United Empire vs. Bullet Club War Dogs (NJPW The New Beginning In Osaka 2024)
Akira, you don’t need to scream all the time.
I’m going to be brutally honest about this match. I wanted this match to succeed SO badly. I wanted this match to make me understand why people seemingly love Will Ospreay so much and consider him the best wrestler in the world. I wanted this match to show me what I was missing all these years. But what I got in exchange for sitting on my chair and watching this with care and love is the worst best trainwreck I have seen in my entire life.
If you didn’t realize by now: I don’t like Will Ospreay. I used to like him when he was this fiery Junior wrestler because I learned to let things slide and excuse some of his blatant flaws because of the style he wrestled: And how many Junior wrestlers tend to be absolute trainwrecks in the good sense of the word for the sake of spectacle. The thing is that Ospreay is no longer a Junior wrestler, and because of that his style never seems to connect with me as other wrestlers would do. I think it has to do with the fact that after seeing a shit ton of Ospreay matches I kinda have learned everything he brings to the table, therefore, I sit and see the minuscule details that simply blow away his house of cards in every match.
This is not an exception.
If you love pro wrestling as I do, you’re willing to sit through 2 HOURS to watch this match and embrace it with all its flaws and mistakes. I guess it’s kind of a curse that we wrestling fans have when we engage in whatever appears on our screens. I’m kinda responsible for this that I’m writing, because I sat and watched the whole thing. And the thing is that this match simply fails to sell me its premise. Not only because of the awful cage (seriously) but because of other obvious details that simply can’t be ignored. Or do you want me to believe that Gedo can’t just throw the table over the cage considering how small it actually is? Do you want me to sit here and pretend Ospreay and Newman doing a double Oscutter after an hour of the most dangerous shit you could ever imagine is actually good?
The worst type of wrestlers are the ones that seemingly don’t understand what is the story they’re telling because you don’t want to insult them or hate them. You just feel bad for them because you know as a consumer what they’re trying to evoke, but they fail and they continue failing every time they step in the ring. Ospreay to me is one of those wrestlers. I respect the guy, I respect the effort he puts into every single match and I acknowledge the inhuman skill needed to pull off some of the things he does, BUT, with these matches, I don’t see a glimpse of evolution from the guy that practically ruined classic matches because of the things he pulls in this one. Or do you want me to pretend Ospreay vs. Oku 2 is actually good without taking into consideration its incelcore at its best?
On the surface, this match is a carnage that sees wrestlers like Gabe Kidd and TJP shine under their own merit (I can’t believe I’m writing this) But at its core, this match fails to sell you the premise it presents, and it’s really sad because you see all the guys in this match were willing to do absolutely everything for it to work, but it simply doesn’t. For fuck’s sake, the protagonists of this match, Ospreay and Finlay, simply can’t keep up with the action and can’t establish themselves as the guys you need to care for. And like, this is not any match for Ospreay. It’s his last match with the company, and for the most part of this affair the one that hypes up the crowd more than any other wrestler is Francesco Akira, who, through fiery comebacks over and over again seems to win the heart of Osaka.
This is a bad match, but you can’t say it like that because you feel like shit considering the pain all these 10 guys went through. I don’t know if you can call it constructive criticism or what, but the more that I write about this match the more that I yearn for another chance in the future for these 10 guys to show what they can truly bring to the table when some of their most blatant flaws are corrected. Because even the good things about this match, for some reason, become awful through the course of it. You know how I said Akira’s comebacks were fiery and all? I would have loved him to do just ONE comeback, but he comes back all the time and it loses its charm completely when you see every member of the BC War Dogs just cooking this pure guy like his name is Shunma. And don’t get me wrong, Akira grabbing the fork was a cool moment and it got the crowd hyped for the last minutes of this match: But then, the last minutes of this match were dreadful.
Overall, this match can be fantastic, but it’s not. If you want to see a match that highlights Ospreay’s flaws not only as a wrestler but as a storyteller, this is the one. And I’m not going to talk about Finlay because Kidd eats him alive as the unsung Bullet Club leader.