14 Ups & 4 Downs From NJPW's New Japan Cup 2019

2. The Ghost Of Tomoaki Honma

Tomoaki Honma was a wonderful professional wrestler in his day. Wonderful.

The reformed deathmatch plunderer won the audience’s affection with his mid-2010s underdog performances, showing incomparable heart, guts, and determination in a long run of spirited defeats to NJPW’s biggest and brightest. Matches with Tomohiro Ishii and Katsuyori Shibata stand among the era’s finest. The man was a babyface par excellence, his Kokeshi was among the company’s most over moves, and Honma - old, beaten-down Honma - drew sympathy like few others.

But he can't do it anymore. 2017’s near-paralysis (inflicted by a simple rope-hung DDT) saw to that, and while it's great to see him healthy, the Taichi bout was hard to watch.

They went for almost 18 minutes on night one. The runtime and layout did nothing to help Honma, whose painful, laboured performances should probably be restricted to multi-mans going forward. Injury has taken a brilliant pro-wrestler from us. It’s a shame, but watching the shambling husk wobbling through performances like this is worse, and he didn’t look good against Suzuki-gun’s jester.