Chyna wins, Chyna wins, Chyna wins! (UGH!)

[Guest Dangerous A]

I would venture to say Misawa has dogged it in NOAH with the exception of the GHC finals match with Takayama. The only defense I can come up with as far as Nagata not getting his usual reaction to Nagata Lock II is that it was definitely a pro-NOAH crowd as evidenced by the junior tag match earlier in the evening (which had white hot crowd heat). Other than that the crowd wasn't really that receptive to Nagata that night. Perhaps they just wanted to cheer Kobashi so much and that took away from the other team. Nagata and Akiyama didn't do themselves any favors by just playing this match straight up. They should've been dickhead heels trying to upstage Kobashi and punish him. They didn't do anything to warrant any enormous crowd heat. The only reason I have it as current match of the year is cause a) everything sucks this year that I've seen and b) it's one of the few matches I still remember vividly, but I attribute that to being a Kobashi mark more than the work.

[Guest RickyChosyu]

Nagata's punishment to Kobashi's knees was nice, but in general it was just too by-the-numbers to warrant any kind of emotional involvement besides "That guy's against Kenta, and I want Kenta to win!" type heat. The young-punk story was there from them to take, especially considering that Nagata was an outsider and had reason to upstage the Noah guys just to rub it in the crowd's face. Ah well.

 

Yeah, that juniors match had MEGA heat. It's rather scary that Liger totally smoked Nagata as far as garnering heat in an outsider role.