Hideki Suzuki Rewind

Hideki Suzuki v Daisuke Sekimoto (Big Japan, 3/30/17)

I loved a whole bunch of this. Suzuki was rocking the purple again so you already know he was top drawer, but I could count on one finger the amount of times I've enjoyed Sekimoto this much and that was when he wrestled Suzuki the last time. Their previous match was the thirty minute draw from earlier in the month and this had a lot of the same qualities. This was a tighter affair at only nineteen minutes, but it was fully-formed and they built on some of that groundwork laid before. The sense of struggle they managed to convey was really impressive and the early hold-trading was great. Suzuki is always adding cool and nasty little touches to his matwork, like digging his knee into Sekimoto's ankle joint or bending a wrist at horrible angles. It all felt very MUGAish. Sekimoto was really vocal with his selling as well so you bought all that joint manipulation hurting like a bastard. He also reversed a top wristlock into this rough key lock of sorts that looked like it could've snapped Suzuki's forearm. After that opening spell they moved into a short burst of strikes, and I shit you not the first forearm Suzuki threw was a Battlarts Hall of Fame level brain-scrambler. Maybe Sekimoto's taken so many crowbars to the skull at this point that his reactions to this stuff are genuine, but I thought he sold a bunch of Suzuki's strikes throughout the match amazingly. There was almost no goofy hulk up fighting spirit and when he got clocked with a true screamer he went with his best dead-eyed "oh Christ where even am I?" Kawada stare. Plus he'll always leather you back so we got some monstrous clubbering in return. After a cool spot where Suzuki catches Sekimoto mid-tope with a forearm (which Sekimoto sells by laying half dead on the apron) they go back to this awesome MUGA/BJW hybrid right through to the finish. Like in the last match it was Suzuki who had the edge in grappling, but Sekimoto is a brick shithouse with enough freakish strength to make up for it. Suzuki was dogged going for the octopus stretch, twisting Sekimoto's fingers for leverage and crawling all over him at one point, but Sekimoto could either muscle him up into a torture rack or drag himself to the ropes. By the end of the last match you got the sense that if one of them could've hit their finisher it would've been over. This had the same struggle over those finishers, the same sense that it would only take one. There was this great bit where Sekimoto was straining so hard to hit the deadlift German that I expected his gum shield to fly out and kill a person sitting front row. Really good match.