A new interview with the G1 Climax 33 winner Tetsuya Naito is now available on the New Japan Pro-Wrestling website in which numerous topics were discussed including his huge G1 Climax 33 win that earned him a shot at the IWGP World Heavyweight Champion SANADA at Wrestle Kingdom 18 on January 4, 2024.
Tetsuya Naito was asked about his semifinal opponent Will Ospreay, who he lost to twice earlier in the year, and how he felt having Ospreay between him and getting to the final:
I had a feeling in my gut that might happen when I saw how the tournament was structured this year, so when it was official, it was like ‘yep, knew it’. It’s tough facing someone you’ve lost twice to, but at the same time there was this feeling, if I could get past him, then I’d have all that momentum. In the league part of the tournament it was Zack (Sabre Jr.) and in the elimination phase it was Ospreay that was like that for me.
It was then brought up that going into the semifinal, Ospreay was on fire having defeated Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada in a one month span.
No doubt. He has to be the best athlete in the business, right? It’s really hard to imagine him losing in most situations. And for him to have the connection he does in a country that’s foreign to his own is really something.
Naito was then asked about facing Kazuchika Okada in the finals of the G1:
Obviously I knew just before I went out to face Ospreay that it would be Okada in the final, so I had that in the back of my mind the moment I won. To be honest, I hadn’t really imagined that it would be the two of us in that final. We hadn’t faced one another in that scenario before, so I wanted it to be Okada, but I didn’t think that it would be him. Facing one another in the finals of the G1 Climax after having gone through a month of these grueling matches, compared to having a title match that we’d been preparing for for a whole tour, it was definitely a different scenario. It added a freshness for sure. Singles title or not, he’s been the top guy for the last few years now, and the guy that the company has been pushing for a decade now. It’s funny, but I got a wave of nostalgia when we were heading into the final. We roomed together when he was a Young Lion, and we’d hop on my bike and go fishing together back in the day. All that came back to me- I guess that’s what facing him on this stage that’s so important to NJPW as a whole does to you.
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