WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 5/3-5/9/20

Jack Gallagher vs. Akira Tozawa NXT 5/6

ER: Pretty meager stuff right here. These two have matched up several times over the past couple of years and this was easily the weakest of those matches, but their other matches at least had some time. This was under 4 minutes, and not one of Tozawa's best performances. He seemed off for a lot of this, never quite grabbing Gallagher the right way, missing beats on sequences, not landing his actual offense flush. He lets Gallagher slip on a samoan drop, flies too far past him on his top rope senton, loses his grip and makes Gallagher basically DDT himself on the apron, and some of his strikes had the accuracy of someone throwing their their eyes closed. Gallagher did his best, took a killer folding bump on a German suplex, and had a cool sequence where he held onto Tozawa's right arm like arm kept working offense from that short distance, showing a few cool things he could quickly pull off all while holding that arm, just by using it as leverage. But Gallagher wasn't going to be able to turn this into a good match.


Drew Gulak/Daniel Bryan/Otis vs. Cesaro/Baron Corbin/Shinsuke Nakamura WWE Smackdown 5/8

ER: This ruled, the kind of fast paced action trading match that it seems like WWE used to be really great at, until the focus switched to fast paced phony reversal wrestling. This was fast paced wrestling with consequences. Moves weren't thrown with the intention of being reversed, moves were thrown to hit (and did!) and thrown with such enthusiasm that the reversals were due to misses leaving guys exposed. I really loved the style of constant partner tradeoffs, where you could have big moments with several different dance partner combinations without feeling like anything was being shrugged off. Gulak has been on a real tear in 2020, and he was the major standout in this match for me, showing how great he is at taking unique bumps from different offense. Early on he took a great uppercut from Corbin and bumped it really cool, with a diagonal staggered bump instead of the played out back bump; later he was shoved off the top by Nakamura headlong into a Cesaro uppercut, and after that ate a kick to the back of the head from Nakamura. He took all of this different offense with bumps that read more like Futen than WWE to me, and it added to the feel of the match greatly.

I think Gulak was the standout, but everyone brought something different and never felt like those awful modern wrestling trios where it feels like everyone is trying to wrestle the exact same style instead of just playing to individual strengths. Otis had some cool stiff arm lariats and always seemed to be getting Gulak out of jams by running his belly into people, Bryan played more crowd control and would come in with a nice dropkick to the knee or a big running knee of his own, Cesaro was an excellent foil for Gulak (including taking a bunch of killer Gulak strikes and stomps in the corner) and I loved how he powered up and out of a Gulak chickenwing/jaw hold, and I like the way Corbin came in and got the win after others put in far more work. It feels like they're actually building some sort of Gulak/Corbin program that will lead to a dominant Gulak win, but that's just me buying into old school logical feud building.

PAS: I enjoyed this, although I think it fell short of a MOTY list level match. These quarantine matches for the most part are failures, and in the few cases that it has worked, it is when the wrestlers have acknowledged that they need to work differently. I usually enjoy Otis, but him working all of his crowd response comedy spots to silence was rough to watch. That worm elbow in an empty arena, oof. It is crazy that Gulak has somehow gotten to the main event of WWE TV, and he was the star of this match, taking a big beating and locking in some cool moves. Corbin is a nice foil too, and his big finishing slam looked great. I think I needed another couple of momentum shifts at the end, I do like this kind of WWE spots trios, but it is tough to build that momentum in silence.