[1994-10-09-AJW-Wrestlemarinepiad] Manami Toyota & Toshiyo Yamada vs Kyoko Inoue & Takako Inoue (2/3 falls)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Kevin Ridge]

Takako does some M-Pro taunting including a middle finger. Toyota ends up in a bunch of submissions. Lots of bendy stuff. Kyoko takes a bad landing off a double team move. She gets pinned shortly after. I’m shocked that it’s over that early but it seems this is two out of three falls.

 

Second fall and they work on Kyoko’s back. Yamada hits five consecutive backdrops. Well it wasn’t five piledrivers. They like doing things five times in Joshi. Booker T would have got this stuff over on commentary. Kyoko’s survives all that and ends up winning the second fall to even things up.

 

Yamada and Takako are more involved in the third fall. Toyota hits top rope dropick to the outside. That hurt me. That seems to be her undoing as they get her back in the ring and put her away. Not a smart move to attempt even though she connected. Good match but didn’t blow me away or anything. The pinfalls for the first two falls seemed to happen too easy. They did pick things up in the third fall.

[Loss]

So why did Yamada stop teaming with Toyota in '95? Hasegawa stepped up and took that spot most of the time. I was just curious.

 

First fall had some of the great Takako heeling that I always enjoy, but I was hoping for more. Toyota is placed in some pretty painful looking submissions. Her jump to the top rope off of the Irish whip is always a nail-biter because it requires so much balance and I wonder if she's going to fall.

 

I liked the second fall a lot for selling the cumulative fatigue of the match, at least from Toyota and Kyoko, who have been in the most for their teams. Takako takes the match in a different direction, trying to build sympathy on Toyota while throwing some brutal knees in her face and putting her in more fun submissions. The Inoues keep doing trade-off DDTs in repetition in a great sequence.

 

The third fall sees the pace pick up out of desperation from both sides, as they are tied at a fall a piece. I'm looking forward to the Toyota/Takako match later in the month based on their interaction here. Lots of close calls, as you'd expect. A few miss moves, as you'd expect. My least favorite fall, but still lots to like about it. It was a small thing, but Takako's reaction to securing the win was the best part.

 

While I thought this was a great match and don't have much critical to say about it, there were so many similar matches during this time period that I would really like them to break new ground, or do something unique to make the match stand out. That seemed to be missing here even though I really enjoyed this, and after the 1992, 1993 and 1995 yearbooks of long Toyota tags, and the ones earlier in '94, I'm a little burned out. Maybe I wouldn't have liked the 1/95 tag so much if I saw all of these first and wasn't so ready for something different. When all the 90s are released and I re-watch the yearbook highlights in chronological order, we'll see how they hold up.

[FLIK]

So why did Yamada stop teaming with Toyota in '95? Hasegawa stepped up and took that spot most of the time. I was just curious.

No major storyline reason if that's what you're asking, Toyota & Yamada were still on friendly terms after that. After 3 years it was just time for a shake up and not much more you could do with the team.

 

AJW did that a lot, whear they'd break up a reg team after a while but leave the door open to go back to it down the line if they ever needed to. That's why you get Toyota/Shimoda (Tokyo Sweethearts) & Yamada/Mita (Dream Orca) teaming again regularly 96/97.

 

Also for 95 Yamada didn't really do too much of note and Sakie was getting the "future ace" push so putting her with Toyota on top in tag title matches helped that.

[jdw]

What Flik says. They were the dominant AJW team from 03/20/92 through 10/09/94, close to three years. They clearly had plans for Toyota the following year as a singles. Time was right to move Toyota out of the tag champ role, and a good spot to slide Kyoko in and have a natural new dominant team in the Double Inoues. Made sense.

 

John

[Exposer]

This was very good to great. The first fall dragged for me and I'm not particularly high on any of these gals. I thought the second fall was tremendous with Kyoko's selling. The third fall was pretty good too but there were too many missed moves. Overall, this was good but there were decent portions of the match where I lost interest. I still thought this was great but it's just not as good as anything with Bull, Aja, or Hokuto.

[soup23]

Everyone was on here as the only two botches I could recall was Kyoko headscissors from the middle rope and Takaka mis timing int he final fall. Everything else was done well and the final fall was my favorite fall with everyone showing desperation and the Inoues accomplishing their goals and ending the reign. The look Takaka have is equal parts evil and satisfying. Great match overall.

[PeteF3]

Hard a tough time getting into this. Nothing was technically wrong in either execution (minus a few things, but at the pace the joshi girls work that's almost an inevitability) or in psychology or in pacing or anything else. But nothing stood out and grabbed me until some hot near-falls down the stretch. In the end it all felt very Joshi-By-Numbers, and there are simply too many better and more epic joshi tags for this to really qualify as a great match by the standard. It was nice to see Takako getting to shine in the end, and her evil smile celebration was a definite highlight. But very little from this will stick with me 48 hours from now.

[ohtani's jacket]

I thought this was the best Joshi tag I've watched of late for the precise reason that they weren't trying to have a classic. Joshi is just as guitly of the self-conscious epic as any other style. In fact, you could probably argue it was a trailblazer given what bloated beasts some of its bouts were. Here they managed to avoid a lot of the big match trappings by having a smaller arching bout that didn't have quite the same number of peaks that those epics aim for. Usually that would seem like a criticism, but I thought the workers were extremely focused here on securing the pinfalls, and there was a strong central narrative involving Kyoko's back injury and the necessity of Takako stepping up if the Double Inoues were to win. Toyota and Yamada more or less played their part and not much else, but as a long time Inoues fan I didn't mind the spotlight being on them. And no matter how sloppy Takako was in the stretch run, I sill got a kick out of this and was satisfied seeing those girls win.

[Zenjo]

To this point Marinepiad had been one of the worst major AJW shows in years. Fortunately the main event was able to save the day.

 

Over the three falls this lasted north of 35m. The opening fall was a mini-match in itself. Kyoko sustained a back injury that flowed into a FIP segment to start the 2nd. Strong selling from K. Inoue. It looked grim for the Sisters at that point. Yet they stemmed the flow and worked their way back into the match. The injury storyline was a really good idea as it added multiple new dynamics to proceedings and provided variety.

 

The 3rd could've certainly done with trimming and it got sloppy due to tiredness. From purely a workrate perspective they didn't hit top gear. Despite its technical flaws I loved the narrative in the closing stages. With her partner ailing, #4 ranked Takako was forced to step up to the plate. That she was able to do by coming through at the end and winning it for her team. A personal breakthrough as she claims the biggest win of her career to date. A feel good moment.