Mitsuharu Misawa vs Kenta Kobashi
Champion Carnival 1995 Match
03/26/1995
Matsumoto City Gymnasium, Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan
(reviewed 05/09/2024) I wonder if I’m gonna end up liking more of the Mitsuharu Misawa vs Kenta Kobashi matches than I am Misawa’s matches with Toshiaki Kawada. In my memory these Kobashi matches are much worse but I can imagine coming to the conclusion that Kobashi’s high energy approach, flawed as it may be, works better with this stone-faced gremlin than Kawada’s frustratingly flat performances do. This thing certainly doesn’t get my hopes up, as Kobashi’s early energy gives way to dry headlocks I don’t love in a match as relatively short as this and horsefaced theatrics that I never love regardless of the runtime. (The latter is thankfully not as bad as it would be with a Nippon TV broadcast, as this footage from either a commercial tape or smaller regional television station makes use of fewer closeups and more long shots from the hard cam.) Misawa is thankfully more tonally consistent, aggressively cutting off and attempting to overwhelm this young partner who’s improved so much since their last meeting two years ago, something that sells Kobashi’s potential as a threat more than anything the kid himself does. In a strange way Misawa’s stoicism actually proves to be a blessing in matches like these, his unflappable demeanor helping to keep things grounded as Kobashi sells at the convenience of his own offense and not in service of the match as a whole. When one asshole is going from woozy roller skate selling to deftly reversing a series of moves in two seconds flat, it’s sort of nice that the other asshole never changes at all. Unfortunately the bevy of high end offense here undermines a lot of that tonal grounding; forcing the pace of a truncated title bout on a 22 minute tournament match gets in the way of the natural excitement of an underdog taking an unlikely swing at the ace, making this so much more monotonous than a (possibly) untelevised match ever should be. Like, no part of me thinks Kobashi’s going to win when he hits a backdrop driver 13 minutes in. Continuing to do a few more of them doesn’t convince me, it only annoys me. Guess it’s only gonna get worse from here in that regard. Misawa picks up the win with the debuting half nelson choke suplex, another indication that in AJPW friendship only begets increasingly severe head trauma.
Brock Hates Wrestling 