All Japan Women's 8/22/1985 - WWWA title - Lioness Asuka vs Jaguar Yokota

All Japan Women's 8/22/1985 - WWWA title - Lioness Asuka vs Jaguar Yokota

 ジャガー横田 vs ライオネス 飛鳥

I can just tell you by the intro, before the match even starts, that this is going to be one of the most heated matches ever.

The finish

Jaguar Yokota beat Lioness Asuka with knee clutch backdrop. This was something and must have been insane for 1985. The crowd was nuts for Asuka all match. They started out working the figure four and a leglock along with a keylock on the leg. Really good leg work and lots of awesome facial expressions as you can see above. They did it for a significant portion of time and it didn't get stale one bit. They started going into spots from there with less focus on the selling. That really pained me because they did so well in the first half and they mostly did the opposite in the second half. They had a string of really big moves/spots with a TTD, which is Tenzan's sitout tombstone, Asuka throwing Jaguar from the suplex position to the floor, Asuka diving and missing out on the floor onto her, a slingshot suplex then the finishing stretch. It was one of the fastest stretches of spots I've ever seen and unfortunately, while impressive, it was disappointing. They did both sell their legs on the bigger spots and they did involve the injured knees even on the finish, but it really just wasn't enough for me. They could have cut most of it out and it would have been a much better match and that's where it broke for me. The finish did involve the knees though as Asuka missed a diving double knee and then Jaguar grabbed her by the injured knee and suplexed her for the win. The ending was a bit sudden and I thought they could have milked it more or let the crowd know "hey, this is it" to get them really into it. Jaguar got a huge trophy as you can see above for the win and I believe it was bigger than her. She had a heck of a time lifting it as Asuka watched on.

Now for the rating. It's a brutal one to judge, because the first half was great and the second half was good, but they just forgot the selling and opted for spots in the second half. They wrestled so smart yet so dumb at the same time. This had all of the features of a 5 star match, but I wouldn't be true to myself if I gave it that due to the rush of spots in the second half that disregarded mostly everything minus the knee. This easily could have been my pick for the best match ever without that, but that wasn't the case. I can't give this 5 stars and 4.75 is too much for something that ignored basic logic. Rating:****1/2