7 Reasons NJPW Should Be Worried About 2017

4. A Roster Held Together By Tape

Katsuyori Shibata
mindofcarnage.com

There are many reasons for New Japan’s surge in popularity over the last few years, and one of the main ones is the sheer physicality of the wrestling itself. After spending years messing about with trying to blur the lines between MMA and pro wrestling, NJPW has perfected the art of strong style, and this stiff style is as enthralling as it is wince-inducing.

Whilst Shibata, Ishii, Goto, Honma and others give us engrossing matches as a result, the human body simply isn’t supposed to go through such intense rigour. NJPW does a good job of keeping hurt wrestlers in the audience eye through their many multi-man matches, but time is sure to catch up on these guys at some point.

Shibata became a major player for NJPW in 2016, but he ended it as a man that was 60% human, 40% tape. Each year comes with new fears over how much longer Hiroshi Tanahashi can go. Arguably the biggest issue here is the fear, the relatively injury-free status of Okada, Omega and Naito over the last few years. Those three will be NJPW’s biggest cards in 2017, can they avoid the injured list?

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.