Keita Yano vs. Yujiro Yamamoto

[6.0] "Decently enjoyable shoot-style-ish sprawl. I say "decently" because this was fairly slow to start off with and essentially had zero striking around, just purely amateur wrestling with the occasional attempt at a submission. This had a lot of fairly strong technique but not a lot of mechanics alongside it that really were interesting so a lot of the match for me felt pretty souless despite the solid sprawling. Keita generally had the lead given Yamamoto's lack of size, forcing the latter to really work defensive and drag this out to try to sneak in holds. They eventually opt for the legs, namely throwing out Achilles Tendon attempts alongside the occasional toe hold here and there. Keita was relentless on this front, at times spending minutes just sitting on a leg and trying to isolate it away from any attempt to defend or prevent him getting a tap-out. This led to a pretty cool bit where Yamamoto snapped on a inverted kneebar that Keita was forced to rope break to escape. This turned on the tension as the B-Rule cup scores a break as essentially a point against the person doing the breaking, meaning Yamamoto was now winning. With mere minutes left there was a uptick in tangible action as Keita struggled to break even, even managing to get full mount at one point by pulling himself up from a dual tendon exchange, but Yamamoto's speed and defence meant that nothing could crack him until the time limit hit at the 15 minute mark. Pretty dull stuff, not going to lie. A lot of this was focused around lots of focus on leverage and stances; that's cool, it's just that there was no real attempt to drum up any interest in it. It felt like the lads just wanted to freestyle for the first half then bring it back into something a bit more exciting a-la Funaki/Shamrock. Understandable (and certainly not a terrible idea either given the talent these two share) it just lacked any fire to make it worthwhile. They did well ramping up things to the frantic end, Keita really felt like a big underdog here just trying to measure up the perfect hold and stumbling at the last hurdle."