NJPW G1 Climax 2019 Night 15 (August 7) - A BLOCK: Every Match Ranked From Worst To Best
And on the 15th day, Kota Ibushi created God...
The penultimate shows of any G1 Climax normally have a certain elephant graveyard quality about them. Fallen beasts laying dormant amongst the odd predators still fighting for their lives, the faint stench of death and decay lingering over broken bodies.
A Block, in spite of extremely limited stakes, has simply been too well stocked to allow for such festering.
The field always looked the stronger of the two, but it was on Night 15 that the depth helped carry the load all the way through to the final weekend at Budokan Hall.
The opening three contests were completely free of ramifications, but even when the points did come back into play, they were suddenly rather confusing to unpack. Kevin Kelly and Rocky Romero had a rare fumble, debating on-air about the status of EVIL following Kota Ibushi's absorbing victory over Zack Sabre Jr, before carrying the conversation into the Los Ingobernables' man's match with Kazuchika Okada.
Like the main event match itself, everything was all figured out just before any problems solved themselves anyway, and everything came good in the end. It almost always does in New Japan.
5. Hiroshi Tanahashi Vs. Bad Luck Fale
F*cking Bad Luck Fale man for f*cks sake.
With Hiroshi Tanahashi’s elimination from the block coming at the end of his exhaustive and evocative effort with Kota Ibushi a few days earlier, this loss wasn’t the one to put a bullet in ‘The Ace’ in 2019. The earliest G1 Climax elimination in over a decade for Tanahashi was a tough one to take - this was almost a defeat too far.
Fale was at his best this tournament getting ragged by Zack Sabre Jr in the middle of the Korakuen Hall crowd. Kazuchika Okada got little from him, KENTA got even less, and last year’s winner was the latest to suffer Bullet Club bullsh*t and Fale’s fumbling, bumbling offence.
No longer hyper-mobile with his size nor dynamic with his dominance, Fale’s struggled to follow (or simply life up to) fellow A Block giant Lance Archer In 2019, and the placement of this match directly after the Suzuki-gun monster’s mini-thriller with SANADA only exposed the gulf.
Tanahashi sold his multitude of injuries with peerless conviction as usual, but it just wasn’t enough to make the Bad Luck Fale formula feel worth the time. In 2019, so little is.