WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak FINAL 2019 Catch-Up

ER: This is exciting, because it is a post that signifies the successful completion of a project. Last year we set out to review every match from Lorcan, Gallagher, and Gulak, and we did. We started halfway through 2019, and I've been going back and filling in the blanks with matches I missed, and this is the last of them. It's been one of my favorite regular projects, just because I love watching these three work. I have obviously been continuing it in 2020, but so far we haven't even seen Gallagher on TV in 2020


Oney Lorcan vs. Brian Kendrick vs. Akira Tozawa vs. Ariya Daivari vs. Mike Kanellis 205 Live 5/21/19

ER: This was disjointed, bad, too long, poorly laid out, poorly agented, made none of the 5 looks any better than the other 4, and was home to everything I dislike about multiman wrestling. WWE is usually a fed that can throw together an interesting main event multiman, and this was a far shout from that. Two minutes into a 16 minutes match, all 5 participants were lying on the mat as if they had all been through a real war. I knew then that this was going to be awful. There were stretches of this match where (I believe) every single participant completely disappeared for 5 minutes at a time. After the first two minutes with everyone chaotically fighting for space in the ring, we went through 80% of the match worked as a series of singles matches, three men either lying out of the way tired or off camera selling, and the layout just flat out stunk. There was no rhythm to this, just a bad series of match vignettes with nobody really standing out. Kendrick probably came off the best of anyone, and the early part of the match with Kendrick locking in and fighting for the Captains Hook, then fighting his balance while fighting out of a Kanellis sub, before getting pushed off into a Lorcan uppercut, was probably the most interesting sequence here. Lorcan hits a flip dive, he and Daivari repeat a couple things from their singles match a month prior (which I might not have noticed had I not watched them the same day), Daivari takes a big thankless splat bump to the floor and gets his ear busted open, Kanellis hits a nice spinebuster and takes a freaking German suplex on the ring apron (in this match! Why??), but this whole thing felt like it added up to nothing and kept purposely resetting itself. The finish was a total mockery, as we had spent 15 minutes with many of these guys lying dead on the mat, and you can tell the second they all get the go home signal, as they all spring to their feet and start do-si-doing into each other's finishers. I hated it.

Drew Gulak vs. Akira Tozawa 205 Live 6/4/19

ER: Gulak had been on a one month NXT sojourn feuding with Kushida, and he made the best possible return to 205 Live by saving the crowd and myself from a show opening Noam Dar match. Gulak jumps Dar in the aisle and spends the next couple minutes beating Dar around ringside, never to be seen again on 205 Live. The match itself doesn't quite catch fire, but these two are familiar opponents and are going to do plenty of things great. The pace was a little slow, which I don't mind, but I don't think the early slow pace was really needed. I still liked how we got a story about Tozawa going for his big babyface spots, and Gulak having every one of them scouted. I really loved Tozawa inching to lock on his octopus hold, with Gulak just tearing free and throwing Tozawa off him. Gulak tosses Tozawa around a few times, with a super memorable snap strength gutwrench and a bone rattling superplex that leads right to the finish. They worked some fun bits around Gulak running away from a tope, then running away from a pescado, before getting nailed with the cannonball. Tozawa's later tope is a great highspot, and Gulak plays it really well so it looks like it blindsides him, Tozawa crashing so hard into him that Gulak flies backwards over the announce table. Tozawa sent Gulak back so fast that it looked like Gulak was sucked out of an airplane. The fans got quiet at points but did stay into Tozawa, really getting behind his last big offense run and staying and responding to his fireman's carry squat lift routine. I think they have a better match in them. They've had several singles matches that all happened on 205 Live, during that couple year stretch when I wasn't watching it, so that great match might be out there as I type this.

Oney Lorcan vs. Ariya Daivari 205 Live 6/4/19

ER: These two matched up in late April, and it's notable how much cooler they look in this match than they looked just six weeks before. Daivari was wearing a black tank top then, and here he's just in black pants with a newly shaved head and stitches and a scar on his ear; Lorcan has grown in his beard and has the great black and gold gear. I like both of these guys (I mean we have a whole feature about Lorcan) but I don't think they have a good long match against each other. They don't have natural chemistry, so even when I like what both are doing it doesn't always work within the match. Lorcan's big comebacks are the best part of the match, with his great uppercuts always playing big to crowds, he also throws Daivari with a cool northern lights and then looks to rip his head off with one of his all time best blockbusters. There is something satisfying about Daivari's simple attack, as I'd much rather see someone using swinging neckbreakers and hard lariats than what makes up the offense of most main carders, but they get just too much time to tell their story. Now, what sets them apart from others - and I think this is very important - is that they had a 100% completely different match than they had six weeks prior. True, I didn't love this match or that match, but I appreciated that the main set pieces of that prior match didn't show up in any way in the return bout. That's cool, and it's an extra step they didn't really need to take. This match had cool parts to it, of course it was going to, but it felt like it should have been more. If they had stuck with the opening minute viciousness of Lorcan, where he ripped at Daivari's fresh stitches, this could have been special. They went a different way, and I like that they're still trying for that thing that will really work.