Be mine the faith whose living flame 

Shall pierce the clouds and banish night.

-Arthur Casell Parker, “Faith”

Sareee and Nanae Takahashi made you believe.

In the purity of their hostility. In their wicked intentions. In the profound gravity of their battle for the Marigold World Championship.

The red-clad champion faced off against the accomplished vet in her second defense of the Marigold crown at Winter Wonderful Fight on December 13. By way of ruthlessness and precision, Sareee and Takahashi created a propulsive championship bout that instantly ranks as one of Marigold’s best. 

While these two wrestlers aren’t arch rivals by any stretch, they have met several times before this showdown in Shinjuku FACE.

Sareee and Takahashi have wrestled each other as part of opposite tag teams going back over 10 years ago in Diana and Sendai Girls. Their more high-stakes bouts, though, came just a few years ago. In 2020, Sareee and Yoshiko knocked off Takahashi and Ryo Mizunami for the SEAdLINNNG Tag Team Championships. Takahashi later teamed up with Arisa Nakajima to win the belts back in 2021.

Their rivalry boasts few singles bouts, but the lack of definitive endings to those matches feed into the tension of their most recent fight. 

The Sun Goddess and Takahashi wrestled to a time-limit draw in SEAdLINNNG in 2017, and more recently, their meeting in the DREAM STAR tournament this September resulted in a 15-minute draw.

That was arguably the most thrilling match of the whole event, a brutal and grand collision. Its lack of winner and simmering intensity made it feel like a movie that unsubtly leaves the door for a sequel.

Add to that mix the bad blood caused by Sareee injuring Nanae Takahashi’s neck with an uranage in a match in November. That pushed back this clash for Marigold’s top title line and increased the personal nature of it. Takahashi was in search of both her pound of flesh as well as championship gold.

You could tell how fierce this was going to be by its first few seconds alone.

After a snarl-filled staredown between them, Sareee and Takahashi started pulling at each other’s hair, tangling themselves together, with the referee struggling to separate them. That energy carried through everything moving forward. Their slaps sang of viciousness. Their headlocks bore the worst of intentions.

Neither champion nor challenger pulled out anything new from a bag of tricks. The familiar tropes of a slugfest played out in front of the Shinjuku FACE crowd, but every element of it was done with such great force and emotion that it powerfully reverberated throughout the match. The wrestlers smashed each other with forearms, threw unrelenting punches, held tight and desperate to every submission. 

The ring served as a church and the match celebrated and worshipped the act of violence. 

The energy of the action built as it went along, churning and growing. Sareee’s dive off a stage in the audience. Her biting her way out of a sleeper hold. Takahashi’s nasty lariats. These all served as big, emphatic moments that elevated the action.

The core of the story, though, was Takahashi working over Sareee’s leg. She dropkicked the champ’s limb and continually went back to it, making it a weak point. This focus on the arm isn’t overdone or forgotten about halfway through. It’s infused deftly, a coda in the symphony. 

Takahashi punishing that arm by submission and strike both showed off the challenger’s viciousness and Sareee’s toughness. Sareee’s suffering grows as the match goes on, but her courage surges to match, her face expressive, her emotions poignant. 

Sareee comes off as both a sympathetic warrior with a lot of heart and as a damn boss. 

At one point, she pulls two folding chairs into the ring, sits in one, and invites Takahashi to sit in the other. Takahashi accepts, and the two women start slapping the shit out of each other.

Later on, after enduring Takahashi’s worst, Sareee fires back with a mad fury of headbutts. She is alight with rage.

Both of them exude boldness, chests puffed up. Chutzpah abound. 

And that, like everything playing out between those ropes, is drenched in authenticity. Whether Sareee and Takahashi are grappling on the met, limbs around limbs in a pile of coiled flesh, or they are beating on each other like mallets on a drum, they do so with such undeniable verisimilitude. The end result is a match that compels, that sticks with you.

It will surely shake up any in-progress Match of the Year lists and instantly enriches the short history of the Marigold World Championship.

This will not be Sareee and Takahashi’s last meeting. While this didn’t finish with another draw, it did have a less-than-definitive ending. Takahashi didn’t appear to give up. The referee called for the bell while the challenger was trapped in Sareee’s sleeper hold for a long time. A judgement call that a never-say-die fighter like Nanae will not like. 

That leaves the door open for another sequel. It’s an easy excuse for the story to progress. 

Takahashi plans to retire next May. Before she rides off, though, she must go after Sareee once more, to prove who is the ultimate predator among them, to inflame our faith again.