NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 16: Night 1 Review - January 4, 2022

By Graham "GSM" Matthews

Pre-Show: Minoru Suzuki, CIMA, Chase Owens and Toru Yano Were the Remaining Four Competitors in the New Japan Ranbo and Advanced to the KOPW Provisional Championship Match on Night 2

​I remember when New Japan Pro-Wrestling held last year's installment of the New Japan Ranbo for the KOPW Provisional Championship on the Wrestle Kingdom Night 1 pre-show and this was more of the same. I hardly follow the product, but from what I understand, it's largely been used as a comedy championship since then. With that said, Yano qualifying yet again wasn't surprising, especially after barely doing any thing. Suzuki, CIMA and Owens are all familiar faces to me and thus I was happy to see them advance as well. The rest of this was your typical Gauntlet match, but I was proud of myself for knowing who a majority of the competitors were.

YOH def. SHO

YOH and SHO are former longtime tag team partners, so they know each other very well. Not only that, but this marked their third one-on-one encounter in the last year with SHO costing YOH the finals of the Best of the Super Juniors last month. This was a fun match and wisely positioned as the opener. They had quality chemistry as expected and made the most of the time they had. I was impressed by both guys.

Bullet Club (IWGP United States Heavyweight Champion KENTA, Taiji Ishimori and El Phantasmo) def. Hiroshi Tanahashi and The Mega Coaches

This served as preview of Night 2 where KENTA will defend the U.S. title against Tanahashi while The Mega Coaches and Bullet Club challenge for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship. Bullet Club are the faction and the cohesive unit, so it made more sense for them to win. The match was going just fine before Tanahashi got his team disqualified by using a kendo stick. It was a lame ending, but I understand it was done because there will be no disqualifications in his match with KENTA on Night 2.

United Empire (Will Ospreay, Great-O-Khan, and Jeff Cobb) def. Los Ingobernables de Japon (Tetsuya Naito, Sanada and BUSHI)

Ospreay has a huge opportunity at the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship coming up on Night 2, so there was no way he was losing this match. Also on that show, Naito will face Cobb and Sanada will face Great-O-Khan. This was more of the same as the previous match in that it was well wrestled and served its purpose of building toward those aforementioned matches, but it didn't really feel like a match befitting of a big show. That's the problem you run into with some of these two-night events.

Katsuyori Shibata def. Ren Narita

This marked Shibata's return to the ring after almost five years. He severed a very serious brain injury that effectively ended his career, so the fact he's able to wrestle again is a miracle. NJPW is clearly trying to ease him back into the ring, but he ditched the catch wrestling rules early on and it was basically a straightforward singles match. I remember Narita from the few appearances he made on AEW Dark last year and I thought he was a nice opponent for Shibata to have in this spot. As for Shibata, a guy that hasn't had a formal match since 2017, he looked terrific.

EVIL def. Tomohiro Ishii to Win the NEVER Openweight Championship

I've heard a lot of negative things about EVIL's heel run over the last year or so and now I can understand why. This was easily the worst match on the show, and it's a bummer because I know EVIL is talented and have liked some of his matches in the past. Ishii is awesome in his own right and deserved better than whatever the hell this was supposed to be. I thought NJPW was better than resorting to these sorts of shenanigans, but apparently EVIL is not immune to it. This was badly booked and not good at all.

CHAOS (Hirooki Goto and YOSHI-HASHI) def. Dangerous Tekkers to Win the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championship

Zack Sabre Jr., who is one-half of Dangerous Tekkers with Taichi, always seems to shine in whatever spot I see him in on these NJPW shows. He has a great thing going with Taichi and the two of them had a superb match with Goto and HASHI here. This was tag team wrestling at its finest. Apparently NJPW doesn't have a ton of teams at the moment due to pandemic preventing certain stars from being able to travel, so I'm not sure how many other teams are available to gun for the gold coming out of this.

IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion El Desperado def. Hiromu Takahashi

I've always been a big fan of Takahashi and he never ceases to deliver on the big stages. Desperado is quite great from what I've seen/heard as well and I liked how they were positioned later in the show because it made the match feel more important. This was the exciting sprint you'd expect given who was involved. I was actually expecting Takahashi to take the title, so Desperado retaining surprised me. People have speculated Takahashi could be moving up to the heavyweight division, which is overdue.

Kazuchika Okada def. Shingo Takagi to Win the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship

I was blown away by the match Takagi had with Cobb at Wrestle Kingdom 15 and since then, he's gone on to win the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship. He actually beat Okada for the vacant title over the summer after Will Ospreay had to vacate it, so that pretty much told you Okada was winning here. He's the tried and true of New Japan, so it was logical to make him champion again as they look to rebuild from what has been a rough year or two for them. The match itself was exceptional. Both guys killed it and those final few minutes in particular were phenomenal. Ospreay confronted Okada afterward to set the stage for their championship clash on Night 2.

Overall Show

This was definitely a mixed bag of a show and not on the same level as past installments of Wrestle Kingdom I've seen. Dividing the card up into two nights hasn't helped and it hurts when several names aren't able to make it due to injury/travel reasons. The last two matches on this show were stellar and there was some solid stuff sprinkled throughout the undercard, but there were more mediocre matches than I was expecting and it brought down the overall quality of the event. The fans not being able to make noise outside of clapping is unfortunate, but such are the circumstances right now in Japan due to the dreaded pandemic.

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