There can be only one winner of NJPW’s New Japan Cup, but that doesn’t stop the other 31 entrants from taking their shot at glory. While these wrestlers won’t be going on to challenge Jay White at Madison Square Garden’s G1 Supercard, they turned out solid performances that could set them up for big 2019s.
NJPW loves a good tournament. Their entire year is basically made up of different tournaments to set up challengers for every title from the G1 Climax to the Best of the Super Juniors to the World Tag League.
What makes the New Japan Cup different is that it’s a single-elimination tournament rather than a massive, often multi-block round robin extravaganza. Coming so early in the year, the Cup is a way for a massive group of wrestlers to make their names ahead of the summer’s G1.
It’s safe to assume that most of the names on this list will compete in this year’s G1, but will they be able to parlay the stories they told in the Cup into summer success stories leading to Wrestle Kingdom 14? Only time will tell, but for now, let’s break down the top 5 performances from the New Japan Cup!
#5: Will Ospreay
Will Ospreay’s quest for 2019 has been to bridge the gap between Junior and Heavyweight. With a critical victory over Kota Ibushi for the NEVER Openweight Title at Wrestle Kingdom, Ospreay began building that bridge with a huge first piece.
Since then, Ospreay has continued to evolve not only his in-ring style but his body. He’s beefed up a bit since his days of wrestling strictly as a Junior and has added some more striking and power moves to his arsenal.
With Stormbreaker, which he debuted last April, he laid the groundwork for his work as a power wrestler. With the addition of his Hidden Blade elbow, Ospreay popped a hugely useful quick-strike finisher to his tool belt. Both of these would need to be at the ready for the New Japan Cup.
In the tournament’s first round, Ospreay made relatively quick work of Bad Luck Fale. Fale dominated with his considerable size advantage for much of the match, but Ospreay proved that while he wants to connect the two worlds of Junior and Heavyweight, he’s not walking just one of those paths directly.
Ospreay used his speed and agility to keep Fale off-base when Fale wasn’t able to ground the Aerial Assassin. As Fale looked to end things with the Bad Luck Fall, Ospreay countered into a hurricanrana for the victory.
Against Lance Archer in the second round, Ospreay would once again combine his growing power with his familiar agility. Despite some absolutely brutal offense from Archer, Ospreay gritted his teeth and put Archer down for the count in surprising fashion – with the Stormbreaker.
Ospreay wasn’t able to make it past Okada in the quarterfinals, but his performances against Fale and Archer specifically proved that there is merit behind Ospreay’s words. Not only can he continue to fly with the best of them, but he now adds power to his skill set which is bound to throw other heavyweights off of their games.
As Ospreay continues to dance the line between Junior and Heavyweight, his 2019 will prove to be massively important for wrestlers who don’t quite fit into one category or the other. And, with a new spotlight being shone on the NEVER Openweight Title that championship could soon mean more than it has in years.
#4: Taichi
Let’s just forget about Taichi’s first round. Tomoaki Honma is a shell of his former self, and his former self wasn’t all that great to begin with. The writing was on the wall for Taichi to advance to the second round of the tournament and that’s where his story begins (and ends, thanks to Ishii).
I’ve mentioned before that I never truly understood the appeal of Taichi. Cool entrance, check. Ridiculous costume, check. Mid-match flare with tear-away pants, check. Everything else, though? Pure bathroom break material.
I was excited to see Taichi and Naito battle at The New Beginning in Sapporo but the match itself was a practice in making Taichi look like a fool.
After Naito was jumped by Iizuka before the match and subsequently carried to the back by medical staff, Taichi paraded around the ring waiting to be awarded the victory and the Intercontinental Title.
As expected, Naito stumbled back to the ring to defend the championship and his honor – and defend them he did. Naito fought back from what seemed to be insurmountable odds to clown Taichi and retain the IC Title.
The point may have been to make Naito look like an unbreakable champion, but my main takeaway was that Taichi was a joke and couldn’t beat a guy who had already been attacked and physically carried out of the arena due to being unable to compete.
It was a bad look for Taichi.
When the second round of the New Japan Cup rolled around, I looked forward to Ishii knocking Taichi’s block off and steamrolling toward the finals. Only a portion of that dream came true and, along the way, Taichi found a way to surprise me.
While Taichi outside of the ring seems like a bit of a fun goofball, his in-ring performances have never excited me. This match with Ishii proved that Taichi is more than just an entrance and a mic stand, though. It proved that, under the right circumstances, Taichi can absolutely go.
Throughout the match, Taichi not only kept up with Ishii’s physicality but he also showed some true character development.
At a key point in the match, Taichi struggled between choosing his trusty mic stand or the mysterious power of Iizuka’s iron glove. He wound up picking the mic stand instead of potentially being driven to the same insanity of Iizuka but then threw the weapon away when Ishii challenged him to use it.
After growing frustrated with not being able to put Ishii away with conventional means, Taichi resorted to a low blow but it still wasn’t enough to keep the Stone Pitbull down. To Taichi’s credit, he did a pretty good amount of not staying down as well – his immediate pop-up from an Ishii piledriver was, perhaps, the moment of the match.
Ishii wound up defeating Taichi and made it all the way to the semifinals, but Taichi didn’t walk away without at least a moral victory. Unlike his loss to Naito, he came out of this absolute war looking like a beast who can harness the fighting spirit of New Japan with the best of them.
What does 2019 hold for Taichi? It will still be a major story point to see whether or not Taichi utilizes the iron glove and what affects it may have on him, but perhaps more than that is the possibility of him turning the corner and becoming a legitimate threat in the ring. If Taichi can pump out more performances like this bout with Ishii, his eventual challenge to Ospreay’s NEVER Openweight Title could put him on another level entirely.
#3: Colt Cabana
There is no shortage of wrestlers who have broken ground in different ways on the internet. Wrestlers who have found a way to connect with fans in new and different ways or who have been brave, or brazen, enough to think outside of the box to bring existing fans something new and to attract new fans.
At the forefront of many of these initiatives has been Colt Cabana. Launching in 2010, Cabana’s Art Of Wrestling podcast was one of the first and most accessible wrestling podcasts available. Cabana found new ways to mix comedy and wrestling alongside Marty DeRosa with series like Creative Has Nothing For You and Five Dollar Wrestling.
Inside of the ring, Cabana’s comedic style was (and still is) something that can attract fans from all walks of life. Sitting down to watch a Cabana match isn’t usually going to be the same type of commitment as watching an Omega/Okada 60+ minute classic. Instead, you can sit down and watch basically any Cabana match, learn the story, and appreciate the action without needing a ton of additional information.
Comedy in wrestling has always been a way of reaching across the aisle, as it were, to more casual fans or those people in your life who don’t think they like wrestling until they see something that tickles their funny bone and allows them to see that pro-wrestling isn’t always the hyper-serious beefcake parade of the 1980s.
In American indie wrestling, Cabana has been a fixture and a solid hand that could be relied upon to put on entertaining matches. As a former NWA World Heavyweight Champion, Cabana has proved that he’s not just a comedy guy and can mix technical wrestling into his matches as well as he can mix comedy wrestling.
When you’ve had as storied a career as Cabana has had in and out of the ring, it’s easy to coast on that success and just do the bare minimum to get by. It doesn’t seem as though doing the bare minimum is a thought that has ever crossed Colt Cabana’s mind. Always looking for new ways to present himself and to grow, he took another step forward – this time to compete for NJPW for the first time ever.
For his first tour with New Japan, Cabana had to bring every last bit of his experience to the table. In the first round, he met Togi Makabe who threatened to snuff out the flame of Cabana’s initial run. To the surprise of the crowd, Makabe, and Cabana himself, Boom Boom came away with the victory and moved onto the second round.
In a bit of a dream match (though it has happened before), Cabana met NJPW’s resident prankster Toru Yano. Yano never runs out of tricks in situations like these, whether we’re talking about taping his opponents to the guard rails, confusing the referee, or relying on his old standby of removing the turnbuckle pads to use the exposed buckles to his advantage.
Unfortunately for Yano, Cabana was ready for all of this. Not only did he unearth rolls of tape from Yano’s gear, but he later used that tape to secure the turnbuckles sending Yano into a fit of confusion as he struggled to untie the protective pad. To Cabana’s surprise once again, he would come out on top against Yano and walk into the quarterfinals.
While he held his own against eventual finalist SANADA, Cabana came up short against Cold Skull. There was a fair bit of comedy in the match, but Cabana also proved that he has what it takes to hang in a more serious affair with someone like SANADA who isn’t known for goofing around the ring as much.
With three big singles matches, Cabana earned the love of a New Japan crowd who may have not known him on day one. My fingers are crossed that he also earned the love of the New Japan office and will be back on the cerulean blue mat as soon as the G1 Climax this summer.
#2: Tomohiro Ishii
It shouldn’t be unexpected that Ishii had some of the best matches of the entire tournament, but his inclusion on the list is due to the insane quality of matches he produced as well as the way he dragged others up to his level to make them look great even in defeat.
Make no bones about it – Ishii is one of my favorites in New Japan and my views may be entirely biased. But then, how could Ishii not be in your list of favorites? He constantly delivers and his placement on the card is akin to that of Chris Jericho’s WWE runs. He can go with anyone on the card and can instantly be believed as a championship contender with very little work.
Ishii’s path to the finals was a pretty unique one. In round one, he squared off with Yuji Nagata in a predictably fantastic match. These two were set to meet as part of the New Beginning USA shows but visa issues plagued the New Japan roster and they were unable to travel for the shows.
It always felt more sensible to me for this match to happen on Japanese soil anyway, so maybe there was a silver lining in the fallout of the US tour after all. Ishii/Nagata became an early favorite of mine and while some other matches may have eventually beat it out for my top 5 list it was right on the cusp.
Nagata is on a quest to prove that he can still go and has a dream of winning the IWGP Heavyweight Title at 50 years-old. Ishii is no spring chicken himself – at 43, he has just as much to prove as the Nagatas and Kojimas of the world. In their first round encounter, Ishii did just that.
There isn’t much else to be said about the Ishii/Taichi match that hasn’t already been said in this article, just that Ishii deserves so much credit for bringing Taichi up to his level. Taichi isn’t necessarily regarded as a workhorse the same way Ishii is, but if this was your first exposure to both men you wouldn’t have a reason to think otherwise.
In the quarterfinals, Ishii once again boosted the status of his opponent. While I am a YOSHI-HASHI hopeful and am aching to see him break out, it can’t be argued that many of his matches are just okay at best. He often isn’t as dynamic as his opponents and it’s easy for him to get lost in the shuffle.
Against Ishii, though, YH had something to prove. In a battle of CHAOS teammates, Ishii was out to not only make it to the semifinals but to win a fight against a YOSHI-HASHI who gave it his all. Out of the same desire many fans have to see YOSHI-HASHI step into another gear, Ishii antagonized his stablemate until something snapped.
Just as Taichi did in round two, YOSHI-HASHI fought back and even balanced on the line between victory and defeat. What’s more impressive, though, is that through Ishii’s handiwork, YH became a believable foil and someone who could conceivably spoil the tournament for the Stone Pitbull.
Ishii would, of course, make it to the semifinals where he would fall to Okada in a classic match. That those two had such a fantastic match is about as obvious an outcome as getting wet when going outside in the rain without an umbrella. You know it’s going to happen, so while it is a fun watch it’s not as much of a surprise. The curse of greatness strikes again!
Many doubt that Ishii will ever reach the top spot in New Japan Pro Wrestling. I’m still holding out hope that he’ll have an IWGP Heavyweight Title run at some point before he hangs it up. The value of an Ishii title chase and victory can’t be undersold, nor can the rising value of the person who could come along to dethrone him.
#1: SANADA
Representing both the greatest joys and the harshest disappointments of the New Japan Cup is SANADA. While much of his New Japan run has been as a tag team alongside EVIL, there has been no shortage of standout singles encounters along the way. Despite only picking up a total of 8 points, his run in last year’s G1 was nothing short of impressive.
With a new IWGP Heavyweight Champion in the form of Jay White and a brave new era being carved out in New Japan, it doesn’t seem like a title change just a couple of months after the Switchblade’s crowning is all the sensible. Keeping that in mind, I figured we would get a New Japan Cup winner who would go on to challenge and lose to White in MSG.
My pick for that person was SANADA. While he and EVIL make a solid team, the New Japan tag team divisions are somewhat dire at the moment with just a handful of teams to make up both the Junior and Heavyweight divisions. It often feels like the same matches are recycled time and time again. The New Japan Cup seemed like the perfect time for a reset on SANADA’s trajectory.
Cold Skull started strong in the 32-man field by defeating CHAOS’ own Hirooki Goto. Goto is the only man to have won the Cup in back-to-back years defeating Giant Bernard in the finals of the 2009 tournament and Togi Makabe in 2010’s.
Like others with a storied past on the New Japan roster, Goto is someone who can be relied upon to have a solid match and become a believable challenger with the snap of a finger. He, unfortunately, suffers from the opposite syndrome of YOSHI-HASHI – he can go in the ring, but there’s not much there as far as personality goes.
That all said, picking up a win over the only person to win the tournament in consecutive years is nothing to sneeze at.
The round two victory for SANADA was unbelievably transcendent. Minoru Suzuki has been a thorn in the side of SANADA for years prior to New Japan. In NJPW specifically, the pair had shared the ring twice before with Suzuki taking the win in each of those encounters.
In this year’s New Japan Cup, though, SANADA turned it all around. After nearly 30 minutes of intense barbarism, SANADA wore Suzuki down to the point of no return. Suzuki could no longer fight back or move in his weakened state, his only recourse to scream at his adversary as he ascended the turnbuckles to close out the war with a Keiji Mutoh inspired moonsault.
The quarterfinals saw SANADA and Colt Cabana lock it up in the most serious affair of Cabana’s Cup run. Coming out on top, SANADA not only showed that he’s able to wrestle technical masterpieces but he can also go with someone whose style is the complete antithesis of his own.
The semifinals were a pivotal moment for SANADA. Battling Hiroshi Tanahashi on any night is a battle for survival, but in the New Japan Cup, both men had their own stories to tell. For Tana, it was the quest to get back on top and prove that he could still hang even when hobbled by a pair of bad knees.
For SANADA, a victory over Tanahashi would solidify his status as a main event wrestler. Defeating Goto, Suzuki, and Tanahashi all in the same tournament? His ticket would be all but punched to future main event glories in New Japan.
In a disappointing turn of events for Cold Skull, the path to glory would stop with Kazuchika Okada in the finals of the tournament. Although he came out on the losing end of the contest, SANADA silenced any doubters that may have existed (are SANADA doubters actually a thing?) to question his potential.
SANADA returns to the tag team ranks to team with EVIL in a double-title match for the ROH and IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Titles at G1 Supercard. The journey to championship gold for SANADA may be through tag team wrestling for now, but the coming months could paint a wholly different picture.
If Okada goes on to Madison Square Garden to defeat Jay White for the IWGP Heavyweight Title, he’ll likely head to Wrestle Kingdom 14 as the champion. With the G1 Climax set to start in just a few short months, SANADA could have the most to prove of anyone on the New Japan roster.
After all, what could be a sweeter bit of revenge than winning the G1 and going on to Wrestle Kingdom to dethrone the man who ended your championship dreams in the New Japan Cup?