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!
IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship: Will Ospreay (c) vs. Hiromu Takahashi
Alright, so, this match… this is gonna be absolutely insane and off-the-wall spectacular. No doubt about that. It’s also very likely to be terrifying and uncomfortably dangerous in many places. That’s more or less the style that both of these guys shoot for. It’s a style that cost Hiromu Takahashi over a year of his career – and forced him to vacate this very title – after a devastating injury that he’s only now coming back from. But his return segment made it very clear that he has no plans to slow down.
Will Ospreay is the pick of many for Wrestler Of The Year, as far as pure match quality and consistency goes. He really did a lot to take the Junior division to new heights in 2019 and every indication is that he’ll continue doing so in 2020. But for now, the story is very much about Hiromu. I’m picking Hiromu Takahashi to regain the title he never lost, and resume his feud with his most famed rival, the newly renamed Ryu Lee.
Ospreay, meanwhile, might find himself going after the Heavyweight or IC titles soon, whilst still identifying as a part of the Junior division, as a means of building equity between the two weight classes.
