Female Open Team Championship 2019
アリーナ立川立飛/Arena Tachikawa Tachihi
AS THE CHERRY BLOOMS SO BEGINS THE CUSTOM OF HANAMI 花見 (flower viewing) and as you can see in the lovely image above this is very much the case in and around Tokyo au présent but I can tell you that it for sure is not these 10,774km away, where we received no fewer than fifteen centimetres of snow (雪, yuki) last Monday night, and a little more since, too. But that too is super beautiful! I am not complaining about it! But I cannot help but be struck by the contrast! The 桜前線 sakura-zensen (cherry blossom front) still feels kind of a long way off (UPDATE: it has since felt like spring for one afternoon since I initially wrote this but it has since largely reverted). Have I mentioned that when we lived in Toronto there was a truly grand old cherry tree out back, but we were renting from the son of a notorious slumlord who died under mysterious circumstances in Malta, and the deathtrap we were living in (and somehow survived [praise be to thee, oh Christ]) featured a seemingly endless supply of old broken toilets in and about the property, and they ringed the cherry tree for what must have been years? If this sounds like a 侘寂 wabi-sabi/æsthetics-of-impermanence-and-suffering situation to you it is because I am explaining it wrong. Or maybe not?
QUINTET FIGHT NIGHT3 IN TOKYO, SURELY THE HIGHLIGHT SURELY OF WRESTLEMANIA WEEKEND SURELY (don't call me "Shirley" haha) although I will say I enjoyed the Naito/Ibushi and Okada/White matches from Madison Square Garden very much, along with everything I saw Orange Cassidy do on the various little indie shows I saw bits of (that guy cracks me up! I love that he carries his title in a Jansport!). I really like the GCW idea of named shows: Josh Barnett's (né Matt Riddle's) Bloodsport, Joey Janela's Spring Break, Orange Cassidy is Doing Something or Whatever Who Knows, all of that is just super neat to me (I don't watch all of the shows or anything, I just like the idea very much, and my friends share with me and point out the things they think I might like -- thanks guys!). The only show that I watched all of (I didn't even watch all of the Madison Square Garden Show [I don't really follow ROH]) was Josh Barnett's Bloodsport, which I reviewed extensively on my locked twitter account (who needs the reply guys? who? and what's the upside: RTs? And for what? The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL.) and which I will present to you here nearly unedited (I have edited out two bits that I now feel are unkind and regret), why not; what is this place if not a place of such things:
* I enjoyed JOSH BARNETT'S BLOODSPORT and found it a v. pleasant two hours (good length!) but I was surprised it was not more shoot style, like the top two matches were not at all in that style. but they were both good matches so what can u say! THOUGHTZ:
* phil baroni vs. the big bjj purple belt dominic garrini (who I am p. sure was on last year's bloodsport, also as a purple belt; mb by next year's he will have made brown! good luck to him!) was a realllly good opener and I liked it about as much as anything else on the show
* simon grimm's real name, I have learned, is seth lesser, which is an amaaaazing name he should wrestle under imo and his match with jr kratos (shoot name unknown to me) was p. good, the hendo/bisping punch was a neat idea for the finish
* D[avey]B[oy]S[smith] J[unio]R has been complaining that comedy matches in njpw w/ toru yano do not display his shooter rootz or whatever to best advantage which is funny cuz he is just some dikk who won a NAGA one time whereas toru yano was national-lvl greco & freestyle so who is truly the clown
* (in the pejorative sense)
ps killer kross has a physiiiiiiiique does he not
* gresham vs. takeda was really good though I did not like looking at takeda's death-matched-up body v. much tbh; gresham is a v. good little guy and takeda's U-FILEism was, at times, quite sikk
* I drifted a little during andy williams/chris dickinson tbh but snapped to attn for dan severn/frank mir, the shootstylemost match of the night *by a lot* and also my favourite one even though both competitors chose to leave their shirts on in the pool (u gotta own it imo)
* frank mir did *great* imo which is not surprising in that truuuueeee shoot style is often best from ppl who can extremely græpple for real & who (this is crucial) are unencumbered by knowing how to work regular trad professional wrestling style, we saw this over & over in RINGS
* (it's because trad professional wrestling style is, let's be honest here, super *duper* fake looking even when it is sikk, and though it is not itself inherently dumb, it is supremely dumb-looking when seen alongside shoot style, and even a hint of it can ruin everything)
* h. suzuki/thatcher (I have seen thatcher before and really like him) and m. suzuki/barnett were both really good matches and I guess I was just mistaken that they would be shoot style ones? test-of-strength/pro-wres-counterz/indie respect spot/applaaaause is not shoot style
* barnett/suzuki fell to shit a little like an INSTANT after the crowd started chanting FIGHT FOREVER (that's not a good chant) which was too bad but good match, good crowd, good show! my expectations where off I think. mir/severn was my fav, followed by baroni/big purple belt
* strong style isn't shoot style
and we all know this
* AS A FINAL NOTE on the bloodsport show: vinny (of bryan and vinny) went and had a great time (though he did not like mir/severn! why didn't anybody like the one real-deal shootstyle match! what gives!)
The seemingly widespread aversion (as wide as any of this gets; we are well into splintered-legions territory) to Mir/Severn, the only match the excellent live crowd booed, was I think very revealing of the extent to which the style we most cherish here at TK Scissors (named after a technique which is, crucially, the fakest-looking real technique, and not the realest-looking fake technique [the significances of this are, in my view, endless] is gone, and gone (not to be overly final about it) forever forever forever. My old friend Bill tagged me into a thread of tweets where a guy who did not like Mir/Severn said simply that it was too much like martial arts for a wrestling event. And based on seemingly everybody's response at the show itself, at least, and everything I have seen/heard about it since, he's totally right, and yet the notion to me is a very strange one, perhaps because for good or for ill I am the person who has written a RINGSblog. But let me close by saying it was a good show and everything, just not what I expected in parts.
AS PERHAPS THIS TOO SHALL BE, THIS QUINTET FIGHT NIGHT3 IN TOKYO which features the Female Open Team Championship 2019 and also a few other matches as well I think. As is customary, Stewart Fulton is our English-language play-by-play commentator, joined by Mei Yamaguchi (not for the first time!); Japanese commentary is again the great Yuki Nakai (chair of the QUINTET referee committee, among his many attainments) and Takeshi Yano, though we do not have access to it. Our brackets pair Team 10th Planet against Team DEEP JEWELS as one first-round match, and Team BJJ KUNOICHI and Team Sun Chlorella in the other. I was particularly pleased to see that KING Reina (KINGレイナ) was going to be a part of this event! As we have written in these pages previously, at the time of her RIZIN bout against Jazzy Gabert, "'KING' Reina Miura placed third, Shu Hirata tell us [though now he doesn't, as the link to which this once linked . . . is dead --ed.], in the Japanese national high school judo championships (Inter-High) at -70kg, won the -68kg division in the President Putin Cup 41st Annual Japan Sambo Championships (all victories by juji-gatame or gyaku-ude-garami), and, at 5'2" and 162lbs, unquestionably offers the thikkest judo/sambo in the field of mixed fight since Fedor. Also she is an unreal star, just look:"
That is what we wrote then, but what now! Mei Yamaguchi says she has trained with a number of the DEEP JEWELS squad, and says they are all wrestlers and judo players, strong on the ground. As probably a pretty high percentage of those of you reading this will already know (to your obvious discredit [mine as well, of course]), Deep Jewels rose from the ashes of the sadly defunct Fighting Entertainment Smackgirl promotion (it's not really that sad), and has been running for a long time now.
Kazushi Sakuraba, suffering horribly from allergies, greets the crowd with warmth and good humour.
The 10th Planet team is introduced (in video package form) by Eddie Bravo, who, unless things have changed radically since I stopped listening a long time ago (and maybe they have, what do I know [and yet I know this]), routinely spreads contemptible views on the alt-right gateway Joe Rogan Experience and is for sure an anti-black racist in a deep and abiding way, and not just because of his blackface video, although that is certainly a vivid part of the picture. Of his competitors, Liz Carmouche is the only name known to me, as she had a championship match against Ronda Rousey . . . wow, six years ago. Rousey broke the fight down for the LA Times in an excellent video that ends with her being quite awful; you can see that here. And now King Reina describes a recent training trip to the U.S.:
Eddie Bravo feels that his team is savages, which is good because without the Joe Rogan podcast in my life I have lost all touch with who is savages. And with that I am not going to say any other things about Eddie Bravo even if he is on here a lot! My feelings are clear so why belabour the point! No good can come of it!
Team DEEP JEWELS all enter bearing stuffiez, which I of course endorse wholeheartedly:
One's thoughts turn to the Snoopy once borne to the ring by 三島☆ド根性ノ助 Mishima Dokonjōnosuke, do they not? Who very much also competed in DEEP, did he not? I answer in the affirmative the questions I have just now asked of myself as rhetorical flourish. Man, King Reina is really very stout; you get a better sense of that here where she is amidst a collection of ladies of varying sizes rather than just with other people close to her weight (often much taller, and so you would think the stoutness would most fully realize itself in that context, and yet no, it is here that it does so; embrace the mystery). The total weight limit for each five-græpplor team is 280kg (in a "day-before" kind of way [and indeed weigh]) and the matches shallst be of eight-minutes, excepting those betwixt competitors of a 7kg or greater disparity in weight! Or mass or whatever! I don't know if there have been any rule changes this time around, as in the last few shows they haven't really said that up front, but just mentioned it in the natural course of things (like [such as] how you can't smother people's mouths with your gross hands, because we're trying to have a sport here, you gross jerks [I mean no disrespect]).
先鋒
せんぽう
Noun
1. advance guard; vanguard
2. athlete who competes in the first match of a team competition (kendo, judo, etc.)
IS WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY SENPО̄ AND WHO SHALL SERVE AS SUCH IN THIS CONTEXT well look at this it is Liz Carmouche and King Reina, the two most-heard-of members of their teams, I would think we can pretty safely say. Let's see how it goes! Carmouche seemed to me a very good grappler in her bout with Ronda Rousey and it's no big deal that she got 袈裟固 kesa-gatame'd and then briefly 浮固 uki-gatame'd and then very much 腕挫十字固 ude-hishigi-juji-gatame'd in that one; that could have happened to anybody. Carmouche did some very correct things in that bout! And also made some mistakes but how many among us would not have. So I think this could be really good with King Reina, who is also . . . really good. Reina and Carmouche are close enough in weight that this will be an eight-minute bout. Shidos all around about a minute-and-a-half in. Reina, we learn, started judo in the first grade, and defeated Shayna Baszler in only her second mixed fight (Reina's, not Baszler's), but the years in between remain a mystery I guess! (Not true because we have talked about them a little bit above.) Reina half-succeeds with a 腰技 koshi-waza (hip technique) but Carmouche sort of half gets her back out if it, and out of that gets on top in the double-entanglement of niju-garami or half-guard. Carmouche has really solid shoulder pressure (so crucial) and passes to tate-shiho-gatame but cannot hold Reina, who bridges and rolls, there for long at all. Reina left her arm dangling like she wasn't especially worried about the juji-gatame, either. And now it is Reina on the top-most side (or top) of niju-garami. A scramble sees both of these pretty nifty grapplers return to their feet with about three-minutes to go as we are told that King Reina weighed in at 68kg/151lbs so it would be a pretty fair match-up between the two of us (that is not true and she would crush me). Reina made a misstep and lost her balance! Carmouche has her back! This is a very bad spot to be in! Reina is hand-fighting well I think, though, so she might last the minute that remains. Yeah, even with one arm briefly trapped, Reina is cool as a 河童 kappa (cucumber!) throughout, and she turns in hard to finish the match on top and squishing Carmouche (more like carsquoosh [or simply carmoosh]). A draw! I like that match.
Next we have Hikaru Aono against sixteen-year-old Grace Gundrum and Gundrum, I am sorry to say, is a sitter. It's not even guard-pulls that I find æsthetically objectionable: it's the straight-up sitting. But what can you do, they have seemingly abandoned the idea from the first QUINTET that sitting (without sufficient contact) would be a shido (and they never called it even once when it was a rule they talked about, so the battle is lost). Shidos about a minute in despite pretty good pressure but no real advancement so I get it. It occurs to me that these matches, these QUINTET matches, would be a very easy kind to referee, because there is no scoring, and so no qualitative calls to make at all; you're only watching for the finish, for the edge of the mat, and for shidos, of which there have just been two more issued. Grace Gundrum is super-rolly and active on bottom but is getting pretty squished by Hikaru Aono's top pressure. I kind of like Gundrum's chances at a yoko-sankaku-jime (side triangle choke) from the weird angle she's at underneath, or maybe a juji-gatame if she can roll her over, hmmmmmmmm . . . ah, she rolled her, but Aono slipped out! Oh man Gundrum pretty much has a twister or GROUND OCTUPUS HOLDOOOOOO locked in with twenty seconds to go but can't finish -- another good match!
I cannot help but notice how sparse the アリーナ立川立飛 / Arena Tachikawa Tachihi crowd is for this show, which is very much how things were for the last show, and though I know nothing of the ways of business, I don't think that's good, probably. Elvira Karppinen finishes an ashi-dori-garami/figure-hour-toe-hold/ankle-lock on Yukari Nabe in I think twenty-three seconds! The hold is announced simply as 足首固 ashikubi-gatame or "ankle-lock," and Stewart Fulton asks Mei Yamaguchi what that means (I think he has a lot of Japanese so I wonder if that is an honest question or if he is just, you know, broadcasting) and she is like "just, like, a regular ankle-lock" and this is all of course very good but what I would like to point out to you is that ashikubi (ankle) is made up of the kanji for 足 "foot" or "leg" and 首 "neck" and so your ankle is your FOOT NECK which is delighting me in much the same way as when one of my foremost pals of judo, a now-fluent Spanish speaker, told me about how one time he could not remember the Spanish for feet and so referred to them as bottom-hands (and everyone laughed at him, but totally understood, so who is laughing now [still them, probably {also me}]).
I am low-key having disorganized thoughts relating to The Long UWF broadly right now as, a little while ago, during the Hikaru Aono/Grace Gundrum draw (which was a good match), Stewart Fulton talked about how crucial it is for all of the athletes to understand that in QUINTET, if you have a position of control, you absolutely must work towards a submission hold (lest ye be offered the guidance of shido), and if the particular hold you are working towards is not progressing rapidly towards completion you absolutely must switch to another hold (lest you be offered that same guidance again), even if that is totally not in any way what you would "really" do. Sakuraba, Fulton tells us, feels, like, unbelievably strongly on this point (presumably Yuki Nakai shares this view or at the very least accepts that his rôle is to implement it). The aggressiveness of the shido system in QUINTET, and the centrality of it Sakuraba's vision for it, is pure artifice atop the real, and calls to mind Dan's recent poesy when he wrote (all bolding my own)
"Seeing Fighting Square Hakata in approximately 2001 wouldn't change my life and seeing it now doesn't have some kind of Proustian effect, but it did offer a taste of something I've subtly hoped for in wrestling ever since: not shoot-style as such but a glimpse of the real, unmediated as possible, slicing through the artifice.
It's a reason that underpins many of my top ten favourite matches of all time, a list I hastily constructed one afternoon while chatting online, despite their stylistic disparities. Mick Foley's bump off the cell cuts through that world WWE bullshit more than any number of CZW self-atrocities. The relationship between Bret and Owen Hart cannot be faked, nor can the meeting-of-worlds between Kiyoshi Tamura and Tsuyoshi Kohsaka in RINGS or even Hiroshi Tanahashi and Minoru Suzuki in New Japan.
But the artifice needs to be there, to give something to slice through, as well as offering an illusion of framework and order and control over direction: this is why despite the excellent scholarship performed by KS on TK Scissors (he is now delving into PRIDE and Quintet with signature flair), I retain favour with UWF over RINGS and its parallel shoot-stylists in UWF-i, PWFG, Kingdom, and BattlARTS (though I love and respect all)."
I thank Dan, as ever, for his kindness towards This, Our Project, but especially for these valuable notes towards a consideration of artifice and the real in the context of The Long UWF (it has turned out to be such a rich topic!). I am thinking all over the place, too, and probably not usefully (but here we are on my blog) about how QUINTET's aggressive, artificial shido system seems somewhat foreign to some of the competitors and even to the commentators who are here to explain it to us (this is not a criticism of either group just now mentioned) but with which I feel pretty much at home with from all the judo, in that the hyper-aggressive shido system in judo insists we do a number of things we wouldn't really do (prohibitions against: biding our time rather than attacking even if the time is not super propitious to do so; holding a defensive posture; refusing our opponent's grip excessively; controlling the grip but not truly attacking the instant that control is achieved [a deep mode of cowardice and indeed perhaps the deepest]; there are a whole lot of them, mostly about punishing cowardice [in myriad forms, broadly conceived] and rewarding an essentially relentless pursuit of the ritual purity/symbolic death of ippon) if left to our own devices/baser selves in order to direct us towards not just a particular martialsportsæsthetic (though it certainly does that) but also towards a particular ethics and indeed a morality which, Kano argued, are probably all (æsthetics, ethics, morality, physical culture) the same thing (judo is principally a pedagogy) and which Kyuzo Mifune argued are for sure the same thing (judo is reason in harmony with nature), and that so much of this is achieved through particular artifices, carefully chosen. I am going to have to insist that these are not esoteric views, but well within the bounds of the several dozen texts on the subject that are immediately to my left as I write this to you (thank you once again for reading). I am aware though that there is a shift in register that is common in the discourse of judo that can appear strange, like "here is an important detail regarding ude-hishigi-juji-gatame which, if we reflect on sufficiently, offers us a path through life and peace in death," which I am only half-exaggerating (and upon further reflection it turns out I am not exaggerating at all) or when Yasuhiro Yamashita, who very much seems about to be named the head of the Japanese Olympic committee, was asked years ago about the purpose of judo, and he said without hesitation that the purpose of judo is to contribute to world peace by the fellowship of international exchange. (Yamashita is a practical man, but also a romantic.) To which a reasonable follow-up Q might be: Isn't the purpose of judo tossing people all over by their clothes? To which one could only answer: Throwing people by their clothes is but a transitional demand.
Annnnnnd so Elvira Karppinen, about as fresh as you please, will face the much smaller Tomo Maesawa in a mere four-minute bout. Oh wow: Karppinen is 64.8 kg, and Maesawa a mere 49.65; this is major:
Quite repellently, the much much larger Karppinen just sits right down and scoots towards Maesawa, and while she is stood up for this almost immediately, she is not shido'd for it, and goes pretty much right back to it. Karppinen plays a very high guard (it gets rubberish) and attacks with sankaku-jime with a deftness that suggests this will not last much longer. Karppinen nearly finishes the juji-gatame armlock as she rolls to the top but Maesawa is hanging on admirably against her much larger and clearly extremely skilled partner. Less than a minute to go! Ah, ok: there's the 腕挫三角固 ude-hishigi-sankaku-gatame triangle armlock with about forty seconds left. Another nice match!
Only Emi Tomimatsu remains for Deep Jewels, and while she is not quite so tiny as Maesawa, she is still plllllenty tiny, so again this will be a four-minute match. Tomimatsu, we learn, wanted to join SHOOTO after high-school but there were no SHOOTOpportunities for women at that time and so she ended up in professional wrestling and making her way into mixed fighting from there (that's interesting!). Tomimatsu taps to a hadaka-jime/naked strangle that is really just a jaw-crushing in this instance I think with no more than five seconds to go. Karppinen went on quite a tear, and 10th Planet wins.
Next is TEAM BJJ KUNOICHI (and if you are reading this blog there is already a reasonable chance that you are familiar with kunoichi as a term for a lady ninja, not because we have necessarily discussed it previously but because of the kind of person you are likely to be [also please allow me to note that one of than many brilliances of the 2012-2017 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tv show is that it is in no small part the story of a teen April O'Neil's journey from novice to a ninjutsu third-dan and full-fledged member of the Hamato clan; this is where the children of today first learn of the kunoichi [there are excellent other kunoichi on that show including Karai and the ninja-witch Shinigami {死神, "god of death" or "death spirit"}]) vs. TEAM SUN CHLORELLA and I have no idea what that means (it's ok don't tell me) but it seems like just a sponsor of some kind. I really like the QUINTET officials' uniform, which is identical for women and men: black slacks, crisp white collared shirt, and a Sakuraba-orange tie with the really very sharp QUINTET logo in white. That they wear dark socks and no shoes is obvious, I won't insult you by even mentioning it. One wonders if the corner judges' chairs have old tennis balls stuck on the ends of the legs to prevent damage to the tatami; doesn't one; does; n't; one.
In addition to the QUINTET officials' uniform (perhaps our new æsthetic? or perhaps one to be explored in conjunction with our current æsthetic?) we see in the above picture young Miyuu Ikemoto of 熊本都市圏 Greater Kumamoto on the island of 九州 Kyushu (literally "nine provinces") in southwest Japan. We learn that she is fourteen and on her first trip to Tokyo! My friend Anth is on his first trip to Tokyo too! What's up, Anth! (I don't think Anth reads these [this is not a problem, please do not mistake me]). We learn that Ms. Ikemoto began to train judo in the fourth grade, and jiu-jitsu in the sixth grade, which she continues to train with her brother; she enjoys it because the teacher is very kind and she loves learning new things every training session, which is exactly what I like about training too! I'm going to root for her! Her opponent Yuki Sugiuchi (old enough to be her mother, I think) might be very nice too but my mind is made up. Let's see what happens! I think she defeated an entire team on her own at an amateur QUINTET event, if I'm hearing that right? Well she's being pretty thoroughly sankaku-jime'd (triangle-choked) pretty much right away and had better watch the juji-gatame as well and while she did take my advice to watch it she was also trapped by it (also my advice [I am so sorry for this bad advice]). Megumi Sugimoto, newly back on the mats after the birth of her first child, is next in for her team and is defeated by juji-gatame just as quickly, I think, and maybe even quicklier. This was a lovely backdoor juji-gatame that I associate very closely with a particular teacher who is very kind and from whom I love to learn new things every training session so we are right back in the very fine place we started.
Mika Nagano is apparently a juji-gatame specialist. We might well describe it as her . . . 得意技 tokui-waza. After a mere eight seconds of dropping and scooting, the action (such as it is) is halted and Sugiuchi is told to stand back up. They are calling this part of things much more to my taste, and are a mere shido away from calling it perfectly (to me). To be clear, I have no problem with people choosing to fight from the bottom, and I myself choose to begin on the bottom in ne-waza randori as often as not; nor do I have any real problem with pulling guard, so long as it is an active and real attempt to break the opponent's posture and haul them on down; what I mind is just sitting without any contact. It drives me nuts! And makes me say things like "what are we doing here, everybody!" And the referees are largely agreeing, for which I thank them. I would like to remind you that Sugiuchi is her team's senpo, their vanguard, as she finishes her third opponent, this time with the arm-crushing-triangle-hold of 腕挫三角固 ude-hishigi-sankaku-gatame. That Sugiuchi is obviously vastly, vastly more skilled at juji-gatame than I am, I have absolutely no issue with (that would be weird), but that it seems she might like juji-gatame even more than I do, that I find lightly upsetting (is that weird?). But I am just kidding around! I am reminded though of when my senior student returned from his travels abroad over the holidays, and we spent a class working on this particular entry into juji-gatame:
 |
| 小室 宏二 Komuro Kōji, 引き込みからの十字固 hikikomi kara no juji gatame (juji gatame from hikikomi) |
Sara McMann is the next to appear, and while she was the 2004 -63kg freestyle wrestling silver medalist (losing the final to ten-time-world and four-time-Olympic champion 伊調 馨 Kaori Icho), we no doubt know her best for sharing about a minute of awful Muay Thai with Ronda Rousey before being felled by a knee to the body in as fine an illustration as any of how truly stupid mixed martial arts can be, and perhaps just is. Checking her record now, as I am not familiar with her work beyond that, I see that three of her five mixed losses have come by submission, including her two most recent bouts, so one would have to conclude that although her freestyle wrestling is probably still pretty good I bet she can be caught by things that are not in freestyle wrestling. McMann is 16kg bigger than Sugiuchi (that's a lot) so this is only a four-minute bout ah but it is in truth only about a ten-second bout as McMann grabs a front choke about as quickly as anyone ever could and that is very much that. Great showing by Sugiuchi though! She went on quite a tear! Akiko Sawada is only the second of the kunoichi, also much smaller than McMann, and so four minutes. McMann's single-leg takedown was awesome, and her shoulder pressure from the side looks great, too. It looks like she would enjoy the head-and-arm choke/arm-triangle of 肩固 kata gatame; yes; yes she did enjoy that (1m10s). I believe she is chewing gum?
Rikako Yuasa is but 49.15 kg to McMann's 67.75 kg so that's 108 lbs to 149 lbs, an absurdity, but let's see, maybe it won't be at all given the disparity in subskillz. This should be like a two-minute time-limit match, but the rules do not afford that possibility. As Yuasa puts her feet to McMann's hips I recall for the first time this show that the closed guard is forbidden (I have cast it out of my own repertoire as a Lenten discipline and it has been revealing). McMann gets a shido for stalling, and so Yuasa is given an opportunity to start from McMann's back, and she goes sankaku-jime to juji-gatame like it was no big deal at all, and the crowd is quite rightly into that finish (me too). She gets Myuu Yamamoto, too! This is has been just a great night for juji-gatame. And so ends this team match.
We have reached the portion of the evening in which Kazushi Sakuraba comes out and challenges an unsuspecting referee and it is "shoot" delightful! Or actually they flip the script this time and it is referee Wataru Miki who challenges Sakuraba to an exhibition. They have a lovely little four-minute roll.
And now in a single match we have Shutaro Debana, who long ago placed third in junior nationals, senior nationals, and the Kodokan Cup (I speak here of judo), and who, more recently, QUINTET'd Kazushi Sakuraba and Tsuyoshi Kohsaka to draws, and finished MINOWAMAN in twelve seconds with 飛び十字固 tobi-juji-gatame (the flying armbar) and little Hideo Tokoro with 袖車絞め sode-guruma-jime (the sleeve-wheel choke [though he was sleeveless {it remains very much a thing}]). He has become a QUINTET favourite of mine and, I would expect, of us all.
This is all quite charming! His opponent is Robson Tanno, who is unknown to me, but that says nothing, as my knowledge of Who's Who in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is pretty much limited to guys my students who also train jiu-jitsu mention to me and then can't believe I do not know, but I mean there are only so many hours in the day, and as you can tell I am a very busy person, occupied by many occupations. I have just looked him up, this Robson Tanno, and see that he is currently ranked 80th in Brazil by some metric, which seems pretty good.
Woah, before they begin, please take a moment to take in just how empty this building is:
Like, this is sub-friends&family, right? This is brutal. (Or "sub" friends & family, as in submission græppling enthusiasts haha [this is so brutal though.]) It has occurred to me previously (as I am sure it has you) that QUINTET might not be super duper long for this world given that nobody goes to the shows that they have, but maybe they have an exceedingly lucrative streaming-rights deal and they're all set until like 2037 or something, what do I know about the promotional realities of this our post-ファイナルファイヤープロレスリング～夢の団体運営 (Final Fire Pro Wrestling: Yume no Dantai Unei! [Final Fire Pro Wrestling: Organization of Dreams {Final Fire Pro Wrestling: Dream Organization Management}]) world. HOLY COW OK Debana just shot through Robson Tanno's fancy guard (it looked v. fancy) and nearly finished a juji-gatame right off that wild pass! Here's another guy who likes juji-gatame an aaaaawful lot. He's all over Tanno, riding high and pressuring, and even when Tanno traps a leg in the double-entanglement of niju-garami/half-guard, it doesn't relieve a whole lot of pressure. A shido is assessed to Tanno, and Debana is given the opportunity to start from behind. He's got him in a crucifix/jigoku (hell) position a moment later, but Tanno escapes and oh my they're all flipped around and Tanno might finish a triangle here! This match is great. Debana doesn't look like he's got a lot of space in there but I guess it's enough, and he's kept his arm out of danger, somehow, too. I think he's stalling out well enough to force maybe a double shido . . . no, he popped right out, after a really strange limb configuration I don't think I have ever seen before (it was a mess). Less than two minutes to go in one of the best QUINTET matches yet! FAR-SIDE STEP-OVER JUJI-GATAME IS MAYBE MY FAVOURITE KIND AND HE HAS JUST DONE ONE SHUTARO DEBANAAAAAAAAAAAA:
Maybe that was the best QUINTET match? Not the best QUINTET performance (that would be one of the several people who have gone on mighty romps through most of the other team's guyz and/or ladeez [as recently as earlier this very show!]), but as a single match I can't think of a better one. Tanno came sooooo close with his sankaku-jime, too, and, as I failed to mention to you from the very nice pre-match video about him, that is totally his go-to waza (please forgive me for failing you in this regard). Oh man. It will be pretty tough for Shooto Watanabe and Tomoshige Sera to follow this one: and yeah there match wasn't anywhere near as good but was all the same totally totally fine and ended with Tomoshige Sera's 三角絞 sankaku-jime with a little under two minutes to go.
At this point in a QUINTET, I am generally pretty ready for the QUINTET to be over, and this isn't really because the shows are all that long (a little over three hours is long, but not unreasonably so), or even because I watch them all in one go (this has yet to ever happen). I can't explain this really. I guess I don't need to see any teams compete twice? I know that's kind of the deal, the four-team single-night tournament, and the only way to be sure (or surer) that everyone on the team will actually get to compete, but I don't especially need it, maybe? Two team matches, a couple of interesting singles matches, Sakuraba goading a referee into an exhibition match, and I'm all set, I think. I am not trying to tell them how to run their business, though. Iori Echigo (BJJ Kunoichi) and Lila Smadja-Cruz (10th Planet) open the finals with an eight-minute draw that, were it to have been adjudged, would probably have been adjudged in the favour of Smadja-Cruz, but that's not the game. Next Nanami Ichikawa works and works for a kata-sankaku/D'Arce choke on Fabiana Jorge and Mei Yamaguchi notes that people from a judo background like Nanami Ichikawa are very strong and physical (why thank you, Mei Yamaguchi) and love submissions like this (well sure, who doesn't). Alas, she does not complete the technique. Another eight-minute draw. Elvira Karppinen and Yuki Sugiuchi meet now in a match of the people who are probably their respective teams' best people. Karppinen is waaaay bigger so it's a four-minute match, probably two minutes of which was spent with Sugiuchi just hanging on as Karppinen tried to muscle her way to a 肩固 kata-gatame/should-hold/head-and-arm-choke finish; Sugiuchi goes the distance, and is delighted to the point of tears at having done so (good for her!). So that's three draws that lead us to young Grace Gundram and Rikako Yuasa, which is way more dynamic and crowd-pleasing (le foule, c'est moi) than you'd expect from a match in which each competitor was assessed two shidos, like the three previous draws were find but this draw was an awesome draw. Finally then we have Liz Carmouche for 10th Planet and Akiko Sawada for BJJ Kunoichi. I remind you that in the event of just endless draws, the team match is decided by the shido totals (lower is better), and if that's even, it goes to referee 判定 hantei (judgement). Liz Carmouche is really very big and strong, and opens this four-minute match by immediately squishing her comparatively wee foe. I don't know what she's looking to do other than just straight smooshing so far but maybe the hope is that something will just emerge in the course of smooshing (that's a totally viable tactic). Sawada is doing well to keep her chin tucked and her arms in tight but she is just getting mauled with about a minute to go. Carmouche has Sawada's arm in such a way that she could go for the sode-guruma-jime variation that Sakuraba teaches as SNAKE CHOKE SUCH AS SODE GURUMA JIME but she might not know that one. Stand-ups and shidos come with twenty seconds to go but if they're going on judges' decision, Carmouche's aggressiveness should count for a lot. Carmouche cranks on a toe-hold/ankle-lock right on the old 足首 foot-neck at and indeed after the bell and injures Sawada, so I don't like her. Ah, so the referee's decision only considers the taisho or final competitors, so it's an easy call, and the 10th Planet Team takes it. Mei Yamaguchi mentions in closing that the Japanese team should feel very proud of themselves because while the 10th Planet team is totally about no-gi submission grappling, the Japanese team (and training in Japan broadly, Yamaguchi says) is still very much centred on the 道着 dougi.
Sakuraba sings a trumpet fanfare into the microphone as medals are awarded to bring to a close THIS FINE QUINTET. I thank you for joining me for it! Let's reconvene soon and talk about an old PRIDE FC show, maybe? Until then, please be well, my friends.
