Minoru Tanaka vs Naoki Sano-Battlarts 30.1.2000.

Very interesting match, particularly because the weird shooty junior style it's worked in doesn't exist anymore. The first half of so had the kind of unique matwork you could only see in Battlarts, where they'd work the counters and the flow of it like it was a lucha match but use holds that were either straight out of RINGS or a 1978 Fujinami match. That portion of the match was a little disappointing, since there wasn't really much struggle out urgence in it. A lot of ideas of used here could've turned out great, but it did feel a little exhibitiony. Maybe it's the fact that the 2/3 falls lucha structure allowed something like Atlantis-Panther to essentially work a 20 minute match where holds don't lose meaning because there's never a portion of the match in where they're doing matwork that couldn't lead to a finish, maybe it's that some of the shooty holds here weren't fit for this type of use. Maybe they could've just executed it better. As it was I don't think it's much different than the million other mmatches where the opening is slower and means less and then the second half is bigger and more exciting, and the matwork at least kept my attention. They did work an exciting fiishing stretch-getting the most out of simple cradles, building up Tanaka's Armbar and milking every properly locked in hold as much as they could without slowing the match down and keeping the pace they established. ***1/4