CyberFight Festival 2021 | Kongoh vs DDT
Kenoh objected to CyberAgent’s acquisition of Pro Wrestling NOAH from the very start. He invaded DDT last year before CyberFight even existed, leading his faction Kongoh in a winning effort against DDT (and now NOAH) president Sanshiro Takagi at Wrestle Peter Pan 2020, exactly one year before CyberFight Festival. That match was a clear and obvious style clash between the two companies, and it set the tone for the year to follow: DDT and NOAH have very different styles, and for that reason, were best kept separate.
After that, each company more or less existed in its own bubble. DDT and NOAH had their own brands and their own stories, and there was little interaction between them, even though technically they now had the same corporate ownership. When Jun Akiyama won the KO-D title and joined DDT, there was a little more crossover, but still not a lot. Then CyberFight announced that they were putting on a supershow.
Unsurprisingly, Kenoh disliked this.
His feud with Takagi from the previous year reignited. Now, the stakes were even higher: Takagi was president of CyberFight, which included both DDT and NOAH under the same umbrella. The merging of the brands threatened NOAH’s entire identity.
There were several NOAH vs DDT matches on the card for this show, but this one stood out for a lot of reasons. It felt in many ways like a mission statement, both for each company individually and for CyberFight as a whole.
My heart filled with joy the moment I saw the DDT team make their entrance. All six of them walk out with items referencing famous DDT icons. Higuchi lists them all on twitter afterward (from right to left): Mecha Mummy's Mecha Drill, Cao Zhang's giant hammer, the Dramatic Dream Mobile, Mecha Mummy's Mecha Fist, Jet Scrambler, something called ヤゴラの頭 that I’m not familiar with, イケメンの父（神）から授かった銀の罠 (another item I’m not familiar with), and of course, Yoshihiko, the DDT wrestler who is also a blow up doll.
Just as Kenoh has something important to fight for, the DDT wrestlers are also fighting to prove that their own style has value, and that it isn’t lesser than NOAH’s more serious style. Takagi’s team wants to avenge their loss from the year prior and prove that they can stand up to Kenoh and take what the NOAH wrestlers can dish out, all while not giving up what makes DDT special.
Naturally, a lot of this match centers on Takagi. He takes the brunt of the offense from Kongoh, and at the beginning of the match, all six of them take their turn attacking him before he has the chance to tag out. Katsuhiko Nakajima even subjects Takagi to his Shutter Chance move at the corner, shoving his feet into Takagi’s face while smiling at the camera.
DDT’s Yukio Sakaguchi, who has an MMA background himself, has some fantastic exchanges with Kenoh and Nakajima, showing that he can hold his own in their style of fight. Nakajima even displays something almost like respect, inviting Sakaguchi to exchange kicks with him.
At one point, Takagi retrieves the Dramatic Dream Mobile and attempts to ride it down the ramp and collide with Kenoh, but Kenoh ducks out of the way at the last minute, and Takagi crashes into his own teammates instead. Then Kenoh picks up the bike and takes it back up the ramp. He pauses at the top, and the audience waits to see if he’s really going to do it.
Then Kenoh climbs onto the Dramatic Dream Mobile, and he rides it straight into the president of the company. For that brief moment, he embodies the spirit of DDT more than he could possibly know. He tries to destroy the bike afterward, but he can’t take back DDT’s ideological victory there.
Near the end of the match, Kenoh and Nakajima subject Takagi to a tag team move that my friends and I have nicknamed “Endless Hate,” since it started as a variation on Nakajima and Go Shiozaki’s tag move Endless Love, except it was Go’s ex partner turning their own tag move against him. All of the times I can recall seeing this move, it was used on someone that Nakajima and Kenoh felt very strong feelings toward, mostly Go, but also Kaito Kiyomiya on at least one occasion.
I appreciated that aspect of the move here, even though it’s a non-canon interpretation. Endless Hate indeed! I was delighted to see Sakaguchi and his Eruption factionmate Kazusada Higuchi answer this move with a tag move of their own. My friends and I have been coming up with nicknames for different variants of the “Endless Love” move, and I’d actually considered coming up with a nickname for the move that Eruption does here, but I couldn’t decide if it was close enough or not. Now that it has been directly paralleled, though, it’s absolutely part of the set! One of my friends suggested that this move is “Endless Drama,” and I think that’s very fitting both for Eruption as a faction, and for “Dramatic Dream Team” as a company.
The DDT team brings various items into the match, but they mostly just glance off of Kenoh and have little effect on him. I love seeing Kenoh do comedy matches, because he’s so serious and angry all the time, and he always completely no-sells the comedy nonsense, which ironically makes it even funnier.
At the very end, when he has Kenoh at his mercy, Sakaguchi brings out Yoshihiko. With Yoshihiko’s assistance, Sakaguchi then puts Kenoh in a double sleeper hold. The two of them keep Kenoh out of commission long enough for Takagi to hit the Sitdown Himawari (Sunflower) Bomb on Haoh, winning the match for DDT and avenging his loss against Kongoh the year before.
Takagi gets on the mic and says, “We are all different, but we have a common goal. We're gonna become number one in the industry.” He continues, “We're gonna make it happen together as a group, without changing a thing about who we are; DDT/NOAH/TJPW/GanPro together.”
Backstage, Takagi says that he has a small bit of respect for Kenoh and his style now. Sakaguchi agrees and says that both DDT and NOAH send the fans home happy with their own styles. In his comments, Kenoh just says, “This kind of style... is... pro-wrestling too... I guess?” Then he punches the table and leaves.
If the story in 2020 was that DDT and NOAH were like oil and water, impossible to mix, the story in 2021 is that actually DDT and NOAH can put on a fantastic show together and shine in their own right without compromising their own styles. Pro wrestling is big enough for both of them.
(This match is now on youtube! You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/YeNnwaPeeLE)
