WWE 305 LIVE: WALTER! Mastiff! Bronson! Dain!

Killian Dain vs. Bronson Reed NXT 2/26/20 - SKIPPABLE

ER: This was some pretty dry big man wrestling. It had cool moves that might make for a decent highlight reel, but both of these guys were having a constant contest to see who could be worse at getting into position for moves, and I think Dain is somehow still the worst at it. Dain puts in no effort whatsoever to make it look like Reed is naturally stringing offense, he clearly looks like someone trying to make Reed look as bad as possible by getting to their marks way too early. Watch the sequence where Reed hits a back suplex, and Dain casually crawls into the corner and sets his head against the turnbuckle, eyes watching Reed the entire time to make it clear that he's waiting for Reed. And after Dain takes that hip attack, he just stands up and walks calmly to the position he needs to be in for the next piece of offense. My god Dain is trash. Earlier he hangs Reed out to dry, making Reed drape himself over the middle rope while he took an age to hit a legdrop. Reed wasn't tons better, making constant eye contact with Dain as he scooches into position to take Dain's Vader bomb, but Dain is arguably the worst on the entire roster at this kind of thing. So there may be a highlight video of this, where you can see Reed hitting a nice tope, Reed throwing a suplex, Dain landing a couple sentons and a suplex, and that will all look good. Once you see how every single one of those things was so lazily set up, none of it looks good.


WALTER vs. Dave Mastiff NXT UK 3/5/20 - VERY GOOD

ER: I keep waiting for these UK bog beasts to have an undeniable banger, but keep falling short. Still, I liked a lot of what they did here. The whole match was basically Mastiff throwing every piece of offense at WALTER, splatting him all around the ring. It's cool how little offense WALTER got, really beyond a few big chops, a running dropkick, and the big powerbomb finish, this was all about WALTER either gaining an advantage by dodging Mastiff or not dodging and getting squished. WALTER went for the powerbomb early and wound up with Mastiff plopped on his chest. WALTER got squished with a cannonball, a cool rolling senton, a regular ol' fat guy senton, and generously threw himself into a German suplex (the suplex really felt like it was 95% WALTER). But the match was also about Mastiff being able to survive as long as he did because of big WALTER misses, like a big missed splash and a sidestepped dropkick. Mastiff tired himself throwing out everything he had, misses and all, and by the time WALTER hit that powerbomb he was toast. The strength of the match was some of WALTER's selling, the way he would curl up or drag himself to the ropes after getting squished, and I love how he fell over after hitting the match ending powerbomb. I have no doubt that WALTER could easily powerbomb Mastiff, but it was one of several things he did that made Mastiff feel like a bigger deal than he looked.


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