Jun Kasai & Masashi Takeda vs. Ryuichi Kawakami & Hayato Tamura
October 9, 2022
GLEAT VER.EX

I’m not really a GLEAT freak. I always make a note to check out El Lindaman’s matches and maybe the occasional Stronghearts match if it looks interesting. But there are only so many hours in the day, so I missed this match back in October.

The story here is very simple – the match is no DQ, and Tamura and Kawakami are out of their league. The Bulk Orchestra duo have the advantage for about a minute but as soon as the action spills outside the ring Kasai and Takeda take over with weapon shots. For the next few minutes, the deathmatch duo play a combo of Frankenstein and Dracula, slicing up Tamura and Kawakami with a variety of sharp objects and pummeling them around ringside.

Jun Kasai remains a wrestling marvel – all his old deathmatch contemporaries have either left wrestling or been reduced to shriveled husks, he’s still working at a remarkably high level today. His match vs. El Desperado will likely make my top 10 for the year and he’s also a beast in this match. And this wasn’t even his only match of the day, as both he and Takeda also worked a Tenryu Project show against each other in a tag match!

Kawakami takes a prolonged beating and finally makes a hot tag to Tamura who tries a comeback that ends with both he and Kawakami with skewers in their head, leaving them literal bloody messes. At one point Takeda pulled out a cross armbreaker which I thought didnt mesh with the overall story (the match doesn’t work if Takeada is outwrestling the Bulk Orchestra team), until he pulled out a razor to slice up Tamura’s arm while in the hold and I nodded in approval.

In a nice bit, the Stronghearts come down to ringside to cheer on Bulk Orchestra against the outsiders. It’s a nice little touch that makes a match really feel necessary.

Kawakami eats a Pearl Harbor splash but Tamura saves and the Bulk Orchestra team is finally able to put some offense together, hitting Kasai with an Ode to the Pitbulls superbomb. But Kasaki cuts off Kawakami with a Desperado punch (great touch) and ultimately plants a kiss on Kawakami before planting him with a cross-arm piledriver to win the match. Afterward Kasai says some stuff on the mic and then Kawakami cuts a fiery promo that has the crowd standing and applauding.

Great match. The bloodletting had a purpose and the story was great. The various chair and weapon shots to the head were likely a bad idea but professional wrestling is a bad idea in general. I would have liked to see the GLEAT team win in the end since Kasai and Takeda took so much of the match, but so it goes.

We have some real GLEAT sickos in the VOW slack but I’ll guess this was gifted to me by Liam, who’s such a sicko he has GLEAT in his Twitter handle.