El Phantasmo and Hikuleo Were Surprised By Length of World Tag League Final

In an interview with Fightful, El Phantasmo and Hikuelo spoke about their World Tag League final with Bishamon, which went forty minutes. The two teams will face each other again at NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 18 for the IWGP and NJPW STRONG tag team titles. Here are highlights:

El Phantasmo on the length of the match: “To be honest, I don’t think any of us knew it was going to go 40. Everybody talked about it, but this tag league, it was like 18 shows in 21 days. Of those off days, they were like eight hour bus rides to Kagoshima or taking a [shinkansen] to Nagoya. It was awful. The worst part was, half that—not even half, like 80% of the tour—was house shows. These giant empty arenas that are half empty with the house lights on. It was a grind. I know Goto and YOSHI-HASHI were banged up, we were both banged up. It was that exhaustion of the finals that dragged that time out. I don’t think we could have poured our heart and soul more into that match.”

Hikuleo on how he felt about the match: “I think it was just like ELP, how he said it. Everything led to this, where both teams were just tired, just exhausted and we knew it was the last show. Even when we walked into the arena, it was different from the rest of the arenas we’d been to. It was bigger. There were more seats.”

El Phantasmo on the rematch: “Yeah, I’m more excited for the Tokyo Dome than I am the finals. Obviously, but it’s also like the restrictions and restraints, the pressure backstage to not go long, to respect the main event. Sanada and Naito are selling tickets, it’s not us. We want to have a great match, but it would be taking away from those guys if we went 40. But then that’s also exciting to us, when we watch our matches back from the Korakuen show and then we watch our finals back, we can kinda see what tag team moves we hit that worked well and what didn’t, counters we can do. This might be a 10 minute sprint, it might be a 15 minute technical masterpiece. You don’t know what kind of match it is. But we’re excited to do something different, knowing the first two times we did lock up with Bishamon, they were pretty good. This is like the tie breaker, the third match of the series. For us teaming together so recently to go up against those guys, who are the most dominate tag team in wrestling right now—not even just New Japan—but they’ve been so good for so long. It’s gonna be fun to go into Wrestle Kingdom against them. I was just watching Goto and Shibata from like Wrestle Kingdom 11 or 12 or something like. That was awesome, man. Goto was so good. Then YOSHI-HASHI is not like the goofball that everyone keeps saying he is. YOSHI-HASHI chops harder than anybody else I’ve been chopped by. Like, he clears Ospreay’s chops. Ospreay does a huge wind up and hits as hard as he can. But, dude, YOSHI-HASHI has fuckin’ bear paws or something that every chop he does is insane.”