Minowaman vs Minoru Tanaka-NEW 5.4.2017.

Junior shoot style! God this match was infuriating. On one hand they have a bunch of cool ideas that would make for badass GIFs. On the other hand this became a chore to watch. They come up with cool striking flurries, flashy counters and so on-but really suck at connecting them into something cohesive, milking drama and creating urgency. "Boring leglocks" is something that's thrown at shoot style a bunch as a critique of why it's not good, and most of the time people that say that have no idea what they're talking about, but it really applies here. Every time they'd grab a leglock they'd just kill the crowd, there was just no way that was finishing the match, and it didn't help that the way they worked the match was dumb, essentially they'd grab "clean" submissions a bunch of times and then either do rope breaks or counter them after five or so seconds, and when they would try to milk them they'd do a poor job of it, giving the crowd clues they were going to go for a rope break instead of selling it more dramatically and then doing a short burts that would result in an escape. Seek out GIFs of this if anyone's even interested in making those and avoid the match. **

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