G1 Night 8 B Block

 

What is this, night 8? B Block? Sound right? Woefully behind, and yet I guess I am still hammering away at this. Perhaps it was best to let the insane ravings of the last G1 breakdown in which one armed women and dogs in reservoirs tangled with Antonio Inoki and too many versions of Octopi pluralosity, which is a word I just made up, linger in the collective psyche for a long moment before delving into whatever the fuck this is gonna be. Let’s find out together.

 

 

Juice Robinson vs Toru Yano

 

Yano, of course, is a walking poem, a man who will one day walk into the clouds and never return and people will wonder whatever happened to Old Yano and then his face, his giant fucking face, will appear on the moon for a second and the whole world will laugh and cry and go insane, but for now he is still trying to use his tricks to get over on yet another rube.

 

Juice is a natural jackass who plays well into Yano’s shenanigans, but he also doesn’t like being caught out as a jackass and so he starts bellowing at Yano in savage American English and Yano doesn’t know what the fuck to do other than to try to tape this jackasses leg’s together. But Juice beats him to the punch, quite literally, and then poor Yano is left to wonder what he did wrong, and wallow in the shame of being outdone by an American Jackass who probably would have been machinegunned right off the fucking boat at Guadalcanal.

 

I like both of these dudes for both of their touched ways. Yano is Yano and if you can’t take five minutes to Yano it up, you lead too high-strung a life and probably get nose bleeds and can’t get your dick hard without help from medicine which is no shame if you take it so you can fuck longer or to counteract the stifling nature of other drugs, but it is kind of a shame if you need it because you are a nervous punk who drinks too much coffee and doesn’t have time for a Yano match.

 

Juice is building a quality tournament for himself, at least results wise. Quality wise is always up for debate with Juice, but I like the dude and think he can bring it if and when it gets hotter than a Yano mashup session. Also, he likes to swear a lot and so do I, so let’s not pretend there isn’t some kinship here. Juice is a fucking jackass and so am I.

 

 

Hirooki Goto vs Zack Sabre Jr

 

This is almost too dark to write about. Goto’s shoulder or arm or whatever is so fucked and he can’t do anything and so it is only a matter of time before ZSJ tortures him like Goto’s granddad probably did to ZSJ’s granddad in fucking Burma or some place like that. Goto gives it a try, but it’s no good, and ZSJ doesn’t even do him the honor of submitting him by ripping his shoulder apart, he just uses one of those tricksy pins he learned avoiding pedophiles in grim English basements during his “training.”

 

Goto is pretty much a ghost for this tournament, just a wrecked man with no shoulder who has let down Shibata again, and even the LA Dojo kids are probably like lol this guy can’t fuck while Goto stares at them solemnly, and it’s just not a good time in his life right now, which sucks because I like Goto, he can kick people in the chest and face and also throw them around a bit and he is always up for a Spirit Warrior Fight To The Soul Death kind of match which makes New Japan so compelling. But these are Hard Times for Hirooki Goto and he doesn’t have Dusty’s charisma to carry him through and so this could get very bad for him and he might find himself where he always seems to find himself, searching for a reason for his near pointless existence.

 

That is harsh, but a man’s got to start fucking sometime. ZSJ is of course a mousy pest who should be drowned in a bucket, but he is what he is and I will not argue with you about it. I wish I liked him more, I really do, as leftist submission machine should always work for me, but it’s too hard to see any of it as real for whatever reason, maybe it’s the birdcage chest or maybe it’s the cockiness that seems like a false front, I don’t know. I am likely just being stubborn.

 

 

Hiroshi Tanahashi vs Yoshi-Hashi

 

I am in the tank now for Yoshi-Hashi, who has taken his whole Spooked Nerd Reaches For An Inner Fire thing to a point where the Spooked Nerd isn’t even seen at all and instead it’s this dude reaching into the deepest places of himself to slay his heroes and icons, the men who have playfully goofed him around over the years, maybe made him do some things in the locker room that aren’t talked about. Yoshi-Hashi has left that Dark Nerd in the past and is bringing the fire you would expect from a legit G1 warrior.

 

He even tries to savage Tanahashi’s knees, which a scared young boy of old wouldn’t have done, and Tana knows he is in a fight with Yoshi-Hashi, and it is a good fight, as Tana draws on Yoshi-Hashi’s New Energy like a vampire, feeding off of his youth so that he may wrestle and fly like a goddamn man again. And Tana of course gets the win because Yoshi-Hashi can only take this so far before his elders remind him that he still has to mop the toilets with his tongue after the show.

 

But you have to feel for Yoshi-Hashi now. Before he was just some geek who deserved to get beat on, but now he has earned a moment that has not come yet, at least not in my week or two behind ravings, and now I want to watch Yoshi-Hashi win these matches. I tweeted something like this a couple of nights ago and it got no response, no favs, nothing, so it is clear that poor Yoshi-Hashi has not yet made inroads into the Collective Heart or maybe everyone has muted me, who is to say? But I will be the dude who takes up the flag for Yoshi Fucking Hashi.

 

 

KENTA vs EVIL

 

I’m not sure if this was interesting or trash. It is obviously a Bullet Club Civil War match which is for sure interesting as we finally get a look at how the hierarchy maybe shakes out. I’ve talked about this a bit, as KENTA made the move last year and became the Hot Shit and then Jay White was lost to Covid shit for a while and so EVIL was brought in to fuck things up. But then Jay White comes back and he still has Gedo with him, marking him as the Ace of Bullet Club still, and EVIL is gifted Dick Togo befitting a dude who has his own designs on being Top Dog, and KENTA . . . KENTA is left with nothing. He is the forgotten man, a hired hand, forced to eat lunch with Yujiro and his tricks.

 

So, it was interesting to see KENTA kind of become his own man again for a moment here, messing around with Dick Togo and Evil for a while and then finally just beating on both of them, but of course, it doesn’t work out well for him as he gets the symbolic punch to the dick and eats the loss and goes back to Yujiro’s rat table.

 

It even seemed like The People were starting to get behind KENTA which is ironic given that was the entire reason he was thrown to Bullet Club last year, their cold hearts refusing his comeback from years of diabolical soul raping in America. But The People and KENTA’s pride are not enough to overcome the dick in the ring and the Dick outside the ring. To be fair, KENTA also cheated it up a bit because he’s still a snake, but snakes eat rats and EVIL right now is pretty much a rat, and so you root for the fucking snake.

 

EVIL is kind of lost here still, I think. His gun poses are corny and lame and he has lost the gravitas of his prior persona. Now he’s just an asshole, and not a very compelling one. I want him to start throwing guys around again instead of hitting them in the junk. It is sad that it has come to this, perhaps a Poor Choice even if it did get him momentary champ status. He is clearly better positioned than he was before, but life is all about momentum and right now his is kind of rolling back on him a bit. But he’s gonna get time to figure out what this new EVIL looks like and wrestles like and I just hope it gets better, you know?

 

 

Tetsuya Naito vs Sanada

 

Naito has been, so far, for me, the Best Dude in this G1, which is not my usual stance as some of you dirtbags know. I’m sorry for calling you dirtbags since the people reading this are almost all Dear Friends unless someone lets this shit out into the wild which I don’t even know is a good idea and what the fuck am I talking about? Oh yeah, Naito, who has won me over and is representing the company as champion like a boss king.

 

This was always gonna be Sanada’s moment, though. It had to, right? Hometown boy hadn’t won a match yet and was facing his Fucking Boss. Gotta win that one. And Sanada did, redeeming his shitty tournament and possibly setting up even more friction in LIJ, although probably not because Sanada is pretty passive and Naito is secure enough in his own cajones as he would probably call them thanks to his Mexican experience to not let this become A Thing. Sure, it might lead to a match down the road, but it won’t go down like the EVIL shit did.

 

I always like Sanada matches that go deep into the night, both dudes exhausted or wrecked, and while it maybe quite didn’t reach those epic heights, which no match in this G1 really has yet to be honest, it was still compelling and still very much what you would expect to see in a Naito vs Sanada match. Things even got a little dangerous with Naito getting brought down from the top rope on his fucking head by Sanada, and if any two dudes are gonna start cracking walnuts like Ibushi, it’s these two, but it didn’t really degenerate into anything more than that, again a theme of this entire tourney, which has been fairly subdued in just about every way you can imagine, from the fans to the ring work to the fires which never quite get started. It’s being played off as a STRATEGY thing, but I don’t know if that’s just a cover for some listless work. Of course, I’m probably being worked.

 

I don’t want any of that to diminish this match, which was perfectly fine, and Sanada gets to go to the back knowing that he just beat his boss man, and Naito knows that he has to keep an eye on Sanada now, especially after the shit that went down with Evil, but Naito is Tranquilo and maybe no other LIJ member reps that as well as Sanada, and so everything’s cool, baby. For now.