I was right about the 2019 BOSJ Final.

I understand the appeal of Will Ospreay, I really do. The things that Ospreay's able to do with his body are truly impressive. Even among his genre of hyperflashy, super junior-inspired pro wrestlers, Ospreay's physicality is dazzling. He really does throw himself into everything with such speed and force, much like one of his noted influences AJ Styles. The man can hit hard, rush into a stunning dive, and then pop right back up to keep going at a pace that boggles the mind. However you may feel about Will Ospreay, at some point in his match, you really will just let out a gasp at something he's able to do, and his tactic is to just keep doing to stack those gasps on top of each other.

If that's your bag, that's fine. It's not really mine, at least not the way that Ospreay does it.

2019's an interesting period for Ospreay though. We catch him here in the finals of the Best of the Super Juniors, but it's become clear that the path forward for him is as a heavyweight in New Japan. Before the year is over, he'll have entered the annual G1 Climax, and by the time the new decade rolls along, he'll be fully entrenched in New Japan's main event heavyweight scene. 2019 sees him in the middle of that real-time transition, working to incorporate more of what's expected of him as a heavyweight while wrapping up his business among the juniors. He bulks up significantly (even here, not quite fully formed, he's leagues away from the skinny kid that came up in the European indies), incorporates more striking into his offense, and even takes on a more power-based finisher in the Stormbreaker.

Here, he's paired against a wrestler in a similar gray area. Shingo Takagi is really just a junior heavyweight in name here in New Japan. Already having spent years running through the Dragongate roster, arriving in New Japan to the junior division is really more of a booking decision to keep him separated from the big stars than anything relating to his size and style. His booking in this tournament emphasizes that as well--he runs the field in the block stages with only two of his opponents taking him past the 20 minute mark.

If one squints, the shape of the match this might be can be seen here. Shingo takes an early advantage with his power, but as the match goes on, Ospreay's superior cardio allows him to win out and hit the bombs necessary to take Shingo down and seal the win.

As with so much of Ospreay's work though, the match doesn't really hold up under a closer look.

The easiest shorthand to criticize Will Ospreay's work is to write him off as a flippy "spot monkey" with a "no selling" problem. Those are aspects of the problem, for sure, but there are superficial ways of dismissing them. Spot monkey? Notice how Ospreay uses some early chain work at the start to set up the anticipation for the work to come later. No selling? Have you seen how he bumps? He eats remarkable shit and takes as good as he gives offensively, he looks like death on quite a few of these big bombs.

The problem that really clouds Ospreay's work though is a lack of consequence. That's something that looms over so much of his work, and it's something that detracts from this particular bout as well. The set up here is rife for the Sumo Hall crowd to accept Ospreay as a conquering hero faced with an impossible seeming task. Sumo Hall wants to play into that dynamic, it's clear as day with how over Ospreay already is and the fact that Shingo receives a fair amount of booing early on when he stalls on the outside to cut off the momentum of Ospreay's momentum or when he goes to the eyes during a skirmish on the outside. The crowd wants to boo Shingo, wants to love Ospreay, but they never move into the most efficient and natural ways to take advantage of that atmosphere.

There's an attempt though. After a very back and forth opening, Shingo finally seizes control and sets into the closest thing in the match that can be called a heat segment. Shingo's no slouch offensively and he drops some great, mean bombs here, and Ospreay takes them with reckless abandon. But then, it's just over. It's not long before Ospreay makes a comeback and then the match settles into something much more resembling a back and forth exchange until the 33 minutes are over.

There's just an infuriating sense that nothing will stick. I wish that was a function of the narrative--Shingo finding out that Ospreay's tougher than he expected--but with the context of the rest of Ospreay's career and work to go off of, it feels much more like a stylistic weakness. The timing on Ospreay's comebacks at basically every turn in the last 10-15 minutes of the bout feel so nonsensical. At one point, Shingo's able to fling Ospreay with a German suplex right into the turnbuckles. Reasonably, Ospreay then follows this up just a few seconds later with an apron Oscutter. Even something like a top rope Last Falconry from Shingo matters so little in the grand scheme of things because things refuse to settle or take an actual effect outside of the half a minute it takes to actually execute a move. Nothing sticks, nothing matters, move to the next thing.

Somehow, it's monster obstacle to the final, Shingo Takagi, that's actually able to display some sense of gravity and pacing to this match. At around the 20 minute mark, it's now Shingo that feels behind, with Opsreay taunting him with chest kicks that force Shingo to fire up and fight back. I know that one can argue that face and heel lines are blurred between these two but it's pretty fascinating how they blunder their way into the Final Boss of the tournament coming across more sympathetic than the eventual hero.

The only path forward for Ospreay is escalation. The moves doer must do his moves, and he finally strings together a sequence that gets it done.

It's hard to say that it doesn't work out for Ospreay either. Even by some of Ospreay's harsher critics, this was broadly accepted as a great match and crowning moment for him, and his momentum would only grow stronger and carry him to the New Japan main event. So he gets his happy ending and his big paycheck too.

For me though, this match has little to offer. Empty spectacle stretched across a thirty minute time limit, mythmaking in the worst way--creating this fairy tale of the great chemistry between Shingo and Ospreay when their succeeding matches would only grow more stretched out and plodding than even this.

It's far from an offensive match by any means. It's indicative of some of Ospreay's worse tendencies, but it's far from the extreme of his absolute dirt worst efforts. It's decent enough to kill some time, and I'm not pulling my hair out over any of it, I just feel like it fails to accomplish anything in its vapid attempt to achieve everything. But what do I matter? It's already cemented its place as one of the most beloved matches of the tail end of the Bushiroad peak. Just don't expect me to toe the line of consensus here, especially when this same card has two matches that are so much better. Go watch Jay White/Hiroshi Tanahashi or Jon Moxley/Juice Robinson instead.

Rating: **1/2