[02-23-2022] Katsuhiko Nakajima vs Kazuyuki Fujita - NOAH: Gain Control

 

Kazuyuki Fujita, from the second he walked into NOAH, has been divisive. One camp thinks that this old, broken-down MMA fighter should not be beating the younger, more proficient, wrestlers in the promotion. The other camp thinks that it is great that this old bruiser is dominating the promotion, bringing an element that is missing from a lot of modern wrestling, harkening back to the era of New Japan that Fujita came from. I'm somewhere in between the two, I suppose. I think if you bring in a guy like Kazuyuki Fujita, he should be running through guys. No one wants to see a guy like Fujita doing workrate classics with the juniors on the card, they want to see him beat people up, to have him give some sheen of legitimacy to the goings-on in NOAH. Sometimes the results can be pretty great, like when he choked out Masao Inoue in less than a minute. Other times, the cracks start to show, Fujita is old and battered, modern wrestling, as it exists, for the most part, isn't something he's suited for. A match like this, the young-ish, well-liked champion, one of the best wrestlers in the world at the moment, going up against an established, and diminished, member of the old guard, can really go either way. I thought this match was great. 

This match is Kazuyuki Fujita in a nutshell. As a fighter, Fujita was a decent grappler, a less than decent striker with some power, but a man whose foremost skill is having a very hard head. He can eat a huge barrage of strikes and keep moving. That's the story here. He can outgrapple Nakajima, but not enough to win. He can't outstrike Nakajima, he's too slow for that. But, he can get off a big shot every once in a while, so he's willing to stand and get hit, in typical Ol' Ironhead fashion, in order to land a big shot. So over the course of the match, Nakajima unloads on Fujita, but can't put him down. Fujita answers back with big shots, and eventually one of those big shots hurts Nakajima enough to really unload. He hits two massive powerbombs, and gets the win. It's not a match without its warts, there are some melodramatic moments and 'strike exchanges' that I could do without, but it's such a great Fuijta match that I can forgive them.