WWECW Workrate Report, 7/21/09

1. Yoshi Tatsu vs. William Regal

This starts out being all about Tatsu eating a beating, with Regal dishing elbows all over, kicks to the chest, uppercuts, big suplexes (standing exploder and delayed butterfly), straightjacket choke...and also all about Striker being an annoying prick on commentary ("the modified Kanemoto strong style of Tatsu" "this is just the opportunity Piston Honda needs" seriously fuuuuuuuck you). This is basically 4 straight minutes of Regal stiffing Tatsu until Tatsu hits a nice Pele kick, and then a whole barrage of other kicks that were too fast for Regal. Regal catches Tatsu up top, and I *LOVE* Regal pulling his kneepad down before he goes for his running knee finish. I thought Greg Valentine moving his shin guard before he used the figure 4 was cool when I was a kid, and that kinda shit is still awesome. But Regal gets caught with a high kick running in and Tatsu gets the surprise win. Real fun match.

2. Ezekiel Jackson vs. Mike Williams

45 seconds, 3 moves, but they were all pretty great. Williams runs into a big boot, Zeke runs him over with a giant clothesline, and then spikes him with his brutal standing urunage. Kozlov comes in afterwards to hit his chokeslam/spinebuster on poor, poor Mike Williams.

3. Goldust vs. Shelton Benjamin

Man Goldust has a beautiful right hand. I think I like the uppercut more than the overhand but I can't decide. Shelton pusses out of taking the butt butt and we'll see if I enjoy 3 straight Benjamin matches in 3 straight weeks of TV. Shelton does do a cool neckbreaker cravate so I can get behind that. Goldust has such a cool run of offense with his snap powerslam, nasty kick to a prone Shelton, hard atomic drop and an honest to god proper bulldog. All of his classic offense sure makes a lot of Benjamin's indied up offense look ridiculous. Who started the idiotic trend where moves involve pulling or dropping a guy onto your own knee? All that shit looks stupid. Benjamin does some sort of springboard...something...into a Goldust uppercut, but it looked really bad. Shelton did his springboard and just landed on his feet in front of Dustin, as if he were supposed to miss a move, but he just jumped in and landed flat on his feet. He then does one of those horrible bits of Marufuji offense where he flings himself over the top to the floor while at the same time kinda sorta vaguely pulling Goldust neck first into the top rope. It just looked like Goldust's face bounced off the ropes while Benjamin went flying out of control and spilled nastily onto the floor. I'm not sure what viewer would get the impression that Goldust got the worst of that move. And then Benjamin wins with his "grab guy and pull them down to the mat, landing much harder than my opponent". Boy this was really bad. Really awesome Dustin offense interspersed with him having to get into position for Benjamin's weird masochistic offense. The whole thing just looked like Benjamin taking moves, and then doing moves to himself. Crowd was dead and confused. So Benjamin had two glorious weeks, and EVERY SINGLE THING that made him cool those last couple weeks was completely absent here. It's really hard to put into words how detrimental he was to this match.

4. Tyler Reks vs. Paul Burchill

I gotta root for my boy Reks here, now that he is a resident of my little 7,000 population town of Cotati, CA. If you see a tall jacked dude with dreadlocks down at Oliver's Market, the odds are favorable that it's Tyler Reks. This was apparently Reks' TV debut. And as much as I want to root for Reks here, this match is a pretty incredible match to showcase how great Burchill had gotten before being released. He has these cool punches to Reks' chest, really made Reks duck on some missed clotheslines that would have just leveled Reks, awesome running double knee spot in the corner, super high bump on a backdrop, etc. He even made the chinlock sequence look good as he lied down with it and really made it look like he was choking the life out of Reks. Reks' offense at least tries to be clever, but it all lands pretty soft. Nothing he did was bad in context, it just really didn't have much oomph. Any time a guy his size does springboard dropkicks and springboard crossbodies it can't help but look impressive, but I found myself being more impressed by his ability than the actual moves. Still the match was the proper length and peaked at the right spots, so all in all this was good.


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