TAKA Michinoku vs. Tiger Mask
Two guys that I love starting off the tourney. Can't complain! And the match was very good too, unsurprisingly. TAKA goes to attack Tiger's bum knee very quickly, and the becomes the big story of the match. TAKA is awesome on the attack w/ nice submissions & dickish stomps to the knee. Tiger sells very well for the most part - in particular there's this really great moment after his first comeback attempt where he had delivered a big kick to TAKA's stomach w/ the bad knee, so immediately afterwards he collapses to one knee & sells the hurt on the knee big time. Very, very nice bout. ***1/2
Titan vs. Yoshinobu Kanemaru
They kept this basic & simple, and it ended up being a pretty solid match. Kanemaru jump Titan during the entrances, and that set ups the Kanemaru-dominates-while-Titan-makes-high-energy-and-impact-comebacks -dynamic right away. **
Jonathan Gresham vs. Marty Scurll
Both guys did their shtick here - Gresham with his typical matwork & Scurll with his finger stuff and all. Didn't care for it much at all, and the strikes of both men looked pretty bad throughout too. Not a good one. *1/2
Shingo Takagi vs. SHO
Extremely generic & dull. They went with the boring "wow, this is epic!!" layout w/ a bunch of bombs & nearfallsthroughout, and I gotta say I didn't care for it one bit. It's something I've seen a million times, so it doesn't do a thing for me unless it's some truly exceptionally great looking offense, and that's something Shingo & SHO didn't offer here. Bleh, meh, bleh. Of course it went 25 minutes too; it certainly felt every second of it & some more. *1/4
Dragon Lee vs. Taiji Ishimori
When they opened this with the usual generic puro forearm exchange, I knew it wasn't gonna be very interesting for the rest of it, and that sure ended up being the case. Boring stuff in a match that would've improved big time had it not gone for as long as it did + annoying no-selling to boot. *1/4
No comments:
Post a Comment