SEM August 17th 2008: Burning vs. Kensuke Office Elimination Tag

So, it took me four attempts to watch this match properly, electing on three successive nights to start watching it after midnight, and crashing out halfway through on every occassion.

I should say that this had nothing to do with this match being dull. Overall, I liked it - I can't pick out any major flaws for the whole sixty minutes, and there are parts of this that were hugely exciting. For starters, the opening pairing (Aoki/KENTA vs. the two lower ranked KO guys) was really great - an energetic opener that would have workerd well as a standalone tag. I thought Aoki was the best thing in this match, both in his focused arm submission work, and the way he just went for Sasaki when he came in in the next fall.

That said, the middle three falls felt completely perfunctory - like the stipulations were a nuisance to get past before the obvious final pairing of KENTA/Kobashi vs. Sasaki/Nakajima. I didn't think the last fall was as good overall as the June tag - I did like the conclusive finish more, but there was some long, slow bits, especially whilst Kobashi working over Nakajima. This was my biggest problem with the match - it wasn't building towards anything in particular, or wasn't based around anything. It wasn't really about anything. Going back to the Nakajima heat section again, Kobashi moved from one resthold to another, while KENTA lay around on the outside. At one point, though, Kobashi does chop Nakajima in the face. That chop-result again: IN THE FACE.

Another annoyance for me was that during this part of the match, Sasaki could have been much more useful from the outside - he often seemed perfectly happy to let his partner take a beating, despite the fact that KENTA was knocked out and Kobashi wasn't covered.

The finisher stretch, however, was excellent. It was the right length, and made full use of all the combinations of opponents, meaning that it didn't feel like when two guys just roll through their finishers until the end. Nakajima's ankle lock, after catching a KENTA kick was great. Obviously, those two were where all the workrate was here, and they just keep going until one of them finds the knockout blow.

What we have here, then, is a match with a hot start and hot finish, and a long, slow build section in the middle. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I suppose when stretched to sixty minutes with novel stipulations there could be a tendency to overrate it. I just think that the absence of an recognisable dynamic of the match, in particular in the final fall (other than of two equally matched teams), hurt it, and make the whole thing seem a lot more ordinary (or maybe a lot less extraordinary).