Featured image by @funyakkichi_pw
First reviewed here.
I honestly didn’t expect this to hold up as well as it does. There’s a lot here that made me doubt how well I would take to it on a revisit at the end of the year. It’s a longer match coming in at around 27 minutes, which feels like a detriment especially against something like a 17 minute Astronauts tag on the same show. There’s a lot of no selling peppered throughout this that can feel good in the moment but can sour given distance.
This time though, I’d say that hindsight only benefits this match. Perhaps the key piece of the puzzle for me here is Yuji Okabayashi stepping away from active competition indefinitely less than two months after this match. Adding that to the interactions these two crafted together in their preview tags leading up to this bout, a very clear intent begins to reveal itself. I couldn’t tell you when Okabayashi made his decision to begin his hiatus, but here at the end of a year plus title reign, one gets the impression he’s putting in the work to set BJW up for success in his absence.
Okabayashi gives Aoki everything in this match.
While it doesn’t carry the same kind of emotional heft, the structure of this match reminds me of something like the Aja/Bull title switch in 1992. Nothing Yuji does here sticks. From the opening bell, Aoki seems to have an unshakeable control of the match. He grounds the champion to the mat early, and Yuji has to throw himself into some big bombs just for the chance to destabilize the challenger. Okabayashi throws himself into a clothesline over the ropes, or later on the apron, he grabs Aoki by the hair to slam him overhead to the hardest part of the ring. The latter earns him a brief bout of control, but Aoki bounces back almost like rubber.
Okabayashi isn’t destroyed here, but he certainly feels deconstructed. His power and his stiff chops earn him some time, but Aoki feels stubbornly immune to all of it. There’s a slight disconnect here between how Aoki still sells and projects like an underdog even as the match constantly rewards him, but I don’t mind it so much as it can read as Aoki channeling everything in his power to achieve the results he’s getting here. It also helps offset some of the more blunt choices like Aoki popping up from big suplexes or kicking out at one for killer moves.
The emotional peak of it though is probably Aoki standing up to those chops from Yuji. It’s a spot that had been worked into a lot of their preview tags but it’s deployed at just the right time in the match here. It feels like the emotional high point of the match, Aoki walks through those strikes that helped make Yuji famous and it genuinely does feel like the next top dude’s inventing himself in front of our very eyes.
It’s a match with big aspirations. It doesn’t always nail it on the head, but as a whole it just feels too strong to deny. I miss Yuji already, and it’s matches like this that are the reason why.
Rating: ****1/4
