New Japan Pro Wrestling 3/3/2013 41st Anniversary Review

New Japan Pro Wrestling 3/3/2013 41st Anniversary Review

Hiromu Takahashi & Takaaki Watanabe vs. Sho Tanaka & Yohei Komatsu
渡辺 高章 & 高橋 広夢 vs 田中 翔 & 小松 洋平

Hiromu Takahashi beat Yohei Komatsu with a crab. This was just your tradition NJ Young Lions match where they have to look the same and do basic moves. The sound was messed up so it was hard to get into it. The only thing I really took from this is that Sho Tanaka has charisma and may end up doing the best out of this crop.

Yuji Nagata, Wataru Inoue, Super Strong Machine & Captain New Japan vs. Hirooki Goto, The Machine Gun Karl Anderson, Tama Tonga & Ryusuke Taguchi
スーパー・ストロング・マシン, 永田 裕志, キャプテン・ニュージャパン & 井上 亘 vs 後藤 洋央紀, “ザ・マシンガン”カール・アンダーソン, タマ・トンガ & 田口 隆祐

Karl Anderson beat Captain New Japan with a bad cutter to win. CNJ bumped too early and pretty much just looked like he fell on his face. The match was no good like these matches are designed to be. It had too many guys trying to get stuff in and it was just not interesting.

IWGP Jr. Tag Championship Match: [34th Champions] TIME SPLITTERS KUSHIDA & Alex Shelley vs. [Challengers] Jushin Thunder Liger & Tiger Mask IV

Alex Shelley pinned Tiger Mask IV with a crucifix pin. The match was okay I guess but nothing special. Shelley goes 100MPH and KUSHIDA barely has anything not stolen from Tajiri. I wasn't too into this one and the camera work was pretty bad. Jushin Liger was probably the highlight of the match.

I will be skipping - Togi Makabe, Hiroyoshi Tenzan, Satoshi Kojima & Manabu Nakanishi vs. Toru Yano, Takaashi Iizuka, Yujiro Takahashi & YOSHI-HASHI. There's nobody in it I want to see and we've seen this match a million times before.

Elimination Tag Match: [CHAOS] Kazuchika Okada, Tomohiro Ishii, Gedo & Jado vs. [Suzuki-gun] Minoru Suzuki, Davey Boy Smith, Jr., Kengo Mashimo & TAKA Michinoku
I believe you can win by throwing your opponent out, by pinfall, KO or submission.

Taka gets eliminated

Jado submits

Gedo gets eliminated



Smith is out after a clothesline over the top



Mashimo and Ishii got after a Ishii lariat on the apron

Okada gets eliminated for the Suzuki-Gun win.

Suzuki-gun got the win after eliminating Kazuchika Okada. I switched feeds during this so if you notice, near the end the picture is alot better. The audio was also on time which made this show much better. The match was fun but had a rough early start. I may have missed an elimination but I did like this. I'm surprised to see Okada lose AGAIN. Definitely would appear that NJ is getting revenge on him for almost signing with WWE but that's just speculation. The man rarely lost last year and has dropped 3 falls out of the 5 or so matches I've seen from him. Rating:***

IWGP Intercontinental Championship Match: [4th Champion] Shinsuke Nakamura vs. [Challenger] Lance Archer

Shinsuke Nakamura beat Lance Archer with the Boma-Ye. This was okay but the ref bump and then interference kind of blew it. I liked Archer busting out the moonsault but this was easily Nakamura's worst IC title match yet, and not because of him. This really resembled a WWE match at times.

Special Single Match: [58th IWGP Heavy Champion] Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. [66th IWGP Jr. Champion] Prince Devitt 
プリンス・デヴィット vs 棚橋 弘至

The finish

Hiroshi Tanahashi won with the High Fly Flow. Pretty good match here though be warned that it was 90% frogsplashes and dropkicks. Could have been worse though. The pace was fine and the heat was fine and I can tell you that I liked this alot more than Tanahashi vs Anderson. They didn't go into overkill either, so it gets good marks from me. Rating:***1/2

Overall thoughts: Skip it. The main was good, the elimination match had moments but the rest wasn't that interesting. If you go in with Tokyo Dome expectations, which I didn't, you will be disappointed.