BRM Reviews NJPW Best of the Super Juniors XXV: Day 4 (awesome)

[Big Red Machine]

NJPW Best of the Super Juniors XXV: Day 4 (5/22/2018)- Tokyo, Japan


TOMOYUKI OKA & FLIP GORDON vs. BULLET CLUB (Chase Owens & Taiji Ishimori)- 5.25/10

SHOTA UMINO & ACH vs. SUZUKI-GUN (Minoru Suzuki & El Desperado)- 6/10
Suzuki-Gun jump the bell on their opponents. They beat the living sh*t out of Umino for a while before we got a good babyface comeback, followed by Umino tapping out Kanemaru’s single leg crab.

CHAOS (Gedo & Will Ospreay) vs. CHAOS (Yoh & YOSHI-HASHI)- 5/10
YOSHI-HASHI is such an odd choice to be Yoh’s partner here. Not only is he a heavyweight facing off against a team of two junior heavyweights, but Yoh has a ready-made junior heavyweight mentor in Rocky Romero who he is already part of a natural CHAOS sub-unit with. The match was fine. Ospreay was exciting.

TIGER MASK IV & TOA HENARE vs. LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Tetsuya Naito & BUSHI)- 5.5/10
Henare once again is made to look like a guy on his way up the food chain.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- BUSHI rips off Tiger Mask’s IV’s eponymous tiger-themed mask. If they’re going to be having a mask vs. mask match at Dominion, there was no reason for this. And given the frequency that masks are tampered with in ROH and NJPW for no reason other than cheap heat, I’m skeptical that there will be one.

CHRIS JERICHO VIDEO PROMO- awesome
Naito had a response in Japanese. The fans seemed to be into it.

BLOCK B MATCH: Chris Sabin(2) vs. Sho(0)- 8.5/10
Sabin started off working on Sho’s knees but Sho didn’t sell it so Sabin just decided to do other stuff. Sho, for his part, worked over Sabin’s arm while also building up to eventually hitting his finisher for the win. Another awesome match from both men. BOSJ continues to look like Sho’s singles coming out party as well as Sabin’s “I’m back to form” party.

BLOCK B MATCH: Dragon Lee(2) vs. Ryusuke Taguchi(2)- 7/10
An exciting match that gave us an interesting combination of Comedy Taguchi and Serious Taguchi that I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing more often.

BLOCK B MATCH: Marty Scurll(0) vs. KUSHIDA(0)- 8.75/10
Great chain wrestling in the beginning to set up KUSHIDA working the arm to set up for the Hoverboard Lock. He would later start working the neck as well to set up for Back to the Future. Scurll also worked the arm and they started to tease their signature submission before a cool finishing sequence showed KUSHIDA’s versatility of setting up an alternative method of attack allow him to get the win via that alternative method.

BLOCK B MATCH: Hiromu Takahashi(2) vs. El Desperado(0)- 7.5/10
Hiromu jumped the bell on El Desperado so that El Desperado wouldn’t be able to do the same to him (which he was surely planning to do because that’s what Suzuki-Gun members always do). They fought on the outside forever without being counted out. They used weapons in front of the referee without being DQed. El Desperado used weapons to lay Hiromu out in the stands, then ran back to the ring and apparently told the referee the secret code word to temporarily activate count-outs so that we could have the supposed drama of a tease of Hiromu being counted out.
Once they got into the ring they had a great slugfest of a match, with Hiromu’s back being worked over and everything was awesome until the finish, where El Desperado tried to use his IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Tag Team Title belt but apparently weapons are illegal at this particular point in the match so the referee had to get the belt away from him, resulting in the referee being distracted so that shenanigans could happen on the finish. This is a fine example of a match that could have been a classic if they had just resisted the temptation of going for easy pops with their earlier bullsh*t and thus not undermined the rules before then asking me to care about them at the end.


An awesome show from NJPW that still disappoints because it feels like it would have been so much better if the main event hadn’t shot itself in the foot. The Jericho promo is also worth seeing, and the undercard was fine for the time it got, so I’d say this is one of the BOSJ shows for which you should make sure to watch the whole thing.