Dragon Gate
Korakuen Hall (Tokyo, Japan)
Open the Dream Gate Championship
Going in I was fully aware that this match might suffer from “overkill” syndrome because a lot of Dragon Gate matches do and because I had seen others “warn” that might be the case. Matches can flirt with overkill and still be good. Volador Jr. vs. Mascara Dorada form Korakuen Hall is an example of a match where it was all big flying spots one after another, but it still all held together because the spots were so spectacular. So while I expected to say “that was probably overkill” after the match, I was hoping to be able to add “. . .but it worked.”
The first several minutes were uninteresting and felt like two guys going through the motions during the feeling out process. Nothing was really applied with much effort and Yohsino’s selling consisted of looking uninterested. It got better in that regard as they moved into the body of the match, but the work still felt uninspired.
Where the warned-about overkill probably came in was really repeated moves. Yoshino hit the spinning head scissors/arm bar move five or six times. But honestly, that was not a huge issue. The bigger issue was the match never reached this frenzy climax that I expected. It sort of just rolled along to the finish. The Korakuen crowd was into the match, but really only Mochizuki blocking a submission attempt with a roll up for a two count got a big near fall reaction and most of that reaction came from Don Fuji at ringside. Overkill wasn’t necessarily an issue here (although the match did go on a few minutes too long). The match simply does not have any other strong merits to support the idea that it was anything great.
Juniors | Common | Hype
