Sonoko Kato vs. Sugar Sato
We get about 8 minutes of a 15 minute match. As usual we got some unique counters and transitions, although it didn’t set my world on fire because Sato is just not very interesting. It didn’t help that the ending run was built around Sato trying to submit Kato who had a bad leg with her dreaded kneebar only to fall to a random rollup. Good for an opening match I guess.
Chikayo Nagashima & Sakura Hirota vs. Rina Ishii & Toshie Uematsu
Typical GAEA rookie sprint action. The more young Hirota I watch the more I am annoyed she retired to comedy wrestling later because she was quite good in her role. The match was built around Uematsu and Nagashima having to protect their younger partners. It didn‘t have a ton of depth and once again we didn‘t get the full match, but it was solid stuff.
Chigusa Nagayo & Makie Numao vs. Meiko Satomura & Sonoko Kato
Another really good hierarchy driven GAEA match. Nagayo had been crushing her rookies, including in 2 on 1 situations, so Satomura and Kato were frantic in trying to not get blown away. Really good heated fighting here, with both of them just firing away at the legend, with Nagayo retaliating with some precise and often extremely well timed kicks. Nagayo blowing off Katos dropkicks and Kato immediately putting on a sleeper was another great, clever spot. Numao didn‘t get in much offense and played underdog to Nagayos overdog, although she does get to look badass unloading kicks at Satomura. She was also great during the finishing run busting out rad lucha rollups into shootstyle submissions, something that was quite state of the art in 1997. I‘m stunned how perfectly laid out these GAEA tags are, as this is the kind of stuff that should warrant a ton of praise and interest even from joshi sceptics. Watching everything in order helps, I guess, but the action here speaks for itself. They just did a great job establishing both the Nagayo as ultra-dangerous as well as the Numao as vulnerable underdog dynamic. Regretably only about half the match was shown.
Intelligent bombfest. KAORU gave her all here, and Hokutos selling of initially putting her opponent down and then slowly falling apart was pretty great. It’s fascinating how KAORU turned from an AJW undercarder to an excellent secondary player in GAEA hanging and banging with legends. I would’ve liked the match to be more focussed, and there was some no selling (particularily the insane reverse northern lights bomb from Hokuto), but all in all, it was the quality match that all their quality interactions in tags so far in the year have been hinting at.
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