Issue 61E - 1/16/00 Battle Station LLPW 3/1/98

LLPW DOUBLE TITLE MATCH SHINOBU KANDORI VS. YUMIKO HOTTA Commercial Tape 3/21/98 Tokyo Korakuen Hall (2,005 sellout) Miho Watabe vs. Keiko Aono

Miho is a loveable underdog because she has a lot of fighting spirit. She did some good things here. For instance, she did a nice handspring to avoid Aono's lariat and used kneecap dropkicks to set up her knee submissions. Unfortunately, she looked green, missed too many spots, and wasn't fluid at all. Aono didn't really do anything. She has turned into a complete stiff, which really hurts Miho as they seemingly wrestled on every LLPW over a two year span (yes, I realize they didn't wrestle on the show I just put a review up for). Chris: This was Miho's best performance up to this point in time. She focused heavily on Aono's leg to set up her new arsenal of Plum like submissions. Instead of doing her sunset flips and roll ups into pins, she now moves into leg submissions. For instance, Miho had a nice counter for a body slam where she crawled down the front of Aono and rolled her into an ankle lock. Most people would go into hizaujigatame, but Miho is to small to make it look (or really be) effective. She also had a good way to get Aono into a Boston crab. Aono is too big for Miho to turn her over, so she used her own knee to prop up Aono and push her over. This looks a lot better than if Aono just turned over for her. All this stuff doesn't make a huge impact on the wrestling world, but it does show that Miho is not content with being a 3 bump jobber. She tries to improve even though she is in LLPW and may never get beyond bottom card matches. She is working on techniques that could possibly give her credibility despite her size. Still, she makes mistakes and is far from perfect, but she is probably the ONLY woman in LLPW who really tries to improve. The worst part of this match was the finish. Aono won, of course, but the way it happened was a total screw job for Miho. When Aono covered her, Ran counted to 2, but Miho got her shoulder up. Obviously, this should break the count, especially since Ran clearly saw it, but Aono just pushed her shoulder back down and Ran counted what should have been one. Instead, the count went 1....2.........3, as Ran didn't restart her count, just counted three as if Miho never raised her shoulder! Miho got screwed completely, but it kind of made her look better since Aono had to take a crappy win. Okay, that's kind of a reach, but work with me here. Special thanks to: Chris Martinez 6:51