BRM Reviews NJPW Wrestle Kingdom XVI in Tokyo Dome: Day 1 (bad)

[Big Red Machine]

NJPW Wrestle Kingdom XVI in Tokyo Dome: Day 1 (1/4/2021)- Tokyo, Japan


NEW JAPAN RAMBO- 3/10
Long and boring, as usual, except we didn’t even get to go to a real finish this time. The nostalgia of getting to see Fujinami is not worth sitting through twenty-seven minutes of this. Minoru Suzuki, Chase Owens, Toru Yano, and CIMA advance to tomorrow’s finals to crown a new NJPW Stupid Idea Champion. Like last year, Yano lucked into the win because enough other people had been eliminated by the time it was his turn to enter that he won without having to do anything. This is the guy we're supposed to root for

YOH vs. SHO (w/Dick Togo)- 4.5/10
The match opens with Sho going to the floor so Yoh can dive onto him setting up a long sequence on the outside. Would it really be so hard to have Yoh dive onto Sho before he gets into the ring and do your outside stuff then, before the bell rings, so that you’re not having the referee ignore a bunch of rules?
As always happens when people go to the outside early on in a New Japan match, the heel got the better of things by breaking all manner of rules while the referee did nothing. Then the heel got back into the ring, and all of a sudden the rules started to apply again so that we could have that New Japan tradition, the Count-Out Tease That No One Ever Buys™.
Yoh made it back into the ring, but Sho immediately knocked him to the outside again because apparently he forgot to do the other thing that is required when the heel has the babyface on the outside early on in all New Japan matches, which is to whip the babyface into the barricade. He did this once, and then rolled Yoh back into the ring. It felt like this happened because Gedo will fine people if they don’t do that spot.
Any now the blatant choking starts. I knew Sho’s hair reminded me of Taichi’s for a reason. Hopefully he doesn’t grow it out any longer or else his choking spots might get unbearably long like Taichi’s. In this case, fortunately, we only got one choke before Yoh got a Dragon Screw off to turn the tide.
They traded offensive spurts, although Sho pretty much always had to rely on cheating. At one point, Yoh had Sho tapping but Dick Togo hopped up onto the apron to distract the referee. Yoh got up to get the referee’s attention, and wound up getting hit with a German Suplex. Sho hit a lariat and then locked in a triangle choke but Yoh got to the ropes. Togo hopped up onto the apron and grabbed the referee, which is not a DQ because “wouldn’t it be terrible if there was a DQ finish in this important match?” As we all know, it’s much better to let cheaters prosper than to punish them for their cheating and reward the person playing by the rules. That would be silly.
This was done to let Sho grab a wrench… which Sho then stood there with, waiting for Yoh to get up so he could run at him with it like it was a title belt. Dude! Just go over to him and smash him in the head while he’s still on the ground!
Predictably, Yoh was able to recover enough to duck the wrench shot. He ran Sho into Togo to bump Togo off the apron, then pulled Sho back for a roll-up to end this.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Or maybe not, because why would you end a big feud that has been going on for months at your biggest tour of the year?
Sho laid Yoh out, then went to hit him with the wrench but Yoh avoided it a second time and hit Sho with a superkick. Well… that accomplished nothing other than to continue this feud in a way that made the babyface victory we just saw feel completely hollow and pointless. Hooray for Gedo!

HIROSHI TANAHASHI & MEGA COACHES (Rocky Romero & Ryusuke Taguchi) vs. BULLET CLUB (El Phantasmo, KENTA, & Taiji Ishimori)- 5/10
Because we sure wouldn’t want the people who purposely skipped the “Road to…” shows because they know they’re pointless to feel like they missed anything. Here’s an idea? How about don’t make people wrestle a pointless match and risk getting hurt the day before their big match?
The match started off with some good action, but quickly devolved into what I hate abut Taguchi matches, followed by everything I hate about El Phantasmo matches. Then KENTA tagged in and we actually got some good heat. We got a ref bump so that KENTA could beat up on Tanahashi with a Kendo stick to build up to a match that everyone watching this show is already going to watch anyway. Tanahashi got free and the Mega Coaches took out Ishimori and El Phantasmo (I refuse to use their stupid team name) so that Tanahashi could get some revenge on KENTA with the Kendo stick. The referee recovered and tried to stop Tanahshi from hitting KENTA with it, but Tanahashi pushed him and did the illegal thing anyway. This sort of sequence happens about four times in each Bullet Club or Suzuki-Gun match and it’s NEVER a DQ… but this time it was, because… umm…

UNITED EMPIRE (Will Ospreay, Jeff Cobb, & Great O-Khan) vs. LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Tetsuya Naito, SANADA, & BUSHI)- 6/10
The heels jumped the bell on the babyfaces. I’m amazed that we made it this far into the show without that happening. This was a fine six-man tag to give teases of Cobb vs. Naito and Sanada vs. O-Khan, but my caveat from the previous match still applies. At this point in the show, it doesn’t feel like I’ve watched anything that actually mattered, and that’s not a good feeling to have close to two hours into what is supposed to be one of the two biggest shows of the year, and doubly so when you want me to watch two long shows in the middle of the work week.

(MAYBE NOT A) CATCH WRESTLING MATCH: Katsuyori Shibata vs. Ren Narita- 6.25/10
I was pretty sure this match wasn’t supposed to have any striking in it, but that went out the window pretty early on. Maybe that’s what Shibata said in the beginning? Then again, this is New Japan, so maybe the match really isn’t supposed to have any striking in it, and the wrestlers are just breaking it blatantly and the referee doing nothing about it, like they do in every other match.
And even in this nice teacher vs. student match, the referee has to get shoved down. Remember two matches ago where the referee told a wrestler not to do something but the wrestler shoved the referee down and did it anyway, so the referee called for a DQ? Well in this match, then referee just started a five count instead of calling for the DQ.
The crowd was into this because they like Shibata, but I like me some G-d damn wrestlef*ck grappling and that was what was advertised, and I didn’t get much of that. Instead I got a bunch of the stuff that I didn’t find particularly interesting about Shibata’s matches (in part because it’s the same thing that 75% of the wrestlers on the card use as their main weapon as well). It’s nice to see that the man has recovered from his injury enough to have a match like this, but that doesn’t inherently make the match great.
Also, people have commented on the “teacher vs. student” aspect of this, and that is where the change in rules actually bothers me the most. The idea of doing the catch rules was that Shibata wouldn’t get bumped or get hit in the head, and Narita mostly stuck to those rules (though he did swing at the head and miss a few times towards the end), but Shibata clearly did not. IN KAYFABE, the best explanation for that is that Narita did not want to risk hurting his mentor. I’m sure Shibata specifically asked (again, in kayfabe) not to be treated that way, but the fact remains that Narita did, so this match was essentially being wrestled on an unfair playing field, and that doesn’t work with the mentor-student story in my opinion, because it shows a lack of respect on the part of one of the two (whether you think that’s Narita for not acceding to his teacher’s request to be treated the same as everyone else or whether you think that’s Shibata for not stopping going for the head when it became evident Narita wasn’t going to is up to you). Yes, that can be the beginning of a long-term story between these two, and if it is I will happily admit that I was wrong, but given Gedo’s track record with telling any story with more nuance than “Wrestler A lost to Wrestler B, but then was finally able to beat him down the line after a few more tries,” I don’t think it will happen.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Teacher and student got a nice little moment together.

NEW JAPAN IS RETURNING TO AXS TV IN THE US- good for them

NEVER OPENWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Tomohiro Ishii(c) vs. EVIL (w/Dick Togo)- 2/10
EVIL jumped he bell on Ishii. I don’t think Ishii even made it the whole way into the ring before getting attacked, but the referee called for the bell anyway. Having called for the bell to officially start this match, the referee then proceeded to enforce NONE of its rules. It is possible that Togo bumped him off camera since he was distracting him early on and we didn’t see the ref again for a bit, but if that’s the case then at least show us a shot of the downed referee!
EVIL did all of his usual stuff on the outside, after which things (including the referee) got back into the ring. EVIL sent Ishii into the exposed turnbuckles and few times and did some other stuff before making that top NJPW heel mistake of doing those stupid little tapping kicks to the babyface to taunt the babyface and let the babyface get up and fire up instead of continuing to do actual damage. You’d think these people would have learned by now, but apparently not, so Ishii took over. EVIL got control back after more cheating. We got manhandling the referee with no DQ and a ref bump, which allowed both Dick Togo and Yujiro Takahashi to interfere. None of Ishii’s friends came out to help him. Fortunately for Ishii, he was able to overcome this interference, but was right back in trouble when Sho ran in as well. Yoh came out to deal with Sho, and took out the others while he was there (and no, this doesn’t count as a friend coming to help because he only came out when his rival got involved. A real friend would have come out when the first people started to interfere), and we got a double-down.
Everyone (including the referee) got up and we had a nice forty-five seconds or so where no one tried to interfere before it started up again. Ishii was going for an Ishii Driller but while Yoh was tied up with Togo and the ref was distracted by Sho, Yujiro ran in and hit Ishii in the balls. Yoh took out Sho, but that freed Togo up to distract the referee so that EVIL could hit Ishii with the title. EVIL then hit Ishii with Everything is EVIL for the win. Fans have hated this sh*t for eighteen months now, but G-d forbid Gedo decide it’s not working and change it.

IWGP TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Dangerous Tekkers(c) (w/Miho Abe) vs. CHAOS (YOSHI-HASHI & Hirooki Goto)- 7.75/10
Blah blah blah, heels break rules on the outside, count-out tease, etc. Zack does some submissions to make me not hate this for a minute or two, and then Taichi comes in for the f*cking choking. He eventually tagged out to Zack. It was only about a minute of choking over and over again, but it felt like twenty. Zack locked in a real submission that had actually had a theoretical chance of ending the match, and might actually factor into a story about an injured body part.
Goto eventually got a hot tag and things got quite good for a while as he and Zack went at it, with their partners occasionally sticking their noses in. We got a double-tag, but things stayed good because we had hit the part of the match where Taichi puts some actual effort in. This was the best thing on the show so far by miles, with the babyfaces eventually winning with quite the nice death-combo on Taichi, consisting of a Canadian Destroyer by YOSHI-HASHI into the GTW by Goto, into a Project Mayhem.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Dangerous Tekkers showed the new champions respect, including Taichi hugging YOSHI-HASHI. You don’t try to choke someone to death in a fight and then hug afterwards.

IWGP JR. HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: El Desperado(c) vs. Hiromu Takahashi- 8.25/10
This was the usual Hiromu mix of big spots paced very well. It was nice to see them mix some submissions in as well. I was very pleasantly surprised that they let El Desperado retain here. It’s a great show of faith to be put over the ace of the division at the Tokyo Dome.

IWGP WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Shingo Takagi(c) vs. Kazuchika Okada- 6.75/10
After some good wrestling in the ring, we wound upon the outside and Okada gave Shingo the usual DDT on the floor… and then they both laid there for a bit, and then Shingo just picked Okada up into a suplex. This was terrible. Why didn’t Okada get up? He had been controlling the majority of the match. This would have worked so much better if Shingo had just picked Okada up right away after taking the DDT. You’re still basically no-selling the thing, so you might as well just do it right away so Okada doesn’t have to look silly just lying there.
They had been on the outside for a while at this point, but only now that they were ready to tease a count-out did Red Shoes start to count them out. Shingo recovered and slid into the ring to break up the count, then went right back out… and Red Shoes did not start counting again. How does that make any sense?! Two seconds ago he wanted them to get back into the ring. The only thing that has changed is that Shingo briefly stuck his upper body into the ring and then it went right back to the situation he didn’t want… and now he’s just fine with it?
Yes, Shingo going into the ring and then back out again broke up the count… but the whole reason that breaks up a count is because Shingo going back to the outside requires the referee to restart from one. This would be like an NHL game where a goal is overturned because replay showed that the play was offsides, but instead of having the ensuing faceoff by the blueline, they had it at center ice as if it were a good goal, but just didn’t count the goal. The goal isn’t being counted because the play was offsides, therefore the game must be continued as if the play had been correctly whistled offside when it occurred.
I know that this is a nit-pick to many, but to me it’s an important detail, because it damages the immersion that the wrestlers are trying to create with their performance. The premise here is that this is a professional fight with rules. Referees are governed by the rules. Yes, they have some discretion, but not on issues that are cut and dry! In this case, the violation of the rule is so ridiculous (they are using the fact that the count would have to be reset to no longer count from wherever Red Shoes was, but then not actually restarting the count) that it just rubs in my face that this is just people trying to do cool sh*t to impress and excite me, which makes it much harder to get emotionally invested in the result of the match and the overall story being told (who becomes the champion and goes on to wrestle Will Ospreay tomorrow with this title and Ospreay’s claim to the title on the line).
And I don’t care how generous a referee would be before starting a count. That doesn’t apply here. Red Shoes was already instructing the wrestlers to get back into the ring. That’s what counting someone out is: A warning to get back into the ring or else you will be declared the loser for violating the rules. Shingo going right back out is him going back to the activity he had just been warned about. There is no “this is the first time” generosity to be handed out here.
And the worst part about all of this was that Red Shoes was at f*cking NINE! Not nineteen. NINE. If instead of rolling back into the ring he had just picked Okada up and ran him into the apron like he did after the in-and-out and then rolled him into the ring, HE STILL WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN COUNTED OUT!
Anyway, Shingo started to work over Okada’s midsection until Okada took over, hit the big dropkick to knock Shingo to the outside. Red Shoes started to count Shingo out… and then Okada headed to the outside and he stopped counting again! And yes, I’m sure that the rules in New Japan don’t say that a count must stop whenever a second wrestler goes to the outside, because the referee will often start counting with both wrestlers on the outside, and there is no consistent wait period. It varies based on the needs of the plot. It’s either after they’ve done all the spots they want to on the outside, or sooner than that if they want to do one of those finishes were someone just beats the count back into the ring and other person can’t beat it and gets counted out. And any time enforcement of the rules is governed by the needs of the spot you want to do, you’ve f*cked up.
This was all done so that Okada could get to do his big crossbody spot, after which he went and posed a bunch… and only then did he start selling his midsection that had just been worked over (if he was even really selling the midsection. It looked more like he was just getting his wind back, but believe it or not, I try to be generous with these things). Red Shoes came out to check on Shingo, went back to the ring and started counting them out, and so Okada got Shingo and went back to the ring. Again, they made the rules look arbitrary just to do a spot that made the match worse. There is such a “gotta get my sh*t in” mentality in this company, and it drives me nuts because it either creates problems like this, or seems to override better decisions that could be made for the match with just a simple adjustment (for example, in the NEVER Title match EVIL worked over Ishii’s back… but when he got him on the outside, instead of hitting him in the back with a chair, he did his stupid thing where he puts a chair on the other guy’s neck and knocks the chair sideways, because that’s his spot and he has to get it in).
Anyway, they got back into the ring and traded turns on offense for a while. Okada kept going for the Money Clip and eventually got it, but Shingo got to the ropes. Shingo eventually took over with a Rainmaker, but after a double-down he wasted time posing instead of following up. This incensed Okada for some reason and he started beating on Shingo. Shingo made it to the ropes but Okada wouldn’t stop so Red Shoes got between them and pulled Okada back, and which point where got a ref bump that probably would have rivaled the one at Final Battle if the camera had been on a different side of the ring. It was completely impossible for Okada to push Red Shoes that hard in the position they were in. Okada was moving in the opposite direction and Red Shoes was pretty much behind him except for his arm, which would have slowed him down a lot because it bumped into Okada’s chest, and Red Shoes landing that “injured” him looked ridiculously soft, even by ref bump standards. He was up quick, but not quick enough that it didn’t look ridiculous.
After that we got some boots, a dropkick, and a lariat leading to a double-down, and then they went to the outside again. Red Shoes clearly wanted them to come back into the ring, or else he wouldn’t have been gesturing for them to do so, but he didn’t take the logical step of starting to count, because the had a f*cking spot to do. Said spot was teasing a Tombstone Piledriver on the ramp back and forth until Shingo finally managed to hit a Death Valley Driver in the ramp. Now that Okada had been hit with the move to set up for the Count-Out Tease That No One Ever Buys™, Red Shoes finally started to count them out. Okada made it back in time. It sure is lucky that Red Shoes didn’t start enforcing the rules anywhere close to when he was supposed to, or else we would have had one of those dreaded count-outs as the finish of our main event.
They did some big moves. Red Shoes was annoying and distracting in the background. I shouldn’t notice the referee. This asshole is constantly gesticulating. TWICE when Okada through a short-arm clothesline (someone please tell Kevin Kelly that it’s only a Rainmaker if he sets it up with the ripcord), Red Shoes turned with Okada and stuck his arm out like a kid watching in his living room and pretending to be Okada when Okada did the move. That’s bad enough, but the fact that doing so resulted in him facing away from the people he was supposed to be watching made it worse.
Look… I’m not saying this was a “bad” match by any stretch. They did a lot of the stuff you expect to see in a Tokyo Dome main event: working a body-part, fighting spirit, chasing finishers, big moves and kick-outs, etc. But every time they did that good stuff, they soon do something that hit one of my pet peeves, and it would take me out of the match, so in a match that went almost thirty-six minutes, I was only enjoying it for three or four minutes at a time before they would do something that would bug the hell out of me and have to start building me back up (compare to the tag title match, where all of the stuff that really annoyed me happened early on, and then I enjoyed the final nine or ten minutes or so quite a lot).
Okada got the win here, which I think makes the most sense. Shingo and Okada are now 1-1, so this sets up a big rubber match at some point. It sets up Ospreay meeting Okada tomorrow, a year and a day after their previous big match, with Ospreay having something to prove, and an Ospreay victory tomorrow can set up for Ospreay vs. Shingo with the backstory being that when they meat in the highest-stakes situations (BOSJ final, New Japan Cup Semifinal, world title match) Ospreay always wins, setting up for Shingo to get that monkey off his back (which can lead into your Okada rubber match).

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- fine
Will Ospreay came out to taunt Okada, calling his title an “interim” title and mispronouncing his name. He tells Okada that he should go be an actor because NJPW will be safe in Ospreay’s hands. Ospreay left, and Okada cut a promo in which the internet tells me that he put Shingo over and said that Ospreay wasn’t a real champion.


This was not a good show from New Japan. Easily the worst show I’ve seen with the Wrestle Kingdom name. Pretty much every match other than the tag and junior heavyweight title matches underdelivered, and there was a frustrating sameness to a lot of the matches. These two-night Wrestle Kingdoms need to stop, or at least radically change (because I doubt they’ll give up the money of running both nights). Either go back to everything on one long show, or switch to an “all killer, no filler” format and give the guys in the big matches a day’s rest unless there is an important storyline reason for them to be working both shows.