One of the best finals in the last few championships

Murakami's ability to break the cadence and surprise his opponent is unreal. Immediately the instructions on winning a duel from Musashi's Book of Five Rings comes to mind! Great match, I am glad I got out of the bed and watched it live. How much do you think height of Murakami had to do with the flow of the match? Ando is a tall kendoka himself and in previous matches it seemed to me that quite a lot of his movement was centered around this advantage.

The experienced kendoka that’s commentating is Kyoshi Hachidan Hirao sensei

I would speculate that Ando lost confidence after the first men waza that Murakami scored on him. The match that Ando had with Yano, Ando performed kaeshi dou which was a little slow because the waza started at Ando’s dobari section of his shinai but was able to pull it off for ippon. Looks like Ando tried again with kaeshi dou with Murakami but the timing of Murakami’s men was irregular and that disrupted Ando’s confidence. Ando did a lot of panic waza,especially the two attempts on tsuki waza and the missed debana kote

thank you for the video!

As ever, thank you so much!

Fantastic Video & Comments !! Thank you Sensei 👍👍

Hey Andy, thanks for the awesome commentary. To me it looks like Murakami’s first Men was a waza that is a fake Tsuki and then Men. It has this timing and effect on the opponent.

Great review. Could you please do it more often.

I thought Murakami was so super composed through this. His waza were fantastic of course but his defence was absolutely impeccable.

i got a tourney tommorow, your comments are really going to be handy

I agree, Murakami totally played it cool and picked his time to strike. Ando may have let pressure gotten to him (unfortunately because I wanted him to win 😢)

Guess if you follow the police scene, seeing Murakami senshuu in the final woudln't come as a surprise. He's fought Ando multiple times and has beaten him previously, once even by leg sweep into dou. It can be trippy watching the team police tournaments, because there are multiple Murakami's on the Ehime team (twins ?). And then there is his brother, Murakami Raita.

I would suspect these know each other as there was not a lot of testing each other at the start as I saw in some other matches.

The other commentator sounded a bit like Miyazaki Masahiro Sensei to me. Could be way off base though.

Watch the semi-final between Murakami vs. Ikeda. Ikeda made at least three what I thought were good "Man". But he was not given points. Can You dissect this match for a better understanding of kendo?

How many waza in kendo ?

Jo-ha-kyū en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo-ha-ky%C5%AB