Featured image by Rinpei Tsukamoto
I don’t know what it is but this pairing hasn’t been clicking properly for me. I enjoyed their 30 minute draw last year well enough but it certainly felt like there was a spark missing. Watching what they choose to do now working a full title match, I’m pretty sure that this just isn’t a pairing that’s for me. I find the first two acts of this really unfocused and uninteresting. There’s some brief attempts at arm work by Takumi but it’s not anything the match explores in depth. It just all feels very ho-hum until they get into the meat of what they want to do where they start dropping bombs. And the bombs are all pretty all right but even there I have things to quibble about. Takumi’s kicks are real inconsistent for me, at times solid and convincing enough, but other times real hollow thigh-slappy stuff. I don’t usually mind thigh slap kicks but it just feels kind of out of place with these two especially given how damn physical and brutal a lot of the Marvelous/Sendai Girls feud has been outside of this. Doesn’t really help that they showed clips of last year’s GAEAism main event in the hype package for this match. Found myself wishing I was watching that instead.