Zack Sabre Jr. Wins NJPW G1 Climax 34
Zack Sabre Jr. defeated Yota Tsuji in the G1 Climax finals
One half of the Wrestle Kingdom main event next year is official.. well, so we thought, as Zack Sabre Jr is the latest victor of NJPW’s G1 Climax. It looks as though he will instead be claiming his title match early at the King Of Pro Wrestling show in October, as he deemed January too long to wait. Traditionally, G1 Climax winners have gone to the Tokyo Dome to challenge for gold, but ZSJ fancies competing at the Ryogoku Sumo Hall instead.
Today hosted the finals of G1 Climax 34 as Zack Sabre Jr. took on Yota Tsuji in a match which promised a brand new G1 winner. On the road to the final, Zack Sabre Jr finished top of Block A, finishing above the likes of Shingo Takagi, Gabe Kidd, Shota Umino, Great-O-Khan, amongst others. In the semi finals yesterday he defeated Shingo Takagi in a hard fought match in the semi finals. Yota Tsuji finished second in Block B, needing to go through a play-off round by defeating Konosuke Takeshita to reach the semi finals where he overcame David Finlay to take his place in the final with ZSJ.
The match saw ZSJ trying to gain the advantage with his submission style and mat-based techniques, but Tsuji worked hard to avoid and used a more hard-hitting style to work his way through the contest. During the bout, ZSJ worked on the arm of Tsuji, which proved to be a theme throughout and it allowed ZSJ to even their inequality in power. In the final stretch, the pair were hitting big moves to various near-falls. Tsuji attempted a Gene Blaster, which was reversed by ZSJ into a pinfall attempt which was kicked out by Tsuji. ZSJ followed up with various pinfall attempts, but his opponent evaded until ZSJ finally wrapped up all his limbs in a submission move.
In the end, Tsuji submitted and ZSJ won the bout and therefore won the G1 Climax, going on to challenge for the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship. The current champion is Tetsuya Naito.