10 LIVE Observations From The NJPW/ROH G1 Supercard

10. How To Craft The Perfect Opening Match

I'm not the most expressive of wrestling fans.

When I attend a show, my octogenarian bladder stops me from drinking too heavily and loosening up. Also, I consider it my civic duty to not indulge in the worst chants. I want to be be the change I want to see in the world. Will Ospreay and Jeff Cobb, by crafting the perfect opening match, changed all that. The hot opener is a lost art in the streaming age because, too often, the epic length ripples across the rest of the show, affecting the sequencing and, consequently, the heat. By going just under 13 minutes, Ospreay and Cobb perfected the remit with their astonishing dynamic, one perfectly calibrated to trigger the endorphins.

When it was over, all I wanted to do was watch more pro wrestling. To mainline more pro wrestling. Ospreay took a vaulting neck-first bump in the first second of the match. From there, in an absolute banger, Ospreay and Cobb essentially threw each other up into the air and across the ring with a propulsive brute force in their own unique version of the Keith Lee Vs. Dominik Dijakovic dynamic. And again, I had to smile at the bullsh*t take that Ospreay can't tell stories; here, his all-risk approach and inexperience in the heavyweight ranks informed the result. He attempted to go power move for power move with the most powerful wrestler on the planet, and lost.

At one point, at the apex of a stunning Tour Of The Islands reversal, I shouted Oh my - and when I got to God, I screamed it, with blood curdled, because they reversed it AGAIN mid-flight.