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!
Great Bash Heel (Tomoaki Honma and Togi Makabe), Yuya Uemura, and Yota Tsuji vs. Toa Henare, Alex Coughlin, Clark Connors, and Karl Fredericks
A New Japan staple is to have young lions – the budding prospects of the future, still in training – compete in tag action with veterans to try and help them gain experience. This is a perfect example, and it seems they’re looking to get a rep in for as many of their young lions as possible. Shota Umino is notably absent from either of the WK cards, after starting an excursion back in October.
However by New Japan’s general logic this is a pretty big mismatch. One team gets two veterans, a long-time tag team at that, whilst the other is made up entirely of young lions. Toa Henare does tend to do a lot better against the regulars than others and his team is generally made up of some of their top prospects, but even so. It’s a pretty easy win for the Great Bash Heel team.
