A lot of companies must be looking at Sendai Girls with envious eyes at the moment. They’re selling tickets, the roster is growing, and with Senjo Spirit, they’ve opened themselves up to a whole new fanbase. As they march towards Budokan, there is a real momentum behind them, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the fun of it all. The vibes are great, and with so many things going right, it would have been a real shock if this show hadn’t followed suit. Let’s have a chat about whether it did.
It might be a new year, but some things remain the same, as I commit to rambling about whatever wrestling I’ve been watching each month. You can tell it’s January because I always enter a new twelve months motivated to keep up with as much different stuff as possible. Will these lists be slowly whittled down to mainly covering Marvelous, TJPW and ChocoPro by the time April rolls around? Probably, but it’s nice to convince myself 2026 could be the year I stay on top of everything. You never know!
Well, March was a busy old month, wasn’t it? With big shows happening all over the place, there was plenty to enjoy, and I’m not going to waste too much time blabbing on up here when there is more exciting stuff down there. Let’s get on with it.
I’ve decided to make a couple of tweaks to my matches of the month round-up. The most obvious one is that this hasn’t been a top ten list for a while, so there is no real need to stick to ten entries. Some months it might be more, some months it might be less, and it’s silly to force myself into a corner for no reason. Secondly, I am going to make a tiny change to the kind of things I write about. There are often brilliant wrestling matches where I have nothing to say. That doesn’t take away from how good they are, but not everything requires analysis beyond saying it rules. On top of that, if they come from one of the promotions I write about regularly, I’ve often reviewed them before. So, rather than stretching myself to come up with something new, I’m adding an honourable mentions list to the bottom of each month, where I’ll round up all the stuff you should watch, but where I have nothing new to add to the conversation.
Apart from that, it’s business as usual! Here are a load of matches from the last month that I loved.
That’s how you get someone hyped for a show. Credit: Assemble
What better way to celebrate the anniversary of Big Egg than to get a load of joshi companies in a building to have a lovely old time. The first Assemble is still one of my shows of the year, so this one had big boots to step into. Let’s see how they did.
Stardom may have been at Korakuen Hall the day before this show, but there has been a change, and that was no longer the star attraction. They sent the big guns to Sendai, and while my love of Stardom has wavered a bit this year, when they send the big guns, they rarely miss.
I managed to avoid the temptation to lock myself into reviewing all of Stardom’s Tag League, but a Korakuen is a Korakuen, and I’m honestly not sure when I last failed to ramble about a Stardom trip there. With this being Giulia’s third anniversary, she was defending against one of her own, Jumbo cashing in her 5STAR victory over the boss.
After a solid first show, Stardom’s Tag League continued into night two, as I realise that because I’ve started reviewing this, I’m probably going to get obsessive and do the whole thing. Oops. Oh well, fingers crossed someone cares enough to read it.
The 5STAR may have ended mere minutes ago, but Stardom is heading straight into Tag League. Perhaps it’s the short break between the two that has convinced them it’s a good idea for teams in the Red block to wrestle the teams in the Blue block. Make sense to you? Nope, me neither. Oh well, it doesn’t make too much difference, I can never be arsed working out the maths anyway.
I believe this was the first wrestling show at the new Yokohama Budokan, but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. Either way, Stardom had packed the card, with all the important titles up for grabs, a unit certain to disband and a couple of mystery opponents. By now, you probably know who they were, but just in case, let’s keep the suspense going a bit longer.