Ladies and gentlemen, after much wait and much hype, the time has come! New Japan Pro Wrestling brings you Wrestle Kingdom 14 – two days of it, in fact! The WrestleMania equivalent of Japan’s biggest promotion becomes all the bigger, starting tonight! This is sure to be one of the most incredible weekends in wrestling history! I’m Jordan Huie of the Overtimer and I’ll be here with my coverage of the shows as they happen!
With all my duties covering WWE and AEW I haven’t really had much time to talk about New Japan this past year, but I am a massive fan and I can’t let a stop at the Tokyo Dome go by without getting in on it! So let’s take a look at what we have on tap for Night 1!
Chaos (Hirooki Goto, Tomohiro Ishii, Toru Yano & Yoshi-Hashi) vs. Bullet Club (KENTA, Bad Luck Fale, Yujiro Takahashi & Chase Owens)
This setup is basically identical to the Los Ingoberables de Japon vs. Suzuki-gun match, and seems like it will occur immediately after it. Here, the main names to look to are Hirooki Goto and KENTA, two men who will be facing off for the NEVER Openweight Championship on Night 2 of Wrestle Kingdom 14. As for tonight, they’ll be captaining reps from their respective stables in this four on four tag team bout.
These matches are largely used to let the crowd see some of their favs do their entrances and hit a big move or two, whilst not putting much unnecessary strain on the bodies of the performers. Everyone gets to share the workload and no one is generally asked to do too much. These are also useful for storybeats.
Goto is the challenger tomorrow night and could use all the cred he can get, so expect him to pick up the win over any of KENTA’s three partners. Chaos over.