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| Nobuhiko Takada vs. Mark Kerr | |
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This was one of those weird works. Kerr is arguably the best heavyweight fighter in the world. I'm not sold on that, but Takada can't even beat a washed up Marco Ruas or his students, so it's not like Kerr wouldn't have eaten him alive in a couple of minutes. What's weird is that normally the reason you'd do a work in this situation is so the chump could beat the guy he wouldn't be able to beat in a real fight. My guess is that the reason they did a work here is, since everyone knew there was a better chance of the sky falling than Takada beating Kerr, they figured they would need Takada again (even though he wasn't under contract to appear on the next show, he wound up taking the fight at the last minute and burning his bridge with NJ) so they wanted to make sure Kerr didn't damage the health of their drawing card. This was short, but not sweet. Even though Kerr is far better in shoots, he wasn't nearly as good a worker as Mark Coleman. The difference between the two is that Kerr wasn't as stiff or believable. This made a huge difference because Takada's win over Coleman was believable, at least to the average fan. Takada was relaxed here, which was one giveaway that it wasn't a shoot. Why is it that I've never seen two guys stand in the middle of the ring holding each other for 45 or more seconds outside of Takada matches that aren't totally real? Since he was doing the job, Kerr let Takada get a tad bit of offense in. Takada's offense amounted to a couple of decent kicks before Kerr took him down. Once Takada was down, everyone should have known he was done because he doesn't have the skill to get off his back, especially against a world class wrestler like Kerr. In any case, the fans didn't have much time to contimplate just how little chance their hero had because Kerr soon applied the chickenwing armlock for the win. Jason: Takada was just totally out of his league here. He couldn't control Kerr, who was ranked by many as the #1 Heavyweight in the world at this time. Kerr just muscled Takada down onto the mat and was able to control him long enough to get the arm lock. When Kerr took Takada down the mat and into the mount postition he didn't "ground and pound." He just went right for the arm so it seems like Takada didn't want to take any stiff blows to the face. Earlier, Takada used some of his famous kicks to show the crowd that he was "trying" to win. Special Thanks to: Jason Higgs 3:04 |
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