Yoshinari Ogawa vs. Jun Akiyama for the GHC Heavyweight Championship, from Pro Wrestling NOAH Encountering Navigation 2002 Night Sixteen Come and Watch in Ariake

I’ve no doubts this was invaluable to NOAH’s bottom line. With many Japanese matches fought over prestigious titles lasting over twenty minutes, it is occasionally a good idea to have one of these go short so the audience doesn’t have to mentally check out for the first fifteen. As something to revisit some twenty years later, though, it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as other brief matches, in large part thanks to it feeling like a twenty-minute match that just happened to get cut short when someone made a fatal error. A victim of its own structure, I suppose.

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