Flupke's Matches That Defined 2022: Part Four
Send In The Clowns
Front Matter
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AZM vs. Mei Suruga
29.04 / STARDOM Cinderella Tournament 2022 Final / Ota City General Gymnasium
Team Mexico (Dalys, Faby, La Amapola, La Jarochita, Lluvia, Marcela, Princesa Sugehit & Reyna Isis) vs. Team World (Alex Gracia, Avispa Dorada, Hikari Shimizu, Ivelisse, Lady Frost, Mei Suruga, Stephanie Vaquer & Tae Honma)
28.10 / CMLL International Womens’ Grand Prix / Arena Mexico
AZM vs. Momoka Hanazono
19.11 / STARDOM Gold Rush / EDION Arena Osaka
Mei Suruga is my Wrestler Of The Year, and Momoka Hanazono, Mei’s tag team partner on a number of memorable occasions, is my Breakthrough Star. This probably ought to have been a piece about two matches, both in STARDOM, both challenges for AZM’s High Speed title. That would have been a sensible and symmetrical way to go about it. But it’s impossible to ignore Mei’s excursion to Mexico in a piece about her 2022, because that trip, and one match in particular, perfectly sums up why 2022 has been her year.
In 2018 I was already convinced that Mei was a generational prodigy, but I felt like one of the few western fans online that both knew who she was and really got her, to the extent that I sometimes wondered whether that thing I saw in her matches was just a wishful figment of my imagination. Choco Pro changed that, and her appearances in TJPW and STARDOM changed it even more, but none of the plaudits she gained from these progressively larger fanbases could compare to her reception at Arena Mexico in late October, where she single-handedly defeated nearly half of the opposing team (the home team, no less) and immediately established herself as a fan favourite. You can talk someone up for years, argue until you’re blue in the face about their ability to get over with anyone, anywhere, in any context, but none of that is going to make a moment like this feel any less miraculous when it actually arrives.
There is no atmosphere on earth like Arena Mexico. Over 10,000 people came to see this show and its main event, featuring women from all around the world competing for little more than pride. But pride here, won like this, is something that no one can ever take away. The crowd LOVED Lady Frost and she showed herself incredibly, to the point where they’ve already brought her back for another tour. Also special was Dalys, born in Panama but a Mexican resident for 14 years, getting to carry the tricolor for the first time, and being embraced as a Mexican wrestler as she went on to win the match for her home nation.
Having said all of that, Mei Suruga was a goddamn revelation in this match, and in Mexico as a whole. I’ve long said that I find Mei to be so much better everywhere outside of Ichigaya rather than inside, but this was on another level. Leading into this she actually won the Guadalajara version of this match, pinning the women’s world champion to the MASSIVE delight of the crowd. Here, she not only made the final three, she defeated two CMLL legends in Marcela and Princesa Sugehit (current Women’s World Champion!) and tapped out a high-level current star in La Jarochita to get there! The crowd loved her so much immediately that they loudly booed the hell out of her elimination!
The whole match was AWESOME, in an incredible atmosphere, and Mei left me with the biggest impression. This was the single biggest night and moment of her career, on a huge pay-per-view main event, in one of the biggest promotions in the world, in a historic area in front of roughly 10,000 fans. Nothing else comes remotely close to this! An absolutely incredible star making moment for her, beyond anything she’s ever had in any other promotion. It goes to show that the old adage, “if you know how to get over in front of 50, you know how to get over in front of 10,000” is the truth. Mei was a wonderful fit here, and I desperately want her to come back. Judging by social media and the crowds for over a week in different cities, the fans of Mexico do too.
- Penguin (@empressconsort)
Like Penguin, I’ve also preferred watching Mei work outside the confines of Ichigaya Chocolate Square, from the moment such a thing became possible after COVID, and I think this crowning moment in Mexico City finally taught me why. Mei is always a delight, but never more so than when she has to prove herself to an audience that might not have given her presence on the card too much thought. She always finds a way to steal the show, whether owning the SEAdLINNNG high speed division, gunning for the tag titles in OZ Academy, or taking the new generation through their paces in TJPW, but this match might just have been her masterpiece.
It’s not just that she eliminated Marcela, Lluvia and Princesa Sugehit, each time with a different signature move. It’s not just that was involved in the action for over forty minutes and the crowd still weren’t sated. It’s also that she somehow felt like the glue holding this mass of international talent together, injecting pace and meaning and character into proceedings every time she stepped into the ring. Her in-ring style probably ultimately owes more to lucha than it does to traditional puro, but it was still remarkable to see how well she adapted to the conditions here, and it was completely unsurprising but no less heart-warming for all that to see the Arena Mexico crowd embrace her as one of their own. She’s taking over the world, and she’s doing it in a way that’s 100% Mei Suruga.
AZM is a generational talent. When I first really noticed her she was a vicious teenager hurling insults at her seniors. As shithead wrestling goblins go, the attitude and in-ring violence that earned her place on Kagetsu’s t-shirts during that hilarious recruitment campaign for Oedo Tai made AZM feel unique, fresh, special.
Though she remains incongruous in Queen’s Quest as the one with the biggest mouth and the nastiest stomp, we’ve seen her grow into a future Red Belt contender by gaining polish and losing some of her sharper, raggedy edges. In short, she’s become a bit less Mei Suruga.
Watching this match is like entering a hall of mirrors for shithead wrestling goblins. While AZM grew into and eventually past her full goblin phase, Mei seemed to emerge fully formed from her debut and, outside the more traditional Stardom dojo, she has had the freedom to build the wackiest version of herself. The adorable apple girl who turns your opening exchange into a ballroom dance smiles as she does the twist with your arm between her feet – like Zack Sabre Jr, but fun. She’s such a force of nature that she can now be entirely herself everywhere she goes.
Mei can surprise AZM in the early going because the champion hasn’t wrestled anyone like her. There’s nobody like Mei Suruga, but Stardom could not have made her if they tried.
Ultimately AZM’s experience wins out, but she clearly loves digging into her own sometimes-buried reserves of goblin energy to give as good as she gets. After the match she proposes a tag team: a mark of respect for an opponent with whom she feels an affinity, and one that would bring Mei further into the Stardom fold. Ever true to herself, Mei sticks her fingers in her ears and walks out.
- Sarah (@SarahParkin1)
Almost six months to the day before her appearance at Arena Mexico, Mei’s High Speed title challenge in front of over 2000 fans at Ota Ward Gymnasium felt like the biggest, boldest realisation of her craft to date. I’ve long described her in-ring style as Magical Realism: she fights with total focus and commitment to a kind of combat that belongs to a world slightly different to (and better than) our own. There’s never been a fiercer, faster, more virtuosic execution of that particular quality of Mei’s work than here in this match.
A day or two after the show, a clip got taken out of context and went viral, and was scoffed at by some fans who saw the action as frivolous, stupid, overly choreographed. Look again, look closer, even without the surrounding context of the rest of the match, and it’s objectively none of those things. Mei’s goal here is to take AZM down with a high-impact move, and to do that she needs to catch AZM off guard, and her method is to never stay still for a second, to bewilder and disorientate, to bend the rules and get the referee involved. She’s trying to win an advantage, and she succeeds. Her failure to win the match in the end isn’t for want of trying - it’s just that AZM turns out to be just as adept at this highly-inventive, highly-technical and highly-athletic style of wrestling as Mei is. Viewed from Mei’s perspective, coming into STARDOM as a rowdy outsider and looking to test the boundaries of the promotion’s house style, there’s a kind of vindication there.
Mei is a competitive wrestler, but it feels weird, insufficient somehow, to talk about her career in terms of wins and losses. She really is convincingly giving her all to win this match: the roll-up exchanges down the finishing stretch are as frantic and exhilarating and skiful as anything I’ve seen in a wrestling ring all year, a desperate struggle for the right kind of leverage, won in the end by the more experienced wrestler.
But Mei is always doing more besides. She’s winning hearts and minds. She’s opening wrestling up to more fun, more spontaneity. Her signature offence always has a flavour of improvisation about it, both because she’s a witty, quick-thinking genius and because she’s had the perfect upbringing to really hone these qualities - the commentator describes her rebound crossbody off the outside of the ring post as “Ichigaya Style”. She makes wrestling feel like an artful, exuberant dance, without losing sight of that essential psychology and attention to detail you need to make a fake fight seem real - just look at the way she loses her grip on that Lucifer attempt ten minutes in, providing AZM with the lucky opening she needs to regain some control of a match which is fast slipping away from her. This is about as far away from black trunks technical wrestling as you can get, but the fundamentals are there. A match can begin with a forced ballroom dancing psych-out spot, and end with a technically precise battle over grip and body weight. At least, a Mei Suruga match can.
From the chaos that a Mei Suruga defense brings to watching Momo Kohgo step up and give the champ a run for her money, AZM’s 2022 title reign has had some really bright spots. At the other end, Momoka Hanazono has had an incredible year herself, appearing in countless smaller promotions, but this is undeniably the biggest match of her career. For the uninitiated, her entrance says a lot about her. Bubbles, a big floppy flower, and flanked by members of the wrestling promotion she GMs for, 2point5. She’s more than just a kawaii trouble maker, she’s incredibly creative, funny, and a leader. In 2022, people began to truly take notice. The gravity of the match wasn’t lost on Hanazono, either, as she takes a rare quiet moment to soak it all in before introductions.
The match starts and it’s a typical high speed affair, with Hanazono’s hijinks mixed in. Hanazono’s game is one of misdirection and confusion. AZM is prepared for it at the beginning, pulling Hanazono in for a quick pin attempt. That’s the thing about Hanazono, she’ll throw anything at you, sometimes it works, and sometimes it’ll fail spectacularly, in the form of getting tripped up on by Tomoko Watanabe, or having the soul lariated out of her by Yuna Manase. She does get trapped in a rear chinlock while her own bubble machine continues to fill the ring, but Hanazono keeps the chaos up and throws the veteran off on a few occasions, pointing at the crowd and taking a cheap shot, running in her trademark confusing way, even borrowing Mei Suruga’s signature jump.
AZM gets the upper-hand in the late going but Hanazono refuses to stay down. There’s times during Hanazono’s matches where I wonder if she even wants to win, or if she just wants to cause chaos. Seeing her kick out repeatedly made it feel like maybe, just maybe she was going to pull it out. It took AZM throwing a double Azumi Sushi and disorientating Hanazono for a brief moment to get the win. And yeah, on the surface, it may not seem like anything special. It’s a pre-show title match that’s just a hair over eight minutes long, but it’s also something that felt unlikely a year prior, and an example of the ever-shifting landscape of joshi wrestling.
- Rich (@sadjabroni)
Momoka’s High Speed title challenge doesn’t quite hit the heights of Mei’s, but it’s similarly generous in its conception of the kind of things you can cram into a competitive match, similarly forceful in its insistence on making the champion hold her own in a style that feels foreign to STARDOM. Early on, Momoka pulls off her own version of that Mei spot from the viral clip - she pulls the old “look over there!” trick, she bamboozles AZM by running this way and that, she crawls through her legs and trips her up and nails her with a sturdy dropkick to the face for a near-fall. You can question the tactics, but you can’t quibble with the results.
She goes again - she brings in her bubble gun as a weapon, and after AZM steals it and the referee is forced to intervene, she uses this distraction to gain a bit of unfair elevation (see image above), for another dropkick to the face. When an attempted dropkick into the ropes goes awry and Momoka is dumped to the outside, she takes advantage of AZM’s fair-play hesitancy to have one of her seconds pass her a party-popper, and she fires it off in AZM’s face. Momoka is a little less technical than Mei, and a little more dedicated to clowning it up - it takes somone with the natural clowning ability of Momoka to make a straight punch to the face look like a comedy spot (Yuka Sakazaki, a clown in a previous life, is also good at this). She’s only a little less technical, mind - I’ve never seen Mei bust out a bridging German Suplex like Momoka does here, and the finishing sequence is shorter but just as breakneck as that closing exchange of roll-ups from the Mei match. The script here isn’t as elaborate or extensive as the one from March, but the language is just as rich.
In fact, while Mei has the edge on Momoka in terms of exposure and international adoration (almost nobody in the current joshi scene has what Mei experienced in Mexico), it’s hard to consider Momoka as the junior partner in MomoRingo. That’s not just because they’re the same age, with the same level of experience, and the same positions of seniority in their respective promotions. It’s also because, since first crossing paths in OZ Academy late last year, they compliment each other, complete each other almost. They’re both mischevious virtuosos, and while they don’t sing exactly the same tune (Mei is more precise in her movements, Momoka more flaily; Momoka is more Devilish, Mei more demonic), they harmonise beautifully. Their shared vision for wrestling jumps off the screen every time they tag together, but in these two title matches they took it to new heights. As far as individual in-ring achievemets go, they were the best thing about 2022. Now we just need to get Momoka over to Mexico, and we can end boring wrestling forever.
Previously: Ice Ribbon and the art of the seventy-two minute sprint
Next: The Match Of The Year