NOAH 1/29

Kensuke Sasaki/Katsuhiko Nakajima vs Takeshi Morishima/Shuhei Taniguchi, NOAH 1/29

Kind of a sad state of affairs when this match happens and Taniguchi is the best guy in it. He still looked green-ish, but atleast showed lots of fire and was motivated, and even dished out some meaty elbows. The rest of his offence looks really clumsy or weak though, which is a problem for a guy trying to be a "powerhouse". Sasaki and Nakajima totally phoned in it, and Morishima was pretty much a non-factor.

Jun Akiyama/Yoshihiro Takayama/Bison Smith vs Takashi Sugiura/Naomichi Marufuji/Atsushi Aoki, NOAH 1/29

This was also really underwhelming. Most of the match was built around Aoki taking a beating and trying to hang with the big boys, and these sections were good but not anything truly stand-out. The beating wasn't big enough, and he didn't have the crowd support. Everything else outside that was painfully average and uninteresting.

Kotaro Suzuki vs Eddie Edwards, NOAH 1/29

Another stupidly long drawn out juniors "epic". Edwards throws some really great chops, which made the striking exchanges worthwhile and exciting, but really that is like less than 10% of a 30 minute match and everything else was dull and forgettable outside one or two big spots. Will be interesting to see how many snowflakes the mongoloid ROHbots give it.