With Trapped in the Cagematch, Kim Wong combs through the highest-rated matches according to Cagematch.net’s voters in preparation for the annual FSM 50 and the year-end Match of the Year extravaganza.
Hirooki Goto (c) vs. Callum Newman
NJPW Wrestling Dontaku
May 4, 2025
Cagematch ranking as of 10/1/25: 220
You can’t tell the story of professional wrestling in 2025 without focusing on New Japan Pro Wrestling, STARDOM’s Bushiroad sibling. Better writers have spent plenty of ink on analyzing the company’s business metrics and wrestler performance before and after the annual G1 Climax tournament, and I defer to their expertise on the state of NJPW. Instead, my attention is turned toward the underlying tension between the old guard and the young upstarts, between the familiar and the new, and between two different forms of unrealized potential in not just New Japan, but the men’s wrestling scene in Japan as a whole.
Hirooki Goto’s win over Zack Sabre Jr. for the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship is one of the enduring romantic moments of professional wrestling in 2025. Finally, the guy I would make fun of for
- meditating under a waterfall, a place of spiritual power,
- painting his body white,
- covering it with scripture,
- and then promptly losing to Kazuchika Okada in a championship match
- and finally, to add insult to injury, accept Okada’s invitation to his faction
had triumphed. The G in Goto no longer stood for “Goober.” The loser had finally won; it’s the tale of Tomoaki Honma, the eternal loser, finally winning a match but written on a grander scale. Goto is the last of the old guard, the only one left from his cohort after Okada, Shinsuke Nakamura, Kenny Omega, AJ Styles, Tetsuya Naito, Jay White, Kota Ibushi, and Will Ospreay had moved on and as Hiroshi Tanahashi strides toward retirement, had finally done it. The romanticism in Goto’s victory, so long in coming, lies in the idea that beating Goto could be the catapult for someone from the next generation, a catalyst for their rise so they can be the next in line to join that vaunted list of former champions. (Not you, EVIL.)
Sure, crowning Goto seems like the choice of a desperate company that doesn’t have any better options and is making decisions out of fear of losing what they still have rather than taking a chance at creating something new. Sure, Goto’s ascension is, at best, a temporary salve to the company’s troubles. Sure, Goto’s long-delayed championship win over Zack Sabre Jr., not Okada or any of the other great IWGP champions listed above, feels a bit like someone popping corks over placing third in a race.
And sure, Goto’s championship had a lower ceiling for match quality because the aforementioned talent drain had left the company’s cupboard bare. All of these elements could be turned into positives: Goto’s inevitable loss could be in service of elevating someone new, he could give wrestlers an opportunity to showcase their abilities and ascend, and the temporary, short-term nature of his reign could give his matches a sense of unpredictability that could be channeled into drama and excitement. Even though he started his reign with vibrant defenses against peers like Hiroshi Tanahashi and Yuji Nagata, there was hope that NJPW understood the potential his reign contained because he also defended the title against younger contenders like David Finlay, Shota Umino, and Callum Newman.
Nonetheless, for a short time, it seemed like NJPW would use Goto’s title reign as a testbed for the company’s upstarts. Fans and critics imagined that Goto would defend the title against more than just one of its new Reiwa Three Musketeers (Umino) and that Goto would be a whetstone against which Gabe Kidd, Yota Tsuji, Yuya Uemura, Oleg Boltin, Drilla Moloney, Great-O-Khan, Henare, and/or Ryohei Oiwa could test their mettle.
Instead, Goto’s only challenger under 30 years old was the 22-years-old Callum Newman, who fell into the match because Jeff Cobb unexpectedly jumped ship to WWE. Newman is one of the sons of Will Ospreay, part of Ospreay’s legacy in NJPW, and inheritor of one of Ospreay’s signature pieces of offense, the OsCutter. A heavyweight at 216 pounds, Newman has gotten opportunities away from the junior heavyweight wheel that has trapped Francesco Akira, another son of Ospreay. Newman’s wrestled in New Japan Cups and G1 Climaxes, far away from the grinding loop of Best of the Super Juniors and IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team and singles title matches that has defined Akira’s career thus far and threatens to for however long he remains in NJPW.
Naturally, Goto would lose the title back to Zack Sabre Jr. in a match that was good until its weird ending. (That match from Tanahashi Jam on June 29 is well-regarded; as of October 1, it is the 29th highest rated match of 2025 according to Cagematch voters. Its legacy is bittersweet, at best, and it represents squandered potential to me. The fact that it wasn’t even the show’s main event is the punchline to the joke that Goto’s reign became. Of course Goto’s first and possibly last reign would be a flat circle that went nowhere.)
In the match, Newman played to his youthful energy by being aggressive from the outset, on the attack because he wasn’t intimidated by Goto. Even when Goto knocked Newman down, Newman remained on the attack and displayed impressive athleticism in the process.
I also appreciated that Goto brushed off Newman’s early aggression; this wasn’t Goto’s first rodeo because the G in IWGP, at last, stands for Goto.
Luckily for us, Goto wasn’t afraid of keeping a fast pace of action and went blow for blow with Newman. As the company’s hero, Goto was respectful with his aggressiveness: he gave the referee space to check on Newman’s neck, but the moment Newman started to rise, Goto was willing to stomp on him and resume his attack. It’s a small but subtle touch that cemented that Goto was a rule-abiding competitor and an appropriate representative of the company and its ideals.
That said, Goto’s not a stupid hero, and he focused on Newman’s injured neck. It’s a neat trick to focus your attacks on an opponent’s injury without seeming villainous, and Goto pulled it off. For his part, Newman couldn’t help but aggravate his injured neck as he tried to upset Goto. As the challenger, he needed to keep the pace fast and take risks to catch Goto off guard, even if he endangered himself in the process, like on this dive, where he hurt Goto but might have hurt himself more in the process.
In tone and rhythm, this match fell into the template of veteran vs. upstart. Goto could be caught off guard by his opponent’s youthful exuberances, but Newman could not overcome an injury that the veteran inflicted on him. He could fight with every ounce of strength he had, but he just fell short.
I’ll credit Newman and Goto for making the sequence where Newman held his hands behind his back and challenged Goto to knock him out feel compelling. And it paid off later when Newman countered Goto when Goto turned his back on Newman, allowing Newman to grab him for a German suplex.
It annoyed me when Newman wound Goto up for a Rainmaker Lariat. I can understand why Newman would try Goto’s bane against him, and commentary tried to spin a yarn about how Newman inherited the Rainmaker Lariat because he was the last wrestler Okada hit with one when he was still a member of NJPW’s roster. I’m not sure signature moves can be passed down that way; if it were, some of our finest tomato cans like the Brooklyn Brawler would have the largest war crates in professional wrestling. Bryan Danielson, possibly my favorite wrestler of all time, did something similar during his Ring of Honor World Championship reign where he would steal a move from his defeated opponents. The difference is that Danielson was usually on the winning side, so it made sense that he took a trophy from his opponents. It doesn’t quite make as much sense to take a trophy from an ass-kicking that you lost.
Newman capitalized on stunning Goto with his bane by hitting another inherited move, the Oscutter 2.0, on Goto and combined it with his fisherman brainbuster, the Firebolt, to score a two count nearfall. You could actually hear the crowd’s positive reaction to the nearfall, so at the very least Newman made a strong impression on the crowd.
When Goto finished Newman with a GTR, it was one blow too many to the neck for Newman. Newman put up a great fight against Goto, and both the crowd and I greatly appreciated the effort.
This was a highlight of Goto’s title reign, and I hope Newman gets more opportunities to shine in the future. It would be ridiculous to wish that Goto had lost to Newman; he wasn’t ready in the eyes of the fans to beat Goto, even if they appreciated the fight that he put up. Nevertheless, it seems a waste that Goto didn’t get to wrestle wrestlers like Kidd, Tsuji, Uemura, Boltin, Moloney, Great-O-Khan, Henare, or Oiwa during his short reign. Showcasing them instead of Tanahashi, Nagata, or Finlay or wrestling Sabre in a match that ended in a double pin might have benefited the company more in the long run. Instead, this match stands as an outlier for a company that chose to resolve the tension between the old guard and the young upstarts by operating from fear of the new and retreating to the familiar. It stands as an example of how the company chose to help Goto’s unrealized potential materialize while ignoring the potential of its next crop of wrestlers. It represents how the entrenched, riding on the coat tails of old successes, pushed back and continues to push back against much needed change.
The match and the show can be seen on NJPW World.
Next time: We return to STARDOM and see how the company used Saya Kamitani’s rise to start building toward the future without involving Kamitani at all.
