A lot of matches in the NJPW New Japan Cup tend to be solid strong style bouts, but few of them are nearly hardcore matches like this one from the 2008 edition. With all this brawling all over the arena it reminds me of Abdullah The Butcher and Brusier Brody…for about a second. No, it doesn’t look like the pair have been in a ketchup fight and is way too one sided to be a Butcher/Brody affair. Come to think of it with the way that Toru Yano beats Rhino up and down the audience it reminds me of Rhino’s ECW work. If that is the case then Rhino has come full circle because he used to absolutely destroy people in that company, but gets himself destroyed here.
The only gore in this fight is the one that Rhino nails through a table after Yano ducks the attack. The spot looks decent, but with another corner having exposed turnbuckles it might have looked niftier to hit the move there. From that point on Rhino never fully recovers even though he almost scores a three count shortly thereafter. Rhino then gets distracted trying to revive the ref who has suffered a bump and combined with a run-in has enough keeping him occupied that he doesn’t notice the chair that Yano wraps around his head.
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