September’s matches of the month roundup is a bit shorter than usual as I’ve been experiencing some post-Japan blues, which has made sitting down to write about wrestling feel like more effort than usual. However, there are still some treats in here, including one that might make my end-of-year lists, so hopefully, you’ll find something to enjoy.
Sakura Hirota vs Eiger, BIG SHOW in Niigata (2/9/23), Sendai Girls
The end of an era. With Eiger presumably moving on to the other side, I don’t quite know how to start talking about her last match with Sakura Hirota. For as long as I’ve been watching this stuff, you could rely on getting a handful of these a year, and they have never bored me. Sure, you’d have to be looking through a faceful of ectoplasm to claim every single one was entirely original, but Hirota and Eiger have that magic touch. They can take things they’ve done a million times before and still find a way to make me laugh.
And the wrestling world isn’t about to enshrine this feud alongside Okada vs Tanahashi, Kong vs Satomura or Dynamite Kid vs Tiger Mask, but maybe it should. Perhaps the levels of creativity and invention these two have consistently found deserve to be rewarded and lauded as much as more ‘serious’ encounters. Hirota and Eiger have wrestled more than any of those pairings, and none of them had to deal with being a ghost and a mum of two. That shit takes its toll!
Of course, I’m not entirely serious, but mainly because I know the wrestling world is incapable of thinking far enough outside the box to care about something like this. However, that shouldn’t, and doesn’t, diminish Hirota and Eiger’s achievements over the years. Time after time, these two have been tasked with going out and making an audience laugh, which, as anyone who has been to enough atrocious comedy shows can tell you, is no easy task. Not only have they done it, but they did it with style, and I, for one, will miss my regular treat. Wherever Eiger ends up next, I hope she finds someone to help her scratch that nonsense itch, but she’ll have to be very lucky to find anyone as perfect a match for her as Hirota.
Nao Ishikawa vs Risa Sera, 16th Battle ~ Waremokou (6/9/23), Prominence
Nao’s first steps into the world of hardcore wrestling weren’t perfect. Her main event with Risa was the last match I saw as part of my Japan trip, and there was never really a sense that she could get the win, even if the small Shinkiba crowd were firmly on her side. You could also tell that Risa guided her through it, dictating the tempo and setting up most of the hardcore spots. It even appeared that she took over the role of blading for Nao, not so subtly cutting open her forehead while she raked a barbed wire-covered kendo stick across it. They kept it simple, which was the right call, but did give it all a touch of baby’s first hardcore match.
And yet, none of that mattered because simple things can still be painful, and Nao winning was never on the cards. It didn’t need to be either because the match wasn’t about that. It was about her pushing herself and trying something different. She leapt into the lion’s den, taking Sera on at her own game, and stood her ground as the blood filled her eyes. It was a gusty and brave performance that won over the crowd regardless of whether the match was a classic or not.
I also suspect that it’s the kind of wrestling that works better live. As of writing, I haven’t gone back to rewatch it, but if you are a step or two removed and unable to see the blood staining the canvas as the fans cheered Nao on, there’s every chance the impact will be lost. However, you can still appreciate Nao stepping into the unknown, facing it head-on and chugging a bottle of sake as she does. The atmosphere might not transfer through the screen, but badassery does, and for all this match’s flaws, Ishikawa had plenty of that.
Chris Brookes vs Shigehiro Irie, Big Bang (9/9/23), DDT
I’m always fascinated by a champion’s first defence, as there are a few different ways you can take it. A classic one is to have a younger or unfancied wrestler step up, someone who no one would expect to win but everyone wants to see get a chance to shine. For that, see Nao Kakuta’s match with Mizuki in TJPW. Or there is the actual threat, the person who could take the belt and end the dream before it started. Just ask Twitter how it feels about Mayumi Ozaki beating Mio Momono for a reminder of that one. Then you have a match like this, in which DDT called upon a former champion who was unlikely to win the title but still promised a challenge. They feel like a test. Beat them, and you’ve proven your initial win was no fluke.
And Irie was perfect in that role. He’s not a wrestler who pops up in the promotions I watch regularly, so I tend to forget what a workhorse he is, but he took the fight to Brookes in this match. He’s got that intoxicating combination of power and speed, alongside a literal willingness to headbutt his way to victory, that makes him feel like a threat even if your brain tells you that he’s not likely to win. There’s also a sense that you have to hurt the fucker to put him down. He might not be the biggest man in the world, but Irie is solid, and to believably keep him down for that three, you have to unload both barrels.
It was a challenge Brookes proved up to. Irie rocked him on more than one occasion, but this was the definition of a champion’s performance, as the hat-stealing bastard (I will never let that go) took his beatings and kept coming back. He was forced to match Irie blow for blow, unleashing a headbutt of his own before deploying two Praying Mantis Bombs to get the win. It was proof that he could go to that place, match a veteran powerhouse and come out the other side in at least something approaching one piece. As first title defences go, it was a damn good one, and Brookes’ reign is shaping up to be one to remember.
Mio Momono & Tomoko Watanabe vs Takumi Iroha & Chikayo Nagashima, Marvelous (12/9/23), Marvelous
Sorry, I’m about to use this match to have a moan. It was great and probably deserves to have someone unpick it, but sometimes you have to let it all out. Do watch it, though.
In fact, it was so great that it pissed me off when the first thing I saw on Twitter about it was someone moaning about Mio getting pinned again. Now, I have no problem with people being upset about their favourites losing. That’s a big part of the fun. However, I am growing increasingly frustrated with people who view wrestling through a prism where all that matters is the result. I assume they’re the same people who judge every film by its box office and can’t fathom that a footballer could have talent if they haven’t won fifteen Champions Leagues trophies because, like those morons, it seems to miss 99% of the point. At least with football, there is a degree of sense to not watching a match and only caring about the final result, but in wrestling? What the fuck are you doing!
Because, let’s be clear, most of these cunts aren’t watching Marvelous. They’re logging onto Twitter, seeing who lost and basing their entire opinion on that, which is the equivalent of reading a film’s Wikipedia entry and then claiming you’ve seen it. Then again, most wrestling criticism acts like a Wikipedia entry, there to list out everything that happens without engaging with the actual meaning of it, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. There is so much more to the shit than the basic facts of what happened! Sure, not every story reaches a satisfying conclusion, and plenty of promotions have dropped the ball before, but that doesn’t mean we should launch them out the window. There’s still an arc to be followed and a world to be explored, which, more often than not, requires a little more thought than ‘fuck you, the person I wanted to win didn’t’.
Mio Momono is going to be fine. Yes, she got pinned by Chikayo Nagashima in this match, but she lost because of Takumi Iroha, and that is the mountain she has to climb to make it back to the top of Marvelous. Will she do it? I don’t know. Maybe Marvelous will fuck it up. They wouldn’t be the first, and they certainly wouldn’t be the last. However, whether Mio gets that big run or not, she’s still having incredible matches every month that, regardless of whether she wins or not, find new ways to blow my mind. I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy, but I kind of think that has a value in itself, and maybe taking the time to appreciate that rather than who Cagematch lists as the winner will make us all a little bit happier. It will certainly lower the number of people I block and mute on Twitter.
TJPW’s relationship with SKE48 seems, from the outside, to have been an incredible success for the company. They’ve got themselves a talented wrestler and a host of fans who will follow her anywhere. However, the highlight of their relationship so far, at least for me, isn’t Yuki Arai. No, it’s Aoki Shiori (aka Oshirin) and her venture into refereeing.
And while this match had a significant number of my favourites in it, it was Oshirin who stole the show. Wrestling referees are kind of famous for being incompetent. You can’t get into that game if you’re going to catch every piece of wrongdoing or refuse to be duped by someone pointing to a corner. It’s something we’re all used to and have accepted as part of the elaborate kayfabe that surrounds this daft sport. However, when you take someone from outside that world, put them in those stripes and ask them to take it all very seriously, it turns out it is fucking hilarious. There were a few genius spots in this match, including a reprise of her enthusiastic reporting of two counts from her first appearance, but I would be content with just watching Oshirin potter around the ring, trying her hardest to be a really good ref. I would happily watch her confiscate Misao’s various gimmicks and try to stop Rika from strangling people all day because she does it with an endearing earnestness that makes her both incredibly likeable and ridiculously funny. It’s brilliant.
It also speaks to the incredible flexibility of wrestling as a genre. Other sports have matches that become about the referee, but it’s never in a good way. Wrestling, though, can make it work. It can take an idol, dress her up in the stripes and have things go so badly wrong that one of the wrestlers ends up strangling her, and it will go down as a massive success. That’s a beautiful thing, and I hope we get plenty more of these Oshirin appearances in the future because I want to watch her deal with every refereeing conundrum under the sun.
Eddie Kingston vs Claudio Castagnoli, Dynamite Grand Slam (20/9/23), AEW
If you stripped away all the history between Claudio Castagnoli and Eddie Kingston, it would do little to diminish the magic of this match. Claudio and Eddie are two people who only have to stand across the ring from each other for you to understand their beef. Of course, Castagnoli, who looks like someone crafted him to be the perfect specimen in a Swiss lab, doesn’t get along with the hardass street kid from Yonkers who doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up. Their past brings depth, but who they are is enough to carry a match.
Those things aren’t just the outer dressing, either. They’re an integral part of how they wrestle. Castagnoli is impenetrable, walking through chops even as his chest betrays the damage he’s taking. Eddie, meanwhile, is someone you can hurt, a human being who stumbles around the ring, selling his ass off. It’s man vs machine, Rocky vs Ivan Drago, humanity vs perfection, and that’s one of those stories that never grows old. You don’t have to be a wrestling nerd to unpick those threads. It’s part of our collective identity, imprinted on us through generations of stories.
And no matter how many of those stories you hear, no one can resist the happy ending. It’s the moment when the underdog, the representative for us all, knocks the seemingly unbeatable freak on their ass. It’s simple, but it works. It works even better when that representative is Eddie fucking Kingston, a man who wears his heart on his sleeve like no other and who, if you don’t love, we can’t only not be friends, but I’m just going to assume you’re a cunt. He’s one of a kind, and even if this match had been shit (which it wasn’t), that ending would have put it on this list.
Mio Momono & Sumika Yanagawa vs Tomoko Watanabe & Unagi Sayaka, Marvelous in Sapporo (24/9/23), Marvelous
I often talk about my love of chaos in wrestling, as there’s nothing I like more than a match which is just a little bit all over the place. However, there is an art to putting something like that together. You can’t just go out and run around a lot because then it morphs from chaotic into messy, and while there is some enjoyment in that, it’s never going to be as good. What I actually mean when I talk about chaos is that I want to be tricked into thinking things have gone off the rails. In reality, the wrestlers should know everything that is going on.
All of which sums up this beautiful clusterfuck of a match perfectly. In the opening minutes, as they messed around with Sumika Yanagawa’s towel, everyone delighting in trying to mimic her tricks, it seemed for all the world like we were in for a fun day out in Sapporo in which everyone had a lovely time. It felt like they were on their holidays, especially when Tomoko and Unagi locked Mio and Yanagawa in a wheeled cage, spun them around a lot and somehow ended up dizzier than them. No one was taking this shit seriously.
And yet, by the end of this match, Mio was headbutting Unagi. As I noted in my Marshmallow Bomb review, those things don’t feel like they should go together. However, watching this, it becomes increasingly clear that it was always the plan. They wanted to lure everyone in with the fun and then slowly escalate it, the tension beginning to break out when Mio half-jokingly grabbed a wrench in response to Watanabe booting her in the shin. Things getting so violent out of so much fun almost made it worse, like two friends who have fallen out and are suddenly punching each other in the face because how dare the person they trust be the one that hurts them. They were supposed to be having fun, so why did everyone have to ruin it?
It’s also (I know I go on about her all the time, but it has to be said) what Mio Momono excels at. There are plenty of wrestlers who can swim in both the nonsense and the serious pools, and even a few who can do them both at the same time, but there are very few who can flick that switch like Momono. One second, she’s all smiles. The next, she has unleashed her inner Chucky, going for the knife before you can stop her. It’s one of the many things that makes her the best wrestler in the world. It also made this match one of my favourites of the year.
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