7 Ups & 5 Downs From NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 17 (Review)
Downs...
5. The KOPW 2023 New Japan Ranbo
A near-30 minute cluster was best summed up by El Phantasmo during Shingo Takagi’s entrance into the match late on.
As listless wars were waged on the outside, ELP briefly checked in with the English commentary team to joke about how nobody knew what was going on and how great it all was.
Neither statement was incorrect or entirely untrue, even if most of the match was mostly trash. The Ranbo was as big a load of b*llocks as usual, at times impossible to keep on top of and almost never coming close to feeling like something that actually mattered to the competitors. It was rubbish, and just occasionally charmingly so.
Toru Yano and The Great O-Khan made the final four by actively avoiding action, Sho did too and Takagi’s place was assured pretty much the second he arrived as the contest’s biggest star by orders of magnitude.
Those four will compete for the Provisional 2023 KOPW Championship at New Year Dash, though the typically knockabout booking didn’t exactly encourage anybody to follow them.