WrestleWipe #5 - August 2024

The state of WWE, the state of AEW, and the state of NJPW. The absolute state of it.

STATE OF WWE: THE SUMMER SLAM  

It’s the biggest party of the summer! And WWE are riding a wave of popularity due to having cartoon characters perform a slapstick interpretation of fighting on the telly for children to ingest in-between fizzy drinks and sugar canes. Only unlike the 80’s, it’s not just children that are engaged in these tales, but it’s fully grown adults who have the ability to drive and drink (often simultaneously, if they’re a God fearing American). It’s always good to reconnect with your childhood nostalgia though, and the world’s biggest wrestling company deserves some summer screen time to see if a jaded, sly old stoaty stoat like me can get behind THE FED again. And I immediately regretted my decision when the first slab of this wrestling show was taken up by Jelly Roll and Triple H, who both engaged in the kind of outdated 90’s piss water that’s best left for American history to devour. Triple H needing his own little entrance pop to introduce Jelly Roll is an eye-opening look at his fragile ego, and he’s clearly not the smol bean wrestling do-gooder that everyone brushes him off to be. 

Whoa, hold the phone there, I forgot to mention that we had TWO songs from fucking Jelly Roll, live and in the flesh, echoing throughout the arena and the toilet stands. Much like WWE, country music has been mostly gash since the turn of the 2000s, and this night we had a double bubble of soulless corporate mediocrity. The second Jelly Roll song was also intersected with WWE clips to build up the show. My Way, this was not, nor was it Dolly or Cash or Willie or Dusty (Springfield). And to top it all off the Miz had to stick his crusty wick in there to throw to the first match, and we continue the theme of woeful music as Motionless In White regurgitates through the amplifiers for Rhea Ripley’s entrance, followed swiftly by the sounds of police intercepting a hundred thousand phones for Liv Morgan’s entrance. 

The sponsored referee cam guarantees that this show will be more overproduced and awkward than a VR DVDA POV scene, as now the ref will be directed around the ring by the producing team whilst still trying to do his fucking job. Then the big OTT introductions fly into view, and at this stage, OVER SEVENTEEN MINUTES INTO A PRO WRESTLING SHOW, the bell rang, and I had the Deity-given permission to skip everything that wasn't wrestling from this point forward just to get to the fucking wrestling on this show. I cannot imagine anyone coming into this pro wrestling malarky to see what all the fuss was about and not glancing at their watch every few minutes, asking the kidnapper who had chained them to a radiator when the actual wrestling matches start. To top it all off, this first match had the fucking temerity to begin with stalling and cat & mouse antics, for fucks sake. Russo, Eric, and the fucking weirdos who keep them in peanut butter like to talk about capturing casuals, when from my experience, casuals would be embarrassed by this and shouting at the top of their lungs, “OH JUST FUCKING GET ON WITH IT!”. 

“DO A HEAD LOCK OR SOMETHING!”

As a positive, this match was the only occasion during these HBK-NXT years that the OMG face was justified as the cheating, out-of-depth heel had her only real chance to escape with the title on her own merits and she still couldn't get the job done. Good stuff, but not enough to justify the mediocre performances on all sides. The throughline of Rhea’s shoulder was slapdash, and the commentary team acting like Dom siding with Liv was some sort of war crime was fucking ridiculous. 

When it comes to the set-up of the show itself, WWE has it right by taking a page out of the AEW All In 2023 mindset by having minimal entrance staging to emphasise the size and scope of the stadium crowd. Save the big entrance designs for WrestleMania to really make those feel special and unique. The smaller entrance makes the wrestlers appear organically over as they walk and work their way through a sea of people, rather than the forced grandeur of a giant magical, all-singing all-dancing PSX tech demo. Sami Zayn vs Bron Brekker finally brought some pro wrestling that I could enjoy, and non-too soon because I was wavering hard. Still, we had to watch the prerequisite build-up video first, and it was a laughable display as not even WWE’s team of highly skilled, underpaid, over worked editors could make the crowd during RAW look like they could give a shit about Sami Zayn and his fiery babyface fire. I hate the fact that Sami has been wrestling just as long as Sami Zayn than he did as El Generico, it properly hurts my soul. The orphan shite that everyone feels the need to post on social media whenever someone tags Zayn in a cool fucking El Generico video needs to end by the way, as it legit puts a damper on his pre-WWE work if we aren’t allowed to properly appraise his incredible all-timer indie run without the discussion turning into repeated meme posting.

This should be submitted to the Library Of Congress

This was the best match of the show. Big Fire, big dumb energy, reasonable length, no rest holds, and the crowd was into the match itself…well kind of, some of Sami's hope spot reactions were less than impressive. You’d think the WWE live production would be on that, seeing as they were filling the stadium with faux- hairdryer crowd noise since the Triple Jelly jack-off session, but I guess even the demons in that cramped, humid production truck have some degree of standards. I’m not going to mention any further the 128kpbs crowdnoise2k15.wav file that they constantly force into the show (the whistles are a real big giveaway, who the fuck is whistling at a live show in 2024?), I’m not going to mention the cartoony name plates and video game presentation any further, and I’m not going to mention the constant stream of unrelenting adverts, commercials, promotional plugs, and various other non-sequitur video atrocities throughout the show either. I feel like I’ve already had WWE hung for those crimes in previous columns, and I will probably need the ammo available when I inevitably have to watch another WWE show. 

To steal a phrase from the worst consistent mainstream wrestling commentator of all time, the SummerSlam rolled on with someone hiding as a security guard during Logan Paul's entrance and it was revealed as MGK? MDK? It was some pop star, and the commentators had to pretend to know who he is, and I and three quarters of the live audience had no idea either. It’s only when Corey Graves keyed him as Machine Gun Kelly that the penny drops, and I actually knew who the bellend was. Machine Gun Kelly, who actually released a half-decent pop-punk album in 2020, and who was powerbombed off the stage by Kevin Owens in what I’m pretty sure was a fever dream, was the mystery man escorting Logan and was looking utterly unrecognisable from the one album cover that I knew him from and was also looking incredibly punchable as most upper-class white boy rockin-the-suburbs types do. Oh, how the perfectly average have fallen.

Anyway, Logan’s match with LA Knight (whose popularity is as mysterious to me as the pyramids, the Bermuda triangle, and Jeff Goldblum’s sexual aura) is very uninteresting as I don't buy into LA Knight’s Dwayne Johnson+Daniel Bryan combo considering he doesn’t even have a quarter of the combined flavour of either guy, or am I interested in Logan Paul's money-for-roster-spot dipshittery (yes he can do moves and has the swagger and the chops and can go along with the ebbs-and-flows of a wrestling match, but so can a thousand other roster members past and present who have bust their asses for years. Logan glided into a top spot due to celebrity leverage and is no different to Shane McMahon taking up valuable air space that could’ve been given to a worthy pro wrestler in need of a rub. It's easy to get over when you’re given carte blanche to do big exciting high spots and elaborate entrances whilst everyone else has to submit their matches through three layers of agenting). 

“You want to do a what? A back body drop? What are we, XPW?”

Logan pulled off a flawless super crazy avalanche asai moonsault in this and then landed on his transphobic dome with a superplex, and that’s where the match started picking up steam. Well, that is until Logan got handed a knuckle duster in full view of the ref and the four giant screens that the ref is looking at, and that’s where the defence collapsed at the Judge’s bench. 

During the build-up video for Bayley vs Nia Jax, Bayley says "this isn't hugger Bayley!", and it's such a damn shame that it isn't. Man, WWE fucked that one up; a sure-fire, cash-over-fist gimmick with a wrestler who lived and breathed the idea to such a degree that she WAS Bayley, inside and outside the ring. Instead, here we have the unnecessary 1990’s comic book reinvention of the character, with all the edges sharpened and all the positives blurred in order to focus on the character’s contrasts and obverses. A massive shame and such an easy win, down the drain as soon as she hit the main roster and Vince McMahon was unable to make head or tale of the money earning potential. That said, excuse me for not getting hyped for 2024 Nia Jax vs 2024 Bayley, with one of these wrestlers being past their sell-by date and the other not even meeting the production line standards to begin with. And Christ, was this plodding. And Christ is Nia just bad. And Christ, Bayley looks like she'd rather be anywhere else. This lacked energy, this lacked impact, this was not good. I'll tell you what it did have though; another shoulder posting spot! Yes, at this point in the show, every single match had a spot where a wrestler was rammed shoulder first into the ring post between the ropes. Looks like the FBI weren’t the only organisation having trouble with agents this summer. 

Time slowed down during this, like Bernard’s Wrestling Match. I felt like I could age a year in the minutes it took them to get to the finishing sequence, where Bayley hit a powerbomb and suddenly the crowd woke up, chanting “Holy shit!” like they've never seen Sweet Sycho Sid before, and following that up with the second biggest reaction for Tiffany's music playing, and I don't blame the WWE crowd for their entrance fetish this time because there was fuck all else to cheer for. This might be a good time to mention that this was also the third match of four that had outside interference. Oh, the joys.

Not many people remember that Debra was slotted in to be the special guest referee at WrestleMania 17 because WWE scrubbed that entire story from their DVDs and music videos and compilations and their general history. It was an awful creative choice and weighed down the main event heavyweight championship match, and so before WrestleMania 17 they nixed the story completely to focus solely on AUSTIN vs JOHNSON. The ‘My Way’ video barely even features a whiff of this dropped turd. They knew it was shit, so they shit-canned it. WWE was mostly good back then, you see, with tried-and-tested touchtone in the writing room and booking department. When the WWE of 2024 faced a similar dilemma with a special guest referee being brute forced into a match, they didn't cancel out that wrinkle in the stain-riddled storyline because they can't let a hot-feeling feud get in the way of fans being able to sing some entrance music. Although we did have the initial big fight feel for CM Punk vs Drew McIntyre, the match immediately took several paces backwards due to Seth Rollins and his prancing, which actually led to the crowd singing Seth's song during the match, actively taking away from what should’ve been the most heated match on the card. 

It’s not all Seth’s fault though; the brawling was greatly uninspired, and the crowd became more and more interested in Seth’s catalyst rather than the feud between Punk and Drew, and the whole Poundland plastic bracelet MacGuffin subplot created more NXT faces and drama that I just couldn’t be arsed with, and I began to drift and spent more time building my breakfast subway order than watching the farce unfold further. I came to as Punk was haphazardly making sure that he was facing the hardcam for his GTS, and the straw that broke the Hulkster’s back was Punk having a go at Seth for wearing a fucking bracelet, before more loud talking and theatrics, and Drew getting the win after a thoroughly fucking boring mare. This was the feud that everyone was talking about? “Oh, WWE is back, and it feels so real!”, and so WWE just couldn't help themselves. A massive disappointment. Punk is officially dead; who is going to usher in the age of post-punk? Oh, and it had another fucking posting spot! FIVE FOR FIVE!  

Gunter vs Damien Priest started out deliciously, with a full-on footlong Southwest-drizzled BMT, garnished with peppers, cucumbers, gherkins and cheese. Untoasted of course; I ordered a fucking sandwich not a toastie, and if it were up to me the option of TOASTING would be removed from all Subway outlets in the West Midlands area, and anyone caught asking for their sandwich to be toasted would be kicked out into the streets like a 1920’s orphan. 

The proceedings here were fine and turned out to be the second-best match of the show, but would’ve been better with the thicker, larger, more intimidating Gunther rather than this current version. Yes, he may be easier on the eye for company metrics and wrestling fans who haven’t watched any wrestling besides 2020’s WWE, but he’s also lost the look of a big hard bastard, exchanged for a more slimline version of himself where he fits the part of a random henchman rather than the end game boss. Get more Subways down your gullet, Gunth. The match was also helped by the Finn Balor turn, which was executed so well that I wondered if WWE was starting to rub off on me, but before they could finish the job and smoke up the back of my leg, I was whisked away by video packages and WWE-isms and suffered no damage to either my clothes or my mental health.

As Cody was walking Pharo through the backstage area before the main event match, and Corey Graves was gabbing on, "Pharo is Cody's best friend! He's been through all the towns and done all the miles!", I legitimately thought for a second that Pharo would be turning during the main of Cody vs Solo, and I would end up begging for that to be the case as Cody vs Solo was a dreadful affair that reverted any goodwill built up by the previous match. Pharo leaping into the ring and dropping trou on Cody’s weight belt to distract him would’ve been a million times more entertaining than what we were offered instead during the main event of the third biggest PPV of the year. 

The negative with Bloodline Rules is that no one is invested in the early going because they know nothing in the match matters until way down the wire when all the interference and fuckery kicks in, and having Arn Anderson before the match giving Cody a speech about having acquired some backup for Cody only hammered that home, so not only was the in-ring uninspired, but the no one cared until the third parties appeared. Even when the Tongans hit their double team on Cody, and Solo covered for the pin, the crowd was dead silent and merely farted with enthusiasm when Cody kicked out, because they already knew more was to come. This wasn't at all helped by Solo being crap in general, who has as much presence as a gnat's anus and as much wrestling acumen as a boneless chicken. The situation was also not helped by the WWE audience’s fixation on entrance themes as they looked to the aisle to pop for the opening chords of whatever superstars were about to arrive. Don’t get it wrong, the entrances were the most important thing in this match, they were what the crowd reacted to the most, and it's absolutely not my version of pro wrestling (because pro wrestling takes place when pro wrestlers professionally wrestle in the vicinity of a wrestling ring). The Roman entrance got the biggest pop of the match, maybe even of the whole night, then the Roman taunt got the biggest pop, and then the Roman finisher got the biggest pop. Let me take you back to WW #1:  

If we’ve learnt anything so far though it’s that the real WWE story is Entrances, Taunts and Finishers.

That was the end of the SummerSlam. Should the worldwide leader in pro wrestling be producing bang average PPVs that appeal to as many people as possible? Yes. So why was this PPV so fucking below-average? The in-ring action scraped and clawed at passable, and the lack of memorable scenes and character-defining moments was a big tell that WWE doesn’t have the chops to fill these big shows with the meat and potatoes of Pro Wrestling 101. I don't know how it's possible to be excited for WWE’s stories when the payoffs are this bland and uninspired. The production was set to its usual overkill mode, and special mention has to go to the crowd sweetening rearing its ugly head whenever someone entered through the stage, regardless of whether they had a big real-life reaction or not, and is an example of WWE"s inability to have anything be received organically. WWE has to control everything; what you see, what you hear, what you read, and how you consume. It wouldn’t surprise me if WWE does away with the crowd participation for good and just has employees hold “CHEER NOW” signs whenever the right moment strikes.

Here comes Tanga Loa…

I had no desire to watch RAW afterwards to see where the cookie crumbs landed, and I had no desire to watch the last big four PPV, Survivor Series, and that’s always a big indicator of whether a product is working for me. I mean, who wants more of this? There's a train of thought right now that says WWE is working for a massive fucking truckload of people, more so than in the company’s recent history, and they’ve got the receipts to prove it, therefore you can't dismiss it as crap if it’s working that well, and I have to say that train of thought is fucking crap. WWE works for people who like game shows, musical theatre, reality TV and talent competitions. WWE doesn’t work for people who like pro wrestling. 

The fucking state of WWE.

---

STATE OF AEW: Great, Dad’s Crying. 

The state of AEW is in constant flux. Picture in your head a glass cup that contains half of its volume in water. Is it half full? Is it half empty? Now imagine that glass stuck to a catherine wheel, spinning wildly, its contents hanging on by the power of science (or the power of God, if you’re a Juggalo). Now imagine that catherine wheel nailed to a broom handle and left standing upright in a malfunctioning lift (or an “elevator”, if you’re an American/a Juggalo). AEW is always residing in the kind of chaos that is disastrous if it goes tits up but, if all the forces come together, then it’s dance of life is an enthralling masterwork. 

AEW All In 2024 was not only a critical success, but it was also a commercial success. When you put forty-six thousand people in a stadium for a non-WWE event, that is a certified commercial success. WWE drew sixty thousand per night for this year's WrestleMania, and both nights were largely made up of the same fans forking out for two tickets each. AEW putting only fifteen thousand less fans than WWE does for a WrestleMania is an incredible achievement, and one that isn’t harked on about enough. And when you have a show where at least four of the matches will be gifted some kind of accreditation at the many year-end awards that litter the wrestling writing and podcasting space, then you have a critical success on top. That’s the glass half full of AEW All In 2024. There’s no denying any of that. It can’t be argued against. 

So now that I’ve got all the hardcore AEW super freaks super fans oiled up and slick and ready to go, let's bring in the glass half-empty and pour it over their heads. Let’s really ruin the mood here, stick on some Imagine Dragons and order some Weatherspoon's breakfasts, really turn the atmosphere sour because I still must ask the question; what happened to the missing thirty thousand? This a 35% percent drop and must be looked at. It’s not like wrestling fans in the UK aren’t going to bite on a stadium show run by the world’s second biggest western wrestling promotion. A few pockets of fans might look at Wembley Stadium and its lack of amenities, plus the general cost of London living and London travel and London people, and hand waive the opportunity to go even a second time, which is understandable. To travel to Wembley from one of the most far-reaching places of the British Aisles, such as Thurso in the northern reaches of Scotland, six hundred and sixty miles away, would take around 12 hours of driving. It’s also 17 hours by public transport but that’s more an indictment on the UK’s concussed train system than an example of how far the two ends are.

One hundred bottles of Irn Bru on the wall, one hundred bottles of Bru…

As I said previously, Wrestlemania 40 took place in Philadelphia this year, and drew sixty thousand fans per night. Now I’ll bet my bollocks that fans from 500 miles away in Toronto attended this event in their droves, and fans from 530 miles away in Charlotte NC, as well as fans 670 miles away in Louisville KY, fans 1500 miles away in Houston, 2700 miles away in Los Angeles, and especially all those fans who travelled 920 miles from the wrestling hotbed that is Sheboygan, Wisconsin. My point is, that regardless of travel costs and travel time, fans travelled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles to attend WrestleMania, and every year this pattern continues and has continued. Even I have donned a pair of shorts and braved a flight across the pond to attend WrestleMania. And I’m meant to believe that thirty thousand wrestling fans snubbed All In 2024 because the travel was too much hassle?  

Staying on topic here, am I also meant to believe that wrestling fans saw the increased ticket prices in comparison to last year’s All In, and all of them told AEW to fuck off? In today’s age where the UFC can charge anything upwards of remortgaging your house to attend a live show of theirs, the mantra “If you build it, they will come (if it’s popular)” goes strong in today’s economically-up-shit-creek world. I don’t want to start digging into September's news here, but WWE just celebrated their highest grossing event ever and the bellends in Berlin were overjoyed! We live in the end times, hear-ye hear-ye! 

When combined with a bit of a travel schedule, the cost of the tickets, AND having to deal with English people, I can concede that a few thousand people might decide to stay at home instead. In fact, I was in that very boat until the card started coming together and I was cobbling together a cheapo threadbare wanker’s way in to Wembley, but I am talking very, very last minute, to the point of not buying a ticket at all and hoping to chance a bargain from a scalper in person on the day. If it wasn’t for real life, chances are I would’ve been there (or been sat in a nearby pub , watching on my phone after being scammed out of my credit card by Dan The Daggerman from Dagenham). 

So, again, what happened to the other thirty thousand? Did they all have life events going on that needed prioritisation and decide to stay home and stay put instead? Did they all decide it was too expensive? Too costly? Too far? Too much trouble? Or is there something else?

It’s no secret that AEW’s creative has suffered massively since the turn of 2023. Brawl Out took a massive shit on their reputation beforehand, but you could still count on AEW to get their eggs in order for storyline arcs and match quality. 2023 however saw AEW slowly lose their steady grip on their idea of being the WWE alternative by gradually morphing into them. More and more sports entertainment conventions became prevalent across their various outputs, whilst all the juicy ratings, attendances and buy rates that everyone loves talking about faltered harder and harder. They were juggling too much of the stuff that didn’t matter and were abandoning the stuff that did. On the way to All In 2023, the main event was built around two best friends and the worst comedy this side of Mrs Brown’s Boys. For a deeper glimpse into AEW on the road to All In 2023, I recommend this article I penned for Voices Of Wrestling back then (an article that was very well received by smart people who have only ever read the back of shampoo bottles whilst taking a shit…but I digress). I’d especially like to highlight this part here:

Today, most of the other wrestling out there still doesn’t hit right with me, and this year I clung to the AEW ship as my only regular source of wrestling. Like most gateway drugs, I found myself craving more and more as the supplier reduced the quality little by little. AEW’s massive positives used to hide their growing negatives, and yet I increasingly found myself sitting there watching the weekly episodes of AEW Dynamite, with a puzzled look on my face. Or a bored look. Or a frown. Or with my phone sitting in my hands and my finger on the fast-forward button. The Machiavellianism, dire leadership, and self-serving, self-centered maneuvering within the many layers of AEW’s locker room and executive ladder was now on my TV screen, and it’s not the TV show that I signed up for or what I was invested in.

All In London at Wembley Stadium is not the AEW that I signed up for or the AEW that I was invested in, and I stupidly thought that when I bought the tickets back in May that AEW would book this show like a room full of adults would. Instead, we’ve got a cheap WCW re-run of, “Well…we’ve already got their money…”.

All In 2023 was a great live experience, a good PPV, and a solid addition to AEW’s PPV output. It suffered from a terrible build, and had many of their big stars hidden away in multi-man matches, and the main event was one of the worst PPV heavyweight championship matches ever committed to live stream. It was a show with a high floor and a low ceiling, and basically told everyone that AEW had its biggest show ever with a card that felt more like a glorified house show than a massive PPV spectacular built to blow off big feuds and offer big surprises. How many people left Wembley that night feeling like that was it for them? How many looked at the disastrous build and the three singles matches that varied massively in quality and validation, looked at their wallets and the tubes and trains and all the concrete, and thought “Sod this”? 

AEW losing thirty thousand people in that stadium is merely burying the real lead and I’m about to hand it to you, so fucking hold on; in the space of two years, AEW has made no new fans whilst also losing fans in the process. They simply haven’t replaced the fans they ran off. Fans come and go, but a wrestling company who is working all their laurels to the fullest will create new fans to replace them, whether that be lapsed fans, new fans, children hearing about wrestling at school or from their family and friends, people who see clips on social media and fancy giving it a go, fans who only usually watch WWE (aka weirdos), fans who only usually watch New Japan (aka social misfits) and fans who only usually watch Tokyo Joshi Pro (aka the inmates in that wing in every prison that none of the officers want to work in).

“And this is where they house the inmates who bought Alexa Bliss merchandise.”

The AEW product and vision that drove the company off a cliff stateside just hasn’t been catching on. All In 2024 however was a step in the right direction and the best course correction they could’ve made. AEW has been making slight alterations to their product ever since Spring of this year (Will Ospreay being a success as an American TV wrestler, the TV shows putting more stock into ring work, ditching the comedy from the main events, turning MJF back heel, not re-signing the Hardy Boys), and it was All In 2024 where all this remoulding and revisioning came to a head. All In 2024 was a cracking big-time, big-fight card with six singles matches that were actually worth a damn (well five of them at least, I’ll let you figure out my tastes), with titles and pride and storyline developments and hatred all packaged together to make for a compelling wrestling show, and that’s without the supreme joys and surprises of the Casino Gauntlet match. We also did not have a thousand video packages and adverts shilling bullshit and ballyhoo in-between, and during, every fucking match. The fans were loud and popping for the entrances, the wrestlers, the wrestlers moves, the wrestler taunts, the wrestler’s taints, they were popping for everything like a pro wrestling crowd should do and were not sat on their hands with their necks and eyes askew to the stage curtains like late stage terminal Nitro, and they weren’t just chanting and singing bollocks whilst not paying to heed to what was happening in front of them. 

All In 2024 ended with Bryan Danielson's kid going apeshit over confetti as 45000 people roared on, and it was the same wild celebration that my own two-year old son did when getting a Happy Meal earlier the same day, and it made me real blurry in the eyes as I sat on my sofa watching one of the greatest wrestlers of all time reach the pinnacle of his career in my home country, picketed by his kids and his wife and his friends. Wrestling can be the greatest, you just have to let it be great naturally and always give the people what they want, and the people that AEW has to court are the people who want professional wrestling. What is the state of AEW? Half full. Half full.

---

THE STATE OF NJPW: THE G STANDS FOR GONE.

After many years away from my main man, my flare, my sweet sweet cherry pie, I was finally reunited with my true love, the Grade One Climax, for what should’ve been a long-lasting coupling but instead turned into one massively disappointing bang. My relationship with the G1 over the past four years has been akin to the wrestling edition of being on a break, only catching each other every now and again when we felt the desire for a booty call, as we’ve both evolved into different people, and we don’t exactly spark those sparks and fan those flames like days yonder. 

I remember those long luxurious mornings and early afternoons watching every single G1 show, not just every G1 match but full-on shows with the formulaic multi-man tags and the feathery teasers of tournament matches to come, and catching bouts whenever I could throughout the day; waking up, catching a few matches, having lunch, catch a few matches, having a bath, stuck in traffic, on the Kidderminster porcelain, whatever the locale or occasion, for the better part of the summertime 2010s it was untold hours and hours of top-tier top-shelf- top draw top-class pro fucking wrestling, and I couldn't help but think of those halcyon days when trudging my way through this year’s offerings. 

2013 was the year that I was smartened up to Earth’s greatest wrestling tournament (the G in G1 stands for GREATEST), courtesy of John Pollock on the Live Audio Wrestling network, and his impassioned reviews of every show, with every name being a name I mostly had no clue on. I knew (and loved) Kota Ibushi from his Super Junior, ROH, CHIKARA, and DTT work (in the 00’s and early 2010’s, this was a wrestling fan’s way of earning their fucking miles, there were no easy-peasy streaming options back then), but everyone else was just a name, and John’s thrilling recaps sent me hog wild to traipse across my usual Megaupload forums and RapidShare haunts to grab links and stinks to whatever John recommended, including Shibata vs Ishii and Ibushi vs Nakamura, two of my all-timer matches that just so happen to be on the same show. Ask any wrestling fan worth his sexual organs what G1 2013 Day 4 means to them, and they’ll spill their guts with love all over you. Pack a raincoat and locate some mortuary assistance for that interaction.

Ishii vs Shibata and chill.

The G1’s of those glory years are responsible for my love affair with Ishii, my sordid getaway and eventual heartbreak with Nakamura, and my sweaty affection with practically any NJPW show ran in the district of Osaka, who lit the wrestling world up like a million suns, and became more a star of the show than the wrestlers themselves. A New Japan show in Osaka meant I was watching no matter who was on the card. You could stick Great American Bash 2004 in front of that crowd, and it would be a Show Of The Year Contender.

From 2013 onwards, the G1 became my muse. Every summertime was no longer for bathing and burning, it was for wrestling, and more specifically wrestling for points. I made graphs and charts, counted the losses and tallied the wins, worked out the various mathematical minefield of outcomes and eventualities and possibilities, all in the good name of the Lord our Gedo. You can throw any year at me up until 2020 and I can throw back golden memories for the tournament, some shite (mostly Fale and Tonga related) but mainly head spun and whimsical. They were the best of the times, and it was all in the name of a sports-based presentation of pro wrestling, something that we weren’t getting from our western mainstream counterparts. 

What kept this fire alive was that New Japan, at the time, was the antithesis to what the other big wrestling outlets and semi-sized wrestling promotions, and hell even the indies and the shindies, were offering up. That focus on in-ring work tied with the backstage interviews and rootable characters and dream matchmaking came together to form this antidote to what the summer months usually unearthed from the rotten coffins of your WWEs and the TNAs. It became an odyssey, to wash yourself in this barrage of excellence, pro wrestling at its finest from both a long-term and short-term perspective. And yes, you had to deal with the Memphis influence creeping in here and there, and throughlines focusing on delivering anti-work just to create some unnecessary artificial drama around the possibility of someone crap making their way to the final or spoiling some workhorse’s chances, but the work in the ring escalated alongside in order to offset the rubbish. You were peeved at Bullet Club bollocks from guys who can barely get off their feet without moaning, and occasionally had scrubs and shlubs in there to make up numbers and pay off favours, but they were forgotten as soon as the good shit hit and that shit dropped like a classic metalcore breakdown (Parkway Drive’s ‘Horizons’ is the G1 of metalcore in my opinion, but I am open to suggestions).

We are no longer living in that era. COVID hit and 2020 became the year that it all came crashing down, with questionable ideas surfacing and the in-ring struggling to bat away the bad vibes due to the crushing formula known as Clap Crowds. That year’s G1 was a slog, and the roster did their damn hardest to get something out of the gruelling affair but came up with almost nothing. As the bell-to-bell wasn’t allowed to emotionally sink in with the audience, more reliance on western ideals set in, and soon enough New Japan was in the muck with the rest of us, and in turn drove away all those fans who leaned on NJPW for a WWE alternative instead of just another WWE. Now it wasn't a complete 180 shift to that direction, it was more like NJPW turning their attention away from someone at a dinner party; angling their shoulder and body away from adoring eyes and chatter so that they can admire the drunk twat at the top of table regurgitating syphilis disguised as stories, and shunning the admiration of the person they had been locked in deep conversation with previously. 

So, we had New Japan Professional Puroresu Pro Wrestling, who shone bright like a diamond whilst everyone was delivering weekly 3-hour and 2-hour slop, catering to those of us who wanted something better, and they were now dull, scratched, unreflective, dented, not even worth the title they were built on. We didn’t want WWE, and we sure as still water didn’t want WWE JAPAN. Therefore, the interest in the G1 shrunk low, year after year, and you’d look at results and podcasts and ranking apps and Cagematch pages (before the WWE A.I children found it), just for any glimmer of hope in this hellscape and we kept coming up short. 

2024 was, and is, the last year that I’ll be paying attention to the G1, for a long time to come. Whilst I didn’t throw myself headfirst for the halo, I did commit to watching all the recommendations that came swanning through this year, and I’d see those recommendations through to the end. It started with such flourish and promise; Night One and Night Two were both painted as fun affairs, with vocal crowds and different dynamics being set, and I thought to myself on my grey IKEA sofa, with its sinking cushions and a wobbly frame that had seen better days before a toddler started jumping on it on a daily basis, that hey, THIS could work. This version of New Japan with less emphasis on crap, with a bunch of hungry new faces and older heads looking to re-cement their foothold, could work. Though the wrestling itself wasn’t to the extremely high standard of those glory years, I was excited, I was pumped, let’s do every show again, let’s do every match again, lets fucking go, IKEA sofa crumbling beneath my increasing mass nr damned! FUCK WWE, FUCK AEW, THIS IS NEW JAPAN!

But then you fly into the turbulence and New Japan just couldn’t help but to lose altitude and fall back on some of their old habits and not pull the trigger on a bunch of the fresh faces, and not go for gold with one old, haggard, re-energised face in the form of Hiroki Goto, who had me so enthralled with the concept of tournament wrestling that I was racing back to my telly with every passing chance to catch up until he was unceremoniously dumped. The match quality of the G1 2024 was all over the place too, with barely a match being scribed into those increasingly sacred MOTYC tablets. There was almost nothing to sink your molars into, barely a snuff of those grand days when each week would have multiple out-of-this world matches, and you lavished in them like an 80’s gangster in a pile of a cocaine on a pole dancer’s arsecheeks. This year’s G1 was stop-start booking at its most infuriating; either take these young hands and grizzled workhorses and invent yourselves again or lose your bollocks on the wine and pass out in your featherweight incompetence (again). 

New Japan became something worse than bad in the summer of 2024; they became disappointing. I can ignore bad terrible wrestling and not bother with it, because I know it’s not for me and I won’t feel that sting of wasted time, but to present yourselves as something actually fucking great, and get the crowds jazzed and jizzed, and then not deliver in the long term? That’s the worst kind of death knell. And let me tell you, by the time ZSJ had defeated Shingo in the finals, I had gone long past caring about the result of this tournament. 

There are promising signs within New Japan but they’re promises as empty as a politician's bus slogan. New Japan presented a front of proper pro wrestling being back on the menu for this year’s G1, but they ultimately didn't satisfy and I think I’m going to pass on the pudding if the winner of the G1 isn’t even taking his title shot at Wrestle Kingdom, a decision so confounding that I wonder if it’s going to affect the grandeur and curiosity around future G1’s and WrestleKingdom’s in the same way that WWE ruined their Spring aura by having two Royal Rumbles and two Elimination Chambers on the way to WrestleMania. People blabber on and on about letting the story play out as an excuse for bad pro wrestling, but the G1-to-Wrestle Kingdom motorway was long term storytelling in the purest, best possible way. Well, at least it used to be. 

Here’s my advice for the Nooj office; stuff the G1. Fuck it off in its current form. A multi-week multi-block blockbuster of pro wrestling matches only works when the wrestlers, the wrestling matches, and ultimately the booking has two goals; the first short term goal is excellent pro wrestling matches, day in and day out to keep us hooked into those mid-term tournament days and give us something to wax fantastical about before the next show. Who wants 19 days of wrestling shows filled with 5-to-8 bog standard acceptable wrestling matches? Who likes that?

Goal two is the storylining through the tourney; to hell with suspense, show us the top stories within the first four days so we can watch them develop from the offset. Racking our heads with point balancers and multiple potential draw breakers is all part of the fun but it should be pretty fucking clear and dry in the lead up to the finish line, which was not the case this year. The G1 should be constantly balancing the point totals to gradually reveal who will be the contenders in the wrestling horse race, with those on the back end having an excuse to go buck wild with the wrestling in order to keep us invested in their matches, instead of almost being on he-said, she-said even keel in the last few days. It’s maddening, and it’s boring. 

So when we don’t have the high-ceiling, high-floor, high-calibre pro wrestling matches and we’re lacking the proper rudimentary maths-based storytelling across the shows, and there’s a refusal to really experiment and put the rocket on unfaded and unprocessed talent, maybe it’s time to take the format back to 1992 and have it be a single knock-out elimination tournament, and put an end to this bland madness. A short, sharp shock to the system would be better for the current state of New Japan than other changes they’ve attempted in the past, more so than recent deviations such as restricted time limits and having four blocks. Give us real time, straight-to-the-veins repercussions and consequences in the form of wrestlers being 100% eliminated with every single match, and with that you’ll solve many of the problems with post-pandemic, post-AEW, post-Omega/Okada/Ospreay G1 tournaments. 

Until NJPW can hammer out a routine more suited to their current house style or turn over the house completely, then I’ll be sticking them on ignore, and even when I inevitably wet myself with cream of wheat at next year's G1 Bracket announcements, I will simply say, “No”. 

---

Thanks for reading! Please share with anybody who you think might enjoy this piece, and get them to share it, and so on and so forth. Every little helps! Cheers!