It Could Be Said #5 What's The Matter With Ospreay?
A look at why Ospreay's recent title victory hasn't been greeted with the same acclaim it would have received last year
There’s a version of the past year where April 4th 2021 was the capstone of a triumphant year for British wrestling which began with Scotland’s Drew McInytre becoming Great Britain’s first ever WWF/WWE world champion and ended with Essex’s Will Ospreay becoming the first person from the British Isles to be recognised by New Japan as their world champion.
Of course, the past twelve months have felt anything other than a triumph for British wrestling. The novel coronavirus forced McInytre’s victory to be moved from a raucous open-air stadium, to the suffocating silence of a deserted gym. Nearly a year later, New Japan was still struggling to present engaging wrestling shows given restrictions on both the number of fans allowed into a venue, and how those present can engage with the action. More than that, Ospreay’s victory was defined to many people by the allegations made against him and other British wrestlers during Speaking Out, and the seemingly sudden downturn in the quality of New Japan’s events.
A year really is a long time in a pandemic.
Sliding Doors
To me, one of the things that encourages me to brood on how my perception of Ospreay’s victory has changed, is that I genuinely think his elevation was delayed by coronavirus. Before the pandemic he had just dropped his junior heavyweight title in a rare semi-main event for the juniors at Wrestle Kingdom, announced his permanent move up in weight by besting Zack Sabre Jr in an acclaimed two-match intercontinental series for the Revolution Pro-Wrestling British Heavyweight Title, and was about to face Shingo Takagi in the opening round of the New Japan Cup.
Given that SHO would defeat Takagi in the opening round of the revised and diminished tournament, it seems fair to assume that Ospreay would have done the same. Maybe all that New Japan had in mind was for Ospreay to challenge for the NEVER Title, but I doubt that. At the time, my read of the original bracket was that it was building to either Ospreay or Sanada facing Kazuchika Okada in the final. And to me, it feels like New Japan have been trying to get back to what the pandemic stopped them delivering. A belief that began with the randomness of Evil’s heel turn at the start of the delayed New Japan Cup 2020, given he had not been portrayed as a serious singles force since his brief feud with Chris Jericho in 2018, and was the only member of LIJ to not have recently hinted at challenging Naito’s authority. He would later stick out like a sore thumb in The Bullet Club, a stable that was meant primarily for “gaijin” heels.
But that belief was only strengthened when New Japan ran the exact same angle with Ospreay in the G1, right down to the weird start-stop-start dynamic where they randomly signalled their newfound heel edge early on, only to revert back to being a babyface, only to suddenly welcome outside interference in their final match to cement their hitherto seemingly aborted heel turn. And where EVIL had Dick Togo, Ospreay had Great O-Khan. Soon after The Dominator’s emergence, Dave Meltzer reported that the original idea was for Jeff Cobb to be Ospreay’s henchmen. At the time that seemed absurd, given Ospreay was rolling out a British-themed stable, and unlike O-Khan, Cobb had no real links to the UK. And yet not only did Cobb join United Empire but so did his somewhat-compatriot Aaron Henare.
The way to make sense of this is that originally there was going to be no United Empire. Ospreay was going to finally succumb to his good friends Jay White and El Phantasmo’s (plus in Gedo the booker who first brought him to New Japan) calls for him to follow in his heroes Prince Devitt and AJ Styles’s footsteps (wrestlers whose moves he used to defeat Zack Sabre Jr just a month earlier), and join The Bullet Club by enlisting their support in defeating Okada to win the New Japan Cup. Jeff Cobb would have been his bodyguard, because unlike O-Khan, he was due to be in Japan in March 2020, and would fit perfectly in a faction with a long Pacific Islander tradition.
So whilst I agree with everything that my PWTORCH colleagues Alan4L, Rich Fann and Sean Radican said about the forced and cartoonish nature of Ospreay’s gammon faction, my gut is that’s primarily a consequence of trying to slap on a Union Jack to hide where a Skull and Guns should’ve been. The lack of involvement of the Bullet Club also meant that the turn on Okada seemed sudden, with Ospreay having no framework for his new heel character.
Seems far-fetched? Maybe. But New Japan has form with slotting people into pre-planned storylines, even when it’s unfair to them or the wider product, the best example of which is Jay White defending the IWGP Heavyweight Title at Madison Square Garden because they wanted Okada to defeat a gaijin champion even after Kenny Omega had left. Likewise, New Japan had clearly toyed with the idea of turning Ospreay heel in early 2019, when he was credited with giving Ibushi a concussion, and would play the psychotic in his matches throughout the first quarter. And as his push accelerated in February 2020, the news leaked that we would get a sequel to Royal Quest after all.
The problem of course, is that much has changed since then.
The Elephant In The Room
Obviously, it’s impossible to talk about Will Ospreay without talking about Speaking Out. I’ve been very open about my unhappiness with his behaviour towards Pollyanna, both in several podcasts and on Twitter. It is a complicated situation, where both the passage of time and the notoriously poor recordkeeping of British promotions, make proving Ospreay was innocent or guilty of the worst accusations almost impossible. Indeed even last summer I repeatedly said that even the now infamous IWL emails were not evidence that Ospreay had directly instructed promotions to not book Pollyanna.
But likewise we had plenty of evidence that he had hurt Pollyanna’s career. The publicly available facts are that as the biggest star in Britwres he publicly lashed out at someone who had accused his friend of raping her, kept criticising her to wrestlers and journalists behind the scenes, and continued booking her alleged rapist in his promotions. In my opinion it’s not enough to justify banning him from wrestling forever, but it’s certainly enough to warrant criticism and want promotions to censure him.
I do agree with what POST Wrestling and GRAPPL’s Benson Richards said to me last October; that the attention Ospreay received was disproportionate to the accusations levied at him, given some of the people still wrestling in WWE despite allegations of sexual and physical abuse having been made against them. There are however clear reasons for that.
Some of it is ironically a sign of Ospreay’s success. Whilst you can argue that some people accused in Speaking Out were bigger stars than Ospreay, no one has achieved as much since being accused as Ospreay has. That newsworthiness means that the memories of last summer’s bitter arguments, keep being stirred up again on a recurring basis. Likewise it’s impressive that a working class guy from Essex has made Dave Meltzer one of his biggest fans, but Meltzer constantly rushing to attack Ospreay’s critics or issue baseless acquittals, only further riles Ospreay’s critics, myself included.
Ospreay’s reputation within Britwres was also overdue a correction. He had escaped the implosion of Lucha Forever despite wrestlers, fans and venues being left out of pocket. He pushed a kickstarter for a film about his life, which long before Speaking Out had clearly betrayed its sponsors by not delivering the content at the previously promised time. He had repeatedly walked away from weird misogynistic episodes on the grounds that he was a young, naïve idiot despite simultaneously being billed as a locker-room leader in not just Britain but also Australia and Japan. And when Speaking Out broke, many men in Britwres, myself included, felt culpable for not engaging with accusations that women had raised about male wrestlers before last summer.
Likewise Speaking Out has lessen the worth of his role as the leader of Britwres. Given the sclerotic mixture of denial, hatreds and debt that is left of Britwres, it’s easy to forget that as recently as 2019 it had a real sense of community. Having been a wrestling backwater for so long, it was a genuine source of wonder to longtime wrestling fans in Britain that what was long WWE’s second biggest market was at long last punching its weight. It felt that the success of the likes of Ospreay was not just their own reward, but was helping proselytise on behalf of the entire scene. But with Britwres being a dirty word to even people in Britain, few are looking to Ospreay (or anyone else for that matter), to spread the word.
It has obviously not helped everyone move on that Will Ospreay has increasingly used his new heel character to troll those who criticised him last summer. As I’ve said before, there’s a lot of fans that whilst critical of Ospeay’s past behaviour are willing to put it past them and move on with enjoying his performances, something Ospreay’s determination to keep punching the bruise has made increasingly impossible.
But I think it’s too easy to blame Speaking Out for the issues that Ospreay’s elevation to the main event is facing.
Struggling To Secure Elevation
It has been widely reported both before and after Speaking Out that Will Ospreay struggles with his mental health, and for once the toll those struggles were taking were visible, with him clearly not looking himself at either the “Epic Encounters” shows he did for Revolution Pro Wrestling or the G-1 Climax. His hair was unkempt, his face haggard, his promos nonsensical and he had bulked up beyond all reason. He looked and sounded like a modern-day homage to an 80s WWF wrestler. Ospreay is a savant in the ring, so he was still capable of having very good matches, but I’d argue he had even lost half a step there too.
Thankfully, Ospreay is in a better place this year. He seems to have lost some of the muscle he packed on during lockdown, and looks years younger for it. Likewise, his promos are at least coherent and he seems to have got his full quickness back. And yet, even those who were not overly critical of him last year, are still not rating his matches at the same level as his best work in 2019 or early 2020.
It would be fair to acknowledge that Ospreay’s ring style, with its emphasis on high-flying and risk-taking, is particularly ill-suited to the coronavirus era. We’ve seen enough pandemic era wrestling to understand that more basic wrestling with an emphasis on full-contact striking or grappling overcomes the challenges posed by lack of crowd reactions. Much like Test Cricket, such “grapplefuck” wrestlers had pre-pandemic experience of performing in front of silence. Whether it be Ospreay in front of crowds legally restricted to polite clapping or WWE ladder matches in front of the cyberpunk dystopia that is the Thunderdome, we’ve been reminded that big spots rely on the live crowd going wild to sell them.
But the pandemic also came just after he made a big change in his role in New Japan – the announcement of his move to heavyweight. And I would argue that some of the problems Ospreay has faced are due to him struggling to decide what tweaks he will make to reflect his move up in weight. Back in 2019 he added the Hidden Blade to reflect his more impactful striking, and the Stormbreaker to reflect his increased strength and ability to hit power moves, but outside these big spots he tends to drift back to his comfort zone of looking to hit flashy high-flying moves. Whilst no one wants to ground one of the best flyers in the world, he surely needs to follow in the footsteps of (say) Kenny Omega who quickly moved from New Japan’s junior heavyweight division to headlining cards as a heavyweight by making his striking and power moves an integral part of his matches. That he’s still clearly getting to grips with wrestling as a heel, has only made matters worse.
Of course, Omega got to learn how to be a heavyweight headliner as Intercontinental Champion, an opportunity no longer open to Ospreay due to New Japan’s increasingly confused booking.
There You Going Again
Gedo is undoubtedly a Hall of Fame-worthy booker. His work with New Japan Pro Wrestling not only revived Japanese wrestling from its absolute nadir, but also seeded crucial elements of the Britwres and American indie wrestling boom. But no booker is perfect, and there has been a growing problem with how he books new heels, the championship and main events.
The call that Gedo will ultimately be revered for will be him rushing the title onto Okada, just six weeks after he returned from excursion and turned heel after defeating Yoshi-Hashi. He would quickly lose the title back to Hiroshi Tanahashi, after only a couple of perfunctory defences, but he had been established as a genuine headliner. It’s a well that New Japan have returned to, time after time, with the promotion seeking to kick-start heel runs of Tetsuya Naito, AJ Styles, Jay White and EVIL by having similarly throwaway initial title reigns. But in the same way WWE is foolish to think they can book everyone like The Rock or Daniel Bryan, New Japan is deluded to think what worked for Okada will work for everyone else.
Worse, the constant use of their world title as a platform for new or struggling heels to workshop the kinks of their character, has gradually damaged the prestige of the title. It may sound controversial, but traditionally a promotion develops their heel characters so that they are over enough to justify putting the world title on them, and only then do they pull the triger. Gedo instead relies on his one weird trick, which is rapidly falling victim to diminishing returns. Jay White may now be accepted as an elite talent, but it was a long eighteen months before his persona and physique reached the level of his push. EVIL meanwhile is less over after his brief run with the title last summer. Now Ospreay is in the same position, with the title thrown at him to kickstart a heel turn that has confused Japanese fans and annoyed British ones. It’s lazy, stupid booking.
But the problems with the championship go further, and can be best demonstrated by Okada and Takagi being gifted title shots by the champion for no good reason. The New Japan world title situation has clearly been a mess since the promotion struggled to agree a direction with Kenny Omega in the second half of 2018. But the problems really date back to the decision to not have Naito regain the IWGP Heavyweight Title at Wrestle Kingdom 12, when he was at the peak of his popularity and still young enough to go at full pelt in the ring. The extra seven months meant that Okada was left with no more mountains to climb having had (in storyline) the greatest ever IWGP Heavyweight Title reign before his thirtieth birthday. Likewise, using the Intercontinental Title to hide Naito’s lack of purpose after he once again choked on the biggest stage, robbed a formerly prestigious title of its unique identity and purpose, so setting the stage for the recent title unification. New Japan increasingly feels like early 90s WWF or WCW, lacking fresh challengers to justify another reign from the legends who had already achieved so much, let alone get new champions over.
That sense we have seen this all before is only added to by New Japan having become addicted to lengthy main events that take forever to get to the obligatory fast finishing sequence. It was a formula which made sense when you wrestlers such as Tanahashi and Okada whose strength is their psychology and storytelling, but it doesn’t showcase the strengths of more all-action wrestlers. Both Naito and Ibushi would have had more successful title reigns if they had been allowed to work shorter, faster matches that placed the emphasis on action rather than storytelling. Instead they awkwardly tried to fit inside a mould shaped by very different performers. That made them seem like inferior versions of Okada or Tanahashi, rather than the generational superstars they really are. It’s hard to see how Ospreay won’t suffer the same experience in this reign, which will likely end before he’s had chance to celebrate two months as champion, as New Japan prepares for Okada to be their figurehead for any involvement in the Olympic festivities.
What should worry Will Ospreay, is that even Naito, with all his charisma and rabid fanbase, was damaged by Gedo’s recent booking of the world title. And Kota Ibushi quickly precided over an era where attendance was imploding despite all his skill and athleticism. His rise to the top of British and Japanese wrestling has seen him demonstrate both exceptional talent and unnerving timing. What he has never demonstrated is sound judgement. If he is to fix the technical issues in his wrestling, overhaul his persona and navigate the problems inherent in headlining a declining company he will need all the wisdom he can muster. That he spent his first days as champion mimicking Connor McGregor, challenging Drew McIntyre and once again acting weirdly controlling towards Stardom once again suggests there’s very little of that at his disposal.
On The Next It Could Be Wrestling….
We will be looking in detail at the recent All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry Into Wrestling in Great Britain. If you’re a Pro-Wrestling Torch Subscriber you can listen to my interview with the Co-Chair of the APPG on Wrestling Alex Davies-Jones MP. Alternatively you can (for free) listen to the press conference they held yesterday You can also read my 23 tweet thread on my initial thoughts about the report.