Gary Albright & Sabu vs Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama)
Real World Tag League 1996 Match
12/02/1996
Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium, Osaka, Japan
Watch: YouTube
(reviewed 05/16/2024) The first of three gimme matches Super Generation Army breeze through at the end of the tour to send them to the finals, as well as the only look we’re gonna get at Sabu’s bizarre AJPW run during this review series. Sadly it doesn’t live up to its potential as an oddball one-off tag. Twelve minutes is just not enough time to let three of these four guys roll around on the mat (Sabu is quietly a great matworker along with everything else, would have loved to have seen him mix it up with his younger opponent more) but they don’t commit to a fast-paced sprint either, leaving this in an uneventful middle ground where most of the big spots don’t land. An even bigger barrier, I’d say, is that these SGA guys simply do not respect these opponents. That might not be such an issue with Jun Akiyama—who’s hilarious and well within his right to just walk way from a Sabu triple-jump dive, the sort of dismissive attitude he’ll center the rest of his career around—but Mitsuharu Misawa all but shrugging off everything Gary Albright throws at him feels bad, a complete reversal of what made their title match so great. Doing this in Osaka also seems like a mistake, inviting your biggest audience outside the Tokyo area to immediately dismiss any of the outside talent AJPW signs. Albright should have been the new top gaikokujin of the late 90s and never really was because of stuff like this, because they blamed him for the end of their (supposed) Budokan sellout streak and never tried ever again. Frustrating stuff. Quite like Akiyama’s interactions with Sabu here and would have loved to have seen more before he picks up the win with an Exploder.
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