Match Guide Reviews: Kota Ibushi v Taichi

The dumbest, stupidest, great match I've ever seen

It has been invigorating being back in this wrestling commentary game. While finding the time amongst family, work and all the rest of things life does remains a constant challenge, I always find that my wrestling fandom is improved when I’m digging into matches.

Particularly if you’re on social media it is easy to get caught up in the constant deluge of hot takes, news, grifters and trolls that we forget what brought us here in the first place: the characters, the stories and the matches.

It's what I hope my podcast and these written reviews can add to the discourse, good faith, earnest critiques of the best stories and matches I’ve seen. Today, something a little different but a match I will always have a special place for in my heart.

Kota Ibushi v Taichi
NJPW G1 Climax 2020, Night 17

I only ever started one fight on the rugby field. All game the opposing flanker and I were dancing along the line of what is legal and illegal in taking each other out at the breakdown, erring more and more on the illegal side as the game wore. With about ten minutes left on the clock I cleaned my opponent out after a tackle, he rolled me over, dropped an elbow on my face and tried to run off to the next ruck. I got up grabbed his jumper and we both started throwing punches. For the effort, we both got sent off, suspended for the next match and it remains the only time my Dad told me he was disappointed in my effort while playing sports.

At any point in the match, one of us could have stopped this pointless sequence, it may have started as part of the broader game but ended up counterproductive to what both of us were meant to be doing on the field. It would have been better for our teams if one of us took a step back and hit pause on it but we were teenagers brimming with jock machismo, locked in a dumb duel to the end.

Not my finest moment.

It is, however, the reason I can relate to the third match in this series, a match that is simultaneously one of the dumbest matches I’ve ever seen and also one of the most creatively ambitious, the story of when Kota Ibushi and Taichi kicked the shit out of each other in Ryongoku.

To set the scene for this match, it came on night 17 of the G1 Climax, the annual New Japan round-robin tournament to crown the best of the heavyweight division. As well as the prestige of winning a tournament previously taken out by a whos-who of pro wrestling, the winner receives a shot at the IWGP Heavyweight Title at Wrestle Kingdom, NJPW’s biggest show of the year. In 2020 the field was divided into two blocks of ten with each competitor facing the other wrestlers in their block and the top wrestler in each block at the end of the tournament wrestling in a final for the crown.

Coming into night 17, the last night for Kota Ibushi and Taichi’s block, while Taichi had already been eliminated from contention, Ibushi was still alive, needing a win to maintain his chance of topping the block and winning his way back to the Wrestle Kingdom main event. While that should have been front of mind for Ibushi that night, fresher in it was the injustice of being cheated by Taichi in the New Japan Cup knockout tournament earlier that year and the indignity of losing numerous IWGP Tag Team Title matches to Taichi and his partner Zack Sabre Jr. in the months leading up to the G1, mostly in dubious circumstances.

For his part, despite being eliminated Taichi was at something of a career-high, reigning as heavyweight tag champion and having beaten his Suzuki-Gun stable leader Minoru Suzuki in the earlier rounds of the tournament.

There was no love lost between the pair as they stared one another down and Taichi opened proceedings, scornfully flicking out an underpowered kick to Ibushi’s leg, as much to annoy his opponent as anything. Ibushi would take the kick and return serve with a strike of equal levels of power and scorn. As the pair started trading leg kicks of gradually increasing force they locked themselves in a duel as neither man refused to cede an inch in either changing tactics or showing the effect of their opponent's offence.

And unbelievably that is how it went for the next seventeen minutes. Kick, sell, kick, sell, kick, sell. Kota Ibushi, a creature living purely in the moment intent on teaching Taichi a lesson in humility even if it meant throwing a future title opportunity in the air. Taichi, a man always striving to prove his worth by any means, wanting to show he belonged with the likes of Ibushi at the top of the heavyweight division, as he believed he had shown by beating Ibushi and Hiroshi Tanahshi in tag matches and Suzuki earlier in the tournament.

As the minutes wore on, the pair reluctantly started to show the effect of this ridiculous duel they were locked in, offering their back while seated to their opponent, then their chest, their leg and finally their head as a target for their opponent’s kicks. The selling and pacing was truly a work of art with each man going from grimacing, firing up and trash-talking, to limping and pushing themselves through, to finally being floored by each kick and pulling themselves up with the ropes as the gap between each strike grows.

Seventeen minutes and nothing but kicks.

Seventeen minutes in this duel until one man blinks.

It didn’t matter to either wrestler the kind of self-sabotage this duel represented, the kind of damage they could do to themselves even just in dealing out offence or the counter-productive effect even a win this way could have. For Kota Ibushi fighting in this manner could have cost him either a position in the final if he lost or seen him head into it (as he did) severely debilitated, essentially going in on one leg. Full of adrenaline, pride and intent, these men only had eyes for each other, refusing to back down, caught in the dumbest of dumb duels.

It is the kind of creative choice that could have lost any suspension of disbelief from its audience but the performance of each man and the story of them letting themselves get lost in this duel completely engrossed the crowd. While the match would have worked in any era, in the era of Japanese COVID-enforced clap-only crowds, this creative choice was even more inspired as early on the crowds were able to clap to the beat of the kicks being thrown, encouraging them to pay closer and closer attention. This attention was then rewarded as the match climaxed with the crowd clapping, stomping and rattling guard rails, as immersed in this duel as wrestlers in the ring.

This match caught me off guard but in the absolute best way. I have only seen a few matches that compare to it creatively and none pull it off as successfully. I adore the creative boldness for the wrestlers to limit themselves so significantly yet still make it fit with their character’s journey and pull the match off with such aplomb, particularly in a tournament of such wrestling excess as the G1. It is like the appreciation you gain of a songwriter when they take a huge multi-layered song and play it acoustically. It doesn’t ruin the original but stripped of electric guitars synths, drums, keys or any production tricks, it emphasises the skill of the musician. It is the kind of risk I wish wrestlers would take more often.

Don’t get me wrong, this match is so dumb. It is two wrestlers doing nothing but kick the shit out of each other for seventeen minutes. Yet for that same reason, it is brilliant. A unique creation in a unique time period, one I doubt will be repeated. Dumb in the most awesome of ways.

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The next episode of the AEW Match Guide Podcast will be released next Wednesday and we will be speaking about Orange Cassidy v Jon Moxley, International Championship Match from All Out 2023.

I’ll be posting another written review in a fortnight.

Also watch this space for a fun little merchandise collaboration. More will be announced in the next few weeks.