This is part of the “Stardom’s Favorite Daughter—Icon or Illusion?” watch series, which you can find here.

While not the first time Mayu Iwatani is asked to work a main event, or asked for a match of significant length, it is the first time where she’s asked to have more than a minor role in either scenario.

But also, shame on these four for thinking they had 20+ minutes of material.

For the most spart, I’ll skip the specifics. The whole thing is a slog, and you can tie most of that back to this featuring two deeply uninteresting wrestlers, the rookie version of Mayu Iwatani, and Nanae Takahashi—who, for the life of me, I cannot get into. It’s hard for me to say what this was a build for either, it’s fairly obvious even at this point that Mayu is eating the pin and that Takahashi is furthering her position atop the promotions card, and although one could infer that this is for the Nanae/Bito pairing, as Nanae is crowned first Red Belt champion in two months time with a win over Bito, that’s the pairing that gets explored the least here. Hard for me not to conclude this is another thing just thrown together for the sake of beefing up the card, but we’re still early in this series, so I’ll give the young promotion the benefit of the doubt.

As for Mayu, this is the first time for me she shows any real flashes, and for my money’s worth, she’s hardly the worst worker in this borefest. Most of the interesting stuff comes with Iwatani as the babyface in peril—if you can call it that, as both Bito and Aikawa hardly commit to working heel—with Mayu getting worked over with some kicks from Aikawa and some basic tag offense. It’s not the most detail oriented selling, but it is largely approached correctly, though a lot of those positives likely come from Mayu forcing her opponents to slow down simply because she was legitimately tired. Non-accidentally wise, there are little bits and pieces where Mayu’s bumping does help some pretty soft looking offense look like it has some impact, specifically a moment early where Mayu takes a scoop slam on her side and sort of just crumbles, which, kind of neat, while her more famous ragdoll bumps we see later in her career do look to have some sort of origin in the way she whips back when taking one of Bito’s suplex’s down the finishing stretch. Again, only tidbits to praise, as some of the uglier stuff from early Mayu like the general tendency to rush when tagging in or that awkward looking hurricanrana pin make an appearance, even so, you can hardly blame this on her when she’s so early in her career and that best work her two opponents do are against her partner.

Not essential, like most things from the first years of Iwatani’s career, but just barely noteworthy—even if for mostly negative reasons—enough to crack the watch & review list.

Rating: Bad