BRM Reviews NJPW Best of the Super Juniors XXVIII and World Tag League 2021: Final Day

[Big Red Machine]

NJPW Best of the Super Juniors XXVIII and World Tag League 2021: Final Day (12/15/2021)- Tokyo, Japan


KOSEI FUJITA, YUTO NAKASHIMA, & RYUSUKE TAGUCHI vs. SUZUKI-GUN (Minoru Suzuki, TAKA Michinoku, & DOUKI)- 3/10
Suzuki mauled the Young Lions. He could probably maul an actual lion cub, too. Then TAKA looked like crap because he had a much harder time with a lowly rookie. Taguchi tagged in and he and TAKA had an entertaining segment. DOUKI go the win because that duck-bill on his face means that we need to give him as much credibility as possible.

RYOHEI OIWA & TIGER MASK IV vs. BULLET CLUB (Taiji Ishimori & El Phantasmo)- 1.25/10
The heels won a short match cleanly. No points for guessing which babyface ate the fall.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- fine
Bullet Club attacked the babyfaces after the match because that what Bullet Club does. Eagles tried to make the save but got taken down and had to himself be saved by Taguchi. Taguchi posed with the belts, so I guess he and Rocky Romero are getting another title shot.

MASTER WATO, TOGI MAKABE, TORU YANO, & TOMOAKI HONDA vs. SUZUKI-GUN (El Desperado, Yoshinobu Kanemaru, Zack Sabre Jr., & Taichi)- 5/10
Stuff happened. Some of it was entertaining, some of it was boring. Bullet Club attacked the referee after the match for no reason, and it will have no consequences.

YUJI NAGATA, HIROSHI TANAHASHI, SATOSHI KOJIMA, & HIROYOSHI TENZAN vs. BULLET CLUB (Chase Owens, Bad Luck Fale, & the Guerrillas of Destiny) (w/Jado)- 5.5/10
Bullet Club jumped the bell on the babyfaces, who gained control within about a minute, rendering Bullet Club jumping the bell on them completely pointless. We got some heat on Tanahashi before the hot tag and comeback. Tanahashi pinned Chase Owens with a roll-up, just to change things up, I guess.

KENTA VIDEO PROMO- He challenged Tanahashi to a No DQs match for the US Title. I’m not sure how this will be any different from any other New Japan match, where there technically are disqualifications and count-outs, but the referees don’t care and don’t enforce the rules.

LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Tetsuya Naito & Sanada) vs. UNITED EMPIRE (Will Ospreay & Jeff Cobb) (w/Aaron Henare)- 6/10
LIJ jumped the bell on United Empire. Even the supposed babyfaces are doing it now.
Sanada’s back got worked over. Naito and Cobb had a LONG segment together. Naito pinned Cobb with a roll-up where it did not look like Cobb’s shoulders were down the whole time. Cobb apparently agreed with me, as he attacked Naito after the match, but Naito fought him off.

CHAOS (Kazuchika Okada & Robbie Eagles) vs. LOS INGOBERNABLES DE JAPON (Shingo Takagi & BUSHI)- 6.75/10
Good action. Okada pinned BUSHI, then he and Shingo posed at each other with their belts.

WORLD TAG LEAGUE FINALS: CHAOS (Hirooki Goto & YOSHI-HASHI) vs. House of Torture (Yujiro Takahashi & EVIL) (w/Dick Togo)- 6/10
Stuff happened. The heels took control on the outside. They knocked over a table behind the guardrail, and in addition to a bunch of the ringside attendants, the f*cking referee went over to check on the person who got knocked over. Well… I guess a stupid reason for the referee to not see things is better than just having him see EVIL use a chair and not do anything. Actually, if you come up with a dumb reason for the referee to be distracted in one spot, and then do another spot where someone manhandles the referee and the referee doesn’t do anything, it’s actually worse, because it shows that you know you need a reason, but you’re too lazy to come up with one the second time and you just do it anyway.
This was the usual long heat in an NJPW tag match, with the usual Bullet Club interference thrown in. After the heels cheated for the forty-third time, Tomohiro Ishii ran in to help his friends. I don’t know why he didn’t come out after any of the first forty-two, and I’ll bet you that no one involved in the match (including the booker) knows, either.
There were some exciting sequences in here, and I’m really happy for YOSHI-HASHI getting this big win, but this was yet another Bullet Club match that was crushed under the weight of the overdone interference and cheating (which is only made worse when no one- either the babyfaces’ friends of the promotion- does anything to stop it, which is what happens in 99% of these matches).

BEST OF THE SUPER JUNIORS XXVIII FINAL: Hiromu Takahashi vs. Yoh- 8.5/10
This match can be divided into three segments. The first was the usual feeling-out process. Then we go Hiromu doing hard strikes and going for head-drops, and Yoh trying for the Calf Slicer (which Hiromu really didn’t sell) and countering Hiromu’s head-drops. I couldn’t get into this part, as it felt like a 2006 TNAMecca poster’s assumption of what an ROH match was like.

Then Sho interfered and attacked the referee, then Yoh. Hiromu didn’t like this so Sho attacked him as well. Sho started to cut a promo but was chased away by Hirooki Goto and YOSHI-HASHI. Look at that! Members of a stable chasing off an interloper. Now why hasn’t this happened in every single Bullet Club and Suzuki-Gun crap-fest?
After that, we essentially got a big reset, after which we got the third segment of the match, which was pretty much just a series of excellent nearfalls, interrupted by the occasional exchange of strikes that almost always ended in nearfalls. The fact that I have rated this so highly despite not caring for a large chunk of it should tell you how great this final segment was.


This was a disappointing show from New Japan. They had two big tournaments concluding on this show, and only one of those two finals delivered, while the rest of the show was the usual plodding NJPW undercard.