4/18/98 Tokyo Nippon Budokan From '98 Champion Carnival Special Highlight Commercial Tape
Even though Misawa belonged on Injured Reserve, the problem with this match had little to do with his health. I mean, obviously Misawa's health hurt the match, but the extent it took the match down is overrated. What really hurt the match is simply that All Japan is such a screwed up promotion. We know the booking sucks, and I'm not going to argue who belonged in this final, but the fact that we'd just seen this match in January, as well as a couple times in mid 1997, really hurt. What hurt a hell of a lot more is that AJ has forgotten what made their matches great. This was basically a spotfest. Since spots rule supreme in AJ these days, and top guys submit less frequently than Hulk Hogan does, you can't build a match like you once could. This whole match was basically cool spot=pop, anything else, especially a submission=silence. The fans actually seemed more into the cool spots themselves than the fact that Jun, who had the best chance he ever had of beating Misawa coming in, was coming close to taking out The King of the Heavyweights.
This
may have been Jun's finest work in that it was the first singles main at Budokan
that he carried. He did as good a job as you could possibly do of masking the
fact that Misawa's health was in the toilet. Obviously, people know how Misawa
wrestles so you can't pull the wool over their head so to speak, but if you
look at the match, Misawa really never shows that he can't do any spots and
rarely looks worse doing a spot than he normally does. Most of his athletic
stuff is done right at the beginning of the match, and it's clear that he's
going for the quick win because of his health, which makes a lot of sense. Once
Jun started destroying Misawa's knee, which Misawa had
in a brace, Misawa did a lot less moving. It made sense within the context of
the match that Misawa wouldn't be doing planchas after Jun destroyed his broken
knee cap, and hurt the "good" knee as well. It was a smart match in
this regard, and with Jun doing the bulk of the work and moving, Misawa mainly
just had to go with the moves and sell.
"This match was important because it gave us a good indication of just how far Jun has come and just how good he is. The setting wasn't good because Misawa was hurt. Thus, Jun was pretty much asked to carry, and he did that well. Jun was absolutely excellent in this match. Not only did he use good psychology, but his move-set and timing were very good. Jun's selling has become one of his best attributes, if not his best. This match turned out well considering the conditions. This was Jun's chance to deliver, and he did just that," wrote Hadi.
For everything that Jun did right, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about the submissions though. Jun's finisher is the exploder, and he has no big knee spots. Thus, while injuring the knee is certainly a smart thing for him to do, you can't build the match around it. You can't pass off a sasorigatame (scorpion/sharpshooter) or figure 4 as a finisher when you never use those moves before. I know Misawa isn't going to submit to a "common" move. You know Misawa isn't going to submit to a "common" move. Everyone in Budokan knew the same thing. Thus, the match didn't build, and Jun's submission holds that no one has ever submitted to did nothing but transform Nippon Budokan into Nassau Mausoleum during an Icelanders game.
Jun dominated this match because of Misawa's injury, and the fact that Misawa was going over. He used all his cool high spots again, but to an extent it fell flat here. We'd seen Jun roll out spot after spot in January, but those spots were advancing the match a lot more than they were here because Jun had a finisher he could go to, and the new moves he used/invented could have done the job. In this match, Jun was able to go from point A to B to C, but point D didn't exist. This match couldn't match their January TC because it was more of the same, with worse work, worse crowd reaction, worse selling, and a top star that was in far worse shape after three more months of being put through the buzz cutter. The work was still great, but it was down. The spots were still awesome, but these weren't nearly as innovative. The selling was still great, but Misawa didn't put as much into it as he usually does.
What pisses me off is that all they had to do to make this match better was give Jun a knee submission. There's no reason he can't do a hizajujigatame. On the way to his 19 points, there's no reason, other than that AJ bookers can't think in advance (that is if they can think at all), he couldn't have beaten a couple of guys with that move. If he came into the match with a hizajujigatame that was over, the whole knee attack would have worked. Instead, he may as well have continued to attack Misawa's neck like we've seen everyone do for the past year because at least Jun has a number of head dropping spots that could put Misawa away. You probably think I'm going overboard on one point, but it's hard enough for anyone to believe that Misawa is going to lose to the deadliest spot in the world, much less a spot that even a joker like Jun Izumida wouldn't submit to. The AJ fans would still buy submissions if anyone finished with them, but instead we get below piss poor booking and waning fundamentals. You'd think as these guys got older and more banged up, they would make the style easier on themselves. They could make the style far superior to what it is right now in the process. Where the style was a few years ago with Kawada & Misawa pushing psychology to new levels was far superior. Instead, the style is regressing. There seems to be a problem with common sense. How else can you explain injured up wrestlers subbing fundamentally sound spots that advance the match for more dangerous head dropping spots that are supposed to get pops but are now almost passe due to overuse?
After Misawa's injured body was put through the meat grinder, he kicked out of Jun's exploder. Misawa stopped the subsequent exploder and used his elbows, a Tiger drop, then as we saw in January, Jun proved the Tigerdriver wasn't enough to beat him anymore. Thus, Misawa KO'd him with a running elbow to win the Carnival for the 2nd time and become the first sitting champion to win since Stan Hansen in 1992. I may be going too hard on these guys because it was practically a miracle that Misawa could even wrestle a decent match in his condition, but the problems with the match are not caused by poor health, they are what causes poor health. A very good, albeit extremely frustrating final. 22:05. ****