BRM Reviews NJPW Best of the Super Juniors XXV: Day 2 (awesome)

[Big Red Machine]

NJPW Best of the Super Juniors XXV: Day 2 (5/19/2018)- Tokyo, Japan


SHOTA UMINO vs. YOTA TSUJI- 5.5/10

ACH, TIGER MASK IV, & TOMOYUKI OKA vs. CHAOS (Will Ospreay, YOSHJI-HASHI, & Yoh)- 6.75/10
Great action. What belt is ACH holding?

TOA HENARE & FLIP GORDON vs. SUZUKI-GUN (Minoru Suzuki & Yoshinobu Kanemaru)- 5.5/10
Suzuki-Gun jump the bell on their opponents… but at this point I’m ready to blame their opponents as well. If you turn your backs on Suzuki-Gun like these guys did here, you’re just asking to get jumped. Flip and Kanemaru did some good stuff.

LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (EVIL & BUSHI) vs. BULLET CLUB (Chase Owens & Taiji Ishimori)- 5.5/10

BLOCK B MATCH: Dragon Lee(0) vs. Sho(0)- 8.75/10
Well… Sho’s singles career is off to one hell of a start. This was an excellent mixture of high-flying, hard strikes, and submission wrestling.

BLOCK B MATCH: Ryusuke Taguchi(0) vs. El Desperado(0) - 0.5/10
El Desperado attacked Taguchi while Taguchi was doing his entrance pose. They did some spots where Taguchi was made to look like an idiot at every turn. Then- in full view of the referee- El Desperado used us3ed a chair to hit Taguchi in the nuts… and was not disqualified. When Taguchi finally made it back into the ring (he wasn’t ever counted out, either) El Desperado took the turnbuckle apart, took a large metal part from it, and tried to insert this metal ingot into Taguchi’s anus. I swear to G-d that’s what happened.
More stuff happened. Taguchi didn’t sell very well. El Desperado won with a cradle after a low blow. This match was horrendous, and I’m really not sure why I’m not giving it a dud other than it just didn’t feel like a dud to me.

BLOCK B MATCH: Chris Sabin(0) vs. KUSHIDA(0)- 8/10
A great babyface vs. babyface submission-based match with lots of working over of limbs. Sabin gets the win in what, due to Gedo’s repetitive booking patterns, has to be one of the least surprising “upsets” ever, especially where the top babyface in a division is involved.

BLOCK B MATCH: Hiromu Takahashi(0) vs. Marty Scurll(0)- 8/10
Your standard Hiromu match mixing crazy feats of athleticism with bumps that make you think Hiromu has a death wish. It was quite awesome, with an extremely exciting last few minutes.



A pretty great show from New Japan, with one obvious exception. This was much more along the lines of what I expect to see from Best of the Super Juniors.

[Big Red Machine]

Dave gave Desperado vs. Taguchi ***3/4 and gave Sabin vs. KUSHIDA ***1/4. He's got to be trolling people, right?

[DHRainmaker]

1 The belt ACH has is the AAW Heavyweight Championship
2 I'm shocked Hiromu isn't in worse shape than Ospreay given that he makes Ospreay look sane in my opinion

[Big Red Machine]

1 The belt ACH has is the AAW Heavyweight Championship
2 I'm shocked Hiromu isn't in worse shape than Ospreay given that he makes Ospreay look sane in my opinion

People bringing non-NJPW partner promotion belts to NJPW has been relatively uncommon recently. Props to ACH for doing that. And yeah, Hiromu is defnitely another one of those guys whose long term health I worry about.