Hi, and welcome to week 2 of the Match of the Week! If you missed last week, it's a simple concept - our team of Iceman, Bidoof and myself will each pick a match for everyone's viewing pleasure, and once we've all given them a good watch we'll have a little vote on the winner and repeat. Let's start with that:
Last week's matches
Bidoof's Match Recommendation (Week 1)
Akira Tozawa & Shingo Takagi (c) vs. Eita & T-Hawk for the Open the Twin Gate Championship Dragon Gate, 15th Anniversary Kobe Festival, July 20, 2014 Match Link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x44y7e8
Let's start this with a match that I thought got overlooked during the year it happened and has been forgotten over time. In a promotion that always seems to deliver when it comes to tag team action, this match still stands out in my mind as one of the best Dragon Gate put out in the last decade. You have two established pillars of Dragon Gate in Shingo and Tozawa taking on two men who were being groomed to be the future of the company. While I don't think I ever saw what they did in T-Hawk, this match really got me onboard with Eita (who finally won the Open the Dream Gate Championship last month). I hope you guys enjoy this match as much as I do and I look forward to seeing what everyone has to say about it.
These two wrestled a few times in 2015, and while they were all fantastic matches, two of them took place in PWG and had a completely different dynamic, laden with story and emotion and animosity because Strong was playing a fairly long-reigning shitbird heel champion there at the time and Sabre was the most popular act in the promotion.
This match was, on the other hand, thrown together at literally the final hour. Another talent booked on the show had travel issues, so the whole card had to be reconfigured. This bout had no feud, no story, not even any real stakes. It was just two great wrestlers trying to decide who was better. And ordinarily, that would tend to be a bad thing. But in this case, what all those missing pieces actually did was give them freedom. Without any confines, they could literally just do whatever they wanted.
And what they did was to put together one of the smoothest and cleanest matches I've ever seen, in the conversation as one of the best indie offerings of all time. Roddy Strong has spent his entire career being the most unassumingly incredible wrestler in the world - unbelievably consistent but never flashy or popular enough to be widely thought of as one of the greats, 2015 was his magnum opus, and outings like this made him my personal pick for 2015 Wrestler of the Year. Zack, for his part, was smack in the middle of his big breakout period - he won his first Wrestling Observer award for Best Technical Wrestler the year prior and has picked up five more since. All of those considerable talents were on display here between two consummate professionals who knew exactly how to play to each other's strengths and build a match with all the brutal beauty that makes up pro wrestling.
Obviously I have to throw some European flavour in there, and after the past few months especially in Brit Wres it's certainly nice to be reminded that some of the best wrestlers to come over here aren't certified pedophiles or abusers - for my money, this is the greatest match in Progress history, and serves as a reminder of how great they can be. For those of you who don't know, Thatcher and WALTER are regular tag team partners as Ringkampf, but at this point WALTER is the Atlas (over 200lb) champion and Thatcher earns this title match here on Chapter 62 and with gold on the line, these two go at each other in one of the stiffest, hardest hitting matches ever contested on European soil. Matches like this especially go a long way to explain why Timo is so beloved in Europe, compared to his EVOLVE work in the States.
So, if you could leave a vote for your favourite match of last week (I think it was kind of settled already but i want to establish the format and give people really two weeks to get everything watched and their vote in) and in the meantime, we've got ready for you a timely special - as this week, we'll all be presenting you matches from NJPW's G1 Climax, with the next edition starting next week it seemed appropriate to spend this time revisiting some highlights of years' past. And we'll have those for you.... soon~!
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Born to bear and bring to all the details of our ending To write it down for all the world to see