This was a No Disqualifications match.
The idea of the “hardcore rules” based stipulations have become extremely sanitized over these last few years. The realistic, or at least believable, nature of these type of matches must’ve certainly died along with ECW and early CZW.
When wrestlers first started going to the floor or under the ring, things felt believable. Extra chairs, camera cable, drink carts, fire extinguishers — things that may reasonably stored under a ring. If a wrestler wanted to inflict extra damage, they brought their own instrument of pain — Abby’s fork, Cactus’ barbed wire baseball bat, Sandman’s Singapore cane. The further the matches went, both in run time and distance from the ring, the wilder things would get. Beating your opponent into submission inside of the ladies washroom, attempting vehicular homicide in the parking lot or even just having a silly condiment fight by the concession stands. Things made at least SOME sense.
Now, and for the last several years, we live in a world where wrestling rings automatically come stocked with kendo sticks, thumbtacks and cheap folding tables that haven’t been used in most set designs for over 15 years.
The feeling of the death match being an über-expressive art form has faded away. We’ve seen creative, entertaining spots replaced by meat skewers in the hairline so much that it’s lost its edge.
And it’s not that the matches have gotten necessarily safer, they’ve just gotten…well, prettier. Polished. And again, sanitized. Overly sanitized, in fact, to a point that a once edgy, hardcore sub-sect of a company’s wrestling division has now become marketing fodder for television commercials. Art is dead, and the artist was the culprit.
But this match still whooped ass!
Believe it or not, it is possible to still enjoy a form of entertainment even in its death spiral. I understand wanting to keep your workers safe and healthy, and workers wanting to make sure they can wrestle relatively pain free for a long time. But I’m also not asking for Zandig roof spots in 2024 (…unless someone’s up for it). Just give me some creativity and parity in these specific match types!
Jon Moxley is capable of making almost anyone and anything entertaining. He’s failed at doing that exactly one (1) time in his career, towards the end of his WWE run, where he was in a situation nobody could’ve fought their way out of and lived to tell about it. He’s also a sick bastard. And while Takagi does not have that perverted function of his brain fully activated like Mox does, he certainly feels like a top 3 choice on the current NJPW roster to be able to have this type of match at this quality, sanitized or not, and that helps.
This is entertaining and was far and away the match of the night at the NJPW show last month. I would absolutely recommend checking it out. Just don’t go into it expecting a genre changing smash hit, or even something that’s better than a WWE Extreme Rules style match, just with two far superior workers than most anyone currently employed there.
Match Rating: ***1/2
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