match is really good. Very much enjoyed seeing it again.

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