Good evening, everyone! In mere hours, New Japan will be going live with a major event, New Beginning In Osaka! Jay White takes on Sanada in the first singles match on the card! New Japan’s New Beginning tours effectively kick off the year on New Japan’s calendar after Wrestle Kingdom served as the season finale for the year prior. While it’s made up of several events, some bigger than others, it all culminates with this last big one here!
The way most New Japan events work, the first half of the card mostly consists of minor matches designed to just get people on the show without burning them out too much, whilst the latter half is the big stuff, which is actually built to. So we’ll just be dealing with the last four in these previews.
Jay White vs. Sanada
This is the first one on one bout on the card and a pretty significant one. Jay White is just coming off winning the Bronze Match at the Tokyo Dome, coming in third place after being involved in the big IWGP Heavyweight and Intercontinental title mini-tournament. Sanada isn’t coming off anything quite as grand, having lost his shot at the RevPro title against Zack Sabre Jr., but he’s been looked at as a headliner of tomorrow for a very long time.
These two found themselves at odds shortly after the Tokyo Dome. Jay is trying to play on his past failings by claiming that he’s been believing in himself too much lately, vowing to wrack his confidence with this match and send him back down the totem pole. It would certainly be a huge momentum win for Sanada to get this special singles victory over Jay, given what a force he’s been over the past couple of years.
However, there’s a subtle understory going on here with Sanada, or atleast one could think so.
Look at Los Ingobernables de Japon. Tetsuya Naito holds both the main singles titles. Hiromu Takahashi holds the Junior Heavyweight Championship. Shingo Takagi is the new NEVER Openweight Champion and also holds the NEVER Openweight Six-Man Tag Team Championships alongside Evil and Bushi.
Coming out of Wrestle Kingdom, the biggest show of the year, every single member of LIJ had gold except for Sanada, he was only one to fail in his title challenge. It’s really hard for me to see that as a coincidence. With how big the expectations always are surrounding Sanada, it seems likely to me that this could all get to him… he might jump from his group at some point and maybe go after Naito himself.
That idea could go either way here, conventional wisdom says that losses lead to a heel turn but wins lead to a title match. I figure on-balance though I’ll say Jay White picks up the win and leaves him all the more devastated. It is what he’s promised, really.
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