BRM Reviews NJPW Power Struggle 2014

[Big Red Machine]

NJPW Power Struggle 2014 (11/8/2014)- Osaka, Japan

MASCARA DORADA & BUSHI vs. TIGER MASK IV & FUEGO- 4.25/10
Standard pre-show stuff.

YOUNG BUCKS vs. FOREVER HOOLIGANS vs. SUZUKI-GUN (El Desperado & TAKA Michinoku)- 6.5/10
A good, fast-paced match with some creative spots. A good opener for the PPV proper.

KAZUSHI SAKURABA & TORU YANO vs. SUZUKI-GUN (Minoru Suzuki & Takashi Iizuka)- half sh*t and half a fantastic segment. What do I mean by this? Read on and find out.
They started off with a brawl, but it quickly wound up with Suzuki and Sakuraba outside of the ring and Yano and Iizuka inside the ring. First Iizuka chokes Yano with a microphone cord. The ref tells him to knock it off. Then he chokes him with his bare hands. The ref tells him to knock it off. Then he chokes Yano with a rope. The ref tells him to knock it off. CALL F*CKING DQ, YOU IDIOT!
Yano pulls off the turnbuckle while the ref is yelling at Iizuka. Yano celebrates his cleverness, but gets attacked from behind. Yano grabs Iizuka’s goatee and won’t let go when the ref yells at him, so the ref jumps up and knocks Yano’s arm down, causing more pressure on the illegal hair pull, so Iizuka gets pissed at the ref (and you’d think the ref would learn that this is a bad idea because it happens in EVERY F*CKING MATCH THEY HAVE). I have seen these same spots a million times already, and I just hate them more and more. Some feuds are bad because the story of the feud doesn’t make any sense. Then there are feuds like this that are bad because the matches all suck. This one has managed to take that to a new level by not only having the matches all suck, but doing THE SAME SH*TTY MATCH EVERY TIME!” This part of the match deserves a dud. Actually, you know what? Not a dud. NEGATIVE 2/10. It’s been SIX MONTHS of this sh*t at this point. And I’m warning everyone right now that if they don’t come up with something new to do at the Tokyo Dome, I’m going to give it negative 10.

Anyway, both guys tagged out, and the moment that Suzuki and Sakuraba got in there, it got awesome (as usually happens). They teased a Kimura, but Suzuki blocked it and locked in the sleeper hold. He kept the sleeper in until Sakuraba really started to fade out, then spun it around to set up for the piledriver, just as he normally does. Then Sakuraba countered the piledriver with a quick roll-up and got the win. The build for the Tokyo Dome is clear: Sakuraba got the win here… but would he have gotten the win of Suzuki hadn’t let him out of the sleeper hold to go for the piledriver? I can’t wait to find out!

NWA WORLD JR. HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Chase Owens(c) (w/Bruce Tharpe) vs. Jushin “Thunder” Liger- 5.75/10
Good babyface vs. heel stuff.

TETSUYA NAITO, TOGI MAKABE, TOMOAKI HONMA, & CAPTAIN NEW JAPAN vs. THE BULLET CLUB (Karl “Machine Gun” Anderson, Doc Gallows, Yujiro Takahashi, & Bad Luck Fale) (w/Tama Tonga)- 4.25/10
A slow, dull match, but HOLY SH*T that Captain New Japan kickout was AWESEOME! That by itself bumped this up from just a 4.

IWGP JR. HEAVYWEIGHT TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Time Splitters(c) vs. reDRagon- 8.25/10
Not as good as their previous match, but still awesome. After the match, the Young Bucks and Forever Hooligans come out and both say that they want title shots and we get some shoving and basically the exact same thing we got last year.

IWGP JR. HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Ryusuke Taguchi(c) vs. Taichi (w/TAKA Michinoku & El Desperado)- 6.5/10
The Suzuki-Gun guys were being great heels as always, and did a fantastic job of always making sure that the referee was distracted… which is why it was so baffling to me that they didn’t do this for the PILEDRIVER THROUGH A TABLE spot. Also, for some reason, there was no DQ for this.
They did a lot of great stuff, but Taguchi started selling his legs less and less as the match went on, and if you weren’t going to have him sell his legs for the whole match, why do those chairshots to the legs in the beginning?

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- The Bullet Club came out and Anderson got into the ring with Taguchi. He then announced to the crowd that “the Bullet Club has arrived.” Umm… Karl? You guys have already wrestled two matches on this show. We already know that you’re here.
Anderson then introduced the man who he said would be the next IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Champion, the newest member of the Bullet Club… KENNY OMEGA! Everyone gasped, because, when he signed with New Japan, he said he wanted to proudly wear their logo. It turns out that he lied. As he explained in a promo, he tricked them into signing him for a bunch of money, just so he could fight for the Bullet Club. This was great but Omega’s nickname, “the Cleaner” is pretty darn bad.

YOSHITATSU vs. AJ STYLES (w/Jeff Jarrett & Scott D’Amore)- 6.5/10
Not much of a pop for Yoshitatsu. The people did get more into him as things went on, though. They had a pretty standard babyface vs. heels match, with Jarret and D’Amore interfering. The finish was… well… do you remember at the beginning of the year when there was that botched Styles Clash on Roderick Strong and he got hurt and had to miss a few weeks? Well this was that, except it looked like Tatsu broke his neck. He was apparently okay afterwards but it was extremely scary to watch. After the match, AJ held Tatsu so Jarret could hit him with a guitar. Despite Jarrett taking FOREVER to do so, the babyfaces who came to make the save were still late, and when they got there, they didn’t even try to get revenge. AJ and Naito just got in each other’s faces a bit.

NEVER OPENWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Tomohiro Ishii(c) vs. Hirooki Goto (w/Togi Makabe)- DUD!
30 seconds in and they are already doing that pointless forearm no-selling. After approximately a million of these forearms having a no effect, Ishii takes a bump off of a shoulder tackle and clutches the back of his head like someone hit him with a baseball bat. This was a typical Ishii match. First he no sells a lot. Then one thing breaks his invulnerability and he sells the exact same body part which he just no-sold as if he is in the world’s worst pain. Then he and his opponent just randomly do that spot where they take turns hitting each other because INTENSITY AND STUFF! Same impossible-to-connect-with sh*t, different day. It’s even that the point where I called exactly the spot that where Ishii was going to kick out at one. That should NEVER happen. Kicking out after a finisher should be something so rare that you NEVER see it coming. But Ishii does it so often that it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
They focus on each other’s heads and sell their heads except for all of the times that they don’t. It stunk. After the match, Makabe and Ishii had a staredown.

HIROSHI TANAHASHI & KOTA IBUSHI vs. CHAOS (w/YOSHI-HASHI & Kazuchika Okada) (w/Gedo)- 7.25/10
Yeah. YOSHI-TATSU is so clearly in this match to take the pin that they might as well dress him up in the Captain New Japan suit. Kota got a haircut and got more chiseled and really does look like a heavyweight now.

IWGP INTERCONTINENTAL TITLE MATCH: Shinsuke Nakamura(c) vs. Katsuyori Shibata- 8/10
They had a typo on the graphics, spelling the champ’s name as “Makamura.” Whoops.
Other than that one snafu, this was a lot more along the lines of hat I had hoped for the first time these two met back in the G1.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Well… we know who will be challenging for the IWGP Intercontinental Title at the Tokyo Dome. Didn’t see that heel turn coming.


A disappointing show from New Japan. The Jr. Heavyweight Tag Team Title and IC Title matches were both awesome, but I was secretly hoping for a bit more for those, and most of the other matches also felt like they were a level below what they should have been. One thing I can’t deny, though, is that it did its job of setting up for the Tokyo Dome very well., and that show looks to be awesome.