Tonight’s episode took place on April 5, 2015 at Sumo Hall in Tokyo, Japan, our first look at the matches that took place on the Invasion Attack 2015 card.
First up we have the Young Bucks taking on Roppongi Vice (Beretta and Rocky Romero) for the IWGP Junior tag team championships. I believe this is their first tour together, as Romero’s former partner Alex Kozlov has taken a sabbatical from wrestling at the start of this year. I always like it when they do singles matches in this division. This was the year they went overboard on the multi tag bouts that are fine, but get kind of stale if you do them over and over. I don’t mind a multi-man match every now and then, but I’d like to see more singles tag team bouts in 2016 as I just feel it means a bit more when competiing for a title. Very good stuff overall in this bout. Romero is pretty underrated in these kind of matches, he’s really tremendous in what he does and he’s usually the most over guy in the division. They win the titles with the Omori Driver/dropkick combination.
After the match Romero says let’s get the party started in Roppongi. Backstage, Romero says that Beretta has proved himself here tonight by winning the titles. Beretta says this is just the beginning and joked they were just going to go to McDonalds or something to celebrate.
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Kenny Omega faced Mascara Dorada next for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight championship. This was easily the highlight of Dorada’s tour as he looked great. His agility is outstanding and and is a really refined worker in knowing the style of New Japan while also implementing lucha libre moves. Omega looked fine in keeping up with Dorada and they had a really great match. It’s astonishing that they didn’t do more with Dorada during his excursion in New Japan. I would have loved to see him work a match with Kushida (they did, but it was really short during the Super Juniors tournament). Feels like a waste of talent just putting him in multi man tags. He lost here, with Omega getting the win with the One Winged Angel.
Omega takes a mic after the match and says that as the master of dark custodial arts he’s cleaned up Mexican and Japanese trash, but now it’s time to take out the worst – American trash. Shelley, who is helping Dorada after the match, is called out by Omega. They two have a staredown before Omega bails. Omega is prone to over-acting in promos as I guess he’s going for an anime heel vibe in terms of delivery, but he was fine here.
Shelley says he (Omega) can clean up his body parts after their match as he’ll take him out piece by piece. How can you do that if your body parts are all over the place? He promises he’ll be the next champion..
Time for a chat with Kazushi Sakuraba. He thought forming a tag team with Toru Yano would be interesting, and felt most natural to him. After not knowing if he’s a member of Chaos or not, he talks about facing Shibata. He says when you are in the ring, you have to think of everyone as your enemy. He doesn’t really have anything special to say in facing Shibata.
Sakuraba, teaming with Toru Yano, faces Hiroshi Tanahashi & Katsuyori Shibata in the main event of this program. This is interesting, as Shibata and Sakuraba are facing off against one another despite coming back to New Japan together in 2012 as Laughter7. They did a lot of technical wrestling and looked good, since both have experience in MMA (obviously). Got very heated towards the end as Sakuraba fireman carries Shibata to the floor and taps him out with a kimura. I liked the latter half of this match, but the first just kind of stalled. I didn’t buy this as a main event, but obviously this is just one part of a multi-show series on the event, and I guess it was fine when you think about that.
Yano after the match says Tanahashi is no longer the ace and will change him into a garbage wrestler. Sakuraba says he came to NJPW to stir things up. He suggests Tanahashi should face Shibata. He also says he would face him if he got the chance. Tanahashi simply says Yano got him.