On the most recent New Japan Road show the Guerillas Of Destiny (Tama Tonga & Tanga Loa) defended the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championships against the superteam of Kota Ibushi and Hiroshi Tanahashi. In a somewhat surprising results Tanahashi and Ibushi walked away with the gold.
Golden. Ace.#njroad pic.twitter.com/H8nwUfbYrB
— Ross W Berman IV (4K+BLU-RAY+DIGITAL) (@RossWBermanIV) February 21, 2020
The loss means that GOD drop the belts without registering a single successful defense after reclaiming the titles on the New Beginnings USA tour from David Finlay & Juice Robinson.
NJPW’s tag division has needed some fresh juice for some time now and most fans have requested that they form teams of singles stars to fill out the tag division, similar to what other Japanese companies like All Japan Pro Wrestling and World Wonder Ring Stardom, who have made their tag team titles legitimate drawing titles. With Tanahashi and Ibushi currently not having anything to do alone, since both suffered high profile defeats at Wrestle Kingdom the popular duo made a great choice to be tag team champions as it makes the titles more prestigious and ensures that neither man falls into the irrelevancy of multi-man tags.
The win marks Ibushi’s first tag team title run in NJPW, in DDT he was a five-time KO-D Tag Team Champion but hadn’t held tag team gold since 2015. For Hiroshi Tanahashi, this will be his third tun as tag team champion in NJPW with his last coming in 2005 when he and Shinsuke Nakamura held the titles. He has also held the CMLL and Noah tag titles with Jyushin Liger and Yuji Nagata respectively.
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