Kaito Kiyomiya & Daiki Inaba vs Katsuhiko Nakajima & Shotaro Ashino
As always, these inter promotional matches stand out as intriguing to me. There is always a question of who's going to be pinned. In hierarchy, Katsuhiko Nakajima is the weakest being the tag champion opposed to the ace of W-1, Ashino, the W-1 champion, Inaba and GHC Heavyweight champion, Kiyomiya. But he's no slouch either and is a former GHC Heavyweight champion himself. There is also a question of how will the wrestlers interact with each other either as opponents and a partners. Also there is always a question of what if someone from another company pins your champion. How will that go?
We got some of that in this match. Nakajima and Ashino were hesitant partners, more focused on themselves rather than working as a team. At several points of the match, they exchanged a few cold looks, refusing to tag to one another and in some cases, sat outside in the crowd or on the floor while the other was in trouble. Nakajima's character work was a big focus for him. Nakajima is very dismissive and treats his opponents with little respect, if at all. Inaba was the main victim of that with Nakajima originally ignoring him entirely, avoiding touching with him and tagging out. Then as we got into the main stretch of the match, Nakajima stiffed Inaba like he was a young rookie, he asked the crowd to take photos while laying on the ropes with both feet in his face and was overall dominant with little struggle. This part of the match was good individually for Nakajima but it also really highlighted Inaba as the weak link of the match and one of the fans were least interested in seeing. Normally you shine in these extended FIP sections but the crowd didn't respond in the way that's needed to show sucess. His flashes of offence didn't garner much respond from the crowd, the crowd didn't bite on the attempts to create chants or claps for him several times. Almost everything he did was met with silence. This was also true in the final stretch run he had with Ashino. The crowd hardly reacted to the point that you could barely tell it was supposed to be the finishing stretch. Inaba was pretty weak overall in the match. He did have a few cool things like his flash octopus attempt but he was lacking in real quality, unfortunately. Kiyomiya didn't do much in the match barring a few sequences with Ashino and Nakajima. Basic stuff with no real depth to it. It's almost like they planned the match out and forgot that Kiyomiya was in the match and added that little run in last second. None factor really. The most exciting aspects of the match was the Ashino bits with Nakajima honestly. It was a fine, tight match but there was no real quality to the match. Serviceable at best. ***
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