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TAKA Michinoku (2018)

72 PTS.



TAKA Michinoku has never been a quiet man but in 2018, he became one of the best promos in NJPW with his patented COME ON OVER HERE!!!! ring introduction for his Suzuki-gun protege Zack Sabre Jr. Michinoku became the mouthpiece and hypeman for Sabre in 2018 helping lead the young Brit to unforeseen heights.

For Taka himself, well… 2018 wasn’t one to remember. TAKA didn’t win a single match. Not a singles match (he didn’t even wrestler one), in tag matches his teams went 2-20 with TAKA taking every single fall, in trios matches his teams fared better at 5-28 but he took 21 falls and lastly in multi-man matches his teams were 6-16 with TAKA taking… all 16 falls. Only Toa Henare (-68) had a worse fall differential than TAKA who lost 57 falls this year without a single fall to his name.

Five NJPW wrestlers this year had 10 or more total matches and failed to pick up a single fall. Three of them are young lions (Katsuya Kitamura, Yota Tsuji & Yuya Uemura), TAKA and TAKA’s fellow Suzuki-gun-er Takashi Iizuka who failed to score a single fall in 85 total matches.

My favorite pathetic stat of TAKA’s year is his 16 pinfall losses in multi-man matches. No other NJPW wrestler with 10 or more multi-man matches lost each and every pinfall. Even Gedo—FREAKING GEDO—let two of his team’s multi-man pinfalls go to another member of his team. The aforementioned Iizuka was pinned only 4 times in his team’s 13 multi-man losses. The fall man in each of those Iizuka losses: TAKA. TAKA’s teams lost 16 multi-man matches in 2018 and he was pinned in each and every one of them.