The Best And Worst Of NJPW: Super Junior Tag League 2018, 10/22-23

Previously on NJPW: Chris Sabin and Kushida made the perfect triangle, I got really worried about ACH’s ribs, and Naito was the most chill guy to ever refuse to take time off from work.

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And now, the best and worst of the Super Junior Tag League tournament matches from the untelevised October 22 show in Matsue and October 23 show in Tottori that were later uploaded to New Japan world. This column also covers notable promos from other matches on these shows and the some thoughts about the social media-only distancing of the Elite from the Bullet Club brand that happened over the past few days.

Best/Worst: As The Robin Rounds

Like the matches covered in the last Best/Worst of NJPW, the ones on the October 22-23 shows usually had less urgency than the average televised New Japan show, but were still pretty solid overall. Shingo Takagi and Bushi vs. Soberano Jr. and Volador Jr. is a match I would love to see as part of something that isn’t a house show, but their October 22 bout in Matsue was solid.

The way the wrestlers enter the venue in Shimane Kunibiki Messe, which is basically a convention center, makes the L.I.J. entrance looks like a reboot of It Follows set in Ye Olde Japan.

Upon closer look, we see that Bushi’s mask that made me think “Is that a scary clown???” from a distance IS indeed a scary clown. Thanks, I hate it!

Under this is another entrance mask that is half glowing eye skull, half scary cat. This is all very extra and probably expensive, but it does make Bushi look ALMOST as cool as – surprise! – Naito, for whom the audience freaks out.

The CMLL team’s entrance is also kind of spooky, and Volador Jr. looks like the fanart I imagine a lot of deviantart and certain sections have of Tumblr have been producing since Venom came out.

After the fashion show, Bushi and Soberano start the match and immediately remind me again how much I enjoy Soberano’s specific type of flippy lucha. The match had several good moments, but mainly just made me want to see a TV or PPV version of it.

Backstage, we get an interesting piece in the puzzle of why Naito is hanging out on this tour. Shingo says that it’s always surpising to him when Naito shows up, so he apparently is not traveling with everyone else. Is he just driving behind the tour bus, following it from town to town?

Because the following Roppongi 3K vs. Tiger Mask and Jushin Thunder Liger occurs in a town New Japan hasn’t visited in several years, the more famous veterans are by far the crowd favorites. R3K, with Rocky Romero at ringside this time, is at their most confident and goofy during their entrance, and then get absolutely dominated by Tiger Liger for the first part of the match. There are moments when Sho is visibly very angry at how thoroughly Tiger Mask (with some extra-legal help by Liger) is beating up Yoh. This makes for some very motivated High Voltage moments when he’s tagged in. Still, after some sequences of double-teamwork by both shiny duos, Yoh ends up winning the match with the Five Star Clutch. This has been a better tour for Yoh’s singles finisher than BOSJ!

Afterwards, we learn why Tiger Mask had to take the Uwajima show off: he got hit so hard in the eye during the Tiger Liger vs. L.I.J. match that he HAD NOT FULLY REGAINED SIGHT in it by the next day! He still wanted to wrestle because it was his birthday (his 48th!!!), but wasn’t medically cleared. Tiger Mask IV is ten times tougher than all of us.

Intermission: Backstage CommentMania 2

Obviously, the best promo from either of these shows is October 22’s ten-second clip of Suzuki and Ishii fighting each other backstage. The next night, Ishii finally makes it verbally clear that he is DTF (down to fight) in another ten-second promo. From the perspective of us normal humans, it looks like Suzuki and Ishii hate each other, but I suspect each of these men might secretly, deep in their hearts, regard the other as his best friend.

On the 23rd, Naito says that watching Bushi and Shingo’s matches has made him want to fight too. He questions why he wasn’t booked for this tour because, “If you guys want to give me a rest, that’s a favor I never asked for.” Somehow this dude manages to pull off both being tranquilo and asking for extra work at the same time. Tetsuya Naito is a magical wrestling character.

Beretta shows why he deserves to become the US Champion at the ROH/NJPW Global Wars show in Toronto with the line, “My headband fell off real early… my powers went with me. I was trash the entire match. The worst I’ve been in the ring in years.” I would like this man to represent my country in this company, please!

In Tottori, Tanahashi brings back L.I.J.’s big talking point from Kizuna Road:

While this tour was going on, IWGP Heavyweight Champion Kenny Omega wrestled an indie show in Winnipeg on his birthday, which included an angle in which Don Callis turned on him, and this all turned out to be in service of promoting the Jericho Cruise. Omega will also miss the second half of the Road to Power Struggle tour due to the Jericho Cruise. The rest of the New Japan roster basically gets to dunk on this guy as much as they want forever, or at least for the rest of this championship reign.

Meanwhile, Tanahashi is “here as usual… I give it my all every day. That’s the kind of pro wrestling I like.” The wholesome burns keep coming from the Ace! If he loses at the Dome we’re going to get shots of audience members crying for like five minutes.

While Okada says that White was the only rotten orange in Chaos and now they’re FINE, Switchblade maintains that he has a mole in the faction. He thinks once this person switches over to Bullet Club, “everyone else is going to follow suit. They’ll see where the success is. Gedo saw where the success is!” LOOK AT ALL MY NEW FRIENDS, OKADA, THESE PEOPLE VALUE ME. EVEN YOUR DAD LIKES ME MORE THAN YOU!

Worst: [Insert Reference To 1973 Eagles Album Desperado]

Suzukigun defeat Ishimori and Eagles in a short, kind of nothing match that made sense, but just wasn’t all that entertaining.

We get an interesting new venue layout and camera angle for this one, and I thought entrance area looked like sort of an indoor tennis court in the basement of a house last decorated in the 1970s. Then I looked up the Tottori Prefectural Industrial Gymnasium and learned it was built in 1981 and is mostly used for basketball and table tennis, so I guess this impression wasn’t too far off.

The junior heavyweight tag team champions jump the BC guys before the bell and intelligently throw Ishimori out of the way and focus on Eagles. Eagles vs. Kanemaru is a very sleazy matchup, and Eagles works one of Kanemaru’s legs because apparently his tactician’s playbook says “Leg work!” on the first page, and then the rest of it is blank. After Eagles gets beaten up for what feels like a long time, Ishimori gets the hot tag and reminds me why I really want to see him in the junior heavyweight championship picture ASAP. When Eagles is tagged back in he has a hot streak of offense, but falls to the combination of a ref shove, whiskey to the face, and El Es Culero.

Backstage, Eagles cuts a passionate promo about how “the whiskey burns almost as bad as the loss” and he’s trying REALLY HARD to prove himself to his new gang friends! Even if you cut both his legs off, he’ll still fight! Eagles and Ishimori might secretly be a babyface tag team!

Worst: I Think The Bullet Club Civil War Reached Armistice Through Rebranding

This column is about wrestling shows and not wrestling social media drama, but I want to briefly talk about a storyline I think may have, judging from social media activity, wrapped up at King of Pro Wrestling: the Bullet Club Civil War.

https://twitter.com/MattJackson13/status/1055306748838338560?s=09

Along with Cody’s tweet that clearly states he’s not in BC anymore, those ones from Matt Jackson and Tama Tonga, all the “last Bullet Club-style shirt” promotional tweets I mentioned in the KOPW review, and Omega referring to them only as “the Elite” in promos at the end of that show and afterward, make it look like this very long, multi-promotional, relatively complex wrestling storyline was wrapped up with rebranding. Since I’ve previously devoted many, many words in Best/Worsts of NJPW to this angle, I’m going to summarize how this, in kayfabe, went down:

• The Elite subfaction of Omega and the Bucks forms and Omega makes it clear they’re his main priority (over Bullet Club)
• In summer 2017, the leadership drama between Kenny and Cody begins when Cody tries to throw in the towel for Omega during Okada vs. Omega II. The drama between the OGs and everyone else starts soon after during the G1 when Tama yells at Kenny about the Elite and gets beaten up.
• After Wrestle Kingdom 12, the Golden Lovers reunite and Kenny vs. Cody really pops off. The Tongans express that they are not fans of either of these people and don’t engage with most of the feud.
• The OGs violently split from the Elite at the G1 Special in San Francisco. They cause some problems for Kenny in the G1, but mostly get a lot of heat for themselves with their shenanigans.
• All In is a success for the Elite
• Over the course of like two months, The OGs win the 6-man tag team championships and heavyweight tag team championships from Elite teams, then beat them in an eight-man tag at KOPW.
• Later on the same show, the OGs get a new heavyweight title contender via secret, four-year indoctrination plan that involves Finn Balor.
• The BC Elite change their name to just the Elite/announce they’re no longer BC via brand shifting in a promo by Kenny, t-shirt ads on Twitter, etc.

So, after like a year and a quarter, the winner of the Bullet Club Civil War is… the OGs! It’s extremely lame that this didn’t end with some kind of stipulation match (they could have even raised the stakes of that KOPW tag with a few tweets before the show), but I guess the OGs just wore their opponents down. It turns out they were right all along and the Elite were sellouts who didn’t really care about Bullet Club because they just quit claiming to be part of it once it got too hard.

The real-life reason this ended like this will probably become clear over the years and could involve either a bunch of these wrestlers whose NJPW contracts are up in 2019 not wanting to officially start their new brand in the wake of noticeably getting their butts kicked by their old, NJPW-owned brand, or the company not wanting to draw attention to the fact they could be leaving. I’m sure there are other valid theories out there too. On my part, even though I thought this feud had a lot of highs and lows and was pretty dead by KOPW, I would have liked to see it end for real with some fun, fake violence rather than whatever lame corporate maneuvering this is.

… or maybe this is all a misdirect and this stuff flairs up again for WK 13 and/or NJPW/ROH at MSG!

Best: Ass To The Future

I thought the most entertaining match from these shows, with its combination of quality wrestling and goofy comedy spots, was ACH and Taguchi vs. Chris Sabin and Kushida. The New Japan regulars are both in Taguchi Japan and ACH and Sabin have history together in ROH, which makes for a dynamic of friendly competition. As with their match against Team CMLL, Sabin and Kushida keep one of their more fun opponents (here ACH) in their corner with less flashy submission wrestling for part of the match. When Taguchi is tagged in, he makes progress with a mix of hip attacks and less butt-based wrestling. Both teams break pins after their opponents land a finishing move, and Kushida ends up winning by tapping out ACH with the Hoverboard Lock while Sabin holds Taguchi back.

The Tag Team of the Future feels very good about this win, and continues to be adorkable about this tag team triangle relationship. This angle might culminate with Sabin, Kushida, and Alex Shelley all fusing together into a Megazord. (There’s an idea for the MSG show, ROH and NJPW! You can have that one for free!)

After the Tottori show’s Chaos vs. Bullet Club multi-man tag main event, Roppongi 3K cut a promo on their opponents for the main event of the October 26 Road to Power Struggle show and the team they defeated to win last year’s tournament, Super 69. Yoh heavily implies that once again his strategy will be to poke Taguchi in the butthole very hard with his fingers, and Sho does not look enthusiastic about it.

Butts aside for the time being, here’s how the points stand after the 10/22 and 10/23 league matches:

• 2 points – 1-3 – Team CMLL, Super 69
• 4 points – 2-2 – Tiger Liger, Suzukigun, BCOGs, The Tag Team of the Future
• 6 points – 3-1 – L.I.J., Roppongi 3K

I’ll see you back here soon to talk about the next, actual normal TV show part of the Road to Power Struggle/Super Junior Tag League!