Cero Reviews AJW Classics ~Retro Hour~ EP 4

[cero2k]

AJW Classics ~Retro Hour~ EP 4
Aired: October 16, 2007
arches from February 25, 1985
Ota Gymnasium, Tokyo, Japan

All Japan Women’s Championship Match
Itsuki Yamazaki (C) vs. Bull Nakano - 6/10
This is a 17 year old Bull Nakano, super young, but she has already joined Matsumoto's Gokuaku Domei stable. Given that, yes, there was soo much interference in this match, like so much that even the heel referee got the point he threw the match out because both women's sides got in the ring.

The match wasn't the best, or at least, it took too long to reach a second gear, and unfortunately, once they did, it was when the match ended. It started strong enough, right into the action, but once Matsumoto started interfering, it got slower and slower with interruptions. Nakano looked greed, but still quite good for her age, she already has a presence.

Post-match - Yamazaki took the microphone and vacated the championship. Wikipedia has this as 'undocumented reasons', and unfortunately, my Japanese is not enough yet to translate what she said, but all I was able to make out was that she was letting go of the title and referencing the Crush Gals and their tag team championships.

Why Nakano didn't win the title here is a mystery to me, because Nakano would end up winning the months later by winning a tournament for the vacant title.

Jaguar Yokota and Devil Masami vs. Dynamite Girls (Jumbo Hori and Yukari Omori) - 7.5/10
At this point, these two teams have ranked enough momentum to go after the WWWA tag titles. The Dynamite Girls are former champions and want to regain. Yokota and Masami haven't been a proper team, but they're a bit of a dream team pair up and have had some success.

With both these teams being babyfaces, this was the most 'under control' match of the night, at least in terms of interference, yet, the match did get somewhat heated a points and spilled out to ringside. Slight story here was that DG had the team chemistry, while Yokota and Masami were just better singles and stronger when cutting someone off, and towards the end, Yokota and Masami just worked together and dominated Hori and Omori. If I could complain about something, was that Yokota and Masami were just super strong in this match. At the end, Yokota won after hitting a piledriver and an assisted plancha.

WWWA World Tag Team Championship 2-out-3 Falls Match
Crush Gals (Lioness Asuka and Chigusa Nagayo) (C) vs. Gokuaku Domei (Dump Matsumoto and Crane Yu) - 8/10
This was an f'n war! Even prior to the announcements, GD attacked Asuka and Nagayo, busting open the latter. So when the introduction came, we had a great badass visual of Nagayo, bleeding all over her white karategi, ready to fight. Both team's had a LOT of women on their side at ringside. In addition, Shiro Abe, the referee, is basically in Gokuaku Domei's pocket, and so he got replaced by the commissioner before the match started.

The match itself was a super heated brawl. It didn't take long for Nakano, Galactica, and Moreno to get involved, it didn't take long for Matsumoto to bring out the chain and spike and even scissors. The match itself was laid out so that 80% of the match happened in the first fall, that was the fall that was built to, and a fall that would end up with a countout win for Gokuaku Domei when Asuka reached the apron at 19, but was held there for a second extra. Nagayo, fired up, didn't want to wait and called for round two to start immediately. Second round quickly went to the Gals via Spike Piledriver on Yu.

At this point, the crowd is boiling hot, Matsumoto is straight cutting Nagayo's hair and it's just nuclear heat. They trade a couple of near falls, but the heat has been so much that both team's stables are just about to explode, and they do, and when that happens, the referee is take out, beaten up, leaving no referee in the ring. Matsumoto starts lariating Nagayo over and over, and indeed, with no referee, Shiro Abe jumps in and makes the count, and Matsumoto and Yu capture the titles.

I really loved the heat this match reached. Nagayo is an incredible babyface, her wrestling is good, but it's her charisma and her guts that just explode through the screen. It's a babyface fire that you rarely see now a days, if at all. I didn't mind the interference, it's an AJW thing, but Abe coming in for the finish was a bit deflating, it's something that for the most part I've always hated from El Tirantes for instance, but I understand that it's the way to get the titles on the heels.

Post-match - Gals and Domei exchange some words, the Gals obviously want to fight, but the decision is done and we have new champions. At this point, the crowd was hot, but disappointed.

OVERALL THOUGHTS
Good episode. The main event totally felt like something huge, just the fact that this episode had one less match to give time to the main event, tells you that it was a bigger match that usual (ok, not bigger than hair vs hair). Something good about this episode was that all matches were from the same show, so it was easier to follow and study on.