NJPW Dominion 6.6 In Osaka-Jo Hall

HIROSHI TANAHASHI & CHAOS (Hirooki Goto, Tomohiro Ishii, YOSHI-HASHI, & Sho) vs. BULLET CLUB (Chase Owens, El Phantasmo, Taiji Ishimori, Yujiro Takahashi, & EVIL) (w/Dick Togo) - 6/10

The usual undercard faction vs. faction tag that we’ve seen a trillion times, plus some dumb comedy crap from Chase Owens. The action at the end was pretty good, and that’s about all you can ask for these matches (because Gedo is too lazy to make them actual mean anything).

POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Bullet Club attack the babyfaces because Bullet Club.

LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Tetsuya Naito, BUSHI, & Sanada) vs. SUZUKI-GUN (Taichi, DOUKI, & Zack Sabre Jr.) - 5.75/10

More of the usual. Putting Naito in a tag team is a good way to freshen things up. He and Sanada will be going for Dangerous Tekkers’ tag titles.

IWGP JR. HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH:
El Desperado(c) vs. Yoh - 7.5/10

We got the usual New Japan formula of a decent but ultimately inconsequential opening spot or two before they go to the outside where the ref doesn’t count them out and ignores something that should be a disquali-HOLY F*CK! Someone in this company finally learned how to distract a referee! El Desperado is my new favorite wrestler in New Japan.

After using a different foreign object as a distraction, El Desperado hit Yoh in the knee with a chair, and that set up half of the story for this match. The other half was Yoh working over El Desperado’s knee. The last few minutes of this were very exciting, but I thought both guys really could have sold better.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT - A challenge is made for an IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Tag Title match.

KOTA IBUSHI vs. JEFF COBB (w/the Great O-Khan) - 7.5/10

I know a lot of people are really high on this match, but I just don’t see it. Don’t get me wrong: I thought it was great. That’s why I gave it 7.5/10. But I didn’t see it as anything that would still be on anyone’s radar in two weeks, either.

I hated the underselling of the forearms early on. I’ve just seen it WAY too many times for it to come across to me as anything but forced (especially with the �"come on! Here’s my cheek: Hit me as hard as you can!” stuff). It can work in the right spot in the match if you build up to it, but when you just do it as a shortcut to artificially manufacture intensity, it fells… well… artificial. I was much more into Kota peppering Cobb with his body blows and Cobb swing his big meat hooks wildly with Kota ducking out of the way.

They did a good job of telling the story of Cobb working over Kota’s ribs (other than the stop where Ibushi hit a standing moonsault and didn’t sell ribs afterwards), and then the story just suddenly changed to being all about the Kamagoye. This makes sense given the finish of their previous match, and that story was told very well, but the change was so abrupt and the ribs so completely ignored once the change happened that it felt like I was watching the second half of a different match than the one I started.

(And, yes, I did pop for the Cobbagoye.)

SINGLES MATCH FOR THE VACANT IWGP WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE:
Shingo Takagi vs. Kazuchika Okada - 8.75/10

Both guys worked over the head. Lots of forearms and lariats and so forth. It’s basically what you’d expect from any babyface vs. babyface NJPW main event not involving Ibushi falling on his head or Zack Sabre Jr. doing his grappling thing. Shingo picked up the win. Now Gedo has to set up some actually challengers for him to run through to really establish himself. I REALLY hope he doesn’t just have him drop the belt quickly.

SHINGO TAKAGI PROMO - Good. He wants a match with Ibushi. That makes sense. Hopefully Gedo does the right thing and puts Shingo over Ibushi.

Final Thoughts
This was a fine show from New Japan. It’s disappointing for Dominion, but the circumstances being what they were, it wasn’t going to be close to a normal Dominion show unless all three featured matches delivered at an extremely high level, but only the main event did.