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Jd' #28 8/16/98 & Battle
Station Jd' 6/20/98 Taped 6/5 Club Citta Kawasaki (720 sellout) Sachie Abe vs. Kazuko Fujiwara |
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Surprisingly, the 3 minutes that aired were pretty decent, as Abe flew around a lot. The execution was alright, but not all that clean. Michael: I think you just have to be patient with Abe. She hasn't really been given a push yet, so it's hard to tell how good she can get if given the opportunity. I know that in the last few years, some of the best young women (Sakai, Yabushita, Akino) are debuting at the age they would have been forced to retire at in previous decades, but Abe is already 25. The window of opportunity for her is closing, especially with all the injury problems she's had in the last year. Abe debuted in 1995, and it's not like Jd' is chock full o' talent, so I can't imagine that Abe is showing she's worthy of a push, but Jd' is holding her back. Michael: I think the point I was originally trying to make in Quebrada 56B-2 when this first came about was that Abe has some talent and some decent flying moves but she hasn't been in a position to advance herself yet. She may've been in Jd' for 3 years (at the time of the those two matches), but she wasn't getting the pushes that Kosugi, Sakai, Bloody, and Yabushita were getting. They were being put into positions to have long matches with Jaguar and Lioness (mostly tags but they still learned alot from them) while Abe was mostly relegated to the opening matches. Abe may've been a long-term project that was never started, but I don't think it's fair to write her off as nearly being untalented because it's not her fault that her raw talent as a flyer wasn't cultivated into a decent worker. That's not to say that she would've been a great (or even very good) worker had she been in those matches with Jaguar and Lioness or if she even had singles matches against them, but we don't know because she wasn't. The age consideration (at the time) wasn't as big a deal in my argument because as you said the women are wrestling longer these days. A year has passed though and Jaguar is gone so I don't really know what's become of Abe (i.e. if she has improved or if she stayed the same or got worse) since she's been injured a lot, but realistically nobody thought Omukai and Fukawa would be great workers. When given the teaching, confidence, and experience that's what they were growing into (or would be already had things not gone wrong in ARSION). That was basically my main point, you said that you saw nothing to warrant her getting a push (which I can somewhat understand) but my retort to that is when was she given the chance to learn and prove anything against a Jaguar or Lioness? I think the point I was trying to make was that if she was as good as the others, she would be getting the matches with Jaguar against Lioness at the TV tapings instead of only on the house shows when "no one" sees them. My line of thinking is that, while Abe isn't ranked highly and Jd' is having a hard enough time getting Bloody, Kosugi, Sakai &Yabushita over at close to the level they should be, there is also probably a reason that has to do with her current ability that prevents us from seeing her in these matches. Michael: That's possible and the perfect counterpoint, but maybe it's just politics. My main argument here is that we never saw her in a situation where she could prove herself one way or the other so how would we know and conversly, how would Lioness and Jaguar know? I think Abe was a green flyer mid-last year, but tere's no reason why she couldn't be turned into a ASARI-like worker (though not with the complicated spots) that just relies on high spots to win. Granted the fact that she (presumably) can't do the things ASARI does might mean she is even less over, but Bloody didn't look to have much talent either and once she got in that fued with Lioness vs. Kosugi and Jaguar she learned a lot and became a good worker in a couple of months. Maybe Abe wouldn't progress that fast, or at all, but she wasn't given the chance so we won't know. I can understand just based on what we saw up to that point why you feel the way you do but I honestly feel that there was/is potential with her that can be reached. And then it becomes a situtation where "if I'm not going to get pushed then I'm not going to bother to get better" so while that may've hurt her as well but if that was the case then she deserves a lot of the blame there. Part of Abe's problem is that Jd' was much stronger on the face side. The only veteran heel was Lioness (and Morimatsu, but not everyone knew that was her under the Ryuna hood, and she wrestled more like a young girl due to her lack of training in FMW), but on the face side you had Jaguar, Cooga, Lee and The Goddess. The only real prospect on the heel side was Bloody, while on the face side you had Kosugi, Yabushita, and Sakai all ahead of Abe. Without the depth on the heel side, there was really no way to get Abe involved in this Jaguar & Kosugi vs. Lioness & Bloody feud. Special Thanks to: Michael Smith 16:03 (3:05 aired) |
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