New Finlay Friday: FINLAY!! CANNONBALL!! FINLAY!! ICE TRAIN!! FINLAY!! ALEX WRIGHT!!

Finlay vs. Alex Wright CWA 8/10/93-GREAT

MD: Really good Finlay performance here as he led Wright through the paces, including beating on his back for almost the whole match. He'd hit these dead on elbow smashes to the back that you never see guys use but that looked absolutely brutal. Wright's job was to hit big athletic comebacks and then get cut off. He wasn't nearly as good as that as he'd be in a year or two, and given what Finlay gave him to work with, he had a long way to go with drawing sympathy as well. Honestly, having his dad out there on the floor probably got the crowd into it as much as anything else. I loved Finlay's tunnel-vision here, and it paid off all the way to the finish and post-match challenges.

PAS: This was pretty great stuff, Wright was only 18 in this match, and Finlay is the perfect opponent for a green son of a legend with some flash. I imagine he would have had a great Eddie Colon match in 1999 or a nifty Mike Von Erich match in 1984. Finlay bumps big for the fancy stuff Wright does, really putting over being flummoxed by a couple of big dropkicks and backflips. Of course when it is time to get down to brass tacks, Finlay is Finlay. He really punishes the kid, mangling his back with these sick elbows to the spine, hurling him over the top rope, dropping him with short clotheslines. He was really methodical, pounding on the lower back brutally until he gets the tape out with a chiropractic Boston Crab. Cool match and totally made me want to see Steven Wright pay him back.


Finlay vs. Ice Train CWA 11/23/94-FUN

MD: Solid Finlay work, getting Ice Train through this one. That meant a shine where he stooged and bumped and stalled and got crashed into. When he took over it was due to a missed corner charge, and some really great stomach-targeting. Whenever he was able to cut Train off or take back over, it was because he went back to the mid-section. The thing with Finlay is that it's enjoyable just watching how he moves. There was a point where he dropped down and out of the ring to take Ice Train with him and beat on him out there and the way he just compacted himself down and out while still hanging on to Ice Train showed a mastery of his body and his ring positioning and how to control his opponent. With a lot of wrestlers, there's no point in even looking for stuff like that but with Finlay it's all over the place where you wouldn't necessarily expect it. The match ended a little silly with Ice Train having a hissy fit and crushing the ref and Finlay together, but I enjoyed the deep care heel Finlay had for the ref after the DQ win.

ER: Ice Train always comes off like such wasted potential, but Finlay is literally the perfect opponent to drag something good out of wasted potential. Train is a guy who looks like he would hit harder than he does, but Finlay is someone who knows how to sell any level of strike and make them look punishing. He builds the match around a couple of Train power spots and one of his strengths (charging avalanches) and it's the kind of performance you could easily see Bret Hart having with Ice Train. I view Finlay and Hart fairly similarly, as they're both strong at using their established tools to make any level of opponent shine, so you see similar recognizable things match to match and you see the different ways they use them to showcase different sized and different skilled opponents. Finlay throws a lot of energy at Ice Train's gut, dropping a great elbowdrop to the stomach (how often do you see an elbowdrop to the stomach? It's almost always the chest but this is clearly thrown intentionally at the stomach), and a bombs away, and even manages to drag Train down with an abdominal stretch (which he turns into a big twisting grab of Train's muzzle, a trick he used a couple times). I like the way Finlay deflated and dropped down to a knee to put over being hit by a Train, especially loved his sell after an avalanche. I kind of liked the silly finish, with Ice Train getting upset with the ref and tossing him into Finlay in the corner before flattening them both with an avalanche. These two weren't really around a the same time in WCW, yet matched up a ton of times in Germany. For all the times they fought I would have expected a bigger performance from Ice Train, but Finlay is always going to be the constant in a match like this. 

PAS: This was fun. Both guys have nice forearm smashes, and this was a match built almost entirely around forearm smashes, kind of less violent version of a Wahoo vs. Flair chop battle. Ice Train's big selling point as a wrestler is his barrel chest, and Finlay just winged shots into that chest, and Train used it as a battering ram nicely.  Certainly could have had a bit more flash, and I really though the rounds system hurt this match's momentum, but I was happy I watched it. 

Finlay vs. Cannonball Grizzly CWA 11/96-GREAT 

MD: People undervalue how over News was with the crowds in 1991. They don't overstate his lack of presence in the ring that year. Somewhere over the next four or five, and with a convenient heel character, he did work it out. Finlay's working face here, and he takes a big chunk of his early, maybe more than you'd like. His go to way to hurt big guys seems to be the nerve hold, into a nosepull, into a forearm to the top of the head, and it's pure Fit. Lots of corner charges here, including some missed, but they all look great. Fit damages his own shoulder on one (by that point of the match, he really needed to throw himself at Grizzly to hurt him) and shortly thereafter, is able to dodge a splash, not by rolling over but almost by contracting himself into a small space to cover for the shoulder pain. Great and unsurprising attention to detail. They matched up well enough that it's a shame this didn't go a little longer.

PAS Grizzly really looks like Vader in this HH, and this feels like what a Vader versus Finlay match would look like.  I loved Finlay using double stomps, perfect way to fight a guy that looks like a crash pad. Grizzly looked really good in this, doing a somersault counter to an armbar, awesome looking enziguiri and a great bump over the top rope. Pretty wild he never got a WCW run during this period. Really should have at least gotten a Master P Army spot. Finlay was great as you would expect, coming off like a real tough guy and taking a pretty nasty shoulder bump. You could tell he was excited to have such a big guy in front of him to pound on.

ER: I really liked this, thought they made an excellent pairing, and came away super impressed with Grizzly's selling for Finlay. Now, sometimes guys are just forced to sell for Finlay, but this was Grizzly selling damage very well and selling strikes excellently. I dug how he came away holding his mouth after Finlay rammed it into the turnbuckles, and at this point he had finally gotten good at stagger selling, nicely rocking and swaying as Finlay threw shots or flew at him with big lariats. They both really focused on wrecking torsos, with Grizzly aiming to crushing Finlay with an elbowdrop dearly, Finlay leaping right onto his chest with a couple double stomps, Grizzly just standing on Finlay's chest while gloating. Finlay just hopping on Grizz with both feet is like what I used to do to my dad when he would get home from work and lie down on the couch, just climb up the back of the couch and leap onto his big belly. The missed shots lead to our spectacular bumps, with Finlay taking his great shoulder to ringpost bump and Grizzly not only taking a big bump through the ropes to the floor, but then a HUGE bump on a missed corner charge, basically doing the fastest fat man combo Jerry/Slaughter bump. We don't get a ton of Finlay vs. big fat guys, and I loved every bit of this.


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE FINLAY