WhiteTail Wrestling

2005

NOAH 3rd Great Voyage

One of the great NOAH shows from there prime years this took place at a packed Nippon Budokan and featured an all time classic match with perhaps the greatest chop battle in wrestling history as well as numerous other high level matches which hold up even two decades later.

The first match available features Akitoshi Saito team up with Masao Inoue and Takashi Sugiura to defeat Kentaro Shiga, Ricky Marvin and Yoshinari Ogawa. The match started off a little slow but the action heated up and had an exciting finish ***1/2.

Takuma Sano defeats Mushiking Terry in another match that built nicely towards its finish with enjoyable action ***1/2. Jun Akiyama and Shiro Koshinaka defeat Minoru Suzuki and Naomichi Marufuji in a match that I loved. Marufuji was great here with some brilliant selling and I also loved seeing the battles between Suzuki and Akiyama by the end this was exceptional fun and excitement and a match that should be checked out by any fan of great puro action ****1/2.

Scorpio defends his GHC Hardcore Openweight Title in a match against Yoshinobu Kanemaru. This was a good match with some nice action including dives from the top but never reached the highest level but given its place on this show it did its job ***1/2.

Katsuhiko Nakajima and Kensuke Sasaki defeated Go Shiozaki and Kenta Kobashi in an all time ***** classic. Go and Nakajima start the match off with a great little battle which set the tone for the action to come and the action never stopped and featured perhaps the greatest chop battle ever as Sasaki and Kobashi chopped the hell out of each other for what felt like a really long time building up the crowd and making each other’s chests get pinker and pinker. A must watch all timer for all fans of great Japanese wrestling.

A Misawa match the worst on a show was not something I expected to say but it was true here. This match was slow and boring and his opponent Genichro Tenryu committed numerous botches showing that he was well past his prime. This wasn’t an awful match that would be virtually impossible for a Mitsuharu Misawa match but it was dull and boring and a real letdown **1/2.

Mohammed Yone and Takeshi Morishima defended the GHC Tag Titles against Katsuyori Shibata and KENTA. This was a great ****1/2 match it was long and started slightly slow but the final minutes here were epic with some great sequences which the crowd were completely invested in another must watch match on this great card.

The main event and I wasn’t expecting much from an Akira Taue singles match but this was really great. Taue defeats Takeshi Rikio to become GHC Heavyweight Champion in an awesome big man match. They hit each hard right from the start and they had the crowd once again invested in the action. It wasn’t super fast paced but it didn’t need to be hard hitting drama filled action with a memorable win for Taue. A great way to finish a great show ****1/2.