NJPW Windy City Riot (4.13.24) 

 

April 13, 2024 

 

We’re in Chicago, Illinois at the Wintrust Arena. Hosts are Walker Stewart, Veda Scott and Chris Charlton.  

 

Ren Narita vs. Minoru Suzuki  

The fucking Yanks are still trying to clap along to Suzuki’s music and getting it wrong. At least they get the singing right now. Suzuki has lost a step or two. NJPW have basically stopped using him, which is telling given their talent void at the top of the card. Narita spends most of the match getting his ass kicked before hitting Suzuki with a push up board for the win. Narita continues to be nothing special.  

 

All the Young Lions look good until they’re allowed to develop their own personalities and characters and then they just go to shit.  

 

NJPW Strong Women’s Championship 

Stephanie Vaquer (c) vs. AZM 

If NJPW want to return to their former glories, they should book more Stardom talent. It’s the one area where New Japan excells now. Lean into it.  

Vaquer’s villainous approach cuts off AZM’s usual high-speed attacks. They do some leg stuff with AZM but don’t stick to it. The match alternates between botchy and impactful. It’s halfway to being cool. Points for effort here as the match was good when it clicked, it just didn’t click often enough. Both guys are talented. Vaquer has won me over in the last few years. *** 

 

Post Match: Vaquer’s next challenger emerges; Alex Windsor. Complete with your standard BritWres level of promo. “I bloody dare you”. Come on, now.  

 

NJPW STRONG Openweight Tag Team Championship 

El Phantasmo & Hikuleo (c) vs. Fred Rosser & Tom Lawlor vs. TMDK (Mikey Nicholls & Shane Haste) vs. West Coast Wrecking Crew (Jorel Nelson & Royce Isaacs) 

Coming out of Wrestlemania weekend and all the dumb multi-man variants (mostly scrambles) this is not the match I wanted to see. My appreciation of the match is not aided by the participants. The only good thing about the action is how people sneakily tag in blind. There is some bad wrestling in this when multiple people are involved. Awkward positioning. Bad execution of lacklustre ideas.  

 

Hikuleo ends up being the most fun person in the match because all he has to do is show up and knock two people over. The match gets better towards the finish where everything slots together nicely from the WCWC showdown with Rosser & Lawlor, through the obvious title retention sequence through to Shane Haste stealing the pin. There’s some good stuff in there. Everything before it was middling. Call it about **¾, to be fair. If they’d gotten on the same page throughout, we would have had a nice time.  

 

Post Match: The Wrecking Crew cut Tom Lawlor’s hair. WCWC should get in Brutus Beefcake as a mentor.  

 

 

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about Brawl Out. Personally, I think Tony Khan should have gotten a better handle on his wrestlers. He’s to blame for the locker room getting out of control. I can only assume Punk considered himself the enforcer, having lived in that toxic WWE locker room for so long, where they had locker room leaders. He probably felt he needed to put Perry in his place. As for Jack, his obsession with doing glass spots is a weird hill to die on in a major company. And, again, Tony should have just shut it down and said it was too dangerous but at heart he probably loves death matches and wants to see blood and carnage so here we are. Now Perry is in fucking New Japan. As workers; Punk has always felt like ‘one of us’ from the Indies. Perry more of an entitled, straight to the moon TV wrestler with a famous dad. In the ring, Punk has much higher highs. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Jungle Boy match that I thought was excellent. So, here we are.  

 

Jack Perry vs. Shota Umino 

We’re in Chicago, so Jungle Jack is greeted with “CM Punk” chants.  

Comms say that ‘everyone has a strong opinion on Jack Perry’. Is thinking he’s not very good at wrestling a strong opinion? Perry works heel here or tries to anyway. I can only assume he can’t talk about CM Punk, or the smart move would be to get on the microphone here and bait the already rowdy crowd.  

 

Both guys are ardent thigh slappers. The crowd chant “you got choked out” and he slaps on the front facelock, made famous by The Footage. Fair play, that’s a good bit. Perry’s offence simply doesn’t fit into this promotion, as is evidenced by the strike duel. Umino does not help, at all. The dancy moves that proliferate his moveset take the heat out of proceedings.  

 

Then, for some reason, we go into BIG BOMB finishers with dramatic kick outs. This is jarring. The one good thing about Perry here is how he plays to the crowd.  

GTS is countered into a DDT and Umino finds something he can do competently; hit a few spots to finish. Some very, very bad wrestling in this but Perry can at least take solace that he effectively played heel against the Chicago fans. I worry for him. He’s now going to spend the rest of his career as the guy who got in a fight with CM Punk. At least he’s not Luke Perry’s kid anymore? Small victories.  

 

Mustafa Ali vs. Hiromu Takahashi 

I would be a good deal more excited about this match if I’d not seen Ali wrestle over Mania weekend. Meanwhile, Takahashi is probably the only great talent NJPW have left from that golden era (who’s still healthy). The Yanks don’t help themselves here by chanting “both these guys”. Pick a side, people.  

This starts out in decent fashion until Hiromu decides to make this a comedy match involving Daryl Jr. I’d rather Hiromu just wrestled and leaned into the Daryl stuff when he’s getting older and can’t go anymore. I guess you have to build up your ‘old man’ shtick while you still have a healthy neck.  

 

While this is a decent match, this kind of spot on a NJPW show back in 2018 or earlier, would have been some fucking insane blowaway ****¼ classic. Hiromu’s injury past has certainly taken the edge off him as a worker. This is the first time I’ve seen him wrestle in ages and he’s lacking that dynamism that made him such a standout performer. If anything, Ali is the better worker here. He’s quicker, sharper and a cleaner bumper.  

 

He takes an insane bump off the apron, and lands on his feet, before hitting a sick tope that wipes out both the guardrail and Chris Charlton. Ali ends up opening himself up hardway on the rail and I respect it. Sadly, they don’t get time to explore the blood loss and instead go to some cool rope spots and the 450 splash finishes. Good showing from Ali here. *** 

 

Eddie Kingston, Homicide & United Empire (Jeff Cobb & TJP) vs. Bullet Club (Clark Connors, David Finlay, Gabe Kidd & KENTA) 

There are no tags here, so at least they can’t annoy me with that. Instead, it’s a big old four on four tornado rules fight. There’s a lot of guys hitting each other with plunder. It does feel pleasantly unplanned. Like the whole thing is improvised brawling. It feels natural because of that. When they get into the ring the stupidity begins. The skateboard thing from TJP. The barbwire headbutt from Connors. 

 

Finally, KENTA enters the ring and his complete inability to do anything wrestling related in 2024 is sad. Once one of the finest workers in the world. Now a sad shadow of his former self. Eddie Kingston attempts to save the whole thing by himself. Trying to break a kendo stick over his own head and then getting into a proper scrap with Kidd. Gabe ends up pinning Homicide in an unsatisfying conclusion after nearly 20:00. A lot of this worked for me but it went off the rails after Kingston had served up the conclusion on a plate.  

 

Post Match: They fight some more and Kingston calls Kidd a “fucking pussy” challenging him to a no-rope Last Man Standing match. This whole process just felt like a part in a bigger story. It’s a shame so many of the supporting characters here were useless. 

 

NJPW TV Championship 

Matt Riddle (c) vs. Zack Sabre Jr  

38 years old and under contract to MLW. Riddle’s career has dropped completely off a cliff. I hope he saved some money. If there’s one thing about Riddle that remains a constant, it’s that he’ll always find a way to ruin himself. Usually on social media. A prime example of Twitter’s app needing a breathalyser attached to it. Although if he wasn’t broadcasting his own failings, someone else would get him on tape. I’ve never known a guy more unafraid of conducting LITERALLY all his business in public.  

Both these guys are good mat technicians and most of Riddle’s worst traits, as a pro-wrestler, relate to his spot work. He’s better off rolling around on the mat with another talented mat wrestler and they don’t come any better than Sabre. The part of the match where Zack gets pissed off and mangles Riddle’s feet is sensational. The way Sabre ‘gets angry’ always works for me because he could, at any point, be a jerk about his skill in the ring but he usually needs a catalyst. He’s a man of principles. Even if those don’t extend to condemning the actions of his mates on Twitter. 

 

Sabre’s technique is as good as his match building. They do a triangle twice. First time Riddle powerbombs his way out. The second time Zack knows that’s coming and switches out in mid-air. Riddle himself doesn’t do many stupid things and utilises knee strikes effectively as his prime offensive move. Most of his dumb spots get countered. Riddle goes for a big KO knee and Sabre, having seen a few of those, counters into a roll up for the win and the belt. Easily MOTN.  

 

Would I change things here? Riddle still did some stupid spots and overused the knee, but I appreciate his overuse of that knee leading to him losing. Sabre is a top bollocks worker. ***¾  

 

Post Match: Zack says he’ll need some industrial cleaner to sort the belt out because he doesn’t trust the last champion. He’s met by Jeff Cobb for the first challenge. “Hawaiian Jeffrey, can I please have my title belt, please?”  

 

Tomohiro Ishii vs. Nic Nemeth 

I keep repeating this point, but I wanted Nemeth to quit WWE years ago and try out the Indies and I think he was a coward for staying (and not being used) for as long as he did. Nemeth has an idea of what is ‘passable’ for stand-up switches and frankly, it’s not. When it comes to striking and selling those strikes, he’s pretty good. Nemeth finds it hard to let go of all his WWE-related crutches. If he’s to become a true star and reinvent himself, he needs to let go.  

This whole match feels like a culture clash between Nemeth’s sports entertainment and Ishii’s strongstyle. Sometimes they meet in the middle and that’s when it truly works. Ishii has an Enzuigiri, which Nemeth knows instinctively how to bump. Same with Ishii eating a big thrust kick. When they hit these moments, the match is good. There’s just too much in between that doesn’t click.  

 

It ends up being a good contest, but it does take them a solid 10:00 to get used to each other. They could end up having a great match in the future. As soon as they started countering and stealing each other’s moves it started getting special. ***¼  

 

IWGP Heavyweight Championship 

Tetsuya Naito (c) vs. Jon Moxley  

Naito is one of those guys where they waited too long to crown him as champion and now, he’s broken. They’ve given him a few nice moments to sign off on, but you cannot rely on him to be the ace. You just can’t. NJPW presumably thought Will Ospreay would stay, which explains their booking. However, now they’re in a corner and need to come out fighting.  

 

Watching Naito nowadays is sad because he could potentially have had a great run now and it won’t happen because of his body. You can tell how badly someone is hurting by the way they move around the ring. The man is in pain. Mox just beats the poor bastard up. It’s not a title defence, it’s a funeral. In all honesty, they could have just had Mox squash Naito here. The fire is gone, the show is over.  

 

Naito is so rough he can’t even flip over the ropes on one of his trademark spots. Charlton blames it on Mox working the knees over but let’s face it, Naito is just fucked. They do a chair spot on a dive and Mox slips under the ring to blade.  

The match finishes hot, as if Naito was saving all his energy for the stretch. Most NJPW matches have this same issue and have had for a LONG time where it starts out boring, continues boring and then hits this insane streak of big spots at the end. Half this match was nothing at all. Death Rider finishes for Moxley and Naito’s (probably) final big run ends staring at the lights in Chicago.  

Watching Naito here was more than a little sad and New Japan, in general, has been tough to watch ever since their golden age just sort of ended unceremoniously.  

 

Look at the guys they used to have here. All at the same time, no less.  

 

Kazuchika Okada. A generational star of NJPW. The guy to replace Tanahashi. Has left early, without putting over a new star. 

 

Tetsuya Naito. The ying to Okada’s yang. Or maybe the other way around. Now a shadow of his former self, limping towards a midcard run based on character rather than talent. 

 

Kenny Omega. Injured, badly, and long gone to AEW for an easier schedule and more power.  

 

Hiroshi Tanahashi. In the office, trying to fix a mess he didn’t cause. Tanahashi gave it his all in the ring and is now faced with a huge talent gap in his NJPW ring. 

 

Will Ospreay. Quit to go to AEW, more money and a lighter schedule. Again, like Okada, leaving a talent gulf on top of the card. 

 

Minoru Suzuki. Increasingly a bit part player. No longer capable of carrying big matches. 

 

Kota Ibushi. Injured, worn out, a shadow of his former self. Has only wrestled once this year.  

 

Katsuyori Shibata. Toying with the timeline slightly to bring back a slightly older name; Shibata’s injury was the beginning of the end for NJPW. Prior to his brain getting damaged, Shibata’s style was what drove the very best of NJPW’s in-ring style and was there at the peak of the promotion’s powers.  

 

Shinsuke Nakamura. It’s not too much of a stretch to include this man, who bailed for an easier life surfing in Florida.  

 

Then there’s the assorted supporting acts; Ishii, Goto, Tenzan, Kojima, Liger, KUSHIDA, Takahashi. Even their numbers have dwindled.  

 

Now the company is relying on an assortment of guys plucked from lesser promotions, the famed NJPW Dojo and hangers on of guys who’ve now left. Beyond the obvious (Shingo) where would you even put the big belt long term? And where are the next generational talents to fill the enormous shoes of that golden generation of New Japan talent? The likes of SHO, YOH, Ren Narita and Shota Umino are fine but not anywhere near the levels of previous stars. They recently ran a show headlined by Great O Khan vs. Tanga Loa.  

 

The 411: 

There are dark days ahead in New Japan. They’ve only gotten worse since the last time I saw them and at least they’ve acknowledged the need for outside talent at the top end. Moxley’s crowning as IWGP champion is a good choice. The worry for Tanahashi, and everyone else, is the long-term future of things around here. As for the in-ring, if I’d told myself I’d watch a NJPW show (even in the USA) where the in-ring peaked at ***¾ and the main would barely register on the beloved five-star scale back in 2017, I’d have said you were mad. But times have changed. Hopefully the rebuild is an exciting as the one Tanahashi executed himself, in the ring, back in 2007. 

 

Tanahashi, back then, was the only option so he upped his game and became the ace. Before him it was Brock Lesnar and a bunch of old guys. They need to find the next ace, like they found Tanahashi in 2007.