Masanobu Fuchi & Osamu Nishimura vs. Minoru Suzuki & NOSAWA Rongai

[6.0] "This is for the vacant All Asia Tag Team Championships, and this was a kind of inprov tournament to crown them. The teams are a bit random: NOSAWA and Suzuki aren't exactly the first people you'd think of for such a championship: but this match is pretty good regardless of that fact. Suzuki is in his weird cocky persona here rather than the stern murderous uncle he'd be later, and him actively doing groundwork with Nishimura is incredibly refreshing after the years of consistent strike exchanges in NJPW. Fuchi is positioned as the far weaker of the pair, through he's still grumpy as anything and can still throw out a mean headlock. NOSAWA is in for a limited amount of time, but it's quickly determined that he's injured in some manner as his foot has already been worn down from a prior fight in the night, and so the pair immediately work around this injury to their advantage. Nishimura as always is a great worker when it comes to relentless limb targeting and he does great here tormenting the guy, as well as Fuchi's cockiness in letting NOSAWA get his shots in before taking him down and focusing in on it. This also means that we don't really get any workrate or sustained offence from him whatsoever, but I'm fine with that for the sake of the story. The part where Suzuki just loses all patience and starts booting the shit out of Nishimura while he's in a figure four was a particular highlight. Eventually Suzuki gets in for the hot tag and has a decent enough exchange with Nishimura, but Fuchi gets a lot more out of the guy, especially when he's hammering Suzuki down with chops and he's just laughing at them all before landing his own huge blows. Nishimura gives Fuchi a headstart with some offence of his own, but as he's busy keeping NOSAWA away from the action with a figure four, Fuchi has to try to handle the guy all by himself. This gives us some nice near falls and submission attempts, but ultimately Suzuki recovers and lands his sleeper into Gotch Piledriver combination for the win and the tag belts. Not particularly great at any point: there's a lot of action here but a lot of it is centred around some slow working holds, and Suzuki isn't exactly someone I'd want to see hit a hot tag and work from underneath: he's just not built for that kind of stuff in general, and while I can understand NOSAWA being here to fill that role for the most part, it does make this into a rather slow match after a while, especially in the middle where he's just getting thrown into holds over and over with minimal resistance. All in all, this wasn't bad or anything, just kinda lacking some coherent elements."