KENTA vs. Tomohiro Ishii
This was actually so great up until the German Suplex moment where it became clear that KENTA was completely out of it. So uncomfortable to watch KENTA try & do (& blow) his spots at maybe half-speed (if even that) & then all the strikes to the face + that damn brainbuster... Damn. EXTREMELY uncomfortable stuff. I will still rate it high because I truly loved everything when KENTA was still operating without showing signs of being badly concussed, but goddamn do I feel dirty about it. ***1/2
Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Zack Sabre Jr.
Tana & Zack do their thing against one another -- it's always a good time, and such was the case here. Not as good as their most recent G1 outing, but still good. ***
Kazuchika Okada vs. Minoru Suzuki
Not their best match, but definitely not their worst either. This was good. Minoru works a mean control seg early on, putting Okada down with his deadly strikes & locking in some nasty holds, in particular targeting the Rainmaker arm. Thankfully he doesn't work over it too much, because of course when it's time for Okada to get back into things, he doesn't sell it at all. But thankfully indeed the big focus of the match wasn't about that; the meat of the bout was the ego-clash between the two very different characters in Kazuchika Okada & Minoru Suzuki. They constantly try to one-up each other & this best comes to show in the lengthy forearm battle where Okada refuses to go down easily to Minoru's dead-blows. It's hard to make a forearm battle like that interesting these days when they're so common, but Okada & MiSu certainly did it here. Good shit. Didn't care at all for the actual finishing sequence though, which came shortly after - very paint-by-the-numbers Okada stuff there to end the match with. A little trimming and this would've been great. ***1/4
No comments:
Post a Comment