Well, the Mets got rained out again today, so they'll have to play another damnable doubleheader tomorrow. But this will give me the opportunity to finally bring you some long-promised wrestling content. If there are any baseball fans reading this, you may want to avert your eyes as I review...

Toshiaki Kawada & Masanobu Fuchi vs. Keiji Mutoh & Satoshi Kojima (12 April, 2003)

This was of course Kawada's return from over a year's absence due to a knee injury. It took forever to air on TV and then become available on tape, but now I've finally seen it. The day after the show, I read the following news item from KrisZ:

Keiji Muto said after his match today that the reason he kept giving Toshiaki Kawada dragon screw leg whips because he wanted to see how Kawada would react & recover from them. Muto was impressed with Kawada’s heart & ability to basically shake off the dragon screws.

That didn't really give me a good feeling about this match, as I was afraid Kawada had taken and no-sold a bunch of dragon screws, but luckily that wasn't the case.

There are several stories going on in the match, and the first one to get going is Fuchi's story. He's pretty clearly the weakest link in the match, but he starts off the match trying to act tough and hold up his end of the match for his team. He and Mutoh are the first in the ring and after a brief exchange on the mat leaves Fuchi in the ring and Mutoh on the ramp, Fuchi cockily holds the ropes open to let Mutoh reenter the ring. Fuchi tries to keep up attitude when Kojima enters, even teasing that he might tag Kawada before deciding to stay in and fight Kojima himself. But Kojima is too much for him and Fuchi gets blasted with some stiff chops before tagging Kawada in.

Now, the obvious way to attack Kawada would be to go after his injured knee. But Kojima and Mutoh seem to have differing objectives. Mutoh wants to win the match, so he focuses his attack on the knee. But even in the first exchange between the two, Kojima shows that he’s more interested in proving that he can hang with Kawada than beating him. So he doesn’t go after the knee, but rather opts to trade strikes with him or no-sell his offense. Kawada hits him with a backdrop in this early section of the match and Kojima basically just pops up. Kawada kicks him in the face and Kojima continues to stand his ground, but after a few seconds he can’t hold up the façade any longer, and sells the effects of the blows before tagging Mutoh in.

Kawada tries to show Mutoh up early, doing his trademark stretching while Mutoh stares at him. Mutoh ends up getting Kawada down with a few offensive moves but Kawada starts kicking up at him from his back to turn the tide. But Mutoh withstands a brief assault of kicks until he’s able to his the first dragon screw of the match, which Kawada sells big while tagging Fuchi back in.

Fuchi tries to start out on the offensive, but the biggest move in his arsenal is a weak backdrop, so he takes the match out to the floor for a bit to try to maintain the advantage. But when the match gets back in the ring, Mutoh catches him with a dragon screw and the heat segment is on. Fuchi doesn’t have the offense to keep up with Mutoh or Kojima for any length of time and match quickly becomes Old Man Fuchi in peril with Kawada and his gimpy knee having to constantly save his ass. In the case of kicking Fuchi’s ass, Kojima and Mutoh are able to get on the same page and work his left knee. Fuchi tries to act tough and withstand the beating, but can’t really pull it off. He does a good job of selling the beating he takes here, and winds up looking like a beaten old man, incapable of contributing anything to his team’s cause. And throughout this segment, whenever Kojima’s in the ring, he’s constantly talking trash to Kawada. Eventually, Fuchi is able to turn another dragon screw attempt into an enzuigiri and make the hot tag to Kawada.

Mutoh gets another quick dragon screw on Kawada, who again sells it big. He does a good job of being very deliberate in the way he stands up to avoid putting too much pressure on the injured knee. He does shrugs off the injury from time to time to do some running kicks to Kojima, but he never totally disregards the knee damage. And Kojima never does anything to follow up on Mutoh’s assault on the knee, so it makes sense that the pain from one dragon screw would subside somewhat while Mutoh is on the apron. Kojima continues to try to trade strikes with Kawada, but Kojima always winds up selling the exchange bigger than Kawada, who basically shrugs off Kojima’s strikes until he’s able to string a few together. Kojima is eventually able to hit a diving elbow for a two count, but before his advantage gets too big, Fuchi finally makes himself useful and saves Kawada so the two can hit an enzuigiri/ganmengiri combination on Kojima and then on Mutoh to put Kawada firmly in control of the match. Kawada hits a powerbomb on Kojima for a two count. Even when in control, Kawada does a good job of selling the fatigue of the match, and continues to be careful in the way he gets up off of the mat. But when he goes for a second powerbomb, Kojima back body drops out of it, and Kawada tries to get up too fast, aggravating his knee injury. It’s kind of an odd moment, but he sells it great, and there is a very noticeable difference in the way he gets up, so it’s a believable device to put the heat back on his knee and reestablish control for Kojima and Mutoh, who tags in and begins to really go to town on the knee with dropkicks, to which the crowd responds with boos.

Back in control, Mutoh starts going for his big offensive maneuvers, starting with another dragon screw, following up with a pseudo-Shining Wizard knee to the head in the corner and then setting Kawada up for the moonsault. But Fuchi stops him, giving Kawada enough time to get up and hit a backdrop and an enzuigiri before tagging Fuchi back in. But Fuchi is still Fuchi and his ineffective offense still won’t get him anywhere and Kawada has to keep saving his ass, first from Mutoh and then from Kojima. His quickness in springing in to save Fuchi after having just recently sold his knee injury like he could barely walk is a bit unbelievable at times, but he still does some nice little things, like putting more weight on his healthy leg while giving Kojima a brainbuster. If there’s a flaw in his selling, it seems to arise more from the structure of the match that has both members of his team seriously injured than from him just disregarding the injury out of laziness or anything like that.

In the end, Kawada isn’t capable of fighting off two men on his own with Fuchi incapacitated. Kojima and Mutoh take him out and Kojima goes to work on finishing Fuchi. Fuchi tries to fight back, but his offense still sucks and Kojima no-sells a backdrop before putting him away with a lariat.

The obvious match to compare this to is the Kobashi return match from last year, with its knee-injury parallels, and this does not stack up to that. This has more selling issues and significantly less of a “big match” feel. Kawada didn’t put on the kind of great performance here that Kobashi did there. But it was still a good match that gave me some faith that Kawada still has something left in him. The Kojima/Kawada story was well done and if they can have a match where Kojima keeps his no-selling tendencies to a minimum, they could do something really good.  ¶ joe | 11:57 PM |