NJPW Dominion 6.19 in Osaka-jo Hall

NJPW Dominion 6.19 in Osaka-jo HallNJPW Dominion 6.19 in Osaka-jo Hall

By Big Red Machine
From June 19, 2016
Discussion

NJPW Dominion 6.19 in Osaka-jo Hall (6/19/2016)- Osaka, Japan

JAY WHITE, JUICE ROBINSON, & DAVID FINLAY JR. vs. SATOSHI KOJIMA, HIROYOSHI TENZAN, & MANABU NAKANISHI- 4.25/10
Stuff happened. Some of that stuff involved babyface Tenzan kneeing Finlay in the balls for no good reason. Tenzan sends Jay White off to ROH with a submission loss.

YOSHITATSU, CAPTAIN NEW JAPAN, & TOGI MAKABE vs. BULLET CLUB (“Hangman” Adam Page, Bad Luck Fale, & Yujiro Takahashi)- 4.5/10
Page gets his gimmick over by immediately attempting to choke “Bullet Club Hunter” Yoshitatsu out with his noose. Stuff happened. Page got the win pinning Captain New Japan. After the match they hang Captain New Japan with the noose until Makabe and Yoshitatsu make the save. In other words, this match was all about getting Page over in his debut.

CHAOS (Tomohiro Ishii & YOSHI-HASHI) vs. LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Sanada & BUSHI)- 4.75/10
Stuff happened until… YOSHI-HASHI got the win? That can’t be right. Yup. I just rewound it and watched it again and for some reason YOSHI-HASHI beat one of the Ingobernables. Strange (and almost certainly count-productive finish).

EVIL vs. HIROOKI GOTO- 5.75/10
They work over each other’s heads, including chairshot by EVIL for which there was no disqualification. Goto won, which completely shocked me. As many people have noted (especially after he dropped the IWGP Intercontinental Title back to Nakamura last year after doing absolutely nothing with it), Goto is pretty much damaged goods at this point. He’s tried and failed to win the big one so many times to the point where just about the only thing that could get people to really believe in him as a main eventer would be a G1 victory followed up by finally winning the big one at the Tokyo Dome. EVIL, on the other hand, is young guy on the rise who had been getting something of a push this spring and has been performing very well. While it will be hard for fans to take Goto seriously as a true top guy, he does still have a lot of name value and a win here could have helped solidify EVIL as being at his level. Having Goto win seems completely counterproductive (unless they actually are going to give him the G1 victory and give him the belt at the Tokyo Dome).

FOUR WAY ELIMINATION MATCH FOR THE IWGP JR. HEAVWEIGHT TAG TEAM TITLES: Matt Sydal & Ricochet(c) vs. Roppongi Vice vs. reDRagon vs. the Young Bucks- 6.75/10
This is New Japan so eliminations can also occur by being thrown over the top rope to the floor. I popped when the Bucks eliminated Roppongi Vice because it meant that I wouldn’t have to suffer through any of Rocky Romero’s usual idiotic shenanigans.
At one point reDRagon looked like they were about to eliminate the Bucks but Sydal and Ricochet took the opportunity to come up behind them and dump them over the top rope instead. Sydal and Ricochet then picked up where reDRagon left off in trying to eliminate the Bucks but reDRagon turned heel by getting back into the ring and laying out Sydal ad Ricochet. Once we got down to the final two things got more exciting and they actually did some cool elimination teases, but ultimately this division has become so stagnant and the belts have been made to mean so little I really didn’t care who won.

IWGP JR. HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: KUSHIDA(c) vs. Will Ospreay- 9/10
KUSHIDA works over Ospreay’s arms so Ospreay relies on his legs for his offense instead. It’s a simple story, but one that will never not be effective with the proper selling. They also had a quite few cool sequences and reversals in here. Fantastic match. If New Japan is willing to take the belt off of KUSHIDA and put it on a gaijin (which is a BIG if, especially for a babyface gaijin) there is a great story available here in Ospreay training hard and working his way up the ranks and finally winning the belt in his third try.

IWGP HEAVYWEIGHT TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Guerrillas of Destiny(c) vs. The Briscoes- 6.75/10
The match was pretty good and they built to the finish well. The Briscoes won, but then got jumped from behind by the Bullet Club’s Adam Page and Yujiro Takahashi. Page hung Mark Briscoe with his noose and Mark sold it very well. Page and Yujiro posed with the titles, so we’ve got some contenders set up. Good stuff.

NEVER OPENWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Yuji Nagata(c) (w/Manabu Nakanishi & Ten-Koji) vs. Katsuyori Shibata- 6.75/10
They did a good job getting you behind Nagata even though he was doing stuff that would normally be the stuff that the young punk heel does to the old veteran (like using his finish). Nagata was quite defiant and wanted to show that his win last month over this young whipper-snapper was no fluke, but it was not to be.

LADDER MATCH FOR THE IWGP INTERCONTINENTAL TITLE: Kenny Omega(c) (w/Bullet Club) vs. Michael Elgin- 9/10
The Bullet Club guys that came out with Omega were Page and Yujiro. The Bucks were already hiding under the ring but the referee found them before the match began and ejected them from ringside? Why? They didn’t do anything wrong. For some reason Page and Yujiro went to the back, too. Were they also ejected? Apparently not because those two came out a few minutes in to interfere.
There were some weird things under the ring like a street sign, but I assume that the Young Bucks planted them there. Whatever they were using, though, they always made sure that the ladder mattered to the spot (even when they were using those really hard Japanese tables, which did not break for Kenny Omega, resulting in what looked like one hell of a painful bump).
The finish of the match featured a lot of overbooking, but in this case it worked perfectly. In many ways this was a very Kenny Omega match, with elements that managed to feel at the same time very over the top and almost cartoonish but also very real. The finish also did a great job of making it feel like they didn’t just cross out “Tanahashi” and write in “Elgin” on the card for this match. This was a match that really only these two men could have had. If it was anyone else, the finish would have bombed, but these two made it work.

IWGP HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Tetsuya Naito (w/Los Ingobernables de Japon) vs. Kazuchika Okada (w/Gedo)- 8.75/10
I’m guessing there are no count-outs in this one, huh?
They had a fairly pedestrian match for a while with Okada working over Naito’s head and neck. There seemed to be a lot of support for Naito from the crowd, which caught me off guard. Naito also started to work the head and things really picked up when Naito locked in the Pluma Blanca. Things escalated from there with finisher teases and reversals and finally kick-outs of both Destino and even the Rainmaker and this started to get a really epic feel… but then Okada just hit a bunch of short-arm lariats then hit the Rainmaker proper to retain the belt. An awesome match…
But definitely not an awesome decision. Not only does putting the belt back on Okada feel counter-productive, but having Naito as the IWGP Heavyweight Champion going into the G1 offers a number of interesting booking opportunities for him to lose matches (or at least not win) to set up future title matches while still protecting him by having him not get pinned. He could, for example, just walk out on a match and take a count-out loss. He’s already the IWGP Heavyweight Champion, so what does he care about winning the tournament? You could also get heat on him by having him run around and waste time to stall out the clock for a draw, perhaps screwing a popular babyface out of an important point. Anyway, this was yet another very surprising finish on this show, but unlike most of the others, I think this one was a mistake.

An AWESOME show from New Japan, but especially if you skip the matches that actually had build behind them. A lot of very interesting (and, quite frankly, questionable) finishes, though. We’ll have to see how that plays out in the future.

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