2025 Matchguide Week 49

Pantera Jr vs Sangre Azteca Jr, Michinoku Pro 11/2

Really enjoyable lucha libre action here, with both guys busting out some creative and unhinged big spots. There was also some surprisingly deep selling and match psychology. There were some 2025esque thigh slappy spin kicks and such which I didn't love, but the overall energy here is good. Mostly, this is a match about two guys nailing every spectacular thing they now, and they nailed all that. Pretty enjoyable. 

 

Kotaro Nasu & FUMA vs Kotaro Suzuki & Tetsuya Izuchi, GLEAT 12/6

Pretty good UWF style action here. The main reason this is worth watching is NASU, who looked like a killer. He was hitting insanely hard and constantly trying to rush through guys with his quick hands, crowbar kicks and powerful suplexes. The action was great pretty much anytime he was in the ring. FUMA is solid at best, but I liked his weird submission a lot, and both Suzuki and Izuchi are pretty competent at this style, which is enough to produce some excellent exchanges with Nasu. Nasu almost caving in Izuchis skull with a massive high kick was awe inspiring and Izuchi fired back with a sick Maeda level kick of his own. Suzuki is pretty good here for his old age and he does pull off a cool finish. Still, Nasu was the man here pretty much.

Marino Saihara vs Sakura Mizushima, GLEAT 12/6

It's kinda cool that the athress girls are also regularily called into GLEAT to do shootstyle matches. Mizushima, for someone who has shown zero shootstyle in her AWG matches, was surprisingly good here. This is a striker vs grappler match with Saihara being the obvious striker and Mizushima doing a cool job getting past her kick barrages and hitting some impressive suplexes and latching into submissions. Saiharas kicks were ever solid and she also had some nifty judo throws. The finish was really cool with Saihara having Mizushima in a leg crab hold, with Mizushima trying to gut it out only for Saihara to switch into this nasty achilles hold variation and crank back for the tap.

 

Drew Gulak vs. Timothy Thatcher, Beyond 10/12

This was an exercise in bending ankles in painful ways. Naturally I dug all that, the twisting of the legs, the slow takedown that was done by leaning on the shin. It's a great display of leverage and some carny creativity. Aside from that they didn't do much fancy here, it was pretty much the kind of grappling match between two gruff balding men in front of a small quiet audience you imagine these two having. Just tight armlocks and nothing much fancy besides a few WoS inspired escapes. Thought this was getting really good when Gulak tried to damage Thatchers leg and immediately got punished with a hard kick to the spine. I would have liked them to continue going in a more BattlARTS direction, but they kind of stuck to grappling it out. Gulaks painful looking instep hold thing that bent Thatchers leg all the wrong way was easily the highlight. I like how they kept it in the scope of an opening match, pretty much no big nearfalls, no overkill, no high spots. They seemed to be making it all up on the fly which benefited the match a lot, a nice stark contrast to the current wrestling scene where everything feels hyper choreographed. A fine piece of wrestling that felt a bit like a skinnier leaner version of an Arn vs Ole Anderson match.

 

Mari & Act vs Anri & Erisa Nagai (AWG 7/18)

Another very good little tag. This was built around Mari and Act being monsters with Anri and Nagai hardly being able to touch them. That can normally be trite, but they delivered a number of neat moments here. Anri and Nagai had to work hard to get anything at all and that made this a pretty intense match. Once again, Anri had a lot of aura and even her initial face off with Mari felt intense. Act didn't do a ton in the match, but I'd be lying if I said she didn't add to the match. She was a really effective monster early on. Mari did pretty much the rest of the match, and it was good stuff. Thought she stuck a great balance between overconfident and untouchable badass to being put on her ass with the slim chance of being caught by a rollup. Nagai is pretty much all rollups and a split legged leg drop, but they were slick roll ups and she really had to earn that split legged leg drop. Anris intensity once again jumped off the screen. Her thrust kicks were awesome and she gets a lot of mileage out of those sillas she does. There was also some fun brutality from Mari and Act, at one point Mari was basically cracking Anris ribs with her kicks. In the end Mari and Act finished their opponents off with ease, which I thought was fine since Nagai and Anri only have about one year of experience each. For a top heels vs hapless rookies match this was really good considering it could've just been a low effort squash.

2025 Matchguide 

I discovered a boatload of old SPORTIVA streams and my first instinct is to go watch the Konaka matches

 So I recently discovered the old Twitcasting page of Sportiva where they livestreamed their weekly shows from 2016-2019 ca. I'd give my left nut to get an archive of all the shows they streamed on Ustream.tv from 2010 to 2016, but this is still quite the boatload of interesting footage. Naturally my first instinct was to go look up all the matches with Konaka in them because lord knows we all need more of that yoga demon in our life

Konaka vs. Nori da Funky Shibiresasu, Sportiva 10/3/2018

Really really nice match, exactly what you want from a Konaka big match against a game opponent. Konaka does all kinds of fun grappling and neat transitions here. His early mat control segment was so cool, the guy really knows how to get in and out of holds in interesting fashions. The whole match was peppered with Konaka mixing in cool little transitions, counters and reversals, doing a really nice job controlling with a sleeper etc. Nori da Funky Shibiresasu is part of the hip hop group that did the Naruto opening theme amongst others, he had one hell of a career working a couple hundred matches in the Sportiva arena and I am happy to finally see him. He was a pretty cool powerhouse here, hitting stiff chops and all kinds of cool tall lanky guy offense, big backdrop suplexes, a big boot that damn near scraped Konakas face off, stiff chops, a big neckbreaker drop. Boy am I glad these Twitcasting streams are still around even if they are potatoe quality filmed with an Android.

Konaka vs. Tetsuya Izuchi, Sportiva 8/21/2019

You give Konaka a game opponent and 10 minutes and you’re pretty much guaranteed to get something nifty. Izuchi is game, he moves slick on the mat and kicks hard, and has some nice exchanges with Konaka early on. Konaka rules here, he hits this really cool 619 to Izuchis leg and then works him over with Indian Deathlock variations because he’s a yoga demon. There’s a completely awesome spinning Figure 4 leglock set up and a really nice Figure 4 battle. Izuchi acknowledges that his leg has been worked over, but he won’t really blow you away aside from throwing Konaka with a really nasty German Suplex. Still, Konaka is so cool to watch.

The Quest for Seichi Ikemoto matches

 Seichi Ikemoto feels like a guy who is nowhere near talked about enough as far as 2022 pro wrestlers go. Really good slick shootstylist with cool Honda-esque submissions who is not afraid to eat and dish out punishment. He's also not afraid to throw down in odd spaces, as we are about to see.

Seichi Ikemoto vs. Atsushi Suzuki, 5/28/2022

We have no achieved an almost perfect synthesis of shootstyle, garbage, and weird office space wrestling. This takes place in a room that I assume would normally have business powerpoint presentation but they lay out some mats and they do shootstyle. For some reason there is a ton of trash strewn about the mat. And they do shootstyle. Ikemoto looks great as usual outclassing Suzuki early on, love the crazy rolling omoplata. Then Suzuki sleazes it up by nailing Ikemoto with a water bottle. Ikemoto takes some nasty bumps including a shoddy piledriver on the mat, and a god damn suplex to the bare floor. Suzuki is a bit clunky but Ikemoto is so stiff and exciting it doesn‘t matter. Nice finish. It all adds up to a memorable fun match.

Seichi Ikemoto vs. Tetsuya Izuchi, GLEAT 8/20/2022

Total Ikemoto show. Izuchi barely brings anything but Ikemoto brings so much neat stuff that the match is still worth watching. Cool mat transitions, cool holds, cool reversals, Ikemotos always doing something interesting. The one cool thing Izuchi did was bust out a nifty Gogoplata. He really needed that. Even his winning KO was lame. You‘ve really got nothing better than a weak slap, Izuchi?

Seichi Ikemoto vs. Soma Watanabe, GLEAT 3/13/2022

This was really good. The match had serious fight and scrappiness, with lots of punishing striking and uncooperative matwork. With a hot U-Style crowd this would have been quite great. Watanabe is about on the level of, say, UWFi era Kenichi Yamamoto. Nothing special but he had fire and could look competitive going at it with Ikemoto, and he wasn‘t afraid to get palm striked in his mush. He also dealt Ikemoto a really nasty face kick while Ikemoto was on his knees, and that was enough to get me behind Watanabe. Ikemoto did a really nice layered performance balancing his flashy moves with how he was punishing Watanabe. Check out how he sold a random Watanabe armbar, really putting over how even random hold can be a possible injury. Finish was great as Watanabe was outclassed but made a big rally trying to put Ikemoto away and I ate it up. Most importantly, the match didn‘t feel like by the numbers shootstyle which is impressive in 2022.

Seichi Ikemoto vs. Yu Iizuka, GLEAT 9/6/2022

This had the kind of flashy moves and matwork you hope for from an ex-U-Style guy and a Volk Han obsessed kid like Iizuka going at it. The match was a good mix of flashy matwork and Ikemoto punishing a rookie. Though I wonder why Iizuka is still this low on the pecking order. He dealt a pretty big blow to Ikemoto spiking him with a Dragon Suplex and then hitting a big jumping kick, but then Ikemoto just won. It felt like they had to rush the ending. It was still an enjoyable match, though.