The 8th of August is a special day in Marvelous canon, as it’s when Chigusa Nagayo debuted as a wrestler. In recent years, it has been reserved for Korakuen, and with the feud with Marigold only getting hotter, the roster was out to defend their honour on the anniversary of the start of their boss’s career. Let’s see if they did a good job.
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.
I’m sure a lot of white powder has been stored in guitars over the years. Credit: DDT
Bakuha Koshien is the Explosion Deathmatch side-project of Atsushi Onita and Sanshiro Takagi. It’s not actually a DDT show, but DDT is helping them out, hence the presence of a fair few of their wrestlers on the undercard. While I believe the original vision was for Onita to take Explosion Deathmatches around the world, COVID has made that difficult, so we’re getting a Bunkhouse Scramble in Korakuen instead. You’ll accept it, and you’ll enjoy it!
These DDT Dojo shows have been so much fun that I’m not entirely sure they need to go back on the road. Sure, it probably wouldn’t be a great business decision, but they could figure it out, right?
Strap yourself in folks, because with approximately fourteen million matches on this card and a billion wrestlers, DDT’s trip to Ryogoku is going to be a long one. However, I have every faith it’s going to be a very good one, so don’t let that put you off.