Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada v Jumbo Tsuruta & Akira Taue (All Japan, 9/30/90)
To nobody's surprise this was not a bad wrestling match. It had lots of really good stuff and some that was great. It's just that, at this point in my life as a wrestling fan, 45 minutes of a style I don't love like I once did was always going to be a bit of a bumpy ride. But it's these four so, you know. I thought Misawa was excellent in this. He was more assured here than in either of the Jumbo singles matches and best of all he was SURLY. Maybe it was because of Jumbo's general presence, maybe he was still pissed at Taue jumping ship, but either way he was about as grumpy as I can remember seeing him. Even in that very first exchange with Jumbo he looked like a man who was there to claim his rightful spot in the pecking order, and he carried that attitude with him the rest of the way. I'm not sure Kawada was all that great yet but he was certainly starting to look more like the Kawada we became accustomed to, at least in that he'd dropped the spinning wheel kicks and quasi-juniors offence for the short kicks and knees to the face. Taue really took a shit-kicking and I thought the strongest section of the match by a mile was his extended heat segment. Him and Kawada hated each other to death around this point and Kawada kicked him in the head many times, but Misawa was downright Tenryuish in how he'd just stomp his skull into the canvas. Taue getting opened up and it leading to some working of the cut naturally appealed to the vampire in me as well. That the proper heat segment came later, after they teased it early on when Taue started bleeding to begin with, is one of those cool bits of foreshadowing 90s All Japan did so well. I also thought the match hit a wall after Taue finally tagged out, which came at about half an hour in. It's not that it went off a cliff or anything, but it felt like they started to run out of ideas down the stretch. Even if I don't have much interest in going back to those '95 tags that went an hour or even the Kobashi/Kawada broadways, they had their formula down by then and the pacing and transitions were much sharper. Still, this was the first time anybody had gone this long in years so it's hard to be too critical. I suppose overall it held up pretty well. I think I'd need to watch 90s All Japan in small doses nowadays, but this did give me an itch to open that book again.
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