Manami Toyota vs Yumiko Hotta (AJW - 09/03/1995)

Hotta is completely merciless, dominating the vast majority of the match with some insanely brutal kicks, and never letting Toyota settle into her rhythm to string her signature offence together. With Hotta having most of her offence scouted, Toyota has to figure out how to survive the onslaught and come up with new ways to win. Throughout the match she's panicked and desperate, going for roll-ups, attempting pins off of simple moves like dropkicks, and even grabbing Hotta's hair while in a pinfall to keep her down. In complete contrast to this, Hotta is supremely confident throughout and believes that she has the match in the bag at several points. Hotta's best match and a clear counter-example to the idea that Toyota couldn't put in a compelling selling performance.

I don't know if I preferred this to Toyota/Hokuto from the previous day, but they're right about the same level and if nothing else the Hokuto match accentuates Toyota's performance here. I thought she was pretty awesome in this. I don't even want to beat the dead horse that is Manami Toyota's in-ring stylistic preferences -- she is who she is and you know what you're getting. But there were very few of her hallmarks from an offensive standpoint present in this, largely because she spent the majority of the match selling. I guess the other dead horse is her refusal to bother with long-term selling and I won't be going near that either, but one thing I've always thought Toyota was good at is the selling of damage in the moment. She's mad as a brush and will take absurd amounts of punishment and she makes all of it look devastating as it's actually happening. She did all of that here and that was probably 90% of her performance. Her in the moment selling was basically one and the same as her long-term selling because Hotta just spent the whole match kicking the living shit out of her. She never had a chance to blow off any selling in favour of running around doing a dozen springboards. Toyota's offensive bursts were explosive as always, but they were few and far between and, regardless of whether it was a conscious decision on her part or not (I'd imagine it was), it felt like the war with Hokuto had taken a major toll. Obviously Hotta was a wrecking ball. In a role reversal from Toyota/Hokuto it was Hotta who jumped Toyota at the bell, blitzed her with kicks, and after about 30 seconds Toyota was crumpled in the corner. The match dynamic wasn't even all that different from the Hokuto match, at least not in the first 10 minutes. In a mirror from the previous night the first bit of Toyota offence was a missile dropkick to the floor, but Hotta looked the fresher - probably because she was coming off a 15-minute match with Reggie Bennett and not 25 minutes of hell with the Dangerous Queen - and she was back rifling kicks before long. Even if you knew Toyota could turn a simple Irish whip into a counter attack she never had the same opportunity to do it as she did against Hokuto, again because Hotta never really bothered throwing her into the ropes. I mean, why would she? She didn't need to when Toyota spent half the time on the mat ripe for the kicking. There was one point where Toyota stood up groggy and Hotta just thumped her in the kneecap with a wholly unnecessary roundhouse. When Toyota could muster something in return she got extra belligerent, even tying Hotta up in the ropes and kicking her repeatedly in the face. I can generally do without the table spots, but I did like how Hotta stuffed Toyota dead on the splash attempt. Hotta also didn't share Hokuto's compulsion to pay Toyota in kind and I like how she immediately rolled her back in the ring and went back to business. I thought the build to Toyota hitting the Ocean Cyclone was really good, first with Hotta escaping each attempt, then the first one not landing perfectly (whether it was intentional or not I don't know), before finally hitting the second one after a bit of quick thinking. Down the stretch you got the sense she absolutely needed to hit that or she was done, because as desperate as she was in going for covers after every move it didn't look like Hotta was for staying down. I guess there was some excess towards the end and Hotta feeding Toyota her arms on the final pin was goofy, but they're minor quibbles. One of the best matches of both women's careers.