NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 9: American PPV, JR on commentary

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POSTER:
DATE AND TIME: 1/4 at 2AM (live) or 7PM
PRICE: $44.95 HD/$34.95 SD (TV/Flipps)/$8.45 (NJPW World)
HOW TO WATCH: Pretty much every major PPV provider, the Flipps app or NJPW World
CONFIRMED MATCHES:
Double Main Event II - IWGP Heavyweight Championship: Hiroshi Tanahashi (ch) vs. Kazuchika Okada
Double Main Event I - IWGP Intercontinental Championship: Shinsuke Nakamura (ch) vs. Kota Ibushi
Special Single Match: Tetsuya Naito vs. AJ Styles
IWGP Tag Team Championship: Bullet Club of Karl Anderson and Doc Gallows (ch) vs. Meiyu Tag of Hirooki Goto and Katsuyori Shibata
IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Championship: Ryusuke Taguchi (ch) vs. Kenny Omega
NEVER Openweight Title: Tomohiro Ishii (ch) vs. Togi Makabe
Special Single Match – Full Conclusion Rules (Match can only end on KO, TKO, submission or referee stoppage): Kazushi Sakuraba vs. Minoru Suzuki
Toru Yano, Naomichi Marufuji and TMDK of Shane Haste and Mikey Nicholls vs. Suzukigun of Takashi Iizuka, Shelton Benjamin, Davey Boy Smith Jr. and Lance Archer
Special 6 Man Tag Match: Hiroyoshi Tenzan, Satoshi Kojima and Tomoaki Honma vs. Bullet Club of Jeff Jarrett, Bad Luck Fale and Yujiro Takahashi
IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Tag Team Title – 4WAY Match: reDRagon of Bobby Fish and Kyle O’Reilly (ch) vs. Time Splitters of Alex Shelley and KUSHIDA vs. Forever Hooligans of Rocky Romero and Alex Koslov vs. The Young Bucks of Matt Jackson and Nick Jackson
Preshow Match - New Japan Rumble: Jushin Thunder Liger, Manabu Nakanishi, Tiger Mask, Yuji Nagata and 11 Participants TBA

JR's calling the show (at least on the PPV/Flipps feed), the price isn't too ridiculous given that it's a four hour wrestling PPV and the card is about as stacked as it possibly gets (the fact Yano's match hasn't been announced yet notwithstanding). If you're new to the product, you might want to give this a look. This is pretty much their WrestleMania and those top three matches are going to knock it out of the park.

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Looks like Matt Striker is calling the show with JR. Not a bad pick but I'd have preferred Josh Barnett since he's on the 12/31 IGF show and would probably gladly stay to call the NJPW show since he's one of the commentators for their show on AXS TV that starts in January.

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Well, Yano's partners are Marufuji and TMDK. Not the biggest group of stars but it's the third match on the PPV itself, I wasn't expecting them to blow it out.

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GFW are weird. They want to promote the Tokyo Dome show, they don't say shit about the show. Just generic talking heads shit about how important the show is with no thought given to the fact that the audience they're targeting by and large has no idea who any of the guys are. Promoting a wrestling show by hyping the announcer as the biggest star on the show is a bad, bad idea. They've hooked people with JR, now start explaining who the guys on the show are and why they're fighting. I don't need a Kevin Nash interview about the Dome, or anyone else on the card gushing about the show. We've had that for over a month now. It's time to start hyping the show itself or you're going to have a foreign audience wondering who almost everyone on the show is and that's not how you introduce a new product. Hell, even ROH reintroduced their roster when they got the HDNet and SBG deals.

[wildfire]

Dec 15, 2014 18:30:11 GMT -4 @ricky said:

Looks like Matt Striker is calling the show with JR. Not a bad pick but I'd have preferred Josh Barnett since he's on the 12/31 IGF show and would probably gladly stay to call the NJPW show since he's one of the commentators for their show on AXS TV that starts in January.

I remember really liking Strike on commentary back when he did the WWE version of ECW... I can imagine him with JR would be pretty awesome.

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Yeah, he's not a bad pick or anything but I think JR needs someone who's not also a play-by-play guy. It'll be interesting to see (or hear, I guess) how they do. I'm probably still hitting the SAP button when the broadcast starts because to me, the English commentary is more of a novelty than anything and I've been watching this stuff with Japanese commentary for a decade. It'd be like if they did English commentary for TripleMania on US PPV. I'm not sure I'd opt for the English over the commentary I'm familiar with but it's a good team for the people that don't want the Japanese commentary for this show.

[guiltyparty]

Okay, I think I've asked this before about these NJPW shows, but what makes these "Special" singles or 6 man matches "Special"?

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Dec 22, 2014 13:03:00 GMT -4 guiltyparty said:

Okay, I think I've asked this before about these NJPW shows, but what makes these "Special" singles or 6 man matches "Special"?

It's basically just a word used for matches with build. Generally, they use that "special" title for matches that either have long build, are grudge matches, are rematches for big tournament matches (examples being Tanahashi/Shibata and Goto/Makabe on the 9/21 show) or have some potential title implication. As far as the ones on this card go:

Styles/Naito is a rematch from their G1 match where Naito beat AJ and is potentially a #1 contender's match depending on who wins between Tanahashi and Okada. (For example: If Okada and AJ win, AJ's a lock for the next title shot since he's up 2-1 against Okada whereas if Tanahashi and AJ win, AJ is down 0-2 against Tanahashi since coming to New Japan full time)
Sakuraba/Suzuki has a special rule set and has been built since June and it's a match between two of Japan's biggest MMA legends who have never faced each other one-on-one.
Bullet Club tag is a big grudge match. Honma's been at war with the Bullet Club for months and Jarrett's been guitar shotting guys since August (though he only got Tanahashi and Yoshibrokemyneck).
Yano and friends vs. Suzuki gun is a continuation of the Yano/Suzuki feud that's been going since the 2013 G1 and has stars from NOAH as Yano's partners.

So yeah, any sort of build up but no title directly involved = "special" single/tag/six man/eight man tag match.

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Here are the first three videos GFW posted hyping the card. Striker does well in these videos even if he's off about a couple of things in the Nakamura/Ibushi video.

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Here's the one they posted today.


They're uploading one for Tanahashi vs. Okada on Monday. If they do one every week day going into the Dome that means one match won't get a video since it's a ten match card and they've only done four of these so far. Maybe it'll be the Jarrett match or the Yano match. Those are the two that really don't matter on this card so it wouldn't be such a bad thing if they didn't do one for one of those matches.

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Very good video for the tag title match.

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