Wednesday, December 25, 2013

AJPW 1/20/1997 - Triple Crown - Kenta Kobashi vs Mitsuharu Misawa

AJPW 1/20/1997 - Triple Crown - Kenta Kobashi vs Mitsuharu Misawa



































Mitsuharu Misawa beat Kenta Kobashi at 42:05 with a running forearm smash. I honestly didn't like this. Neither guy knew whether they wanted to do a technical match or an AJPW head dropping bonanza, so they just combined the two.

They match was most focused on Kobashi working Misawa's arm before it became the usual head drop fest. Kobashi worked it for the entire middle portion of the match but the arm work ended up meaning nothing anyway as Misawa ended up winning with the same injured arm, like I knew he would. The kicking out of the Tiger Driver '91 infuriated me. Following it up with Kobashi getting up from a dragon suplex didn't help matters either. I honestly was starting to think that a Tiger Driver off the building wouldn't have mattered at that point.

I also didn't like the length of this match. It went 42 minutes and could have used about 10 minutes or so less. These two didn't need the extra time and all the extra time did was allow things to escalate more than they needed to. It  felt like it could have went all night with the way things were going.

I'm going to hold off a rating on this one. I used to think it was a great match back in the day but this viewing totally soured me on it. There were some good things and the story was good up until the end, but they just had to blow it. At least the crowd was hot and ate all of it up, while I was here throwing it up.

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