Revisiting 90s Joshi #34

Shinobu Kandori v Yumiko Hotta (AJW, 3/10/99)

Yeah, this is the good stuff. I half wondered if this match wasn't a myth and it never actually existed, because despite reading about it over the last couple years I could never find it on yon internet. But lo and behold our favourite Eastern European Facebook came through in the clutch! It's very different from their '98 match, much more deliberate, a bit stop-start in terms of pacing, which gave it a bit of a shoot style vibe. Ikeda/Ishikawa works again as a comparison, at least in the sense that they wallop each other many times. I liked that those big shots felt like huge moments though, partly because they used them sort of sparingly. There was a tentativeness to what they were doing, where you knew one of them could reel off a KO shot at any moment, then when they did you bought it as a potential knockout, whether it was the first minute or the fifteenth. Lots of low key moments of nastiness to go with the overt in-your-face holy shit I can't believe she just did that moments of nastiness, like Hotta punting Kandori in the wrist as her arm was hammerlocked and Kandori making a point of selling it for the next few minutes (or maybe it wasn't selling). At one point Hotta full on volleyed Kandori in the spine and Kandori opening and closing her hand like she had nerve damage was an incredible little piece of selling. The grappling wasn't flashy at all, but like everything else it had an underlying danger, and on a couple of occasions one of them would snap into a hold and the other would need to scramble to the ropes. It was pretty awesome how they'd build tension like that and the crowd responded to it big time. Hotta using an old fashioned arm wringer to set up a brutal knee to the face was also amazing. I suppose I could see the finish maybe falling a wee bit flat for some, but I thought it was really cool how technically Kandori got up before the 10 count, but she wasn't actually in the ring when she did. Also the punt that put her down was brutal as fuck, because obviously.