Io Shirai vs Shayna Baszler (Stardom - 2/23/2017)

The shooter Baszler showed up in Stardom to challenge Shirai for her title. Baszler was a deadly submission artist and damaged Shirai’s arm right from the onset. Shirai used her athletic offense to target Baszler’s back, while trying to evade the arm submissions Baszler could grab from seemingly anywhere. Eventually, Shirai survived the holds and wore down Baszler’s back enough to setup her winning moonsault. A worthy invading shooter vs. promotion ace match.

Watched this because I'd heard it Shayna's best match, and I think it is based on my very limited sampling of her WWE stuff. When reading other online discussions of this, I'd seen the credit primarily given to Io for her selling ability and how good she is fighting from underneath. That is definitely a factor, but Shayna also seems to have a lot more freedom here compared to WWE in digging into her MMA playbook between the lengthy submission sequences and not having to hold back on her strikes as much. They were losing me towards the middle with some of the back-and-forth, but they got me right back in when Shayna yelled "Omae wa mou shindeiru" at Io in the corner, and it was awesome that the crowd picked up on that reference. 5* moment right there. Shayna arguing with the ref at points was fun too. Not sure what the usual psychology is in Stardom, but it's standard in AJPW for the ref to force the person applying a choke to go for a cover when the other person in the hold looks passed out, so that spot just seemed like a cool near fall to me.

Edit: So the issue seems to be there was a build-up 6-man that ended with the ref doing a stoppage when Shayna got Io in the sleeper. Weird, but still doesn't bother me much. Maybe it being a title match changed his judgment.

vk.com/video-5899799_456239917

Starts about 1 hour and 20 mins in.