Kensuke Office (Kensuke Sasaki, Katsuhiko Nakajima, Kento Miyahara, & Takashi Okita) vs Burning (Kenta Kobashi, KENTA, Atsushi Aoki, & Akihito Ito)
Eight Man Tag Team Survival Match
taped 08/17/2008, aired 08/24/2008
Korakuen Hall, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 03/03/2024) I became a wrestling fan at the tail end of 2007 and pretty quickly started watching whatever puroresu I could find, which meant that this was one of the first widely-acclaimed Japanese matches to make waves while I was a fan. Back then I didn’t have internet at home, so this is also one of those long puro matches that I have clear memory of rushing to the public library to watch in ten minute-long chunks on YouTube, hoping to God I could get through it all before my hour allotment of computer time was used up. So many of the formative memories I have of watching wrestling were these races against the clock, that looming deadline—literally ticking down at the top of the screen at all times—adding to the drama of larger-than-life figures duking it out on the other side of the world.
Sadly this match does not live up to those fond memories. If not necessarily overlong, it’s underwhelming and uneven while also failing to make the most of this stipulation. This is a survival tag, an elimination match which may or may not have its roots in earlier gauntlet matches across puro history but which I’m most familiar with seeing in 90s AJPW. Instead of being a 4v4 elimination, you have two teams of two start out and whenever someone is pinned or submitted, another member of their team enters the fray until one side is totally tapped. It makes for long, dramatic matches that, when done right, also highlight what makes tag team wrestling compelling in the first place. There’s the appeal of partnership and the thrill of someone making a last-minute save on a pin attempt but beyond that, a good tag is beautiful mechanically. Having more people in the match in well-specified roles not only allows for more variety than a one on one encounter does—like more colors on a painter’s palette, to borrow a Mike Quackenbush metaphor—they also allow these wrestlers to make up for each other’s shortcomings and failures, to patch up the little holes in the match that might detract from our enjoyment. Like I said I’ve been watching wrestling for more than 15 years now; not a terribly long time in the grand scheme of things but long enough to not be surprised by it too often anymore. I never know what’s coming next in a good tag match because four or six or eight wrestlers are better able to distract from and subvert the tropes and telegraphing that might undermine a simple singles match.
This match isn’t interested in any of that. Sasaki makes a surprisingly early entrance and seven minutes later half the field has been eliminated, less than halfway through the hour-long runtime. Instead of exploring the varied hues of these lesser-known rookies and youngboys, we get an emphasis on the familiar shades of brown and yellow, white and teal. (Kobashi doesn’t really have a signature color at this point? Let’s just go with purple.) Instead of allowing these younger wrestlers to help carry the load for a Sasaki that’s weirdly off his game or a very broken down Kobashi, we get 35 minutes of these past-their-prime stars going at it yet again. Watching their fourth chop battle in as many months, years removed from the Tokyo Dome, it’s just sort of tedious. KENTA and Nakajima are the only reason the back half 63% of this match works at all, as they finally bring the sustained, focused intensity they’ve lacked in their singles matches before and after this, at least until the relatively flat finish.
It’s frustrating because you can see that most of those AJPW survival tags weren’t as top-heavy as this, with eliminations stretched out over time instead of bunched all together. They didn’t act like half the match was vegetables you had to wolf down to get at the meat of the matter. It’s as insulting as it is underwhelming. What if I wanted to watch more than thirty seconds of ex-footballer Okita flattening old man Kobashi like he’s Budokan Bob Sanders? What if I wanted to see the dearly departed Aoki tie Sasaki up in knots like no one’s even attempted to do in years? “No,” comes the collective reply, “you will instead get the repetitive rematch of the time limit draw you just saw two months ago.” You can watch the mentality that killed NOAH play out here across an hour with this stubborn insistence on pushing established stars as they get older and less effective alongside a small handful of anointed youngsters who rarely get any sort of rub themselves. Really bummed that this didn’t hold up. Wasted my hour of computer time today.
HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO SHAWN MICHAELS VS THE UNDERTAKER FROM WM25: As much as I dislike Shawn/Taker, it’s not promising me one thing and then swapping it out with a rehash of something I didn’t like the first time around. From the start, the build to that match is all about the majesty of WrestleMania and these impossibly lofty ideals. They’re not pulling a fast one on me; it’s just a bad match. This K-Office/Burning tag, however, purports to be one thing and throws all that out the window 20 minutes in. That might not be a bad thing if I liked what they did instead but I don’t. Would rather watch a bad match that was honest and open rather than one that lied to me about what it wanted.
VERDICT: Worse than Shawn Michaels vs The Undertaker from WrestleMania 25
Brock Hates Wrestling 