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| Sumie Sakai vs. Hiromi Yagi | |
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Yagi rules! That's all there is to it. I mean, she came out of retirement here after a 14-month layoff and all she did was carry Sakai to the best match of her career. Obviously Yagi was going to be rusty, but she had clearly trained really hard for this and was in top condition, so it didn't really matter. She almost seemed like an alien because she was so much better and more advanced than everyone who worked on this card before her was. It was a really cool battle of the Judo girls, with Sakai also having a good performance en route to once again topping her best ever singles match once again. The match started fast with Sakai trying an ipponzeoi, but Yagi landing on her feet and giving Sakai an ipponzeoi of her own. Yagi hit a plancha, but really it was too early to be doing such a move. They rolled out a lot of spots to keep things moving, but the key spots were hard to come by in the first half. After that, they weren't all that hard to come by and it wasn't because the first half wore them down so much. Even though it was really fast-paced, they weren't afraid to slow down for submissions. The problem was they didn't really have any focus on the mat, and instead of making the submissions an integral part of the closing minutes, they were doing a bunch of "pinning predicaments." Thus, they didn't really make the submissions the important part of the match they should be when two ex-judo players are going at it. The highlight was Yagi doing the best ever wakigatame out of an attempted German suplex. It was a little sloppy, but given Yagi had been absent for as long as Sakai had been wrestling, they worked exceptionally well together, particularly when it came to counters and sequences. Mainly it was work and spots, but it was a very exciting match that could have gone either way. The crowd was into all the near falls down the stretch until they realized it was going to be a draw. That was not the result they were looking for. GAORA really needed more than an hour for this show because this was one of the best Jd' matches of the year, yet they only had time to show 5 minutes of it. 15:00 draw. ***3/4 Michael: The spot where Yagi flipped the crowd off was cool, as was shown by some guy in the crowd getting up and pumping his fist like he was watching Arsenio or something. Jason: An excellent match that would have played out well in an ARSION ring. This had strong matwork and some great counters out of submissions. The finish was great with near falls back and forth even though they went about 5 seconds over the time limit because Sakai was slow on her suplexes. The only problem I had with this match was Sakai didn't really sell her leg or arm when they came toward the finish, while Yagi sold her arm that Sakai had hurt. Special Thanks to: Michael Smith & Jason Higgs
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