NXT UK Worth Watching: Wolfe vs. Dragunov No DQ

Alexander Wolfe vs. Ilja Dragunov NXT UK 11/16/19 (Aired 1/2/20) (Ep. #74)

ER: Dragunov is a sincere goofball, and in a No DQ match there are abundant opportunities to make a ton of faces while acting like you're charging into battle. All of that starts when Ilja pulls a kendo stick out from under the ring and then holds it aloft like the world's dorkiest Beastmaster. He gets in the ring and levels the cane at Wolfe as if anyone in wrestling has felt threatened by a cane over the past 20 years, and that's when we get something I didn't expect: Wolfe disarms Ilja of that cane so quickly and efficiently that he looks like the type of man who says "look I don't want any trouble" moments before leaving 14 moaning broken bodies in his wake. Wolfe made this match cool, and he was a real savage with that cane. He challenges Ilja to pick up the cane and when Ilja foolishly takes the bait Wolfe kicks him right in the face, hits a disgusting cobra clutch neckbreaker using the cane to choke Ilja, throwing the back of Ilja's head into his knee. Wolfe jams the cane into Ilja's face and chokes him with it, and Ilja shows a ton of bruises on his neck and body early. 

Wolfe throws a chair off Ilja's face to knock him off the top rope (and almost hits himself in the face on the rebound) and then  hits a wild death valley driver off the apron. Ilja kicks out of some pretty big stuff, and the match was hurt a bit because you knew there was zero chance that Wolfe was going to beat Dragunov, so the bigger the moves got the more you knew they would wind up with Ilja back in control moments later. But that still gives us great stuff like Ilja piling a ton of chairs into the ring only to get tossed onto them with a sick release German, and then spiked vertically on the chairs with a DDT. Wolfe even gets to torture him with those chairs: slamming him throat first with the edge of the chair and smashing his fingers. Obviously, no matter how many ugly horrified faces Ilja made while holding his mangled hands in front of his eyes, you knew he was going to quickly put this thing to bed, and that's fine. We got another great Alexander Wolfe match, the clearly coolest member of Imperium. 

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