This was the first defence of Zack Sabre Jr's NJPW Television title after he became the inaugural champion at WrestleKingdom when he defeated Ren Narita in the tournament finals. New Japan have had a chequered past with introducing new championships over the last decade. The NEVER Openweight title originally was supposed to be defended exclusively on NJPW's NEVER events, before it quickly turned into an undercard title coveted by typical strong style wrestlers such as Katsuyori Shibata, Hirooki Goto and Tomohiro Ishii in show-stealing matches. The IWGP United States Championship never really differentiated itself enough from the IWGP IC title as their US expansion stalled and both titles felt devalued by the existence of each other. The NEVER Trios titles have been pretty worthless ever since their inception and the KOPW title was an pandemic era experiment that should have been abandoned by now. By making 35-year old Zack Sabre Jr your first TV Champion instead of Ren Narita, and the next challenger being 47-year old Ishii, the early premise of the title being something for the younger wrestlers to challenge over already feels compromised. What does give me hope that this title can find it's niche is in it's time limit rules. By imposing a 15-minute time limit for every title match, it forces wrestlers to cut out the fat and the stalling of the house style and cut to the chase in a dramatic fashion. I was a big fan of the 2012-2018 boom in New Japan, but have long since grown tired of the 30-40 minute epics that get served up for title matches in this company. The main event of this show was Hiromu Vs Yoh for 30 minutes for example. Who has time for that?
Another cool aspect of this title is that all TV title matches are free to watch on NJ World without a subscription, so if you have a spare 15 minutes today there's no excuse not to check this out!
Zack is now the leader of The Mighty Don't Kneel, teaming up with Mikey Nicholls and Shane Haste (remember TM61?) which feels like a step up after being an upper-tier guy in Suzuki-Gun since he joined the company six years ago. He also now sports the famous WrestlingClique Orange and Black colour scheme 😉 I'm not certain this will ever lead to him becoming a top guy in the company, but it's a positive sign nevertheless that he has been given the opportunity to lead a faction and carve this title in his image.
These two have met six times before in singles action, so by now both men should know what to expect from each other, but Ishii has a trick up his sleeve straight away with a cross armbreaker which transitioned into a kneebar. Zack was thrown off guard slightly by Ishii's 'teckers' as he called it, This later turned into Zack returning the favour and firing off some Ishii like chops in the corner to let him know two could play at that game.
The match then settled down more into the styles clash we expect of these two. Ishii brings the brutal strikes and Zack goes for the submission work and show-off pins and as the clock ticked on it was a battle of whether Zack could snatch a win before Ishii knocked him out. I particularly enjoyed Ishii countered an arm wringer with a headbutt. I don't want to see a code red become a staple part of Ishii's moveset, it felt a bit PWG-era John Cena for my liking, but it was a cool spot in isolation. The last 3 minutes or so of the match you could feel the pace and intensity increase as Ishii knew he needed unload his big hitters now-or-never otherwise the title would stay with Zack in the event of a draw. There was a good nearfall off the sliding lariat for a 2 count, before Zack countered the 2nd lariat attempt into a roll up. Zack's offence is perfect for this TV title environment where a quick, sneaky pin out of nowhere doesn't feel like a deflating finish. That's actually how I expected this match to go down, so I was surprised when the brainbuster was countered into a Zack Driver to end this one with 22 seconds left on the clock.
It might not be the best match these two have ever had together, but I'll champion anything that proves you can have a great match within 15 minutes - ESPECIALLY in this company.
No comments:
Post a Comment