With Trapped in the Cagematch, Kim Wong combs through the highest-rated matches according to Cagematch’s voters in preparation for the annual FSM 50 and the year-end Match of the Year extravaganza.
Starlight Kid (c) vs. Rina
STARDOM Path of Thunder
February 24, 2025
Cagematch ranking as of 10/1/25: 35
To establish that your rule-flouting and black clothes-donning bad guy group is something to be taken seriously, they have to win matches and, more importantly, championships. The theory goes that by holding every championship, they are a presence in every part of the company. They get promoted as the company’s champions. They’re in every match of significance on every show. They become the focal point and a foil for someone to eventually push back against, hopefully to the fans’ adulation and approval. (Sometimes, this theory backfires in practice and the fans cheer these villains instead.) (This happens a lot.) So, while STARDOM promotes Saya Kamitani, who holds the World of Stardom Championship, as the company’s fulcrum, the other members of her faction, H.A.T.E., have to try to win at least some of the other championships too.
In the process, STARDOM can also use Kamitani’s charisma and prominence to start succession planning for when she steps aside as the company’s main character. Much as even Evolution was a platform for Triple H to help Randy Orton and Batista prepare to be WWE’s next set of stars in the main event, H.A.T.E. can be the launching pad for wrestlers like the astoundingly young Rina (19 years-old) and Azusa Inaba (17 years-old) to jump start STARDOM’s next wave.
Starlight Kid made her debut in 2015; by 2018, she had developed enough as a wrestler that STARDOM’s management crowned her the inaugural Future of Stardom Champion and made her the featured draft pick for STARS, the faction formed by Mayu Iwatani, Saki Kashima, Shiki Shibusawa, Natsumi, and Tam Nakano. As of this match, she was the Wonder of Stardom Champion, a title that is second only to Kamitani’s World of Stardom Championship. The headline is that Starlight Kid was and continues to be an important part of STARDOM’s roster.
Effectively, this match paired a wrestler who had represented STARDOM’s future against a wrestler who represents STARDOM’s future now. If Rina’s career is successful, she should play Starlight Kid’s role in a match a decade from now against someone in the wave that comes after her. The goal for this match was to make Rina seem like a worthy contender to a fixture like Starlight Kid and let her show off her strengths. Though Rina and Starlight Kid were in Oedo Tai together and have teamed together and clashed before, this was their first singles match. This was my first time watching Rina in action, and I wanted to be impressed.
I was also wary of the possibility that H.A.T.E. would interfere and distract from this match. Unfortunately, H.A.T.E. came into play less than a minute into the match as one member distracted the referee while Rina whipped Kid’s leg on the apron. Not long after, a member of H.A.T.E. held Kid against a ring corner so Rina could smash Kid’s arm with a chair conveniently placed under the ring. I know the idea was to make Rina detestable and try to steer the crowd away from cheering Rina because Rina is from the Tochigi prefecture, where this show was held. I just don’t think it worked since the crowd cheered Rina before the match began and only continued to give her the heroine’s welcome after she battered Kid with an illegal object. Asking Rina to play against type in this match might have been too high a hurdle and might have set Rina’s transition away from H.A.T.E. off prematurely. Still, I wonder if things would have been smoother if Rina had just played the face and Kid the heel in this match.
While Rina was able to hold off Kid at first thanks to H.A.T.E.’s interference, the momentum shifted after Rina spat at Kid. In response, Kid sent Rina out of the ring and slammed her on the mat. Rina was now on her backfoot and could only weakly slap at Kid the same way that Callum Newman could only weakly hit Hirooki Goto in their match. It’s fascinating to see this same trope show up in another newbie vs. veteran match.
The talk of seeing tropes show up in matches from different companies actually accentuates when wrestlers break from familiar tropes. For example, I enjoyed seeing Rina pick a different angle to attack from when Kid decided to run the ropes against her.
Like Goto vs. Newman, this match is structured so that Kid, the experienced veteran, can weave a story by targeting a specific body part. It creates an easy path for Rina to focus on her selling and for Rina and Kid to show that Kid is the smarter, savvier veteran and that Rina is the determined but too inexperienced challenger. Specifically, Kid has targeted Rina’s knee throughout this match. So, even when Rina countered Kid’s rotating press from the top rope, she had to sacrifice her knees.
Unfortunately, the match doesn’t consistently stick to this narrative strand, since Rina would later try to take advantage of Kid’s hurt abdomen by driving her knees into Kid from the second and top ropes. By the end of the match, none of this early emphasis on Rina’s knee felt like it mattered because she seemed to run around none the worse for wear. Still, does worrying about the consistency of selling a body part really matter when Rina, back in the driver’s seat, sets up a cool pinning attempt from what looked like a sideways inverted powerslam?
When the pinning attempt didn’t work, Rina tried to force Kid to submit with the Hydrangea, but all Rina could do is say, “Hi, Drangea” because Kid, the veteran, was able to fend off all of Rina’s attempts to lock Kid in the hold. Rina reached into the Peak Ring of Honor playbook with a Gory Bomb and a Cop (Kid?) Killa, and she even tried a package piledriver to no avail. Kid blocked the package piledriver attempts and hit a piledriver of her own (the Black Tiger’s Divine Punishment), the Tiger Driver, and locked Rina into a stretch muffler submission. The stretch muffler brought the match back to the narrative strand about Rina’s damaged leg, but it didn’t feel that fulfilling since Rina didn’t seem to struggle with her reduced mobility for most of the match. Kid eventually bent and twisted Rina to force her to submit.
At the top, I had hoped that we should see what Rina excels in this match. In the end, I came away from the match more impressed with how hard Starlight Kid worked to make this match work, from wrestling as the bullying veteran to putting her body to work to make Rina look impressive. For example, look at how she slid across the ring to make Rina’s missile dropkick look devastating:
Rina was well supported by her home crowd, and I’m glad that they stopped H.A.T.E.’s interference when the match’s dynamics flipped so Rina could play the underdog. Nonetheless, H.A.T.E.’s very presence fit awkwardly in the match’s logic. Why would H.A.T.E. interfere early but refrain when Rina was getting her ass kicked from pillar to post? I can only assume that they’ve explained why this is somewhere in a promo, but any explanation would feel like a stretch.
Overall, I thought it was a good match, though I am peeved that the story of Kid’s targeting Rina’s leg faded to the background for so much of the match only to jump back into play when Starlight Kid had her in the closing submission.
The match and the show can be seen on Stardom World.
Next time: We visit Dragongate to see how another men’s wrestling company in Japan handled the tension between the old guard and the young upstarts. It went slightly differently than how New Japan did.
