Ayumi Kurihara retires.
Honestly, this news did not have the same effect on me as it may have with others. I always found her to be quite competant, but she just never stood out to me. This is odd, as she started her career just as I was living in Japan and subscribed to Samurai Fighting TV and could watch this stuff constantly. Now to hear of her retirement, I wondered if I had missed out on a really good worker.
Let's hear the official news from Dirty Dirty Sheets:
Ayumi seemed to have a lot of fun and let it all out in this match. At one point she gave Aja 8 missile dropkicks in a row (it took 6 to get Kong off of her feet). The match was a fitting way to send off Ayumi and the torch was definitely passed to Mika Iida, who was super impressive here and in her singles match against Ayumi that opened the show.
In honor of the news of her showing during this event (I have yet to see it), I felt I needed to start off by burning the candle at all ends, in a different manner of speaking. Here, I'm going to watch a previous match between Ayumi and Aja Kong and see how things were one of the last times they met:
Not bad! She showed alot of guts there against the much larger "schmo" type of body of Aja Kong.
Here is one of the more recent episodes of Pro-Wrestling WAVE featuring her in order to catch up on things in the joshi world (well, recent as of December, anyway):
Huh. Not enough of Kurihara, though this show seems fun. Moving on...
A match between her and Yuzuiki Aikawa (which is also my first time seeing Aikawa in action):
I left this one impressed by both Kurihara AND Aikawa. Both are excellent with the strikes, and the drama was very high.
Her versus Syuri, a girl whom I've become a BIG fan of as of late:
Again, a great match. Syuri and Kurihara have a very similar gutsy style, and both are fantastic at it.
And here she is taking on joshi legend Mayumi Ozaki in a... um... "dress up wild fight."
Way too much outside interference to really gauge this one, but this was a really fun fight-around-th-arena type of match. A really fun puroresu style brawl. Ozaki is vicious, and Kurihara is aware of this from the begining. Also featuring Dinamite Kansai and Manami Toyota!
In fact, just about the ONLY match I couldn't find was her debut match, as I had hoped to be able to compare her earlier work to her later. If I do find it, I'll add that to this entry as well.
As I promised, I have updated this post. Here are my results: I like her. I really like her now. She has excellent snug looking strikes, and I've always been a fan of that. Not to mention I really dig her fantastic german suplex! All in all I find her move set is really solid.
I'm looking forward to seeing more! As she did alot for Shimmer in the US, I just wish I got into her a bit sooner.
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