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 Intercontinental Championship: Jay White (c) vs. Tetsuya Naito
Here we get to the real nitty gritty of this weekend’s wrestling extravaganza. The centerpiece of this two night Tokyo Dome experiment. Wrestle Kingdom 14 Night 1 is capped off with the promotion’s two most significant championships being defended, starting with the IWGP Intercontinental title. The winner of this match will face whomever comes out of the night with the IWGP Heavyweight title the next night in a battle for all the gold.
Jay White is one of the top heels in the business right now, managing to get under the skin of damn near every audience he ever competes in front of whilst still managing to have great matches with basically everyone. He has a lot of long-time enemies at this point, Tetsuya Naito being another key one. Naito is of course one of the pillars of New Japan. He’s been indisputably #3 in status and popularity just behind Hiroshi Tanahashi and Kazuchika Okada, and at this point he’s probably closer to #2 than Tana is. I liken him as something of a Counterculture Ace, the cooler, edgier option, a mantle he took up after Shinsuke Nakamura left it behind.
Something that’s cool how this has been set up is that both men have a lot of history with the other half of the night’s double main event, making it very tricky predicting what the long-term goal is. But by far and away the sentimental favorite is Naito, as this weekend feels very much like his last real chance to solidify himself among the all-time greats in New Japan’s history. It could genuinely go either way, as could the next match, but I think ultimately I’m siding with this though. Tetsuya Naito over.
