It's a very rare occasion to get to point to a single match as the arrival of a new style. Chris Charleton actually mentions some of those occasions on commentary, I felt it in 2016 watching Ospreay/Ricochet, in 2017 watching Omega/Okada 1, and I felt it here. NJPW's used the same house style for their main events for a decade now, arguably since Okada's first long reign with the belt in 2013. That style worked, but it eventually propogated across the entire wrestling world, melded with other styles, and became stale regardless, as is the fate of anything in this sport that goes without or with very little change for too long. This was Oiwa and Uemura finally breaking out of the shadow of that. I think the thing that made me love it even more, though, was that the match's central ideological thesis wasn't that more guys need to wrestle like Oiwa or Uemura. It was that we need more unique styles, a wrestling equivalent of the boxing/mma 'styles make fights' idea. Speaking of style, it's something that's shockingly fundamental, something that a lot of people, in all honesty, myself included, would've written off as something that never would've worked in the modern day. If you had told me 8 or 9 years ago that my favorite match of the 2020s would essentially be two guys fighting for a headlock or wristlock for 35 minutes, I'd have laughed in your face. Everything mattered here. I was fucking glued to my screen for the entire runtime. I didn't think NJPW had a snowball's chance in hell of topping Okada/Tanahashi for MOTY, but goddamn, they've done it.
>>21025645that faggot never watched Claudio/Danielson from PWG where they literally did a headlock for 20 min
