New Japan announces the top matches for the Cow Palace

Originally published at https://www.postwrestling.com/2018/06/10/new-japan-announces-the-top-matches-for-the-cow-palace/

New Japan Pro Wrestling has announced the top matches for the G-1 special event on Saturday, July 7th at the Cow Palace in San Francisco with the following matches announced at the press conference:
*Kenny Omega vs. Cody for the IWGP heavyweight title
*The Young Bucks vs. EVIL & Sanada for the IWGP tag titles
*Kazuchika Okada & Will Ospreay vs. Tetsuya Naito & Bushi
*Jay White vs. Juice Robinson for the United States title

There will also be three Kizuna Road cards on June 17th, 18th, and 19th and they will be announcing the G1 participants, blocks, and main events over the course of those three events.

The June 17th card will be headlined by Michael Elgin vs. Hirooki Goto for the NEVER Openweight title and the June 18th card will feature Hiromu Takahashi taking on El Desperado for the IWGP junior heavyweight title.

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It’ll be interesting to see how ticket sales for the Cow Palace go now that the card has several matches advertised. Interesting as well to see neither Jericho or Rey are listed for the show right now.

I’m surprised they’re giving Elgin a main event spot. That’ll go over well.

Looking forward to seeing BUSHI in a high profile spot. He gets left behind, and he’s so solid.

I loved when Naito talked about how important Bushi was to him and to LIJ recently. I give Naito a lot of credit as he is clearly the stud of LIJ but does everything he can to give the other guys plenty of spotlight.

I’m not shocked to see Jericho off the card - I really do not think he will wrestle in the US for them and I understand that. Rey being off is a surprise because I did think that’d be the make-up for him missing the earlier show this year. Plus with the number of matches they should want to get to with Rey - I would have expected him to be on the Cow Palace show, All In, maybe one more show before the end of the year, and then the blow off at WK before he is back in the Royal Rumble. It’ll be a real shame if he doesn’t get 2/3 singles matches in NJPW before going to 205 Live.

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I can kind of see a story where New Japan are trying to get Jericho to defend his title but he is refusing to come at times. Don’t think they want to overdo Jericho too much, use him in special attractions and really build his next challenger.

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