The Wrestling Bucket

Daisuke Ikeda/Tiger Shark vs Super Tiger II/Ryuichi Kawakami, BattlARTS 3/21

IKEDA SMASH. Ikeda was terrific in this, totally bringing it and destroying his opponents. It's just a shame that's all this had going for it as the other 3 dudes flat out sucked and took up most of the match. The mat exchanges between the two Tiger's in particular were life-drainingly dull.

Yuki Ishikawa vs Kieta Yano, BattlARTS 3/21

This was a pretty fair carryjob from Ishikawa. Most of the matwork early was dryer than a camel's uretha, but it got better as the match progressed thanks to the vocal selling. Yano was pretty uninteresting and doesn't do much to make his holds look dangerous, but Ishikawa sold really well for him - him yelling in pain from the first jujigatame attempt changed the complexion of the match. His strikes also looked and sounded nasty, but Yano really, really sucks so this was never going to be anything great. How you going to wrestle in BattlARTS looking like a Jeff Hardy wannabe?

Jun Akiyama vs Taiyo Kea, All Japan 4/8

Very difficult match to rate, I had to watch this a second time to really make up my mind on it. I find myself agreeing with much of Craig from DVDVR's review of the match, and it is layed out very well. However I still struggled to get into it. The matwork at the start felt purfunctory, Kea's control segment on Akiyama was lacking in drama due to the lack of big offence and attempts at putting Akiyama away, and as a result the outcome just felt telegraphed the whole way through. Akiyama gave a really solid effort, and I think anything positive about the match came from his end of the bargain, but ultimately the match never really got out of first gear, and neither guy broke out the big guns or felt like winning until the very, very end. It's solid, but that's about it.

Daisuke Sekimoto/Yuji Okabayashi/Ryuichi Kawakami vs Yoshihito Sasaki/Shinya Ishikawa/Kazuki Hashimoto, BJW 4/18

After being dissapointed in the 2/12 tag with 5 of these 6 guys, I didn't have the highest of expectations for this. And indeed, this still felt lacking. Sasaki brought it and managed to get some fire out of Okabayashi, their first exchange was pretty hot with neither guy co-operating with simple spots such as the snapmare. K. Hashimoto is much better than M. Otani and brought it whenever he was in, but once again Sekimoto's team failed to deliver a compelling beatdown on him. There were a couple of good exchanges such as the initial Sekimoto/Sasaki throwdown and the finish between Sekimoto and Hash, but really I am still left waiting for Strong BJ to get back on track.