2025 Wrestling Roundup Week 37

 
Grand Passion Mask #4 vs Super Taira, Sportiva 8/27

Grand Passion Mask #4 has been one of those acts that has been kind of lost on me. But this was a pretty good match! No surprise since it has Super Taira in it. The most straight wrestling I've seen GP4 do, he brought a lot of cool holds to the table, and Taira is really cool to watch as always. This had a lot of quasi-lucha style work. Cool moment where GP turned a mishappen roll up attempt by Taira into a cool Full Nelsion hold, and then a facebuster to gain control. GP proceeded to work over Taira with cool lucha holds. The second half was cool mostly because Taira is established that he can win the match whenever he ties his opponent up, either with a llave or a pin combo. GP Mask even did an Hijo del Santo style tope into a camel clutch with Taira fighting out of the camel clutch. I think fighting out of submissions is cool. This was a fun creative 10 minute undercard match that felt competitive, which is just what I need, feels like a breath of fresh air.

Ali Najima & Super Taira vs Yuta Oya & Ryutaro Ohno, Sportiva 9/17/2025

Whenever I watch a Sportiva main event, its almost guaranteed to be one of the best matches of the match. That is remarkable, and it has probably made Sportiva my favourite promotion to watch this year just because of their incredible consistency and charming recurring cast of wrestlers. This had a dream team in Najima and Taira, the continuation of the rivalry between Oya and Najima, and greenhorn Ohno showing up in a main event tag. It was good as you expect. I wish the first Taira vs Oya exchange had gone longer as these two are always fascinating against each other. Ohno is as solid in the old businessman rookie role as you need him to be. He still has to fight to hit even a bodyslam on Najima, and that makes him compelling. He also adds some cool flavour with his kicks and his chunkiness. The real story of the match is Yuta Oya being the underdog teamed with the rookie against two higher ranked wrestlers. He takes an Anderson Bros-like beating from them. There was a great moment where Najima was hitting all kinds of nasty kicks to Oya, and Taira was also bending his leg pretty hard. Tairas 'dangerous lucha maestro who uses submissions and pins like a shooter' act is really cool. There are some quality exchanges between Ohno and Taira which is really fun to see because Taira is such a unique wrestler, and then we get Oya vs Najima. Both these guys were hitting really hard and doing good stuff. The saves were also really dramatic. There are so many modern tags where it feels like there's endless saves by the partner and it starts to feel meaningless. Here there were 2 or 3 crucial saves and they were really dramatic and important. And then you have the aspect of all these guys constantly adding new stuff to their skillset. Very good match, another good chapter in the Sportsbar Kings Road.

Ali Najima & Ryutaro Ono vs Yu Shimizu & Masanori Watanabe, Sportiva 9/3

Onos return match after a 2 month absence, glad he's back. This was a short match but really hard hitting and with some nifty wrestling. Watanabe was just destroying Onos leg here with nasty low kicks. Ono is in the role that he's mostly taking a beating but he can fire back with big crowbar elbows and the occasional hard kick of his own, he's a fun chubby hard hitter. Shimizu vs Najima sprint section was really good. Najima is still building up to things like a body slam or suplex and he's always compelling, and Shimizu continues to be reliable with his simple style of hard elbows and sleepers. At one point, Najima punched him square in the face. The finish had Watanabe just obliterating Ono with a brutal headkick. Watanabe is quickly becoming a guy who's must watch in my book, and everyone else here is realiably good even in a small dose.

Yusaku Ito & Michio Kageyama vs Shinya Ishida & Konaka, Sportiva 9/3

Yusaku Ito baby. With his gritty headbutts and general scumminess always make him a highlight when he shows up. The parts where he and Ishida were beating on each other were easily the selling point of the match. Not that anything else was bad here, but the match got a bit more heated when they faced off. First with Ito starting to bitchslap Ishida and then pulling him over and raining punches on him. Later they had another gritty exchange wailing on each other in the corner. Ishida is not afraid to hit back and stomp the shit out of a guy. Aside from that refreshing scrappiness there was also some fun methodical Konaka work. Kageyama is solid but won't set your world on fire here. He's not much in the match anyways. Ito on the other hand was working his ass off having some great exchanges with Konaka and Ishida. I love that the sleeper is always a plot point in Sportiva. Quality match with an interesting layout.

Ali Najima vs Konaka, Sportiva 9/24

When I saw this would be happening I thought it would be the main event. It was the opening match, I thought it could be an amazing main event but as an opening match it was still really good. It was a classic match that was nearly all grappling with Najima attacking Konakas arm and Konaka in turn going for his leg. Lots of nifty cerebral wrestling moments and it felt like every moment counted, which made it so good. Konaka is pretty much always doing something neat, and Najima is getting really good at making simple holds interesting. I loved his nasty hammerlock takedown, so simple but cool. Konakas counters were amazing. I love the hard hitting Ali Najima but it's cool to seem him do well in this kind of chess style mat wrestling match.

Yasu Kubota vs Yu Shimizu, Sportiva 9/10

The Scum Bastard challenges for the title! Yasu Kubota is a type of wrestler that is easily underrated. What he does is very simple, straight forward, basic - but he has a knack for mixing in a few cool touches that make him stand out. And most importantly, everything matters. He's also a 51 year old geezer, so he has to be smart about what he does. Shimizu is quite unrelenting with his hard elbows and sleepers. The result is a simple, but very enjoyable and compelling match that is built around Shimizu elbowing the champion really hard, and Kubota hitting back hard slowing him down by taking out his legs and locking in a few cool holds. Shimizus elbows and sleepers are awesome and there is some gritty leg selling. It's a very old school type match with the high spots being something like a reverse DDT or lariat. I could see some people finding this boring but I really enjoyed it and I was rooting hard for Shimizu to take the title. His chokes made me jump out of my seat and a match that can make me super excited about a chokehold in 2025 has to be a really well crafted piece of wrestling. 

2025 Wrestling Matchguide