Will Ospreay's First Match Against Shingo Takagi Is Frustratingly Incomplete

When I pitched Joseph on Hot Takes Month, I half expected him to do what I did and pick a couple of older matches that were dear to most fans of this great sport but not him. I forgot, however, that Joseph is a much more thorough critic than I am, watching upwards of a thousand matches a year, drastically expanding the field to include takes of his that I’d forgotten about because the privilege of being the editor of a wrestling website meant that I could delegate coverage of wrestlers I didn’t care about to other writers, later discovering that the privilege of having been fired from said wrestling website was that I could pay even less attention to wrestling I didn’t enjoy. 

I was never Fanfyte's primary source of NJPW punditry (shoutout to Emily Pratt), so I didn’t have much cause to consider Will Ospreay much after I wrote the admittedly petulant article “Will Ospreay Isn’t Even a Top 25 Junior Heavyweight” in the aftermath of his match against Hiromu Takahashi, which, to quote the article, “made me confront, for what feels like the hundredth time, that I just don’t get Ospreay, one of the most ecstatically hyped wrestlers of his generation.” Every time I’ve seen him wrestle since, including the match against Bryan Danielson that immediately rewrote what wrestling could be for many viewers, I have found myself confronting the same feeling, though I am certain now of the answer to the question I asked back in 2020, as to whether the issue is mine or Will Ospreay’s — it is absolutely, definitionally my own.

I am, at this late date, one person in a sea of people with opinions about the great sport of professional wrestling, and while the way I write about wrestling may be prettier than most, my influence upon it, in every role I’ve had inside and outside of the business, is minuscule, which is frankly the way it should be. The relationship between artists and their critics is necessarily one with a considerable amount of friction — as often as pieces of media feel like they’re “for me,” I would be bored witless if a film or an album or a wrestling match was actually put together with me in mind. One of the things I like most about art, as both a poet and an appreciator, is how esoteric human expression is, and how, despite that esotericism, we find ourselves in fragments of space and time in which we had no hand in creating. Artists operating at the peak of a mass medium, like televised wrestling, are masters of attuning their particular foibles to as broad an audience as possible. There are many whose work I can lose myself in, there are far more whose work loses me, and it just so happens that Joseph’s hot take — that the 2019 BOSJ Finals between Will Ospreay and Shingo Takagi isn’t very good — involves both kinds of wrestler. 

It meets right in the middle of what I find so captivating about Takagi and what I find so offputting about Ospreay. The simplest way I can put it is this: Shingo Takagi acts as if he’s in the middle of a moment, and Will Ospreay acts as if he’s consciously attempting to make one. This dynamic is established before the bell rings, as Ospreay points his white dude samurai sword at a Takagi who has wrecked too much shop in the BOSJ to give a fuck about a guy cosplaying his culture through the lens of a bone-deep mediocre video game franchise. 

This dynamic is honestly thrilling when kept simple. Ospreay’s thing is his highlight reel offense, but one of the trends that’s accompanied his rise over the past decade is a maximalist approach to offense — coming up in a scene where his contemporaries were dabbling in literally everything, Ospreay meddles with a bit of technical flash, a fair amount of big time striking, and a lot of super indie death move spamming. Against said contemporaries, this is often a road to nowhere. Against Takagi, there’s more grit to it, as his standing as the first graduate of the Dragongate dojo puts him right at the source for a lot of what eventually trickled its way down to Ospreay.

He spends a lot of this match treating Ospreay like a punk, kicking him in the face when he’s down, testing his mettle with the sort of chops that’d make a lesser man quit the business. The opening moments of the match see Ospreay overcommit to his seeming mastery of the whole of wrestling, trying to tackle the strongman with finesse, only to have Takagi confidently walk through and counter even his trickiest attempts to knot him up with a wristlock. They do this again in an early lockup, Will throwing everything into backing Shingo down, Shingo realizing it and using his opponent’s momentum to put him in the corner, teasing a clean break, then leveling him with a chop.

It’s really good “look at these two future main eventers butt heads” stuff, though it’s punctuated with the sort of perfunctory box-checking I’ve always disliked from Ospreay: flash kip-ups and high velocity counter exchanges that exist for the Marvel movie posedown at the end, strong style wrestling for people who can’t stand to watch without the benefit of English-language commentary. So much of what I don’t like about Ospreay is tied to his body language, particularly when he’s in control, constantly adjusting pads as foreshadowing and pointing to the crowd to bold and underline his every move, as if he’s completely unhurried by the match and not altogether enticed by the reward promised to its victor, the rare pro wrestler who does, in fact, seem to be getting paid by the hour. 

On the other side of that you have Takagi, who manages to catch Ospreay posing often enough to make it seem like a psychological weakpoint of his opponent rather than an unchecked quirk, a flaw in an otherwise flawless machine. The most impressive risk taken in the match is his madman tope con hilo, which ends with Takagi banging his knee against the top part of the guardrail, which is, in a nice touch, the beginning of him losing the zip in his offense. The performance that unfolds from here on his part is incredible, but somewhat futile as his downfall is not the point of the match. Instead, it’s the burnishment of Ospreay that’s at stake here, accomplished by further establishing his relatively new Storm Breaker finish as one of the greatest in NJPW by having it defeat a wrestler who is by all rights basically a heavyweight, which is the division both wrestlers are destined to transition to within the next year. 

In other words, he’s more focused on increasing his spirit meter than making what he does seem like something a person would do in a fight. You can see his influences — AJ Styles, El Generico, Shawn Michaels, Manami Toyota — but he stitches them together like he’s editing an MV to a Linkin Park song, with little attention paid to the details of what made their babyface heroics really work. It’s a frustrating experience, and not just because Takagi’s performance as the monster deserves, as its mirror, a babyface who can make you feel the beating of his heart as it’s ripped from his chest: it’s frustrating because it doesn’t matter. The match just works, not just for the room but seemingly for a majority of people who’ve passed comment on it. I can see why, as every time Ospreay pushes the needle towards my wanting to call him a pretentious fraud, something reels me back towards center, like the moment where Takagi avoids a pointlessly balletic kick, establishes leg control, and wheelbarrow German suplexes Ospreay into the turnbuckle. There’s some smart wrestling here! 

There is not, unfortunately, a lot of heart, or an internal editor at work. The point of this match is the Storm Breaker, but it should have ended with Takagi’s failed, punch drunk attempt at stopping the Oscutter. Instead, we get a coda, and it doesn’t really work. Shingo is great playing gassed out and fighting from underneath, but Ospreay’s sudden dickishness works against everything the two have established to this point, with what that shift allows feeling like more box-checking — here’s a fighting spirit strike exchange, here’s a gnarly finisher, here’s a kickout at 2.99999 followed by a long gaze into the camera. It’s cold, calculated wrestling, right down to Red Shoes’ overselling every nearfall, designed to do little more than draw a pop.

Before you say anything, I know that’s ultimately what all wrestling is designed to do, but the tawdriness of this goal never feels more apparent than when I’m watching Will Ospreay’s impulses dictate the flow of a match. I’ve never really gotten the sense that there’s anything more to his psychology beyond showing off all of the really cool things he’s managed to drill down to the point that the impossible looks routine. I don’t begrudge him for not wrestling like Sabu or Hayabusa (even when he dresses like Hayabusa), but having basically broken his style of wrestling and bent it to his will, the impossible that he’s making routine here is stretching his “every sick move you’ll see during BOLA weekend” routine out over the extreme lengths necessary to be a main eventer in New Japan, as if his response to the chant of “Fight Forever” is “you know, I really could.”

That’s impressive, and, I’m sure, appealing, but not for me. It’s Shingo’s battle against cardio that’s enticing here, the way his edifice slowly crumbles as the clock ticks deeper into the night. For it to register for Ospreay, I’d need him to feel like a different wrestler at minute 31 than he did in minute four, but he doesn’t connect the dots between those moments meaningfully or sometimes at all, content with the vague impression of something spectacular that all of those dots leave behind. 

Rating: ***