The Best And Worst Of NJPW: Kizuna Road 2019, June 25

Previously on NJPW: El Phantasmania ran wild! Also, the G1 blocks were announced and those excluded tried to get in the tournament through petitioning the audience (Suzuki), threats (Suzuki), and challenging someone to a Title-And-G1-Spot vs. Absolutely Nothing match (Yoshi-Hashi.)

You can watch New Japan Pro Wrestling shows on their streaming service, NJPW World, which costs 999 yen (about 9 USD.) You can also watch certain NJPW shows on Fridays on AXS TV.

You can keep up with With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook, follow our home site Uproxx on Twitter, and even follow me on Twitter @emilyofpratt.

Don’t forget to share this column on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever social media you use! Also, leave a comment with your thoughts on the show and/or article! All feedback is appreciated and will help us keep up the NJPW coverage.

And now, the best and worst of the last show of the 2019 Kizuna Road tour at Sendai Sunplaza Hall in Miyagi.

Best: TenCozy Up To End Of Kizuna Road

The opening match between TenCozy and the team of Nagata and Tsuji wasn’t an all-time great, but it was a fun, mostly old man match. Most importantly, it featured Tenzan and Kojima making their first appearance as a two-man tag team since Tenzan returned from injury. It’s hard to start a show with better vibes than those of seeing these platonic life partners and charming individuals reunited and using teamwork. They might even be better than Opening Match Liger vibes, which is good, because oh my gosh Liger isn’t wrestling anymore after January 4-5, 2020 and that’s so sad and crazy to think about.

The Rest Of The Undercard

The rest of the undercard consisted of mediocre to good tag matches that felt very transitional. Such is the post-BOSJ-and-Dominion and pre-G1 tour that is Kizuna Road because they’re saving the good stuff for next month and the rest of the year!

G.O.D. vs. Mad Juice (the superior sequel NXTeam to Death Juice) felt extremely transitional and extremely like this pro wrestling thing might not be on the level! How convenient that the champs were scheduled for a rare two-on-two non-title match with a team featuring an Australian guy right before another rare non-title tag match with the same team in Australia! This match felt very much like TV match setup for a PPV match, and it made me expect the Southern Showdown bout to be more aggressive and possibly involve even more brawling.

The bigger tag matches looked further ahead, to the G1, and mostly repeated what we learned about the dynamics going into the tournament earlier this tour with a few new minor developments. The L.I.J. ten-minute ten-man tag against a Home Team team featured Naito continuing to act more like his full heel self than he has been for a while, Sanada being an athletic marvel, Shingo’s back elbow looking better and more intense than the Judas Effect, and Ibushi and Evil previewing that their G1 match could be very good. The aftermath revealed that while everyone is hot for the G1, Ibushi is already on fire and ready to burn down his enemies (everyone who isn’t Hontai) (a full-time top guy contract for life does a lot for morale.) The moral of the story is to get hyped for the G1!

The main thing that stood out to me about the other ten-man tag, Suzukigun vs. Chaos and Tiger Liger, was the lack of any Suzuki vs. Liger. They had such an instant money feud and were pretty heavily promoted when they were going at it, so it seems like they must just be taking a break to make sure the pre-G1 action got all the spotlight, with Suzuki’s continued angst about not being in the tournament part of that. Unless Suzuki is using his freelance powers to ditch New Japan before January, it seems like this match must finally happen sometime later in the fall, or hey, maybe the Tokyo Dome, though it seems more appropriate for Liger to go out against another junior.

But with the G1 the most important thing coming up in the near future, this match gives us a look at two big matches: Ishii vs. Taichi III (in this current rivalry/2019) and Okada vs. Archer. The former will take place on the extremely stacked, consequential last night of B Block action, an easy time to set up another rematch for them in the fall. And don’t you dare think New Japan won’t do Archer vs. Okada for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. They love Okada vs. Big Monster (and Tanahashi vs. Big Monster, which is probably why Archer and Fale are in the block with both of them) and we can see that Okada and this particular monster have a dynamic that will probably be a crowd-pleaser, if not a mind-blowing technical marvel.

The Bullet Club vs. Tanahashi, R3K, and Henare match was the one that made it the most difficult for me not to zone out, but it did have a few highlights. Tanahashi looked less rusty and broken down and his teamwork with Yoh felt like a nice endorsement of the younger wrestler. Yoh ultimately didn’t do much of consequence in the ring on his thirty-first birthday, but this whole match basically existed to set up the opportunity for another wrestler to look like a badass on his fortieth.

Best: Hirooki Goto’s Revenge Road To Revival

This isn’t just a Best for that mini-documentary about Goto’s American excursion that has that amazing title on NJPW World, though it does look good even without subtitles. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t put English subtitles on something that could be so easily promoted to at least American people because it takes place in America, but I understand the sight of reunited lifelong best friends, one a currently disgraced wrestler and the other a trainer who can no longer wrestle, doing pushups at the same time and shots a group of people training at the beach in a way that definitely confused some onlookers.

To recap that disgrace that prompted the Goto character going to get a tan, previously on NJPW, Jay White shrieked backstage that if Goto lost to him he would be a disgrace to his family, et cetera, for like a month. Then Jay White beat Goto in a match that wasn’t very good. Goto left the company to go on the War of the Worlds tour and train with his lifelong friend/rival and returned after a few months to interrupt a long promo that no one in the audience understood (not even the parts it sounded like they were expected to boo.) But Goto sure understood at least the part where White said he and his pal’s name in an insulting tone, or possibly just got really mad about Jay saying nobody cared about Yoh’s birthday! He looked like a no-nonsense badass and White looked shaken to his core.

If this is the beginning of an actual badass run for Goto, the kind his return segment built excitement for, then that public humiliation on the Dontaku tour was at least a logical moment of his character hitting rock bottom. It’s hard to believe that about Goto at this point though when it seems like he’s hit rock bottom several times without ever really coming back. It’s almost like he’s Yoshi-Hashi without it being super obvious or kayfabe-sympathetic that he’s a perpetual loser. However, he’s not so completely Yoshi-Hashi that I won’t buy into the idea he could beat Jay White. I am receptive enough to the moral of this segment, which is to get hyped for specifically the first night of B Block to see if this revenge quest works out and or if Goto is immediately plunged back into sadness!

Worst: The Failed Voyage Of A Sendai Sailor Boy

The first one-on-one match of the show felt like an attraction in multiple ways. First, it was a singles match for Taguchi in his home area! Second, in contrast, it continued to feel like some of the appeal of El Phantasmo to the Japanese audience is that he’s different from most wrestlers in Japan – whereas part of his lack of appeal to me is that he feels like a generic indie wrestler with a more expensive jacket. Part of their match was comedy and part of it was straightforward wrestling. It felt disjointed and like it didn’t need to be over twenty minutes long. The crowd sounded like they have a good time, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone take the time to watch this.

It’ll be interesting to see if New Japan keeps hosting defenses for the RevPro Cruiserweight Championship. You couldn’t prove to me right now that it’s a real championship, and if you could, you definitely couldn’t convince me that anyone, especially anyone who works for New Japan, cares about it or that it means anything to win it. However, the Undisputed British Heavyweight Championship has been built up to mean something in Japan as well as the UK with hot feuds, the promise that if you win it you get to main event a show in another country, and Zack Sabre Jr. actually having clout as a villain and a wrestler in NJPW. Maybe the RevPro Cruiserweight Championship will be elevated in the future, but the best thing I can say about a guy who didn’t even come in second in his BOSJ block’s quest for revenge right now is that at least it’s giving guys like Taguchi and Rocky Romero singles match opportunities.

Best: Brought To You By Karl Marx And The Mighty Boosh

Speaking of that British Heavyweight Championship, it seemed like Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Yoshi-Hashi wouldn’t be the best match on paper, but I think it worked out really well in praxis. (Did you know socialists love the word “praxis?” I do now that I’ve been on Twitter for like a year and a half!) They have the opposite dynamic that Sho vs. Shingo had for the junior heavyweight division; these are the two least physically powerful heavyweights. That initially sounds boring, but Sabre and Yoshi-Hashi are good enough at the other parts of wrestling to make it work, and without the usual issue they both have of not looking as believably hard-hitting as their opponents.

This match’s biggest strengths were selling and consistency. Unless you started watching New Japan like last month (and if you did, welcome!), you have a clear idea of who these characters are and how they’ll play against each other. And that’s what they do – with Zack even more mean-spirited than usual against a weaker victim than usual and Yoshi-Hashi just trying his best. Zack was cocky as he destroyed one of Yoshi-Hashi’s legs and the Headhunter sold that leg really well for longer than a lot of wrestlers sell a body part that has been worked on. (Sanada won fourth most popular wrestler in Japan, but could maybe also win fourth least consistent body part seller.)

As usual, Yoshi-Hashi’s weaknesses showed when he made his offensive comeback. Most of his moveset just isn’t that exciting or intense. However, the amount of damage he had taken justified his comeback always seeming kind of doomed, while Sabre being a beanpole of a man justified why a Yoshi-Hashi chop absolutely destroyed him.

Sabre also really delivered playing not just a skinny person in a fight, but a completely evil Submission Master. In addition to the leg work, focusing on Yoshi-Hashi’s perpetually injured shoulder, including using that bad arm to assist in a choke, was impressive and despicable. Usually, when he targets multiple body parts throughout a match the bout ends in some horrifying full-body submission. Here, that was essentially true (the modified double armbar was so convoluted that NJPW’s official results just say he won by “submission”), but we could see the move mostly targeted that shoulder and that bad leg. Sabre is a terrible bully, but you have to respect his four-dimensional chess when it works out.

He also came off really well in his mic performance, which was both peak ZSJ and one of the promos that’s entertained me the most this year. Unlike Jay White’s earlier promo that it seemed like it was supposed to get a reaction from the audience despite not being understandable to most of them, Sabre seemed like he was mostly saying his piece for his own entertainment, and it worked for him. The line about being buried next to Karl Marx with his title and the delivery of “And guess what’s coming up everybody? It’s the G1 Climax with all your favorites” killed me.

Something that continues to be interesting about the way Sabre presents himself in Japan is that he very much represents the UK and plays up his Englishness, but also puts over Japanese wrestling constantly even as he says, “Strong style is dead. Long live Sabreism.” In the ring and backstage, he uses Japanese words and phrases, but always uses them obnoxiously and/or sarcastically. Here, his bit about wanting to win the IWGP Heavyweight Championship to cement himself as a British wrestling legend put everybody over. Part of Sabre’s gimmick is that he’s very clever – or at least thinks he is while quoting the Smiths and comedians – but he is legitimately very smart about choosing words that earn him both heel heat and respect. His promo and character work at its best compliments his in-ring work at its best, which is what those things are supposed to do.

With only two shows in Australia (and sort of that all-L.I.J. RevPro show) left before the G1 Climax, all the pieces are in place for a really good tournament, in which I’m predicting Archer, ZSJ, and maybe Suzuki via freak tag match pin earn shots at the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. I’ll see you back here for a Best and Worst the morning after the first night of A Block in Dallas.

P.S. If you’re interested in content from that event besides a show review, make sure to keep your eye on With Spandex and our social media (especially Twitter and Instagram) because I’ll be doing press for it in Dallas. If I don’t livetweet the G1 press conference/fashion gauntlet, please assume that I have died.