Search the Community

I got interested in the Atsushi Aoki & Kotaro Suzuki team from watching 2013 All Japan. Their bouts against Koji Kanemoto & Minoru Tanaka are some of the best this year. So I was curious what they were doing in NOAH a year before they jumped to AJPW. Let's take a look! Suzuki & Aoki vs Nakajima & Kajiwara - (NOAH 01/15/12) - Story here is Aoki is gunning for Nakajima's Jr. Title. Man do we get that. Aoki is like Kawada or KENTA by going after Nakajima every chance he gets. He even leaves his lesser opponent Kajiwara (new to me) in the ring in order to injure Nakajima's leg. Suzuki plays the supportive partner by keeping the attack on or defending. Aoki and Nakajima's work makes me want to watch their title fight. Very good match. vs Ricky Marvin & Super Crazy (03/18/12): This was fun with lots of cool moves but was excessive. And I'm not sure it told much of a story. I think if it was 15 minutes, you could get away with that and I'd say it was a great fireworks match. Just too many fireworks from start to finish with no build up or downtime. vs Marvin & Sabre Jr - (NOAH 04/22/12) - Very good small show match. Slow or perhaps insignificant first part but then we get the pairings of Aoki vs ZSJ and Marvin & Suzuki and it gets cooking. vs Marvin & Ishimori - (NOAH 04/29/12) - Basically the closing 5-7 minutes of a match presented as the whole thing. Sequence after sequence especially by Marvin & Ishimori. Kotaro gets annihilated! Pretty cool but not quite a full match as its more of a sprint. Fun though! Shiozaki, Suzuki & Aoki vs Otani, Hidaka & Hashimoto - (NOAH 05/09/12) - OMG, I loved this match. Korakuen hall 6 man tag magic here with every pairing offering something interesting or outright exciting. The big story is young Hashimoto being able to hang in there with Noah top dogs especially Shiozaki. Otani keeping Go in check was enjoyable as all hell since Shinjiro looks like someone's buff dad. I think what made this great beyond the actual talent was the pacing. It was around 20 minutes and built up steam little by little until at the end, the excitement was at a fever pitch. Never did they over do it or go down a road narrative wise only to abandon it. In fact the story finished what it began with twists and turns along the way. I think this was a classic 6 man tag. vs Naomichi Marufuji & Taiji Ishimori (05/13/12): Great match but not without its faults. The hyper pace is so untenable and renders so many cool moments forgettable. They never let anything sink in. And that can work if you have a shorter match of like 10-15 minutes but they went double that. It's too much. Still there were so many cool moments that I guess they accumulated into something special. vs Marvin & Super Crazy - (07/22/12: THIS is the definitive version of this match-up! Under 20 minutes, all fireworks still but the slimmed down version of their March match. They wrestled it as Aoki vs Crazy in the first half and then Marvin vs Kotaro in the second. Of course there were double teams and break -ups but the legal guys really broke down like that. I respect their decision to do this. It made for a much better match. A fitting end and on a high note. Great fireworks match!. This mini project has been OK. It at least reaffirmed my lukewarm interest in later day NOAH. But there are some diamonds in the rough - shorter matches are better is a good rule though. There is a lot of what I don't like about contemporary wrestling here as well (and this was 10 years ago!). Aoki & Suzuki's work in 2013 AJPW is so much more substantive than many of the fireworks displays here. The 6 man match above was the highlight without a doubt though! That was a under the radar awesome match and very similar to the stuff I loved in AJ '13.

Here's a quickie covering a few Ikuto Hidaka matches that I found online. I guess it's all a part of looking for Zero One wrestling matches. He's a guy that really impressed me from my brief foray into BattlARTS and from an ECW match back in 2000 or so. Had ECW lasted longer perhaps he'd be in the mix with Super Crazy, Tajiri, Jerry Lynn, Little Guido etc. and the best Juniors matches on US TV. Anyhow let's take a look at what I found. & Minoru Fujita vs T. Kuroda & Yoshihito Sasaki (08/31/04): Classic structure Jr. tag match with an awesome high energy final act. Great to see FMW alum Kuroda kicking butt! And man Sasaki had a relatively short career but he's so impressive even this early. No one talks about him so I'm going to praise his work and no frills style every chance I get. Here Fujita's execution is on point and the man Hidaka is his usual wizard self. He is just so quick and clean in his movements that it's a joy to watch. Fujita's hot tag to Hidaka is just sick! This is a very very good match. & Fujita vs Spanky Brian Kendrick & Alex Shelley (03/27/05): Kendrick surprised me again! He's so scrawny that I just don't believe he's any good. Then he proves me wrong. Thank goodness! Fujita was a bit off tonight or there were communication issues so some of his stuff (especially with Alex) didn't work correctly. But Shelley vs Hidaka was sublime. Their mat wrestling was totally worth it. Really other than those couple execution errors this was looking to be a great match ('05 Shelley and Spanky make it easy). As it stands its still very good and absolutely worth a watch if you're interested or nostalgic for early 2000's ROH type stuff. vs Super Crazy (04/14/05): This was what I had hoped for! He and Crazy met in ECW and had a breathtaking encounter on ECW on TNN. Here they do it again and actually take it more to the extreme. Crazy lived up to his name and Hidaka wouldn't be outdone in his home promotion. 14 minutes of fireworks. Very good match! Absolutely left me wanting more. vs Munenori Sawa (09/19/10): Wow this was some BattlARTS shit! I kinda didn't know what I was watching since stylistically this was so different from the previous junior style matches. This was two dudes beating the crap outta each other. There was little defensive manoeuvres. It was palm strikes and kicks until someone fell down. Then try to snap a limb or pop a joint. But in BattlARTS fashion there were drop kicks and a couple more moves too. But then Sawa just punches Hidaka in the face His face swells up and is bleeding from the mouth. This was a heck of a match. Feels weird to watch something so Indie 90's Japan take place in 2010. I love it! I'm not going to give a rating but highly recommend watching this! Overall this was a fun little mini project. I know there's more Ikuto Hidaka on my horizon as I've got some Zero One wrestling dvds as well as some late 90's stuff. This has only gotten me more hyped to watch those. Thanks for reading!

Ah, the XPW European Title, where do we start with this one… As part of their growth and the desire to pull more international eyeballs onto the promotion, the FWA was continuing to look at where it could partner up with companies overseas. The partnership with ROH that had led to the joint Frontiers of Honor show the previous month was a logical and obvious move, the decision to work with XPW, perhaps less so. I won’t go into too much detail on XPW, other than to say they were a Pound Land ECW, owned by a Porn producer, with all the violence, but none of the nuance. I’m not sure exactly how the relationship between the two companies was first established, but from the ever reliable Wikipedia: “The championship was created in 2003 through a working relationship between XPW and the FWA. This was to be the flagship of the working relationship as the title would be defended throughout Europe and would appear on both promotions respective television programmes, however the title's primary home was to be the FWA.” As we’ll document, and as ever in wrestling, things didn’t really turn out like that. Shortly after this XPW folded, but the title itself did continue to be defended in the FWA. In a somewhat comical note, an actual title belt never existed, which led to the brilliant visual of Jonny Storm, the inaugural champion, supposedly carrying the title in a briefcase he carried with him to the ring. Storm was the winner of a tournament which had a British and US bracket. Some decent names were featured, so for interest (if there are actually odd people out there like me interested in the prestigious lineage of the XPW European Title), I’ve included the brackets below: Round One Zebra Kid vs Robbie Brookside Jonny Storm vs Juventud Guerrera Psicosis vs Simon Diamond Jerry Lynn vs Chris Hamrick Round Two Jonny Storm received a bye Jerry Lynn vs Psicosis Final (held at FWA Crunch 2003) Jonny Storm vs Jerry Lynn Perhaps this is where the WWE got the idea for the UK Title… So that’s the rather lengthy backstory, onto the actual match. Jonny is coming in full blown heel now, and pleasingly gets a lot of boos from the crowd. As we’ll see after another match that night, the company was going all in on trying to make him the top heel in the promotion. Super Crazy, with the obligatory ECW chants, was I believe with XPW at the time so it makes sense for him to be the first challenger. This is wrestled very much like an ECW match from 1999/2000, with lots of back and forth, and at times, some pretty non existent selling. At the beginning of the match they announce the contest as under ‘XPW’ rules, which means that a chair comes into play at one stage, but mostly the match is wrestled cleanly. For most of the match Storm shows he can hang with Crazy – including hitting a perfect moonsault from the top turnbuckle back into the entrance area - although when he tries some of the lucha sequences and the arm drags, you can tell he’s not as polished. Crazy is the one that actually slows things down at times, and I really enjoyed his transition out of a rana and a sunset flip into an STF. You can tell in general, that Storm was getting more comfortable at being a heel, taking more time to antagonise the crowd, rather than just going from spot to spot. Crazy for his part still looks good and consistent with the standard of performance he was putting in towards the end of ECW. A criticism of some of the FWA matches at this time, which I can readily see, is how many of them seemed to copy the tropes from ECW, and matches going on at the time in TNA/ROH, with the overuse of the choreographed stand offs and series of two counts and pinning combinations. I’m looking at these matches with 2018 eyes, and they always got a good reaction in 2003, but I’m very happy that the UK scene now has much more of an original style to it, and includes many more nods back to the WOS days, than was the case in the early 2000s. From the pin reversals you get a nice escalation into the exchange of some big bombs, including a massive sit down power bomb from Crazy where he catches Jonny springboarding in, but unfortunately the match ends on a flat note by going pretty much straight from there into Storm hitting a powerbomb of his own with his feet on the ropes. I can understand why it was done – it gives Crazy an out for losing and helps to put further heat on Storm, but just feels a bit underwhelming and that it could’ve been built to better. Still, this is a fun match, and a nice rebound for Jonny after a disappointing showing against AJ Styles the month before. (*** ¼)

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

Discuss here.

Shake Them Ropes March 19, 2015 Episode 71 http://traffic.libsyn.com/shakethemropes/str71.mp3 Download Rob McCarron and Jeff Hawkins are back, a day late but with our dollar in tact, to discuss all the big happenings from this week’s WWE Raw. Plus, we’ll discuss Jimmy Jacobs’ signing to WWE, his role in NXT, and who else might be joining him soon. We also continue our Top 100 Matches on WWE Network review countdown with Super Crazy vs Tajiri from ECW Guilty as Charged 1999! We also have an announcement about a special show this weekend we're doing with @mookieghana, and an update on our post-WrestleMania audio plans. Subscribe

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.