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Tournament ARS '98 Ikkaisen: Michiko Omukai (2-5) vs. Rie Tamada (2-5-1) |
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This was a weird match. It had elements of something really good, but it had too many weak looking spots and it didn't follow any kind of pattern. The match was hurt by an overall lack of direction, as well as Tamada switching her point of attack and overly relying on a slow, imprecise, not very coordinated looking, and typically low impact, rolling elbow. "It's sounds low impact but the sloppiness of the move is what makes this thing hurt. It's comparable to a weak uraken delivered by Aja in the sense that Tamada's blind attacks have caused the girls in the backroom to complain on more than one occasion," wrote Keith. The best analogy I can draw is to compare this to a video game match because they just did things back and forth when they could rather than chain the spots together in any kind of a logical order. Omukai has turned into one of the best sellers of all the women wrestlers. Her shoulder was all taped up, so Tamada should have attacked this from the outset, especially since Omukai was putting it over from the start of the match. Instead, she attacked the knee, and it looked like Omukai was going to do a really good job of selling that. However, as Omukai was selling the knee, Rie switched to attacking the bad shoulder for no apparent reason. "Tamada's mental aspects have improved in the sense that she focuses on a body part, but she really has no idea what to do with it outside of attacking it. It makes the structuring of her matches really weak," wrote Keith. I think even with that, you are giving Tamada too much credit. She is capable of working a body part over, everyone is. I agree that she doesn't understand when and why, but I think she wouldn't bother at all if she wasn't lead, if not forced, into it. Anyway, you'd think that if Tamada was going over, she would have used a submission to either the knee or the shoulder since she weaked both, but instead she won with her uncoordinated rolling elbow that at least looked decent this time. "I think they wanted to put over that move as a legit finisher, so they had her continuing to finish off her opponents with that move. That doesn't mean that's a good thing, as she's definitely no Misawa," wrote Keith. That may be the case, but why not use rolling elbows to the weakened shoulder. Well, probably because Tamada is lucky if she could consistently hit a target the size of Eagle's gut with it, but nonetheless. Again, attacking one body part is good. However, she attacked two in a short period, and neither of them had anything to do with the outcome of the match even though she won. What the hell was the point of the first seven minutes of this match? It's a shame that this match wasn't better because there were some really good spots and sequences. I really hope they were just out there reacting (which they certainly should be at this point in their careers) because I'd hate to think that this sounded logical to somebody, anybody, in the locker room. "I didn't mind the beginning that much where both women went for their finishers early (i.e. the Tiger and Dragon suplex holds). I thought it was an interesting way to start the match. Both sold both moves initially to a small reaction; I thought by kicking out of those holds it told the audience that those moves weren't going to be the finishers," wrote Keith. A key idea in ARSION at this time was that the old finishers weren't going to work anymore, so you could argue that placing them this early in the match devalued them. On the other hand, sometimes wrestlers will use a big move early just to get it out of the way, figuring they can get the crowd into the match a lot earlier if they show them something they "aren't supposed to see" until later on. In any case, if Rie wasn't goofy and she would have waited until she could properly perform her rolling elbow to start using it, this could have been quite good. 7:56. **1/2 Miko: I'm all ready to like these matches, but I'm not being impressed. They go at it pretty hard, but Omukai's kicks are still hit and miss and so is Rie's rolling elbow. Omukai needs to work on improving the stiffness of her kicks. Special thanks to: Keith Watanabe -
Manami Toyota Rules!, & Miko Kubota - Michiku
Pro 7:56
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