Outside of a couple brief moments where they frittered in a kneebar, this was pretty much fantastic. Ohtani was a phenomenal underdog with a chip on his shoulder and took it to Liger right from the start, slapping him when Liger offered up a handshake before the bell and really never letting up. His performance had a great balance of defiance and understanding of the gap in hierarchy between them at this point. It's kind of insane that he hadn't even made his debut 12 months prior so he was a literal rookie here. It felt like he went to the leg because that was what a young guy not even a year into his career would do, especially against the ace of the division. It's probably a decent enough strategy to begin with, nothing overly complicated, nothing that forces him too far out of his comfort zone, and he wouldn't have enough bombs to go at Liger more directly yet anyway. Liger is one of the best "okay he's about to kill this kid" wrestlers ever and there were a couple stellar moments where you knew he'd had enough. Ohtani had him in one of those leglocks and Liger broke it by rolling onto his back and heel kicking him in the face. When he stood up I would've put money on where it would go, and initially it went there when he fucking obliterated Ohtani with a shotei, but I loved how Ohtani fought back quickly and weathered the storm before Liger could really punish him. You could tell Liger made a point of giving him a ton, selling big for everything Ohtani hit and Ohtani absolutely made the most of it, to the point where the crowd were molten getting behind him. Liger hit one disgusting rolling kick to Ohtani's face, then whipped him into the corner to follow up with another, but at the last second Ohtani flipped out onto the apron as Liger crashed into the buckles, Ohtani hitting a springboard dropkick as Liger gets up and turns around. Ohtani followed that up with two more of the same, the second as Liger is down on one knee selling the leg and Ohtani basically lands across that leg while dropkicking him on the back of the head. It was an awesome sequence and people were going ballistic. Towards the end Liger starts picking apart Ohtani's arm, trying to break the thing across his own shoulder with some really nasty shots, and Ohtani was amazing selling all of that. Liger was always going to string together some proper offence and he wouldn't need much of it to put Ohtani away, but the Ligerbomb being as outrageous as any you've ever seen is sort of a compliment when you think about it. Liger might've been bang in the middle of his peak here - not a particularly short peak either - and honestly, this was probably par for the course for him in terms of performance level. He gave Ohtani the floor though, something that maybe isn't as easy as we take for granted, and you better believe Ohtani ran with it. I really think this might be my favourite of all their matches together.
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