NJPW New Japan Cup 2013 - 3/11/2013

NJPW New Japan Cup 2013 - 3/11/2013

Satoshi Kojima vs Tomohiro Ishii

 Tomohiro Ishii beat Satoshi Kojima with a brainbuster. This was a heck of a match and reminded me of classic AJPW matches from the 1990's. Tons of stiffness here and great lariats. These two just beat the crap out of each other and the crowd loved it. This may have been the second best Satoshi Kojima match I've ever seen. Great stuff and I totally want a rematch. Rating:***3/4

Tama Tonga vs Hirooki Goto

Hirooki Goto won with the Shouten. This was nothing special at all and they did very little in the given time.

Toru Yano vs Manabu Nakanishi

Toru Yano won with a low blow. This was bad. Yano's never been good and Nakanishi is a complete shell of his former self and is completely shot. It was like he was almost doing a parody at one point.

Hiroyoshi Tenzan vs Karl Anderson

Karl Anderson got the win with a cutter. Another unimpressive match that truly felt like a midcard match. Nothing really of note here and it was very skippable.

Hiroshi Tanahashi, Alex Shelley and KUSHIDA vs Prince Devitt, Captain New Japan and Ryusuke Taguchi

The finish

Hiroshi Tanahashi got the win with a High Fly Flow. The match was okay. I liked the segments with Tana vs Captain and the juniors kept things at a fast pace. Nothing wrong with this at all. They also had a mini story here with NJ trying to snub Devitt and get tags instead of him.

Togi Makabe vs Yujiro Takahashi

The finish

Yujiro got the win here with a deadlift german. I didn't like this one. It was two midcarders having a midcard match with ref bumps, nut shots and weapons. No thank you. I'll watch WWE for that.

Yuji Nagata vs Minoru Suzuki

Minoru Suzuki beat Yuji Nagata with a Gotch-Style Piledriver. The match was alright but for these two, a lazy effort and when you get down to it, they spent about 7 minutes in ring total. A big step down from their better matches in the late 2000's before NJ was the cool thing to watch.

Kazuchika Okada vs Lance Archer

The finish

Kazuchika Okada beat Lance Archer with the Red Ink. Good match here with Archer looking really good. He threw a mean chokeslam and he was pretty decent here. Okada wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything noteworthy. Rating:***

Shinsuke Nakamura vs Davey Boy Smith Jr.

DBSJ won with a ligerbomb. The match wasn't anything special. I always have a hard time getting into DBSJ. He's big, but not imposing and I frankly don't find him that interesting to watch. Take him down 6 inches and change him to John Smith Jr and he wouldn't be in NJ. Nakamura couldn't work well with him either. He was just too tall for alot of Nakamura's kicks so they all looked wonky.

CHAOS and Suzuki-gun got into after.

Overall thoughts: This was a mixed bag with the opener being awesome and nothing really coming close to it. Due to their being so matches, all of the matches were shortened and not as good as they could have been. The tournament also had alot of bad heavyweight wrestlers in it instead of some of the younger guys who could and should have made a run. It would have changed it up a bit at worst. I really do reccomend the opener but you can skip the rest.