It's been a slow start to the year for quality tag team wrestling, but it's exploded in the last week or so. Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens won the tag titles from The Usos in a glorious main event of Wrestlemania Saturday, ROH put on a spectacular ladder match which Lucha Bros survived as new ROH tag champs, FTR were back on top of the tag division in AEW after they beat The Gunns for the titles on Wednesday, and this weekend we saw one of the better IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Title matches in recent history.
Timing has never been a strong suit for Aussie Open. When they were on the come up in late 2017/early 2018, the BritWres boom was just about peaking and starting to drift downwards. In early 2020, Mark Davis teared his ACL which took him out of action for a year. When he returned in early 2021, the world of wrestling was deep into the Pandemic era with limited opportunities to tour. It took until the end of 2022 before Aussie Open could get started for real with New Japan as part of the world tag league where they lost in the finals to, ironically, Hirooki Goto and Yoshi Hashi.
A few minutes into the match Kyle Fletcher hits a beautiful moonsault to the outside of the ring, but his momentum on landing caused the back of his head to crash into the guardrail and get a nasty cut in the process. Mark Davis then took control for a long beatdown of Yoshi Hashi while Fletcher got treated on the apron having a bandage applied around his head with blood still seeping through it like Terry Butcher in 1989. The blood won the sympathy of the crowd and turned Aussie Open into defacto babyfaces with the Ryogoku faithful as they could see how passionate and how hard Aussie Open wanted to fight for these titles. Bishamon have been a great team over the last few years, but it's not often they come up against challengers as determined, and frankly, as good as this. This match was stacked full of cool double team moves and a tremendous performance from Fletcher who wrestled like a fire was light under him once he started bleeding.
After a double lariat from Fletcher and Davis, they hit the coriolis on Goto to win the titles clean as a whistle and become the new tag Champions after around 15 minutes of great action. These guys get bonus points for being heels that get the job done without help - I was a little worried when the United Empire entrance involved Cobb, Henare, Akira and O'Khan, but they played no factor in the match thankfully. United Empire > Bullet Club.
In some respects it may not be such a bad thing that Aussie Open have had to wait so long for this moment. Kota Ibushi, Will Ospreay and Shingo Takagi all had their first IWGP World Heavyweight title wins soured by being in front of quiet, clap-crowds because it never felt like the big moment it should have been. At Sakura Genesis New Japan was back to the way it was before the pandemic, and the way the fans rallied before Aussie Open really helped make this moment feel like a huge one for them.
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