If you didn’t catch episode one, welcome to 31 Days of Deathmatches. This is an advent calendar-style countdown to Halloween offering you a door of deliciously gory wrestling per day. Our trip to the spookiest day of the year will take us around the world and through time. This will chronicle some of the most significant deathmatches throughout the years but will mostly consist of my absolute favourite barbed wire bouts and glass shattering matches. Without further ado, let’s open the next door.
We return to my favourite promotion, BJW, for one of the most wince inducing matches I had watched this year. This was one of the matches I saw where even I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This was the penultimate day of the 2019 edition of the Deathmatch Survivor Tournament. This is a round robin tournament held each year to showcase the best of the best in the deathmatch field. The match I am going to reference in particular is a knock out round bout between Masashi Takeda and Abdullah Kobayashi. Takeda was the top dog of the company and former death match champion whilst Kobayashi was the veteran fighter with a lot to prove in his age.

The match saw Takeda win but also featured some spots of unbelievable brutality that even I was unprepared for. Takeda was merciless against Kobayashi, throwing him into all sorts of brutal bits of furniture. These included chair shots to the head and a deadly dive onto a nail board. The after-effects of this match were visible the event after as Kobayashi was bruised and battered from the experience. It was a pretty cruel match to have been entered into, proving just how willing Kobayashi is to sacrifice himself for the company. Kobayashi was tortured in a match with light tubes, his own pitchfork contraption and the aforementioned nail board.
Abdullah Kobayashi vs Masashi Takeda from Endless Survivor 2018 pic.twitter.com/5v8Yfhk6ev
— Alex (Daichi Hashimoto Fan) (@trinidadchainz) August 9, 2019
This is one of those examples I can turn to when I feel like a match may have gone too far. I enjoyed it personally and the highlights of this match were aired before the finals when they were showing Takeda’s and Isami Kodaka’s route to the finals. It was still wince-inducing then. That is the power of deathmatches. You can enjoy them, become numb to them then one match comes along and brings back the shock you felt at the start. This may not always be a good thing, as day 13 showed accidents happen and things can get very messy. But in this one, Kobayashi was as alright as he could be after the bumps he took. Plus, he looked like an absolute badass throughout. I mean could you work the next night after a match like that?
Come back tomorrow for your next deathmatch treat!
Images courtesy of trinidadchainz (twitter) and PuroresuArtt (twitter) and Lege2K (twitter)