This was for Okada’s IWGP Heavyweight Championship.
While the final twenty minutes (don’t worry, there were thirty minutes of boredom beforehand) or so featured some cool spots and some genuinely electrifying moments, this match basically was the culmination of the major crisis that has been going on in the main events of big NJPW shows for far too many years.
NJPW main events have such an obligatory feeling. The first third of the match is always a giant wank fest. They exist simply to exist and to artificially increase the length of the whole thing. This is not a good thing to ever do for starters. To actually standardize the practice of doing it in…every…single…major…main…event is an artistic disaster
This has not always been the norm with NJPW main events. At some point in the 2000s (I’m on a historian on Jonas Wakefield’s level), this mentality took over. That is not to say that every main event NJPW has run has been bad. (Far from it in fact).
It’s just a structure that ignores the strengths and weaknesses of the individual wrestlers. It forces wrestlers to fit inside of a box. It plays into archaic notions that longer is always better in professional wrestling. It gives the wrestlers such a small margin of error for success that they are almost destined to fail every time out there unless you have a true wrestling genius (Tenryu ain’t walking through that fucking door in case you’re wondering).
It forces two talented wrestlers like Kazuchika Okada and Kenny Omega to creatively fail on a major stage.
It forces them to make their physical sacrifices worthless.
It makes super dragon suplexes meaningless because that moment followed 30+ minutes of nothing.
It prevents true creativity.
It holds down the art form.
Enough is enough. Something has to give. Someone has to step up and make a change.
The king of sport needs to actually think forward and do something new. Not just with the people in the ring but with what those wrestlers are actually doing.
Until that happens, NJPW main events like this one will continue to be physically impressive but in the end frustrating mixed bags.
Because this match was far from bad. Some moments were impressive. Some of the sequences down the stretch caught me off guard. It was genuinely unpredictable. Kenny Omega possibly became a star in Japan on this night. The physical effort that went into producing this match was on a level most wrestlers will never come close to reaching. It just was not very good. (**1/2)
Views from the Hawke's Nest 