Final Standings
| Los Ingobernables de Japon (EVIL and SANADA) | 20 pts. |
| Guerrillas of Destiny (Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa) | 20 pts. |
| Tomohiro Ishii and Yano Toru | 18 pts. |
| Killer Elite Squad (Lance Archer and Davey Boy Smith Jr.) | 18 pts. |
| Michael Elgin and Jeff Cobb | 16 pts. |
| Zack Sabre Jr. and Taichi | 16 pts. |
| Juice Robinson and David Finlay | 16 pts. |
| Best Friends (Chuckie T and Beretta) | 14 pts. |
| Minoru Suzuki and Takashi Iizuka | 10 pts. |
| Hangman Page and Yujiro Takahashi | 10 pts. |
| Hiroyoshi Tenzan and Satoshi Kojima | 10 pts. |
| Togi Makabe and Toa Henare | 8 pts. |
| Yuji Nagata and Manabu Nakanishi | 6 pts. |
| Ayato Yoshida and Shota Umino | 0 pts. |
After an exhausting month-long tour, and around 170 matches,The World Tag League came to an end on December 9th with a victory for the Los Ingobernables de Japon team of EVIL and SANADA, which made them back-to-back winners of the tournament. They defeated Guerrillas of Destiny in a decent, if over-long, final match to set up a Wrestle Kingdom match for the IWGP Tag Team Championship, although post-match The Young Bucks managed to insert themselves into the match on January 4th. EVIL and SANADA managed to survive the GOD super powerbomb, and hit Darkness Falls followed by a moonsault to defeat the reigning IWGP Tag Team Champions.
The final standings in the tournament didn’t contain too many surprises. Near the top of the tournament standings you had a lot of the big names in the tag team division, including LIJ, GOD, KES, Ishii and Yano, FinJuice, and the less regular tag teams of Cobb and Elgin and ZSJ and Taichi. Dangerous Tekkers (ZSJ and Taichi) became one of the best things about this year’s World Tag League, and their match against fellow Suzuki-gun members Minoru Suzuki and Takashi Iizuka was excellent. Best Friends finished lower than I expected, but that was largely down to the storyline that ran through the tournament of Chuckie T attacking opponents with weapons and getting disqualified. There was a lot of debate over whether this is part of angle that there is a Bullet Club mole in CHAOS (something that Jay White has stated in the past), or a Best Friends breakup angle, but whatever the case is it proved to be an interesting wrinkle in the tournament and allowed Best Friends to take some losses without looking too weak. I don’t trust New Japan to necessarily handle a mental health angle with a lot of tact, if that’s what they are going for, but it should be interesting to see what comes from this.
In the lower half of the standings came the weaker teams in the tournament. Suzuki and Iizuka was never likely to do much given that Iizuka is by far the weakest member of Suzuki-gun, while Hangman Page and Yujiro got to have some good victories over Cobb and Elgin and Dangerous Tekkers without really troubling the top half of the standings. Page continued to impress, and Yujiro actually put his working boots on for a lot of the tournament, even if I would have liked to see Page and Chase Owens get a run in the tournament. TenCozy and Nagata and Nakanishi provided some good nostalgia pops – particularly when Tenzan hit a moonsault and Nakanishi managed to hit a dive over the ropes to the outside – without anyone really expecting them to be contenders, and Makabe and Henare improved on their 2017 showing of 2 points in the tournament. Finally, Umino and Yoshida brought all the fire of a Young Lion tag team desperate to prove themselves, but finished with the usual result of 0 points. Yoshida obviously came in with a decent level of hype and is in a sort of limbo between Young Lion and the full roster, but Umino again demonstrated that he’s going to be an excellent addition to the full roster. He must be getting close to going on his excursion at this point.
The World Tag League final, which was held in Iwate (an interesting choice as it’s a good few hours north of Tokyo, which is where most of the big show finals are held) also saw some noteworthy matches setting up angles for Wrestle Kingdom. Will Ospreay returned from a rib injury to defeat Taichi in a really good NEVER Openweight Title number one contender match. This match had originally beens cheduled for Power Struggle in early November, when Taichi was still the NEVERChampion, but Ospreay’s injury meant that the match was changed to Taichi vs.Hirooki Goto and led to Taichi dropping the title. Although I’m disappointed that we never got a Taichi vs. Ospreay title match, this somewhat made up for it. Taichi seems to get a very polarising reaction amongst fans online, but this was a strong showing by both men, and I like the fact that they’re now playing up the Openweight part of the NEVER division. Following that match Hirooki Goto defended the NEVER Title against Kota Ibushi, in a decent match that ended with Ibushi defeating Goto to win the NEVER title for the first time in his career. This match didn’t quite live up to their G1 Climax showing, but it was still a solid bout, and the crowd popped for Ibushi after he hit the Kamigoye for the win. This meant that the rumoured Ibushi vs. Ospreay match for the NEVER Title at Wrestle Kingdom can now go forward, and that match should be very good.
The show also featured an eight-man tag team showdown between Hiroshi Tanahashi, Ryusuke Taguchi, Finlay, and Juice and Kenny Omega, The Young Bucks, and Marty Scurll. Kenny had been conspicuous by his absence from the World Tag League, but he returned here to continue the build-up to their Wrestle Kingdom main event. Thousands of characters on Twitter have been spent dissecting the IWGP Heavyweight Title match, so I’ll simply say that the build-up so far has been flat and this match didn’t do much for my excitement for January 4th. Hopefully the Road to Tokyo Dome shows will help add something to this feud. Kenny’s team picked up the win after The Young Bucks hit an Indytaker on Taguchi.
Looking back on this year’s World Tag League, I think the overall level of quality was up from 2017. It has been mentioned on various forums that part of the reason for that might be that there were more participants this year who were fighting to for recognition and so were more motivated to perform on every show. Teams like Dangerous Tekkers, FinJuice, and Umino and Yoshida all exceeded the pre-tournament expectations. They also threw in some quite major storyline elements, including the first ever team between Kazuchika Okada and Hiroshi Tanahashi, who took on Jay White and Bullet Club. However, I was not a fan of the format of the tournament this year, particularly the number of matches and shows, which felt like a real slog to get through. I have to admit that I didn’t watch every single match in the tournament, just in order to be able to keep up. New Japan usually does tournament wrestling very well, but adding in a long World Tag League to Best of the Super Juniors, G1 Climax, and Super Junior Tag Team Tournament just feels like too much. I would prefer to see a return to the two block format of previous years for the 2019 WTL. Still, overall a strong tournament with a surprising amount of good matches and storyline progression for those who had the time to follow it.
