Previously on NJPW: We learned that no one is safe from the Stormbreaker and that Colt Cabana and Toru Yano are a match made in clown heaven. Also, Bullet Club has three out of the company’s eight titles now.
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And now, the best and worst of the Anniversary Event celebrating forty-seven years since Antonio Inoki started this whole thing, from March 6, 2019, in Tokyo.
Mostly Best: An Undercard With Direction
There are a few different kinds of NJPW big show undercards. Sometimes you get extra dads-and/or-Young Lion matches. Sometimes you get a bunch of tag matches that are blow-offs for recent feuds, which tend to be good in themselves, but can be a little repetitive, depending on what we’ve already seen on the tour. Sometimes though, you get these shows with very little filler and strong forward momentum like we got on this Anniversary Show two days before the start of this year’s supersized New Japan Cup.
The show kicks off with a ten-man tag between Makabe, Yano, Yoshida, Umino, and Narita, and the Bullet Club team of Fale, G.o.D., Chase Owens and Hikuleo, making his in-ring return, and wow, it took me typing that out just now to realize Yano basically did nothing in this match! A real highlight of this for me was when I thought Chase Owens was wearing a grill like a sleazebag genius. (He was actually wearing a Bullet Club-branded mouthguard, which is also pretty good. By which I mean appropriately terrible.)
This match is mostly fast-paced chaos with some moments of quality Bullet Club teamwork and we learn that the crowd is very hot for this show! We also learn, after Owens picks up the win with the Package Piledriver, that he has “absolutely nothing to lose” going into his first-round match with Juice Robinson. He absolutely is going to lose that, but I appreciate Owens giving himself an angle.
Yuji Nagata and Toa Henare vs. Tomohiro Ishii and Yoshi-Hashi is a study in investment whiplash. Ishii and Nagata obviously really, really want to fight each other! Ishii just ZEROES IN on Blue Justice with that stare from the beginning. Imagine you’re, like, buying cough medicine at CVS and you look up and see this man at the end of the aisle looking at you like in the above screencap. How loud do you scream?
The Ishii-Nagata exchanges in this match are veteran tough guys doing veteran tough guy things and it rules. And then Henare vs. Yoshi-Hashi get in there and do Henare vs. Yoshi-Hashi things, and the crowd chills out. These two end the match, but Ishii and Nagata have a little staredown afterward, and the Nagata’s promo, which turns into a sincere former-Ace pledge to win the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, rekindle the feud.
The Suzukigun vs. Taguchi Japan ten-man tag match restarts a rivalry between even older men, and though it doesn’t make sense to hype Kojima vs. Suzuki in 2019 as much as that previous match, they work to make it more interesting and fun here. The also-teased Taichi vs. Honma is a Honma singles match in 2019, so it probably will be less than great, but I appreciate that these two have been slow-burning this feud for a while and also that their match COULD INVOLVE A STABBING.
The most crucial part of this match, though, is that Taguchi picks up the win because fate brought this man into the New Japan Cup and he now has an actual shot at being the 69th IWGP Heavyweight Champion! This is basically #Kofimania and Becky winning the Rumble and Christmas all wrapped into one, you guys!
Oh, and the actual most crucial part of this match is probably that Dragon Lee is in it! He, with his brother Místico, killed it on this year’s Fantastica Mania tour and it’s always great to see him back in New Japan. His involvement made some people think that this might be the date of Hiromu Takahashi’s return and made me wonder if we might get some more Lee vs. Desperado mask violence, but it turns out he’s actually here for a different, also cool reason that I will talk about later!
Best: Goto The Polls
By far the best of these pre-NJ Cup multi-man tags is the show’s semi-main event – Tanahashi, Okada, and Goto vs. Naito, Evil, and, Sanada. Besides being star-studded as heck, this is just a well-put-together trios match in itself. When Naito and Okada face off at the beginning, their rivalry feels ALIVE AND WELL which feels like a very good sign for both of them and, like, NJPW in general. The L.I.J. vs. Tanahashi’s knee bit is also quality.
First-round opponents Goto and Sanada work very hard to generate hype for their upcoming match and Goto wins the match with this incredible, technical rollup, which has to be the coolest thing he’s done since… the last G1? Every six months or so, the Fierce Warrior has a moment where he looks like the best wrestler in the world for a second, and this was one of them.
The post-match promo parade of sorts – with Naito just looking on and then confronting Ibushi on commentary – continues to make everybody look good. To me, it does way more to build interest for the New Japan Cup than the more serious moment with most of these people in the ring at the end of the show.
Best: Exit The Dragon, For Now
While this show mostly built hype for heavyweight adventures to come, it also ended two chapters of junior heavyweight division feuds in satisfying ways. First, Yoh and Sho finally win back the belts they lost at last year’s Anniversary Show. Their match against Bushi and Shingo Takagi starts off fast-paced and with teamwork included, exactly what you like to see from a big junior tag match. The crowd, already established to just be very receptive and hot for almost everything that’s happening on this show, is super into it, and everyone lets the mixed support thing happen.
And everyone gets a few moments to look good in this match, with Yoh especially showing some cool, creative offense, R3K doing double submissions at one point, which I don’t think we’ve seen them do before, and – I know I write this almost every time he’s on a show, but it keeps being true – Takagi continuing to look like a super-duper star. The finishing sequence with the mist to the block of Rebellion to the 3K is exciting and well-done and legitimately kept me guessing who was going to win.
Sho getting VERY EMOTIONAL on the belt and the surprising standoff between Yoh and Shingo also wrapped things up really well… for now. A rematch is not unlikely! There aren’t that many of these junior tag teams right now!
Mostly Best: Exit The Beast God
The Jushin Thunder Liger vs. Taiji Ishimori title match tells the story you’d expect it to if you’d been watching their tag matches leading up to it. The much older challenger’s strategy is to slow the champ down and weaken him with submissions, which he manages to do early on. When Ishimori gets some offense and throws Liger out of the ring, it feels like it’s pretty much over, but I guess Ishimori’s been weakened enough that it buys Liger a lot of time. Ishimori ultimately taps him out with the Yes Lock to TRULY REBIRTH the junior heavyweight division, having defeated the man who carries its history.
What didn’t work for me about this match was how much you could tell it slowed down for Liger. Like the matches in last year’s Best of the Super Juniors with Tiger Mask and Super Junior Tag League with Tiger-Liger, the suspension of disbelief is hurt a bit because we’ve seen the speed at which the juniors in their prime usually work and it’s not what they’re doing in these matches. But to the live audience at this show, that doesn’t seem to make a difference. Maybe this would have worked better for me if I was there live and seeing Liger wrestle what had been heavily suggested would be his last shot at this championship.
Given that he’s retiring at the next Tokyo Dome show, which he hinted at after this match and announced the following day, it wouldn’t shock me if Liger ends up getting one more shot at the title. Whether he does or not, it’s cool that his kayfabe reason for retiring puts over the current champion, who is now such an unstoppable little Terminator that he made Jushin Thunder Liger realize he couldn’t hang with the current generation anymore. That’s kind of a big deal!
But age and ability to hang shouldn’t be an issue with Ishimori’s next challenger, Dragon Lee, who responds to the Bone Soldier’s open challenge to anyone from ROH to fight him on the G1 Supercard with actually, CMLL also has awesome wrestlers, so let’s see how many abs can fit into Madison Square Garden! This match should rule, and it’s cool that CMLL is going to be represented and this inter-promotional alliance supershow – along with Stardom, probably, if Mayu Iwatani is still Women of Honor champion.
The Main Event
https://twitter.com/judekilgour/status/1103442245536108546
Here are some takes about the Jay White vs. Will Ospreay champion vs. champion main event of the 47th Anniversary Show:
- It has no stakes and yet is almost thirty minutes long
- It made me think of how that Jungle Kyona vs. Momo Watanabe match that just happened was apparently awesome and I still haven’t had time to watch it, and also still haven’t watched the whole last TJPW show
- An early issue with post-excursion Jay White was that he felt like he was playacting and everything to do with him was forced, but wow, Will Ospreay makes him look like the most natural, subtle actor in the world
- I am currently on prescription drugs due to a rib injury that still hurts a lot of the time, so I should have been super receptive to Ospreay’s rib pain, but my reaction to all of his insane, loud selling was pretty much, “Stop being a baby!” and thinking maybe NJPW should just bring back, like, full Inokiism
- Commentary tries to sell Jay White as BRET HART IN HIS PRIME??? Maybe calm down???
But whatever, I guess you could call it “an amazing war” because that they both tried hard. The crowd is pretty into this match. It didn’t make me want to watch more New Japan and neither did the previously-mentioned redundant summit of the good guys afterward. (Though the potential Goto-Ibushi tag team and the Ibushi-Tanahashi alliance backstage did make me prick up my ears.)
So that was the Anniversary Show! Happy 47 years of existence, NJPW! I’ll see you guys back here next week to talk about the first round of the New Japan Cup, for which I will link you my predictions right now so that when I say who I thought would win matches I can back it up.
