DDT Ganbare Pro Star Platinum 2020 24/02/2020
Ryuichi Sekine & Tetsuo Usui vs. Kouki Iwasaki & Washi Sakurai
This was really fun. Usio for someone who has been wrestling for six months looked really refined and impressive. He has some cool strikes and shows tons of fire. Iwasaki looked good and dominant. He threw some hard kicks and Sakurai was good as the bigger guy. ***1/2
Independent World Junior Heavyweight Title Match: Keisuke Ishii (c) vs. Yumehito Imanari
Keisuke Ishii has been quietly having a solid run of matches this year and this is no different. I’ve never really watched Imanari enough to form an opinion of him but he works well as someone working from beneath. He really captures the cult indie spirit GanPro tries to inherit. Ishii is a bulldog that knows his way around a ring. He is very much a top dog in Ganbare and he wrestles like it in this match. He feels dominant, has great control and presence to everything he does. But hey, he does sell well for Imanari as well, allowing for some good hope spots where the match looked like it *might* swing the other way. Imanari delivered offensively in that sense. Really good title defence by Keisuke Ishii. ***1/2
DDT Ganbare Pro Hermit Purple 2020 21/03
Ken Ohka vs. Tetsuo Usui
Really solid match with Ohka being the vet, setting up spots for Usui to shine in. Usui looked impressive and sold well in return. ***
Eruption (Kazusada Higuchi, Saki Akai & Yukio Sakaguchi) vs. THE HALFEE (Katsuzaki Shunosuke, Moehiko Harumisawa & Washi Sakurai)
This looked really good on paper. Eruption have been super solid since their formation in January of 2020. And their opponents mirror them in terms of styles, individually anyway. Sakaguchi and Shunosuke/Shuichiro Katsumura have the MMA influence, Harumisawa/Moeka Haruhi are the slender women of their team and Sakurai/Shuhei Washida are the burly big men of the respective groups. Something they were eager to explore in the opening exchanges. The GanPro team THE HALFEE were on the defensive for most of the match with Eruption asserting their dominance with some systematic tag work. The crowd rallied behind the regulars who responded with quick stretches of offence and some of that underdog flair. They utilized the styles match ups really nicely, as well as blending the pairings together. Sakurai, who was the young guy of the team, impressed me a ton. He and Higuchi were probably the best together out of the lot. His selling was really good, and while his offence was naturally basic, being only two years in, he used it really well. The match went at a super fast pace, making the whole match feel exciting and thrilling to watch. Great use of time and wrestlers involved. ***3/4
Independent World Junior Heavyweight Title Match: Keisuke Ishii (c) vs. Kouki Iwasaki
This was a hard hitting match with some brutal kicks from Iwasaki. Ishii took some hard bumps like the flip flat bump on the floor. There were some craft moves and sequences in the match too. A slick, strike battle between two good strikers. ***1/2
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