10 Things WWE Fans Need To Know About KUSHIDA
6. You Need To Watch His...
...Best Of The Super Juniors tournament final victory over Will Ospreay from 2017.
What a f*cking match that was. KUSHIDA is a very, very critically acclaimed performer, but in a strange old way, he might be the most underrated on the planet: his name is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Kenny Omega, Hiroshi Tanahashi, Daniel Bryan et al., but he is as consistently brilliant as the best of the best, and this match, this modern masterpiece of storytelling and off-the-charts action, is right up there with those that somehow broke the ***** barrier where this didn't.
The premise of the story was as simple as the physical aspect was jaw-dropping in how impossible it all looked viewed through the eyes of the audience: Will Ospreay was an alien life form capable of doing things with his body nobody else can, where KUSHIDA was an expert fighter with such a laser-focused ability to hurt people that he knew exactly when to cut the Aerial Assassin off - and, since we couldn't keep up with Ospreay, let alone hurt him, these sudden submission traps yielded so much incredible, unpredictable drama that made immersive sense in its context.
KUSHIDA's best match ever, watch it before he makes his TakeOver bow. It will do an even better job of pumping you up than WWE's amazing production dept.