2023 Pro Wrestling NOAH. And...Okada??

Kazuchika Okada v Kaito Kiyomiya (NOAH, 2/21/23)

This is the most I've ever enjoyed Okada by a distance. No I'm telling you, a DISTANCE. I do not have a clue who the other guy is and I haven't watched or paid attention to anything to do with NOAH in at least 10 years, so I might be talking horse shit here, but it was kind of crazy to me how the NOAH heavyweight champion was so clearly beneath the IWGP one. Obviously Kiyomiya is much younger and far less established (well, I assume) than Okada, but when I last followed Japanese wrestling with actual interest these companies were treated as being Big Deals on fairly equal footing. I mean I know the gulf between them is substantial now and NOAH was basically on death's door for a minute there, but still, it's sort of jarring. At least with New Japan v WAR you had Tenryu who commanded a bitta by god respect. Kiyomiya was not Tenryu and came across as Kodo Fuyuki with a slimmer waist. I'm not complaining though, because it made things interesting. I have no use for Okada whatsoever but I'll hold my hands up - I thought he was really good in this and never did anything that annoyed me even a wee bit. Obviously he was a prick and that was great. So was the way he demonstrated how little respect he had for Kiyomiya. His derision was palpable. Then he'd give the kid just enough to make himself look vulnerable and in general I thought his selling was really strong. The arm selling was good and I liked how he put across the accumulation of damage. There were subtle moments as well, like when he hit that flapjack as a cutoff after the big German suplex and stayed down a little longer, selling the damage from the suplex itself. It wasn't just a case of him hitting his move to go back on offence again and instead it felt earned. If it needed reiterating I'd never seen Kiyomiya before, and he looked perfectly fine and maybe I'd come to like the feller if I ever decided to watch more than 15 minutes of him, which, cards on the table, I probably won't. He walked the line pretty well between showing defiance and your rote tough guy shouting when hit in the face by a forearm. Ultimately it felt rooted in hierarchy and they put that hierarchal gulf across well. The first big transition where he reversed that DDT into a suplex over the barricade ruled. I also liked the setup to the arm work with the jumping knee to block the Rainmaker, not just because it was cool and made sense but because it stopped the commentators from shouting RRRRRAINMAKEEEEEER which is extremely close to Gabe Sapolsky shouting DANGEROUSSSSS as the cringiest thing ever. The Misawa and Inoki references were also kind of goofy but I get that I'm just grumpy so whatever. Or maybe they were FORESHADOWING~ because Okada picking Kiyomiya up and effectively finishing him with the embodiment of NOAH's own finisher was pretty awesome. I'm almost tempted to watch more of this Okada, if it exists. If he's out here wrestling a tubby modern day version of Tatsuo Nakano I'm all over it! Maybe.