The G1 is upon us, praise be. I'm much more excited for this year's than I was last year, both blocks have a lot of quality matches sprinkled throughout and, I might be in the minority here but I actually think the winner is actually LESS obvious than last year simply due to the fact that I think there's more potential winners this time around. So I'm pretty excited overall and I'm sure you all are as well.
One thing I am hoping for this year, and I've said this since probably 2022 when it started to become a running theme, is that the matches need to be longer imo. I know that a lot of people actually seem to prefer shorter matches and I get that, I'm not suggesting every match should be 20+ minutes by any means. However, when it comes to the big matches I would like to see them have a bit more time on average to really get going to that level we used to get in the 2015-2021 era of G1 tournaments.
There's still been some great matches in the past few, particularly the knockouts and of course the G1 final itself still delivers every year, but they seem to be the only matches that are given enough time to get into the classic G1 belter territory 9 times out of 10. Sometimes 15 minutes IS enough to still have a crazy good match and some matches do work better that way, but in general I get a bit annoyed at match length in recent years.
One example that really bugged me last year was Shingo Takagi vs Gabe Kidd – 13 minutes. I was really disappointed with that to be honest. There are plenty of other examples but that one really puzzled me. Like, if Takeshita and Takagi get 12 minutes again like they did at Wrestle Kingdom I'll be very disappointed. Hopefully we see a return to the main events/semi main events being in the 18-25 minute range more often this year because there are SO many potential MOTY candidates that deserve it (especially in B Block). That's just my opinion though, I much prefer longer New Japan matches in general but I know its a bit of a hot topic for some people so you might disagree.
by SubstantialStill1431