Re: The 2012 MOTYC thread
NJPW King Of Pro Wrestling 8/10/12
Kazuchika Okada vs Karl Anderson
Great match. Okada continues his awesome streak and Anderson continues to impress me in a lot of areas. He really needs to make his offence lead somewhere though, thankfully this had Okada to add that to the match with all of his usual great neck work setting up for his finisher. Finishing run was bloody great and I was on the edge of my seat for most of it. ****
Hiroshi Tanahashi vs Minoru Suzuki
Yeah, this was really great. The start is all about Tanahashi keeping his distance from Suzuki, and when he finally gets Suzuki were he wants him he acts like a dick and pays for it. Suzuki’s in control for a really good amount of time here, and his arm work is great, as is Tana’s selling, keeping his arm by his side and trying to strike with his other arm. It’s all good stuff, and then Tana finds and opening and goes after the leg. At this point I thought it was going to suffer slightly because of his tendency to go after the leg and then completely forget about it in the finishing run but that’s not what happened. The leg work is really good for a while, but it’s not enough to fully stop Suzuki and his onslaught on the arm. Submission trading is so much fun, and when Tana has the Figure Four locked in the match really picks up. The visual of Suzuki screaming and shouting at Tanahashi while he’s in the hold is amazing. Suzuki eventually goes to his strikes to wear Tanahashi down but he keeps going back to the leg as a cut off point and it works really well thanks to Suzuki’s great selling. Really both guys selling is top notch throughout the whole match. I loved each guy going for their bigger stuff but, especially Suzuki, not being able to hit it so resorting back to the limb they’d been working on. Some really nice exchanges in the finishing run, all the while keeping the selling and the limb work in the story of the match. This is one of Suzuki’s best performances ever, and Tanahashi was great too and nowhere near as annoying as he sometimes can be. Not as good as Okada/Tanahashi II and definitely not as good as Okada/Naito imo, but it’s not that far off them and it’s better than their WK match. ****1/4+
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The 2012 MOTYC thread
I don't want to randomly jump from Day 3 to Day 8 and back to Day 5, I will wait until every G1 hits internet.
