Tam Nakano and Giulia Wrestled, I Think.
More like All Star Grand Boredom, amirite?
A bell rings at the start and end of this match, so I assume that it happened. I had the video up on my PC screen and I sat down in front of it for the entire duration of the (shockingly restrained) 23:40 runtime. In fact, I likely spent more than that watching this bout because I rewound every few minutes, trying to process what I might have missed that led us to any particular point of this match. The rewinding didn't help.
Record books and logic dictate that I saw this match, but I'm left with the sneaking suspicion that it didn't really. By the time these two are panting in the ring, delivering their final messages to each other on the house mic, I feel somehow unchanged by anything I'd seen in the time before. That's perhaps unfair, I was a little more frustrated than anything else as this match might be one of the slipperiest that I've ever had to tackle in writing ever.
Even writing about Triple H for four weeks didn't prove as challenging as this. With Hunter, at least, there's a motivation behind the horror--whether that be his awful political machinations or his misguided attempts to recapture some sort of magic. But this? Tam Nakano and Giulia do moves for twenty minutes, I suppose. I'm still not entirely sure that they did. The memory of this match seems to constantly escape me and slip into some fuzzy void burned over by the static of an old television screen left abandoned in some distant apartment.
This is just one of those matches and rivalries that remains beyond my comprehension.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend I understand all the nuances and history these two have with each other. This is one of the last major matches wrestled as part of one of the most important rivalries for STARDOM's 2020s. I've given them a shot at multiple points, it's never been for me. It's probably worth bringing up that I've enjoyed work from both these women (if rather sporadically) in the past. There's some great hard-hitting stuff Giulia does with Mayu and I have a soft spot for one of the Tam/Natsupoi matches from a couple years ago.
This match and rivalry leaves me entirely hollow though. Beyond being weightless in both execution and spirit, this suffers from smoothness more than anything. Smoothness in the sense that all the work feels a touch too practiced, a touch too clean, for a match up that anyone who enjoys it absolutely insists is meant to be an uncomfortable and distressingly violent affair. Uncomfortable? I've slept in hotel beds more uncomfortable than this velvety soft match. Every bomb looks well protected, every strike believably distant. To that last point though, there's some perfectly fine striking sprinkled throughout this. Giulia's big cut off punch, a couple of her knees, some of that actually lands really strong and leads me to believe that she's actually only gotten worse with time because this is better than most of the recent work I've seen of hers.
The smoothness doesn't just apply to the physicality either. A much larger problem is that this match lacks friction. For such heated rivals--again something that fans of this bout online as well as official commentary insist that they are--there's no active sense of conflict here outside of those opening moments when Tam responds to Giulia's first big shot. Funnily enough, they get way more drama out of the rather tame fighting over a headlock on the mat early on than all the other bland bomb throwing they'll throw towards the match's end.
This is a match free of danger, free of strife. A twisted utopia of a match, akin to those mind-numbing visions of a "too good" heaven one might find in The Twilight Zone.
Sequencing-wise, I'm left baffled by so much of this as well. At an early point of the match, Tam throws a big series of running knee strikes to Giulia both on the ramp and in the ring. Between Tam's fluffy ring gear and the awkwardness of her run due to the ramp's uneven path, it's up to Giulia to put any sort of weight behind those strikes with her selling and bumping (and she does that well enough, to her credit). What makes it funny is after all these knee strikes, Giulia finally has enough, slaps the mat and fires up, drawing a collective gasp of awe from commentary at the exact moment when I was thinking that it takes way more work to sell a Tam Nakano knee strike than it does to fire up from it.
The back half of this is just the bland bomb throwing that's endemic of these bad main events. It's not a problem exclusive to Tam and Giulia--certainly not in Japan, certainly not in the world--but it feels especially bland here. The crowd does actually start to come alive for them, reacting to some of those bone crunching drops, but these two have earned no love from me. They take turns kicking out and making faces at the camera until Tam Nakano finally wins. Good to know that Giulia was working for the job she wanted, I guess.
All that shit happens, and none of it matters in the slightest. Does this match ever really happen? Who's to say? They might yet be standing in Yokohama Arena, one of the most historic and significant venues in all of joshi history, waiting to begin, never able to stop.
I was never going to like this. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. And yes, you can claim that they're not set up for success here as I'm coming in with ill feelings. But I've come around on matches before, my perspective has shifted on many things, and there was a fine enough chance that maybe on this go around some spark of the magic people seem to love from this rivalry would touch my cold, cold heart.
Nah, this sucks.
Go watch literally anything from GAEA instead.
Rating: *