ROH TV Workrate Report: 12/13/10

Opening Davey Richards promo. They show upcoming still photo line-ups of KOW vs. American Wolves and Davey vs. Roderick, and a lot of these guys are pointing at the camera during their photos, which I don't really understand. Davey talks for awhile and the crowd looks bored. There's a guy right up front that looks like a cross between Stephen King and Tim Heidecker's character Jan from The Only Married News Team. As the promo goes on, the camera slowly pans up this man, and the higher it pans the more androgynous it becomes. We start at man, then slowly we start to question ourselves, and by the time we're at just glasses and up we're convinced it's Janet Reno. Davey says "shit" and he can't even swear very well. It just wasn't very convincing. Like when Michael Cole says "dammit" and it sounds like an alien that's just trying to replicate human swearing to fit in to society. Roddy and Truth Martini are out and Truth's look just screams indie wrestling, but I liked Strong here. "How will it feel to let down your dead grandfather?" My grandpa is awesome. He took me to baseball games and gave me candy and once got thrown out of one of my Little League games for heckling other kids. I would want to win an indie wrestling title for him.

1. Daizee Haize vs. Taaeyleor Hendrix is up and I like Haze's drop toe hold. Decent chops by Haze and this is basically an extended squash and it just kinda gets sloppier as it goes on. Some parts seemed to be in slow motion

Papa Briscoe is awwwwesome. I want to see him get his hands on Hagadorn. Shane's dad obviously never gave him a proper whooping, so Papa Briscoe is gonna do it for him!! YES!!

2. Kory Chavis vs. Kevin Steen is OK as they both slam into each other with hard shoulderblocks, and Chavis throws a decent right hand and a great back elbow. Chavis takes a hotshot like a man. Steen has a crummy kick to the stomach. Chavis goes for a rad looking rana and Steen plants him with a powerbomb, F-5, and package piledriver. Done. Chavis really made Steen look devastating here, but also played up a couple weaknesses that Generico might be able to exploit.

3. Aries/Strong is starting at the halfway mark of the hour and I'm not really in the mood for a 30 minute match, but maybe they'll pleasantly surprise me. Aries is real nice on the mat and has a cool arm takeover that Strong squirms out of. Aries has nice punches and the feeling out process is engaging. Truth Martini gets on the apron and he is just lousy and so damn bush league. But he makes me regret typiong that as he TOTALLY redeems himself by bumping SO damn awesome from an Aries punch. With his bug-eye glasses he looked like a fly cruising at full speed into a spider web and violently springing back and forth.

Strong gains control from there and hits a brutal chop in the corner, charges but Aries gets a nice sunset flip. Strong starts throwing Aries around and Aries eats offense so fucking good and this match is getting awesome. Crowd really seems into Aries here, too. The match starts getting insane with Aries reversing a backbreaker into a DDT and going crazy on offense, hitting a crazy twisting body press and a quebrada, then a missile dropkick inside. These guys are working off each other really well here and the match just keeps building in a nice way. Strong hits some backbreakers, Aries gets some roll-ups, Aries gets the crucifix bomb and a particularly nasty brainbuster, and then NAILS the 450.

And Strong gets his boot under the ropes. I'll be honest, I really thought that was the end. Of course that sounds crazy that they would change the title and completely derail the Davey storyline less than a week before the iPPV, but it made me doubt my rational thinking. "Maybe it was announced as a non-title match and I didn't notice?" Awesome nearfall. The final 2-3 minutes of this are just red hot and the crowd is going insane. Strong hits this unreal vertical suplex, but as he's falling back he gets his knees up and turns it into an unbelievably painful looking backbreaker. After that he just hits his running flying kick for the pin.

I don't always like Strong, but I always love Aries and these two really worked together great here. The match never turned into spotty overkill and they worked kickouts really smartly so that they never felt ridiculous. Instead of just kicking out of everything they smartly laid stuff out near ropes so they could do some feeble rope breaks and it just worked great. Aries is so killer with all his transitions, coming across really natural in his execution. A guy like Davey Richards always seems like he's thinking of what move was planned next, getting those Polar Express dead eyes. Aries just is so great at rolling with things, giving some things a nice "sloppy" look. Sloppy in a good way. Not every move needs to be executed perfectly, the same way every time. This isn't a video game, and Aries gets that.

I gotta give ROH a lot of credit here. This had to have been filmed 4-6 weeks prior to airing, and they managed to build to the PPV really nicely. If I was actually around that weekend, I probably would have ordered it, and I have only ordered two PPVs in the last 10 years. I mean shoot, they got me interested in finding out who Sara Del Ray's mystery partner was! Great job. Now I just hope that the TV show remains good with no Necro or Aries.