NJPW King of Pro Wrestling 2019: Results, Highlights and Analysis

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Lance Archer vs Juice Robinson – IWGP United States Championship (vacated)

Jon Moxley was stripped of the IWGP US Championship title after being unable to appear at this defense, so Juice Robinson – his original challenger – has been matched up with Lance Archer to fight for the now vacated title.

It’s significant to mention that this match is a no disqualification match (by agreement between both Juice and Archer), and originally having Jon Moxley as an opponent meant that Juice was fighting someone familiar, at the very least. Having to adapt to someone like Lance Archer almost last minute in a match that could turn incredibly violent is about the most stressful thing I can imagine. They never even met in a tag match before this.

If it shook Juice at all, he didn’t show it. He walked into the arena looking kind of like a bear and kind of like a bird, all confidence even when facing someone somehow so much bigger than him and screaming about turning the arena into his ‘murder hawk mansion.’

Juice catches Archer with a completely legal low blow and knocks him outside of the ring, hitting him with chairs and running him into the barricade. Archer puts Juice through a table, dismantles the protective padding from the turnbuckles and fills the ring with chairs and tables.

Archer throws Juice threw a table and immediately breaks his hand (broken for real). They throw chairs at each other until Juice is able to hit Archer with The Juice Box, which does almost nothing.

At this point, Juice looks like he’s one stiff wind away from death, but he starts piling up the chairs in the middle of the ring. He tries to use Pulp Friction on Archer directly into the piles of chairs, but he slips and Archer takes that opening to throw him down.

The match nearly ends with Archer hitting Juice with a Blackout into the chairs, which have become the centerpiece of this fight, but it’s the following E.B.D Claw that takes Juice out.

Lance Archer may be the new IWGP US Champion, but the best part of this match was the surprise run-in by David Finlay, Juice’s friend and a wrestler who’s been out on injury for several months. Finlay drives Archer out of the ring and just based on how Juice breaks down, there’s a good chance that it was as much as a surprise to him as it was to the audience.

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Juice has some healing to do, but to go up against an opponent like Archer on such short notice, in a no disqualification match, shows how much heart and determination Juice has, and that will take him so far.