AEW Five Fingers of Death: Week of 6/13 - 6/19

AEW Rampage 6/17

Darby Allin vs. Bobby Fish

MD: I'm pretty sure that, having not been super familiar with either of them, I've got more time for singles Fish than for singles O'Reilly. It probably comes down to styles. Fish is more apt to just tear you apart in a corner or toss you around outside while O'Reilly is going to do more stuff. It's not even bad stuff, but it's kind of refreshing to see a guy who will just try to dismantle you instead. It's hard not to appreciate the dragon screws into the guardrails, for instance, as something that'll hurt an opponent three ways at once, even if it's something that probably won't make it into a highlight package. He also had a great bit in the picture in picture where he verbally and tauntingly directed a camera to get in closer to see him punishing Darby. That's the kind of thing you'll see Negro Casas do now and again and not much of anyone else. Darby, meanwhile, and we know this, is unique in the company as someone who takes and takes and takes, has hope spots that are big, devastating, mutually destructive bombs, and then will mount a comeback or sneak a win at any moment. No one else in the company is doing that and it's a company which probably has slightly more sameness than differentiation. That he's able to make it work with huge bumps, visceral selling, and picture perfect precision on his comeback spots makes him a transcendental talent when if any of those things were lacking just a little, he'd end up a guy that was trying too hard. Here it works. Fish took the brunt of the match, survived Darby's big moments of comeback, had some great continuations of one move into the next when the first didn't work, and ultimately got outslicked on a banana peel due to Darby's resilience and technique. Both guys came out of this looking good (though I didn't love O'Reilly's hamming in the post-match).

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AEW Five Fingers of Death: Week of 5/30 - 6/5

AEW Dynamite 6/1

CM Punk/FTR vs. Max Caster/Gunn Club

MD: Obviously, it's hard to watch this one back and not be on the lookout for how Punk is hurt. They really build to him coming in the first time and he's there for the hot tag at the end, so there's not a ton of it but it was a little striking how often he went up to the top in that short time he was in there, a double axehandle to start, the body block back off the ropes, the elbow drop on Caster, the springboard attempt that goes wrong on his way in. The Gunns, Austin especially, with his manic energy, have a lot of potential, but they're not there yet. I've come around on Austin's chop block to take out the legs. The first times I saw it, it felt inadvertent, a move of opportunity that shouldn't come up every match, but now he seems to look for it more, as part of his overarching strategy. He's great at reacting when he knows something is coming, when it's a planned spots, but you never know when the crowd is going to start an ass boys chant and he's not always so great at organically working that in. Punk, on the other hand, old pro that he is, can switch a facial expression or little appeal to the crowd mid-sequence depending on how they're reacting. Most of the match was the heat on Dax, and it was good, with a great cut off to lead into the commercial as Dax knocked two of his opponents out of the ring only to have them rush around to take out Punk and Cash off the apron. The fact he put them in position to do so made it even better. Having Billy to sneak in a punch and Bowens to use the crutch only helped matters. Any issues with the match down the stretch were due to Punk's foot, and the internal feeling in your gut that we'll be missing out on what this pairing might have been the start of.

Matt Hardy/Christian Cage/Darby Allin/Jurassic Express vs. Hikuleo/Young Bucks/ReDragon

MD: This was the homecoming match for the Bucks and was going to showcase them while also theoretically giving a little attention to Hikuleo in advance of Forbidden Door, given that Cole is apparently banged up. It wasn't going to be for me but I thought the structure was generally effective for what they were trying to do. Here, there the sort of shine where everyone got to get their stuff in before the dives were all to set up the transition, by clearing the ring so that you were left with Christian and the Bucks. The most interesting moment in there was Christian interacting with Matt Hardy for a moment. Anyway, it meant that Christian worked as face-in-peril during the commercial which is always where they stick the heat, and even though it was a fairly pro-Bucks crowd, by the end of it, there was a chant for him because he's one of the best traditional babyfaces in the company. I know people are itching for the Express to lose the titles and Christian to turn on Jungle Boy but I've always much preferred Christian as a face and there's about another thirty match-ups I'd like to see him have in the company before such a turn. After the hot tag to Luchasaurus it all broke down like you'd expect, an extended, chaotic finishing stretch leading to the Bucks ascendant. Hikuleo got to show a few things here defensively, jamming the chokeslam attempt, catching a dive, no selling Hardy's slams into the corner, but he didn't do much of anything on offense which seemed like a bit of a missed opportunity. This wasn't anything I was particularly looking forward to but it gave the crowd things that they wanted and had enough good things that it did me no lasting harm.

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2021 Ongoing MOTY List: Danielson vs. Fish

13. Bryan Danielson vs. Bobby Fish AEW Dynamite 10/16

ER: This was the week before we started writing up every single Bryan Danielson match (a man who for a three year stretch not that long ago was working more minutes and more matches than anyone in wrestling) and was the week where we realized we were getting too many weekly TV matches from the best AEW guys and that it should be documented. Danielson is a guy who clearly has fun in matches and has several eras to pull from. This was a throwback to 2009-2010 Danielson, which is probably my least revisited era of Danielson. It's not because of his work specifically, but it was the era of Davey Richards and 35 minute matches and I'm not sure what it would take to get those bumped up my watch list but I'm not there yet. This was a better version of that era, with the excess bloat trimmed and a little more gravity added to heel hooks and kneebars due to the extra 10 years on the joints. Two guys in their mid 40s kicking each other in the hamstrings and bending ankles is almost always cool. They work most of this match around kicks, with missed charges leading to turning around into kicks and every other move punctuated with a kick to the back or leg. 

They work a really cool attack the leg match, but they also don't really put much effort into selling any kind of sustained leg damage over the match. Maybe that is Danielson pulling from his 2001 "sell the arm" era. I don't need a lot of melodramatic 2009 "Ohhhhh my leggggggg" selling and this match gave us that 2009 match with the melodrama snipped out. Danielson's leg took a beating before he started attacking Fish's leg harder, catching Fish in a cool trap leg German suplex before throwing sick dragon screws and wrapping Fish's leg around the post several times. Fish's big offense looked like something that could finish Danielson, and he hits a backdrop driver nasty enough that we could have seen Bobby Fish become the top AEW heel after concussing the legend into retirement. Fish's Falcon Arrow took them halfway across the ring, and things looked chippy as hell when they were heel kicking each other in the eyes and nose while holding heel hooks. Danielson really cuts through the shit for the finish, throwing a bunch of knees before locking in quick tap kneebar that looked like something Fujiwara would have used to punish an impudent student in the 80s. Bobby Fish seemed like a somewhat unnecessary AEW signing and Danielson immediately made him feel like a guy worth having around. 

PAS: I thought this was tremendous. Fish is going to be stuck working workrate tags with the Young Bucks, but this period where he came in and just hit Muay Thai leg kicks and sharp elbows. I thought it was simple and violent, and then when it got bigger it kept the violence and the selling and never went into overkill territory. I loved how Fish paid back the leg capture German suplex with a leg capture backdrop driver later, and if I came into this match not knowing the hierarchy, I would have totally bought his top falcon arrow into the knee bar as a finish. I thought the kneebar duel was one of the best I have seen done in wrestling, and that final ankle pick was sick stuff. This match obviously had a little extraneous stuff which a BattlArts match wouldn't have. But BattlArts is what this reminded me of, which is obviously about as big a compliment as I can give.

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW's Five Fingers of Death Week of 10/25-10/31

A couple of years ago we did weekly posts when the WWE was running cool weekly TV matches with Oney Lorcan, Drew Gulak, Jack Gallagher, and Brian Kendrick. Those guys got buried deep, cancelled, or retired, but we're bringing it back! With AEW running plenty of killer weekly TV matches featuring all-timers Darby Allin, Bryan Danielson, Eddie Kingston, CM Punk, and Dustin Rhodes. We're running it back with a twist!

AEW Dark 10/26 (Taped 10/24)

Eddie Kingston vs. Jack Evans - FUN

PAS: Crazy that these two guys had never had a singles match before considering how long both guys were on the indies. Evans is best known for flips, but he is a world class guy at getting beaten up and he is at Chris Frazier level here, with Kingston caving his chest in with hard chops and twisting him like taffy with the stretch muffler. Evans gets in some spin kicks, and Eddie does some nice nerve selling before putting him away. I think this would have been better in a different time with less of a hierarchy difference, but it was definitely an enjoyable TV match.

MD: Unsurprisingly, this was really good. Good on Jack for being irritating enough to get heat after coming in so flippy and entertaining. To be fair, it's pretty evident that you don't get anything like a normal tourist crowd with these studio shows, which is probably a shame. Still, it went from the studio wrestling comedy with Bryce and Jack's new look to Eddie leaning hard into Jack's kicks very abruptly. Then Evans not just leaned into the chops but ran into them (but in a way that made total sense for his character and the match). Evans bumped himself on his own Michinoku Driver which is on brand. Both of these guys made what their opponent did look amazing throughout. Took two tries for the Saito suplex because that's the house style; everything either takes effort and fails the first time or hits the first time and gets countered the second. It makes sense to have Eddie win with the Stretch Plum since to help (re)-establish it as a weapon for the Danielson match; it let Excalibur point out during that match that he won with it here.

Bryan Danielson vs. Aaron Solo

PAS: Danielson is going to work a long match with pretty much anyone, and throw enough fun stuff in it to make it worth a watch. Solo has a very power plant offensive resume, I liked his double stomp, but otherwise it was very Evan Corageousish. I dug how Danielson interacted with Factory outside the ring, getting clocked by a nice QT Marshall right hand, and taking out Comoroto with a tope. I dig WCW Pro American Dragon, but there are a lot more interesting opponents for him in the enhancement pool.

MD: One good thing about enhancement or JTTS matches is that it lets people actually hit moves that will get countered almost every other bigger match. Most of the time Danielson goes for his corner flurry that ends with the top rope 'rana, some aspect of it gets countered. Here it worked. Basic Flair hitting moves off the top rope occasionally logic. Unfortunately, Solo was intrinsically less interesting than Comoroto or QT as an opponent. The deal with AEW Danielson is he's going to push you to your point of desperation and Solo's point of desperation was pretty mild. The most interesting things here were when QT was getting involved and how Danielson leaned into those late 80s WWF narrative opportunities. Honestly, given it was his first studio match in forever, I'm a little surprised Danielson didn't do anything more experimental here. I suppose that he's saving that for hooded nonsense?

AEW Dynamite 10/27

19. CM Punk vs. Bobby Fish

MD: I'm starting to see some patterns with Punk's matches. Structurally, the first acts are pretty complete, to the point where I could have seen things legitimately ending after the tope and being a nice, little TV match. Instead, that's the predecessor to the heat. The Garcia and Sydal matches had similar moments where they just broke open. In general, Punk looks as smooth and physically sound as I may have ever seen him. I'm guessing it's either due to the time off or all the training he did for MMA and just changing his body and his way of moving. The early knees in the corner looked great. The switch around neckbreaker looked so smooth. The way he's able to adapt to working on one limb while making some of his stuff, like the elbow drop, look as good as ever, is pretty impressive. And that's just the half of it. Punk was getting fans to pop huge for bodyslams. In 2021. Three times. There's so much value to that and so much skill and so much daring and fearlessness to just lean into something simple and trust that the fans will go along with you for the ride. They did, 100%. 

There's value in having matches paced like this on an AEW card to help (re)train the fans. Once this got going, I liked how Fish varied his offense, which made things a little different than the Punk/Garcia match. The hurt leg was often a means to his other shots, which themselves were a means to let him target the leg again. It was a good 65/35 balance between leg shots and cutoffs and other bits of offensive striking. That was obvious and overt. Less obvious was the early transition where he picked Punk up in a fireman's carry and in my head, that was to goad punk into going for the GTS too early. A leap? Maybe but these guys earned plenty of good will here. As for that kickout right on 3 on the GTS? It was the guy's birthday and more importantly it was earned and set up by Punk's inability to get over there quickly and the fact he couldn't cover Fish how he would have wanted. The move was still protected. Fish was protected. No problems there.

PAS: Fish is a guy who had Shawn Michaels NXT and Davey Richards era ROH stink on him for me, but man did I dig him here. He seemed to cut any superfluous nonsense out of his work and focused instead on vicious looking leg kicks and Thai knees. I am going to be into a guy who basically works like Mitsuya Nagai and he was a fun foil for Punk. Fish was really obliterating his leg with those heavy kicks, nearly knocking him over with every shot, and it allowed Punk to do some fun selling with the one legged elbow drop and the delay on the GTS. Punk does look physically great (working once a week will do that for you) and his stuff has way more impact than I remembered. Great match, wasn't really expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. 

ER: Bobby Fish is one of those wrestling weirdos with terrible life opinions who came up in systems entirely surrounded by people with terrible wrestling visions, who also somehow keeps getting better as a wrestler the older he gets. Punk has been out of wrestling the entire time Fish was turning into an old cool limb twister, and somehow Punk has turned into an actual execution guy. Hitting your 40s and suddenly hitting your offense better than you ever have before is a great trick and I sincerely don't think we've seen Punk look this crisp...ever. His strikes look better, and Matt pointed out how the MMA training likely helped that along, but everything he does looks better than it did a decade ago. His attention to detail is different and it makes things like those corner knees more potent, but just the way he works his way through a bit of offense looks so much better. My favorite bit was the final GTS sequence, with Punk fighting Fish up onto his shoulders only to have Fish reverse into a nasty dragon screw that I actually thought would lead to the finish, and I love how Punk fought to get Fish back up into the GTS and struggled through hitting it clean. 

But the match building to that great stretch was filled with cool moments that felt totally different than any CM Punk match I've seen. Fish was mean about targeting Punk's leg, and I flipped out when he hit an inside leg kick that sent Punk's leg shooting off to the side and wide open for a Fish follow up. Fish kicking out at the 3 could have easily felt egregious depending on how it was handled in the immediate aftermath, and it's a tough (and fairly unnecessary) needle to thread. If the timing is even slightly off then the finish looks blown and the entire great match is remembered for that busted finish. But the timing of the entire finish worked really well, with Punk nailing the GTS and then collapsing, making it over to Fish just in time to secure the pin. Great match. 

AEW Rampage 10/29 (Taped 10/27)

1. Eddie Kingston vs. Bryan Danielson - EPIC

PAS: Danielson has been so great working within the match styles of his opponents in AEW, working the world's best Omega match, the best possible Suzuki match, and a great Dustin match just last week. I was interested to see what type of Eddie match he would work, as Eddie can do a bunch of different things.  This was slugfest Kingston, and I love slugfest Kingston. Eddie is willing to deliver a huge beating, and absorb a huge beating, but what really makes him a master at those kind of matches is his selling. So many great little moments of Kingston here: the dazed look after the head kick, the hulking up on the strikes while still feeling every shot, his reaction to arm numbness, just a masterclass of the little things. The big things in this match ruled too: Danielson gets every blood vessel in his chest opened up, and was throwing his kicks just as hard. They named dropped All Japan a bunch on the commentary, but this was more Tenryu than Kawada, just a pair of tough guys standing in the pocket and trying to knock each other out. Loved the escalation here, with the big DDT nearfall being spectacular, and the triangle choke being one of the better finishes of the year. 

MD: What a match. I'd gone back and watched the 2010 match between these two, which was Danielson's first match back on the indies after the Nexus tie incident in WWE and it was striking how forward-driving and aggressive Danielson had been working then, very similar to how he is now. In that match, Kingston just ate all of Danielson's stuff, got beaten around the ring, and threw suplexes as hope spots as the fans got what they wanted on that night.

This is a leaner and somehow meaner Eddie though, and he proved to be the wall that could halt the previously unstoppable freight train that's been AEW Danielson. He stormed to the ring, hovered in the corner waiting for the bell, and came out unleashed. From the first unclean break, it was on, and Kingston felt like the protagonist of this story, first surviving Danielson's kicks to his leg, then surviving the armwork. Every moment here felt uncooperative and earned. I got the sense at one point that Danielson was drawing Kingston in to launch the machine-gun chops in the corner too early so that he could switch it and start on the kicks. The match was full of moments that made you wonder like that.

It really opened up once Eddie hit the belly to back on the floor and then the awesome slingshot belly to back using the turnbuckle. From there, it was unmitigated violence, with Danielson trying to open things back up with a well-timed block or shot, but Kingston just able to chop him down. Danielson had the welts on his chest to prove it and it was all capped with that amazing moment of defiance as he was crumpled in pain. If Suzuki was the first guy to really make Danielson lose his zen coolness, Kingston totally shattered it by forcing that middle finger from the corner. Eddie wasn't going to put him away with those though, which eventually led him to the top rope and the really epic battle that ensued, with Kingston punching up every time he got shrugged off and Danielson doing an amazing sell job, slumping all over the place.

I loved how it was a belly to back (avalanche) which turned the tide again. After that, as they went into the stretch, the amazing moments just flowed in one after the other. The kick to the head. The DDT. The attempt at the armbar. The backfist. Eddie collapsing and Danielson showing him absolutely no mercy by swarming him, and the crowd reacting huge to each and every one of these, despite having already sat through two hours of Dynamite. All of it led to the triangle (yet another finishing move) and that last paralleled moment of defiance by Kingston. Each of these moments was timed exactly as it should be. Just a beautifully balanced, perfectly paced, meaningful, uncooperative, character driven, resonant pro wrestling match.

ER: I loved this so much. I think it's the best Eddie Kingston match since he's been in AEW, and I think it's Bryan Danielson's best match since the best match of 2020, which was Bryan vs. Gulak at Elimination Chamber. The match felt like Tenryu vs. Fujiwara's Greatest Son, and since Tenryu/Fujiwara is a match we really only got to see once, that's a welcome match type. For two guys who wrestled full time at the exact same time for over 30 years, Tenryu and Fujiwara only matched up once in WAR (in 1997, and it ruled). Kingston and Danielson were in the all time great ROH/CZW Cage of Death, and then had a 2010 singles after Bryan's NXT debut but before his NEXUS debut. However, as much as I love both of these guys, I don't think this was a match they could have had in 2010.

Both men have injuries they didn't have a decade ago, Danielson has a family, Kingston is an uncle, both have a new decade of risks they didn't have in 2010, both have considered retirements more than once, and both have now wrestled in front of crowds the size they hadn't seen in 2010. Things are different now, and I don't think they could have done this at any other time. I loved everything about this, and the details have been covered well by Phil and Matt. Kingston turned Danielson's chest into meat and hit some of the greatest strikes of his career: his shotei to knock Danielson off the ropes was better than any palm strike I've ever seen Liger hit, his backfist looked like a murder (and Danielson sold it like he just took a bullet into an open grave), and he threw his suplexes with his whole body. Danielson is an execution guy known for his tight offense, and he worked an impossibly tight match here. The timing and pacing of everything was perfect, and Danielson was kicking Kingston as hard as he was getting chopped. Since Eddie Kingston is nuts, he was taking Danielson's kicks in the most painful way each time, getting kicked across the shins and thighs and then leaning head first into kicks while on his knees. 

The nearfalls down the stretch all felt like worthy finishes, and it's incredibly fun watching two masters peak and peak and peak their rollercoaster and still make each turn more thrilling than the last. Kingston refusing to die is one of my favorite things in pro wrestling history, and any time Danielson gets pushed by someone to that next level of aggression and violence, his finishing stretches are unparalleled. The nearfalls all work, and I really bit on that DDT of Eddie's. This was a great pro wrestling match that would be great in any year, but really only could have happened this year. 

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST

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WWE Big 3 Returns! Lorcan, Gallagher, GULAK 5/24-6/7/20

Battle Royal WWE Smackdown 5/29

ER: Drew Gulak has not had great luck in battle royals during his WWE tenure, but he's always a good presence in a battle royal. Here he is mostly on the defensive, but I like how he hooks his leg over the bottom rope while trying to eliminate guys from the apron, mostly locked in a battle with Cesaro. I will always love battle royal spots where one man is on the apron and someone in ring is pushing boot to throat, and Gulak is great at hanging on while Cesaro pushes that boot under his chin.  It feels like a good idea for me to make a couple keyboard shortcuts for Gulak, one of them being "would have liked to see this go longer but", as I was foolishly thinking his return after not taking a weak offer was going to turn into one of those weird Vince "this guy stood up to me and now I respect him" kind of situations, and I would have like more of him with Corbin. Corbin and Gulak had a good match on Smackdown last month, and Bryan had a great match with Corbin, along with a great trios. So they were keeping that Cesaro/Nakamura/Corbin feud going with Gulak and it would have been cool to see that go in Gulak's favor. But I also like Gulak taking a huge hiptoss to elimination, so oh well. As for non-Gulak people, Dolph Ziggler continued to show that his greatest strength is as a guy who comes very close to being eliminated from battle royals before eventually dying on his elimination bump. This was a decent enough battle royal.


Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. vs. Roderick Strong/Bobby Fish vs. Tyler Breeze/Fandango NXT 6/3

ER: I wish this got twice the time it did, because I loved what these guys were bringing. The structure was tough to follow as it was a 3 way tag, meaning three guys were in the ring at all times, except for half of the match you had both members of UE in there and after awhile everyone was involved. Typing that out makes it sound like this was a mess and that guys would constantly be getting in each other's way, but somehow this was worked with precision. Everyone (except maybe Fish?) was working snug, and with nearly everyone involved at all times I thought they did a killer job of always giving everyone something to do. Burch is like an old man luchador as he seems to get better the higher up his trunks go, and here he at later career Villano III levels of trunk height (he really needs to pace himself as he's the same age as me, meaning those trunks will be over his tits by age 48, way too soon). Three way exchanges can be clunky and tired, but Burch was in their keeping things moving and mixing up strikes, throwing in a hard headbutt to make sure the exchange never approached rote, hard dropkick, throwing a surprise back elbow at Fish on the apron (which was paid off nicely when Fish laid him out on the floor later), and running interference for Lorcan's hot tag. Strong was a great pinball for Breeze and Burch, and I like that he took over when he just said fuck it and had Fish come in the ring full time. Fandango's hot tag was cool, totally forgot he had a cool snap powerslam and after he broke off the second one I kinda just wanted him to keep going. Lorcan's hot tag obviously ruled, with him flying into everyone with chops and elbows. Love how he flew into one corner with an uppercut, and cleared his path with an elbow on his way back to throw an uppercut in the opposite corner. Fandango tossing him over the top into most of the guys was done really well, but everything here was done well. With just a couple more minutes this could have been list, and it really wasn't far away as is.


Drew Gulak vs. AJ Styles WWE Smackdown 6/5

ER: Hot little Nitro match with both working quick to make up for the time. Styles always tightens things up when working against guys like Gulak. Not that Styles is out here showing daylight every other week, but he's also not throwing corner punches or aiming lariats at throats like he did against Gulak here. I like how Gulak recognized Styles' aggression early and started turning that into submission attempts, running Styles' into the mat with his cool crossface variation. Both guys got bounced off their head and shoulders in uncool ways: Styles shoving Gulak down into a backbreaker that bounced his head to the mat was probably my favorite moment of the match, and Gulak pays him back late with his cool drop down Michinoku driver variation. A fired up Gulak is quite a thing, and he really crushed AJ down the stretch with a dropkick that looked like it would have staggered anyone on the roster, big clothesline and an even bigger corner clothesline, and he knew exactly how snug to hold that pinfall. I had the weird hunch Gulak was winning here, and I'm happy he got the win with no kind of shenanigans, just outsmarting Styles and beating him to the punch.


Oney Lorcan vs. Tehuti Miles 205 Live 6/5

ER: I've been enjoying Tehuti on 205, he's the newest 205 guy who doesn't actually work like a cruiserweight. I like his brand of minimalism, and really enjoyed his Tyler Breeze match from a couple weeks ago. This match is built around the simple premise that Danny Burch kicked Miles around the ring last week, but Miles won with a schoolboy while grabbing the trunks. Someone who does a schoolboy with a handful of trunks on the show hyped entirely around the spectacular things that smaller wrestlers can do in the ring is someone I'm going to enjoy. This whole thing is worked simply, like a fun house show match where the goal is to pay off the simple story they broadly presented to the crowd. There's a reason that simplicity works. Lorcan uses almost entirely chops - and one wicked knee to the gut - to start and finish, hitting our story note early when Miles bails to the floor after taking some chops, gets stopped by Burch, then turns around into another Lorcan chop. The camera work was surprisingly good (because it was actually different) during Miles' control, and I especially liked the camera zooming in on Lorcan's face when Miles was scraping it with his boot in the corner. Miles drops some nice elbowdrops and works a cool Fujiwara armbar, then of course tries to win a handful of tights. This got a lot of time and I'm sure there was a better match they could have had, as neither guy was bringing out his biggest guns. But I liked the simple storytelling, Burch yelling about the pulled tights leading to Lorcan rolling Miles up with a prawn hold, and I like when guys work a more bare match like this. It's cool seeing wrestlers boiled down to their basics, and I'd love to see them build off of it.


Jack Gallagher vs. Isaiah Scott 205 Live 6/5

ER: This felt really scattered but always threatening to get really good, and the most successful moments were typical for Scott matches: whenever he drops the unnecessary embellishments things look better. This had a lot of Scott embellishments, and it played more like a Scott showcase than an actual match. And that's kind of what it feels like EVERY time we get a Gallagher/Scott match. Gallagher is great at working style clashes, but against Scott you never get enough "clash", you get guys waiting around for Scott to finish his windmill backspins so he can finally hit his headscissors. There were at least four different moments where Gallagher had to pause and leave a limb out for Scott to finish his embellished sequence, or stop short because he arrived at the right time for a sequence but Scott wasn't done with his handstand. Gallagher would try to drop interesting threads into the match, and Scott would make sure they'd go nowhere. I got excited for the moments that felt like the change was happening, like Gallagher wasting Scott's time avoiding him on the apron, only to grab his leg and yank it through the turnbuckles. But those moments where quickly forgotten in favor of Scott working so so armbars. When he toned down the BS it got good, and Gallagher's adjustments to go briefly into control were cool. I loved Gallagher leaping into a guillotine to drop Scott to a knee, or Gallagher working a side headlock on the top freaking rope, and reversing a big backdrop suplex into a hard landing crossbody. But you take a cool moment like that, and it instantly looks more silly with Scott kicking all four of his limbs like an upturned turtle. There was plenty to like here, but the main thing that hurt this match was that it never felt like a match, it just felt like Scott doing Scott things.

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 3/1-3/7/20

Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish NXT 3/4

ER: I thought the first minute of this was pretty dumb, one of those four man strike exchanges where someone hits a chop and the others all stand around reeling until someone else hits a forearm and the other three stand around reeling. They mixed up that kind of thing more interestingly than it typically looks, but when the ceiling of a spot is "pretty dumb" you're just throwing good money after bad. But once O'Reilly and Fish spilled to the floor and Lorcan hit a double blockbuster off the ring steps, I was into this the rest of the way. We built to an early and good Burch hot tag, and some of Burch's best work is on quick hot tags (Lorcan rubbing off on him?), and I like the twist of a hot tag leading to Burch getting separated from Lorcan. Burch hits hard on straight rights and uppercuts, and I dug Fish and O'Reilly holding him back with bullshit. O'Reilly would get on him and just slap and palm strike him, drop short knees, nothing that was going to finish him but just slowly grind him down at the farthest spot from his corner. Fish was really good from the apron, great little moment with him hooking Burch by the trunks and yanking him back to their corner. Of course we built to Lorcan's big hot tag, him flying horizontally with uppercuts, hitting the blockbuster, throwing heavy chops, hitting a big tope con giro on both guys at once. I like how we got to see Lorcan taking on both guys throughout the match with moves he usually only hits on one guy, and then moments later it's over. I was really satisfied with the sudden finish, as we had seen Lorcan going up against both men at once and having nothing but success, and it made sense that luck would run out. Back in the ring post-tope Lorcan was running buckle to buckle with elbows, and just like that he was taken out by a legsweep/elbow combo. I could have stood a couple more minutes of this, but like how the finish played out.


Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Tony Nese/Mike Kanellis 205 Live 3/6

ER: We've been getting a lot of Burch/Lorcan tags on TV lately, often getting two per week so far in 2020, and I like how they rarely feel the same. Lorcan and Burch always mix up who is hot tag and who gets heat (and really the way to mix up their matches at this point would be to have them as the team in control), and this was another fun pairing. Lorcan and Burch work a lot of atomic drops, and work in cool spots like sending a Nese tope right into Kanellis on the floor (basically sidestepping Nese in ring and sending him matadoring into Kanellis). Nese may be at his best as part of a heel tag team, and now that 205 Live is 30 minutes we likely won't get any more 18 minute Nese epics. Nese and Kanellis together on paper didn't do much for me, but the execution was much more interesting, and Kanellis is a good odd couple pairing. The two of them don't have similar movesets in the least, but they complement each other well. Kanellis looked really good here, with a great straight right, some buckled knee selling on multiple atomic drops (there were both inverted and regular atomic drops here, which made me realize how seldom those are used anymore), and it's clear that he's a real good hand who has been underutilized. I'm here for the 2020 Kanellisance. Nese straight up dunks Lorcan's throat over the top rope, and I dug Lorcan's staggered sell across the length of ring ropes after Nese missed the follow up moonsault. Kanellis and Nese take Burch's DDT really well, and I love their finisher: Nese holding Burch up for a powerslam, Kanellis leaping off the middle buckle with a knee right to Burch's head, into the Nese powerslam. I wouldn't mind seeing a series with these teams, which is not something I expected to find myself typing about a Tony Nese match.

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NXT TakeOver: Portland 2/16/20

ER: I was seriously consider going up to Portland to see this, but instead I am sitting at home wearing soft pants. Nobody I knew was interested in either a) seeing this with me live, or b) spending a few days in Portland, and that is fine. It's a place I frequently look for excuses to travel to, so I will surely be there in the next couple months anyway. Let's see if friends and well wishers were correct to convince me not to go. Although, to be clear, this show could be terrible and I would have had a great time in Portland. Plus I can go up there and eat at Screen Door any time I like without having to also sit through an Adam Cole singles match.


Keith Lee vs. Dominik Dijakovic

ER: I saw the hype video with Mark Henry talking about how big these two are, and how unfathomable it is for big guys to do what they do. And I am so happy that Mark Henry did not do what these two do and instead wrestled like Mark Henry. I want to see a hoss fight, not two big guys cosplaying an Ospreay match. And this match was definitely these two having their match, and their match does very little to excite me at this point. It is their collection of "Isn't it crazy that THESE two are doing THESE moves!?" exhibition, and I have seen it a lot and I hope this is a blow off match. I think all their stand and trade spots look badly rehearsed, and Dijakovic always seems to be 25% off on every super complicated thing he executes. So these matches are always filled with "MAN that's impressive for a guy his size. Imagine if it landed!" moments. The whole thing is one Eliminators move set up after another, with one big move leading to rest, leading to the other guy doing a big move, and then more rest. Dijakovic keeps breaking out new things, and they are impressive, like his twisting moonsault in ring or his gigantic swanton to a seated Keith Lee on the floor, but these moves always seem to get sold about as long as any other less dangerous move he could have done, and that's a "him" problem. We get a lot of "your big move/strike made me recoil off the ropes/mat and bounce back with my OWN big move/strike" and that's something I typically hate from 160 lb. guys, and lemme tell you that it sucks even harder with 290 lb. guys. For every move I liked, there was a moment that immediately showed that it wasn't actually that devastating, and Dijakovic doesn't have the acting chops to pull off the bad fighting spirit faces he always attempts. This was the match I was expecting, and I probably would have praised it to the heavens if they came out and worked a Mabel/Diesel match instead.

Street Fight: Tegan Nox vs. Dakota Kai

ER: I haven't been sold on heel Kai, but her street fight gear is legit. This is the coolest that Dakota Kai has looked. Kai is channeling mid 90s AJW street fight attire and it rules. Meanwhile, the person I'm supposed to root for is just wearing her normal wrestling gear and has her hair bumped up to absurd levels. I think a lot of the small stuff worked here, while a lot of big stuff did not. This was my favorite Kai performance, and it worked because she was making small things look as good as big things. She took an early drop toehold into the barricade and just went into it mouth first. And she continued to pay that kind of attention to every little spot, and it elevated things. My favorite moments of the match were not complicated, they were things like Kai snapping off a quick kick from the apron to Nox's face, or Kai splatting hard on her stomach on the apron, or Nox calculating wrong and throwing a low right while Kai is meeting her head with a trashcan lid, or Nox swinging a chair right into Kai's knee and Kai going down like someone who actually had her bad knee beaten with the odd angle of a trash can. When they kept it to basic street fight elements, I thought it was working well, and only fell apart in the moments where they got too cute or overthought what they were doing. No matter how nice Kai's kicks looked, duct taping Nox's wrist to the ringpost comes off a little silly when Nox is watching you do it, and her hand only shoots up to stop you the second you stop wrapping duct tape but not a moment before. But I liked stuff like trapping Kai's knee in a chair and smashing it, the German suplex into a trash can was nasty, and the visual of Kai's head in the chair on the table was strong. Now, using this street fight as a way to reintroduce Reina Gonzalez (with a painfully flat "Oh My God That's Raquel Gonzalez" read from Beth Phoenix) came off more than lame. She looked bad in her big moment, futzing around on the top rope with Nox, before Nox has to jump entirely on her own "through" the table. Gonzalez took forever and couldn't get into a good position to throw her, so Nox did everything on her own (no camera angles could make Gonzalez look good) and the painful bounce off the table came off much more accidental than "intentional badass move" from Gonzalez. Bad reintroduction, flat finish.

Johnny Gargano vs. Finn Balor

ER: This one was one of the on paper matches I was mildly dreading, having those "I just volunarily agreed to watch a show with a likely hour worth of Balor and Cole matches" thoughts, and then this started out just fine. The problem was that it kept going, and I did not want it to keep going. But I was fairly involved with this when they weren't doing "well scouted like looking into a mirror!" wrestling. Heel Finn don't interest me, Face Finn don't interest me, so there wasn't likely much they could have done to win me over other than surprise me with something different. And I was into this, until I wasn't into this. Once this started getting overly sequenced it got the same kind of silly I was expecting. It's so funny that they work on crafting these fast elaborate reversal sequences, and I am into stuff like Finn catching Gargano's spear from the apron. But I can't help but giggle when they run this fast sequence, Balor drapes Gargano over the top rope, sprints to the apron...and then carefully climbs up every single buckle on his way to the top rope. No matter how quickly and ironed out these sequences get, I'm always left with silly little moments where someone is holding themselves in an awkward position waiting to take a move. And so before long Gargano is doing that offense that Gargano does with a lot of pointing, and I chuckled at Balor kicking him off the announce table. Went too long, but the odds of this ever being "for me" left the building pretty quick.

Bianca Belair vs. Rhea Ripley

ER: This was the match I was most excited for, and while it didn't hit the high level I was hoping for, it was still a good match that delivered much of what I wanted. This was a tough position for Bianca, as the match has clearly been treated like a lame duck to Charlotte/Ripley in all of the build. This match was so clearly second banana, with a result so obvious, that getting people invested was going to be like not getting robbed blind in a trade after the player publicly demands a trade. So they don't work this cute, and they throw hard shots, and the occasional messiness on suplexes added to things for me. NXT has had to much cleanness in their main events, I like a little mess. The important thing is that Rhea threw harder clotheslines to the chest and harder knees to the head than Lee and Dijakovic earlier in the evening. I enjoyed how they handled learned behavior, like Belair eating a big boot after going for her series of leapfrogs, and Ripley scouting the hair whip after taking one to the midriff earlier in the match. I really wish Bianca had been treated like more of an overall big deal, as she's lost on every single TakeOver I've watched so has that "Luger always loses" mid 90s WWF feeling to her. Belair as Luger isn't actually crazy now that I think about it...and I really like Luger...and I really like Belair's power here. This was good, and pretty easily my favorite match of the night so far, even if I am getting very tired of Charlotte.

Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish vs. Matt Riddle/Pete Dunne

ER: This was good! I expected this to be good! Some restraint would have been welcome, but the NXT house style is getting further and further away from any kind of restraint. I got into it from the beginning, with UE jumping Riddle and Dunne in the aisle way, babyfacing themselves by stopping the awful Bobby Fish song, which had the special power of getting less funny every time it was spoken. I thought this was an especially cool showing for Fish and O'Reilly. Bobby Fish is basically the least talked about member of UE, but he brings a cool salt and pepper old athletic guy energy to things. Fish is like the best possible Frankie Kazarian, that tanned guy in his 40s who is now leaning deep into his aged hair, only Fish does great offense catered to his age, and is maybe the finest example of a silver fox wrestling has seen. Dude was owning the silver and I thought he came off with actual star appeal. O'Reilly had a real nice very fast kick combo, that didn't actually look like he was just thinking about the next step, it really just came off like he was winging kicks. Sure he had some silly wobbly legs down the stretch, but there were a lot of things O'Reilly did great in this one. My one hang up is that I don't really think the Riddle/Dunne team works as well as I thought it would. There's something missing and they just aren't as complementary as I thought they'd be. I like both of them, Riddle especially, but the team just keeps coming up lesser than sum for me. Riddle is always going to do things I like, and here he's hitting sentons and taking big bumps barefoot and tossing out Germans and I'm just going to like that. I don't think this reached the kind of fluidity that some of the best of these NXT go go go tags can hit, and of course doesn't touch the same kind of match from To Infnity and Beyond or Philly-Marino, but this was very fun and part of a really enjoyable 1-2 with Ripley/Belair.

Adam Cole vs. Tommaso Ciampa

ER: Nope.

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Much Later Than Live NXT TakeOver: WarGames 11/23/19

I had a co-worker's 50th birthday party to attend earlier in the evening, so couldn't get a reasonable start to this one. But it's not tooooo late and I'm all partied out, so let's see if this WarGames is going to be decent.


Rhea Ripley/Candice LeRae/Tegan Nox/Dakota Kai vs. Bianca Belair/Kay Lee Ray/Io Shirai/Shayna Baszler

ER: I really was not feeling Candice in the opening minutes of this, didn't think most of her offense looked good; but I really enjoyed everything being done to Candice, and that's important. Shirai boots her with a big missile dropkick, Belair cracks her with an elbow, powerbombs her several times, throws her into the cage with LeRae sliding uncomfortably down the metal, really everything done to punish LeRae works. But once Ripley gets in, takes a long time grabbing the same exact weapons you've seen for decades now, we build to several dumb uses of them. I think your work should be able to stand alone in a match like War Games, and going to trash can shots and propping up chairs and having everybody make increasingly stupid decisions to get into a big tower in the corner, just comes off lazy. Even when the end result is LeRae getting the back of her head whipped into a pile of chairs,  it still feels like they spent way too much time on dumb bullshit. I didn't anticipate the Kai turn, but I also am not an avid TV follower and Kai has never done much for me anyway. I do like how Kai kept running back to repeatedly attack Nox. Belair is I think the only person making strikes and weapon shots mean something. There has been a comical amount of bad hockey fight spots in the match, and here's Belair finding three different cool ways to make a trashcan look dangerous. Belair is really the mega star of this match, and it's kind of crazy how much of a non-factor Shayna was after getting into the ring. Shayna is in the ring for 2 minutes and then sells on the mat for the next 10. But Belair just won't quit, she's whipping the hell out of Ripley, jumping around like she's getting swarmed by ants at a picnic when LeRae is whipping her, in with a great nearfall save, tasked with catching Shirai on an ill-advised top of cage moonsault, Belair was just EVERYTHING in this match. Mauro Ranallo was expectedly unbearable, and my least favorite Mauro moment is when he described a "top rope avalanche poison rana" by LeRae as "desperate". I will not be able to understand how doing a move that you have done before, here performing it when your opponent gave you the opening and it could lead to a win, is "desperate". Shitting your pants and smearing Kay Lee Ray with your own shit would be a desperate move. That is the move of someone with zero options left. But performing a complicated reverse rana? That seems like someone very much in control of things. Shayna stopped selling long enough to lose the match, just a bizarre misuse of her, but Belair's performance made me overall like this match despite not liking a TON of directions this mess went.

Damian Priest vs. Killian Dain vs. Pete Dunne

ER: This was a much too long 3 way that had the problems nearly every 3 way has, and could have ended earlier after a few specific spots and been better for it. I'm a Damian Priest novice and will probably opt to stay that way. Priest feels like a better version of Matt Taven, which means he is a worse version of just about anyone else. He's not good at occupying himself, forced Dunne and Dain into unlikely scenarios just to get his shit in (most egregious is Dain having to get up way too quick so he can be ready for Priest's spinny kicks), he's the guy who is always too early or too late to his marks. Dain had a real nice match, kind of got stuck in the thankless role of getting shunted aside so we can continue to watch Dunne/Priest have zero chemistry together, or have his very good offense shrugged off early so we can get to more stupidly chained 3 way moments. But Dain had cool stuff, leveled Priest with a dive, did a bombs away on Priest while hitting a Michinoku Driver on Dunne, and was the guy who was actually bringing something a little rough edged to the dance fighting of Priest and Dunne. The finish I thought was pretty dumb, with Dunne getting Dain in a backpack choke, leading Dain to leap onto Priest while wearing Dunne...but then Dunne just shoves Dain away and gets the pin. This match was filled with moments of "Wait why is that guy selling so long...wait why is that guy selling nothing at all?" (much like that War Games we just sat through) but damn did that finish come off dumb as hell to me.

Matt Riddle vs. Finn Balor

ER: I dug a bunch of this, while this also made this the third ending of the night that I just really did not like at all. I haven't read what anyone else has said about this show, but I cannot fathom logging on tomorrow to find out the rest of the internet thought this was a night of the sickest finishes. These matches finishes have been fucking terrible to me. I liked too much of this to shit talk too much, as these two were super complementary wrestlers breaking out some wild stuff in their first ever match of any kind opposite each other. I really dug all the submission stuff, and liked how Balor was actually lacing in some nasty stuff to rub Riddle's face into it. That baseball slide dropkick was just plain mean, and we even got a very special All Japan Comm Tape slo mo shot of Riddle's mouth going all rubber face mask after eating that boot. Now, it left me a little cross when Balor sent that boot straight into Riddle's teeth, but then bumped noticeably early the first time Riddle went for a big kick. I mean you gotta give and get, and luckily Riddle made him pay with some nice throws (his early Karelin lifts will always look cool), and I like how he just showed Balor how shit his German was by hopping up, hitting that V trigger, then dumping him with his own German. Riddle catching a Pele kick was probably my favorite part of the match, as it turned into an actually good ankle lock sequence, something I could have actually bought as the finish - and would have loved for it to be the actual finish. Riddle caught that Pele kick perfectly, twisted that ankle, sent an axe kick down into Balor's kidneys, grabbed the other ankle when Balor gave it to him, and I just really wanted that to end things. Balor was actively good at selling that ankle, and I even got into all the performative shit like Balor coming up lame while getting thrown into the ropes, because Balor was actually doing it really well! Now, obviously, that ankle selling went WAY out the window when it came time for Balor to do a double stomp of the top, and...I can't speak for everyone here, but I, if I was limping badly on an ankle, unable to even run, able to put no weight on it....and then I was given the opportunity to jump as high into the air as I could, and stick a landing right on my Kerri Strug'd ankle...I probably wouldn't take it. But Balor cannot WAIT to jump as hard as he can right onto that ankle, a man literally incapable of coming up with ANY other offense to do to Riddle, a man so set in his ways that he is obviously going to just jump into the air and land upright. I don't think Balor needed to win this match, and I didn't like that he did, and I didn't like the stupid double stomp because man what the fuck.

Roderick Strong/Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish/Adam Cole vs. Keith Lee/Donovan Dijakovic/Tommaso Ciampa/Kevin Owens

ER: This came off like a big, bloated, overly dangerous indy War Games, and I mean that in a good way. I like the regional indy flair it had: An oafish giant, an anti-hero team captain wearing weird facepaint, a big man taking stiff shots to the side of his cinderblock dome, guys going through tables at awkward angles, and just the way the big moments kept inching up bigger and bigger, bumps getting dumber and harder. Some of the prop set up was too focused and mapped, but at times it added to the cheap charm of them being big stage backyarders pushing their limit. I really loved the first 5 minutes, Ciampa vs. Strong. I thought the match did get weaker once we got the tables integrated, but the first 5 minutes were those two really laying in stiff strikes and constantly pushing pace. Ciampa hits a wicked kneelift after tying Strong up in the corner, and it was the start of a really great match long performance for Ciampa. Keith Lee is a super fun wrecking ball, takes a few big ass bumps, and deals with multiple moments of Undisputed teeing off on the side of his head. Lee is a great Hulk to sit there and be slowed by hard shots to the ear. Owens got a good reaction and seemed to feed off it, turning in a real spirited performance with dangerous bumps, including my actual favorite use ever of Adam Cole's bunny hop flipping piledriver. I really loved the struggle the two of them went through, fighting on the metal plate joining the two rings, like they were fighting on a stadium's catwalk in a Bond movie or something, and they way they fought over it I had no clue who was going to be dumped on their head. It went long, but it felt like it ramped nicely, felt closer to real epic than faux epic.


ER: I really didn't like the finishes of the first three matches, but the PPV ended on a decent note for me because I liked each subsequent match more than the last. I was majorly disappointed in the women's War Games - fantastic Bianca performance aside - and the three way felt clunky during all the Priest/Dunne moments. Riddle/Balor was very fun for much of the duration, and the main event delivered better than I was hoping. So it kept getting more enjoyable as it went on, which will make it seem better than it was in hindsight. But it was still one of the weaker TakeOvers I've watched.

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NXT TakeOver: Toronto 8/10/19...Everything Except...

ER: So I was unable to actually watch this as it was actually airing, but I always look forward to big NXT shows (no matter how much I've been dreading their main events the past year) so I figured I would watch as much as possible tonight before getting sleepy, then finish the rest tomorrow before Summerslam (and then do Summerslam)!

The Street Profits vs. Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish

ER: I thought a lot of this was pretty boneless and emotionless, big parts feeling like O'Reilly especially were some kind of automated driverless wrestler, just mechanically running through spots in really unattached ways. But Montez Ford brought some actual personality and freak athleticism and salvaged a match that felt too long. Ford seems to glide sometimes and it's cool to see, watch him hit a neat kip up and standing moonsault, super graceful tope con giro, and an absolutely great top rope splash for the win. People had moments in this, liked some Dawkins cut off spots, liked O'Reilly kicking Dawkins in the inner thigh, but a lot of this felt a little phony and I couldn't match the crowd's appreciation.

Io Shirai vs. Candice LeRae

ER: This was up there with the most I've ever enjoyed Shirai in a singles match, but I really didn't like LeRae and thought she kept screwing up the pacing and doing terrible drama. LeRae leads off with a terrible double leg takedown and everything else seems about as out of place from there. She was really obnoxious about immediately getting into position to go back on offense, right after taking a KO move. She takes a nasty 619 to the back of the head, and she sells it by standing up immediately, bounding off the opposite ropes, and hitting a tope tornado DDT; later she eats a huge German suplex and sells it by getting immediately to her feet and waiting patiently in place for Shirai to bounce back off the ropes to run into LeRae's obvious offense. It made things pretty uninteresting to me, and creating drama by merely taking a big move and having it not affect you, is not drama in any way. Shirai hit some of the meanest stuff I seen from her, a crazy double underhook backbreaker, Spanish Fly that landed hard, wrenching LeRae around with a backbreaker, but none of it ever felt appropriately absorbed by LeRae. LeRae's emotion and fighting spirit and selling were all over the map, and even though the match had some fantastic moments and a more grown up Shirai performance (still overshooting that genius moonsault though), but Candice kept taking me out of things.

Velveteen Dream vs. Roderick Strong vs. Pete Dunne

ER: This gets a fun personalized Canadian entrance, with what appears to be the Raptors dance squad coming out and jamming to The Mountie's old theme song (a personal favorite) before throwing it to the Dream's entrance (who comes out in Canadian red and white). And I had a blast with this match. I t was a really great showcase for Dream and Strong, and Dunne was also in the match to mostly add stupid offense but also take exciting offense. They kept up a really insane pace for the duration of the match, without anyone getting crossed up or standing around waiting to hit their marks. This had some pretty impeccable layout, with nobody really having to get up and hit a spot right after taking a beating because that's what the layout dictated. Three ways are difficult to pull off, because you need to get it into singles action a lot of the match but also believably get the third man out of the ring during that time. Most 3 ways a guy just rolls to the floor after taking a fairly standard move and then disappears for 4 minutes. Here we had regular involvement from the 3 players with nobody feeling like they got in the way.

Strong really stood out like a big deal to me. Funny thing is, he almost always does. Strong has been consistently great for probably a decade now and it's still somehow surprising to me when I watch another great Strong performance. I don't think this thing works as a Dream/Dunne singles or as a 3 way with somebody other than Strong. He kept peppering this match with big backbreakers and suplexes, big kneelifts, and appropriate bumps and selling for his opponents. Dream really seemed to benefit from being in their with Strong, as Strong took every axehandle like a gunshot, went down hard for every long arm lariat, and seemed to be orchestrating every car crash spot involving all of them. Dream has really great body movement. He's not a very large guy, but he throws his most simple attacks with such unique movement and flexibility that he comes off like Mr. Fantastic. There was a stretch where he whipped off a couple great punches, threw a couple weird straight arm lariats, hits a Rockette kick, the way he rubber man bounces out of the DVD, and he gets such great stretch from his limbs that it makes him look like he could catch you with a strike no matter where either of you are standing in the ring. Some of the spot set up is brilliant, like Dream slithering away from Dunne only to get his legs grabbed by Strong, who crotches him around the ringpost; or Strong running around dropping both with back suplexes on the apron and barricade; or Dream hitting that big elbow all the way across the ring during a tree of woe spot. The big moves hit big, and they even did some stuff that comes off silly during 3 ways but I think was elevated here by Strong. Really the only thing I thought looked bad was whenever Pete Dunne would try to do any strikes. I don't know why he thinks his slap fight girly hands look good, but he looked like he was defending himself from a backseat big brother attack than stand up to Dream and Strong. Those little flimsy slaps need to be dropped immediately, and his bad punches when trying to fend of Strong should literally be in the running for worst strikes thrown in a major company. My god. The finish stretch was hot as hell, loved Dream hitting the DVD only for Strong to throw him over the top rope and hit a big backbreaker on Dunne, only for Dream to rebound right back in with the big elbow. This was the match I needed after the first two.

Mia Yim vs. Shayna Baszler

ER: This never really clicked with me. They chose a couple of interesting directions to take, with both gals going after arms, but none of the arm stuff ever actually went anywhere interesting. I liked some of the exchanges, and some of the actual moves, but the selling seemed like it was part of a different match than they actually wound up with. It was kind of odd. Yim set up a spot where she kicked Baszler's arm in the ring steps, and Baszler sold her arm the rest of the match...but Yim weirdly skirted the arm several times. There was a spot where she set up the Code Blue off the tope rope, and specifically trapped Baszler's arm in her knee crook, and I'm thinking "Oh man that's an awesome arm break spot that I've never seen! Flipping over and using her own weight and momentum to kick the arm work up another level!" And then she just did the sunset flip bomb and went for a pin and I was left wondering why they even bothered paying attention to her clearly setting up a focus on the arm during the move. Shayna kinda did the same thing in a way, establishing an attack on Yim's arm (leading to the great spot of her stomping the posted out elbow), but it's not uncommon for Shayna to establishing arm work to then making it easier for her to sink in a choke. So I was expecting that, but then also thought it didn't make as much sense within this match. Not only was she then doing rear naked chokes using the arm that Yim had been working over, but I would have liked to see her punish Yim for having the balls to even come after her arm. And was anybody else expecting the Horse Girls? They made such a big deal about Yim taking out and injuring the Horse Girls, that surely that meant they were going to come out and do something, so I was amused when that never happened. But I was still left so confused about why they never really cashed in anything they actually set up before or during the match. I have no major complaints about the ring work, it all looked fine, though perhaps the obvious silence of the crowd during much of the match was a sign they weren't sure what was happening either. At one point Yim yelled at the crowd to get into it, and the quiet that came after couldn't have felt good. Even right after that when she hit a nice dive, it merely got scattered polite applause. It feels like this is a frequent NXT TakeOver criticism I use, but...It felt like these two have a good match between them, and this had the potential parts of that hypothetical good match, but this wasn't it.

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NXT TakeOver: XXV 6/1/19

I spent the day up at my parents' place as my sister was in town, and now after hearing my mother tell me in detail about her 50th class reunion three different times, as well as hearing a 20 minute story about how she had a very normal trip to the supermarket, I'm ready to just write as much as I can about tonight's TakeOver as I can before I drift off to slumberland. Whatever I don't finish tonight I will finish tomorrow when I wake up.

Roderick Strong vs. Matt Riddle

ER: Totally wild stiff overkill battle, a match that kept things interesting with inventive reversals and showcasing several ways for men to land knees and elbows to faces. Riddle is a guy who looks like he could really eat Strong's lunch, and yet three minutes into this Strong is dropping Riddle on the apron with a fast backdrop suplex and hammerfisting him in the stomach from the mount I find myself wondering "How is Riddle going to last against this!?" Both guys land such jaw jacking shots that I'm not always sure how they stay standing in a long match, but when I get Riddle dragging Strong by the arm chin first into his knee, or Strong hitting an insane running jumping knee into the ropes, I just want more. Both men move so fast, and land so hard, that it really adds to everything they do. Riddle scrambling down out of a press and locking in a choke, Strong landing a couple hard backbreakers, Riddle landing flush onto Strong's knees on a twisting press, Strong bouncing back and forth off the ropes with hard elbows, Riddle flinging Strong with a German suplex, A top rope superplex from Strong, it's all done with such speed and precision that they always seem a millimeter away from stopping a match due to brain bruising. They never get trapped in a strike loop, they always advance, and I'm never quite sure where every sequence is going. I don't really mind the way these two do overkill, because some of the stiffer sequences just impress me that they're able to keep going, and while somethings weren't as focused as other big matches from these two, I thought they did a great job at building the threat and the violence. Hot start to a show.

Street Profits (Montez Ford/Angelo Dawkins) vs. Forgotten Sons (Wesley Blake/Steve Cutler) vs. Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Kyle O'Reilly/Bobby Fish

ER: They're really letting matches go long on this show so far. This one probably goes a little too long and features a definitely too long run in from Forgotten Son Jaxson Ryder (and really someone who has that name is probably overstaying every life situation they're ever in), but also has a bunch of crazy stuff on par with most of the crazy stuff in the MITB matches two weeks ago. It genuinely felt like everybody in this match had several opportunities to fit in a couple crazy spots and a couple crazy bumps, like they were all filling quotas. I really liked Forgotten Sons, both guys really exited the ring in dynamic ways when they needed to clear space, and they willingly threw themselves into getting suplexed while wearing a ladder around their necks, or Blake doing a tope INTO a ladder. Montez Ford had some big stuff (overall I thought the Profits came off like a team who kind of snaked a victory, which is weird since they were the favorites going in) including a frog splash so big that it sent him vertical into a perfect headstand and a tope con hilo with a painful landing (a LOT of dives in this match had painful landings, felt like every guy here was taking flat back bumps onto the hard ground), even does a bonkers leap from the top rope to a ladder. Lorcan used his body as a weapon and flung it into people and ladders, Fish and O'Reilly took some nasty spills into ladders, Dawkins hit a huge dive to the floor, O'Reilly may have taken the most painful bumps onto ladders (and another where he just took a big Hamrick back bump from ring to floor), and this whole thing was pretty crazy. This show is a pretty easy 2/2 for me so far, every guy is working this show like it's their WrestleMania or something. Trying to take buzz away from AEW? I don't know but whatever it is I dig it.

Tyler Breeze vs. Velveteen Dream

ER: Breeze is someone I thought was one of the most consistently good performers in NXT history, who got kind of predictably chewed up on the main roster. He's a guy who showed he was really good at 8-11 minute matches, a guy who could have been a real valuable Smackdown TV match guy, who never got much of a chance to work the kind of match he's really good at. So on paper I'm excited as hell for this match, and really WWE should be more willing to send people back down to NXT if things aren't working out. MLB teams do that all the time, send a guy back to work on mechanics before giving them another shake. It doesn't have to be seen as a negative, but it obviously always will be. And I thought this match was pretty awesome, while also thinking that they probably had more than enough tricks and moments for a rematch, and I think they took to much time fitting them all into this match. This was a really good 18 minutes that I think could have been a flat out awesome 14 minutes. Breeze is a guy with a limited offense arsenal, who finds cool logical ways to create openings and reverse moves. I don't think a lot of his stuff feels like a modern do-si-do dance sequence reversal, he just finds simple ways to dodge and strike fast. Breeze is one of the better guys about making space, about not rushing through sequences, and he comes off more like a solid Stevie Richards type than a modern 2.9 count guy. His simple stuff hits hard and he finds ways to smartly get into position for Dream's offense, while having an impressive sense of when a strike doesn't land as hard and thus doesn't need to be sold as hard.

Because of that skill we got a few sequences that weren't really "clean" but I think benefitted from looking messier. Dream threw a backhand that didn't really land, but followed it up quick with a shot from the other direction that landed much harder, and Breeze knew exactly how to play it. Dream is someone who throws a lot of his body into shots, so when one doesn't hit flush it can look silly, and Breeze is a perfect guy to cover for that kind of flash. I love how Breeze doesn't skimp on shots and doesn't cut corners. Weirdly my favorite part of the match was when Breeze was setting up a superkick, but opted for just a simple (killer looking) front kick to the face to set up the kick. We've seen superkick overkill for a few years now and I thought it was cool that Breeze didn't just go right to it, he kicked Dream into a better position for it. Even though I thought we got maybe two too many kickouts, I thought the placements of them rolling out of the ring and working count outs was really well done, and I thought a lot of the reversal sequences looked cool because they didn't look overly smooth. Dream has a way of looking incredibly graceful while occasionally looking totally stumbly, and I'm genuinely unsure if it's intentional or not, but I think it works. It leads to moments like Dream stumbling face first into a hard enziguiri, which winds up looking nastier because it was face first and he looked off balance. Breeze barely beating a 10 count only to slide back into the ring to get blasted with the Dream Driver felt like a perfect spot to finish things, even though part of me is glad the went longer to make Breeze look more threatening. And late in the match we got an absolute freakshow eye popping move set up where Dream jumped off the top to land past a laid out Breeze, landing right where he needed to so he could hook Breeze's leg to roll him through into sticking him with Breeze's own Unprettier. It looked insane. And I loved the set ups where Dream would purposely throw off Breeze's timing on spots (which is something Breeze did to him a couple times earlier). I really loved this, warts and all, and this show is firing on an easy 3/3 for me.

Io Shirai vs. Shayna Baszler

ER: Apparently Tokyo Sports at one point called Shirai the "greatest wrestler in the world" which just feels like someone somewhere had to have wrongly translated a quote. This was the first match that felt like a miss, felt like something that would have been a decent hour one Smackdown match, but didn't have any big moments to make it stand out on this card. Really the most exciting part of this was Candice LeRae running out to wreck Shafir and Duke with a kendo stick. Candice was really swinging hard, broke the damn stick over them both, really liked that whole section. But the match itself seemed really basic. Shirai just doesn't seem very good to me, and as Shayna is working her over I'm sitting here knowing that it's going to just lead to a bunch of fairly implausible Shirai offense. Baszler toying with Shirai was fun, kicking at her and getting her to flinch, before ACTUALLY kicking her. Shirai isn't a very interesting seller, so her selling limb damage always feels comical, and her staggering around for shots looked like when Jeremy Irons was awkwardly learning geisha movements in M. Butterfly. Her flying does little for me, although I think she may have had a decent missile dropkick in there. The finish itself was really good, as the bridge looked like a plausible way to win but I was confident Shayna would turn it into a choke. I think I'm more interested in the inevitable Shirai/LeRae vs. Shayna/Horse Girl tag as Shirai works better in a tag or multiman setting, but this underwhelmed.

ER: Just want to make a note here about how godawful Mauro Ranallo has been on commentary the entire show. He isn a very specific and infuriating kind of awful, a different side of the Matt Striker coin. The specifically infuriating part about Ranallo - I mean aside from his constant fucking screaming - is that he seems to genuinely LOVE the product that he is announcing for. He seems like he adores NXT and he is living his absolute best life. But he's just so fucking annoying about enjoying his favorite thing. He's the fan you hate to hear talk about the thing he loves, and you hate the specific way he loves it. Striker is unbearable in that way you picture him sitting at home writing hack shoehorned references trying to get himself over, Ranallo is the guy who does that because it's how he can best express his love for NXT.

Adam Cole vs. Johnny Gargano

ER: I actually somewhat unexpectedly enjoyed the first 15 minutes of this match! But as we all know this was not going to be a match than ended shortly past the 15 minute mark. Pro wrestling inspired by the Marvel Cinematic Universe is absolutely one of the worst things to happen to pro wrestling. It just makes me dream of Stan Hansen running into the ring and beheading either of these goofs with lariats. There are always things I enjoy! Gargano can take some bone rattling bumps, and they both have some cool ideas about building off past matches and past interactions. But FUCK them. That Star Search dance routine with Gargano hitting a reverse rana and then waiting patiently on his knees while peeking over his shoulder, waiting for Cole to bounce of the ropes with a superkick, or their little Total Eclipse of the Heart dance recital where Gargano kept getting kicked chest first into the ropes and bouncing off and hitting his own bullshit only to spin Cole into his arms as rain pours down in dramatic fashion, that kind of horseshit can just die. I hate all of Marvel's final 25 minute "Two invincible guys not able to do a ton of damage to the other while causing millions of dollars in structural damage" and it's not something I'll ever want to see in pro wrestling. Nothing damages these guys, until something damages them. Fuck Off Forever.

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New Footage Friday: Destroyer, Abby, Finlay, Fish, Navarro, Roadblock, Vilano III

The Destroyer vs. Abdullah the Butcher AJPW 5/23/80

PAS: This match had been on the schedule for a while, and it obviously has larger significance with the Destroyer's passing yesterday. Destroyer is such a legend, that any new chance to see him wrestle is a treat. I really loved the push and pull of this match, Destroyer want's to wrestle a Destroyer match, lock ups, a big butt drop on the knee to set up the figure four etc., and Abby wants to drag him into an Abby match with blood, bumps into chairs and head severing elbow drops. Destroyer keeps getting battered and bloodier, until he says fuck it and goes to war and we get a double count with Destroyer chocking Abby with a chair. Not a ton of Destroyer bloody brawls, but when it breaks down, he shows he can hang in this atmosphere just as well as he can on the mat.

MD: I've been pushing this one for a while and it just happened to work out that it was at the top of the list the day after Beyer died. I'm glad for the kismet even if saddened by the overall situation. There is generally a joy to Destroyer matches, a sort of whimsy. He was a wrestler who was exceptional at his craft, just a wizard on the mat, but that was also so confident in his own abilities and his presence that he allowed himself to emotive and even comedically vulnerable in a way that added to the match and did not detract from it.

And here we get an entirely different side of him. The first half of this match has him trying to solve the problem of Abdullah, and more power to him because he decides the way to go is with repeated figure-four leglock attempts. The back-half, however, is a straight-on headbutt war. I'm pretty certain he loads the mask in there to even the odds, but regardless, the two of them just go at it. It's not at all what you'd expect and it's at times unrelenting and triumphant. There's one headbutt where he staggers Abdullah, which is as good a comeback moment as you'll see. This is Abdullah in AJPW in 1980, so obviously it devolves further, but it does so with blood and metal and escalation.

That this vivid image, a bloody yet valiant mess of a masked man choking out an absolute monster with a chair, is now how I am going to remember the Destroyer is simply a testament to how great he was at so much else.

ER: I must point out that Phil sent me a text saying we were writing this match up WELL before news of Beyer's passing, which would have felt like a coincidence if he hadn't also been sending me a bunch of Airwolf texts the past several weeks. Destroyer is a guy who has been criminally underwritten by us, and I'm not just saying that because he passed, but because he's clearly a guy who is as much a Segunda Caida Guy as anyone. It's a lame observation, but I just love the way he moves in a ring. He has a bunch of his own Finlay type moves, the kind of things that come off so natural but obviously must be way harder or else we would see them more often. I love early on how he takes this big (but safe and smart) bump to the floor, Abby chucking him down the length of the ring and Destroyer bumping out to the apron to the floor; later on Abby does something similar and Destroyer grabs the ropes at the right time to effectively stop it. He's really smart at leaving those kind of breadcrumbs in a match. 

There are not many things I like more in wrestling than Abby dropping elbows, I love the way he angles his elbowdrops, love the degree they land, love when he charges in and misses his big killshot sliding elbowdrop, love them all. They're really smart about pacing them out so they still feel strong, and throwing in the missed shots at the right time to give Destroyer a chance to go back in control. By the time it devolves into headbutt exchanges I'm in love. One of my favorite matches ever is Destroyer and Killer Karl Kox (under a mask) doing just think, and I love the visual of these two locked in and just clunking heads together. The red color scheme on Destroyer only adds to the visuals of this wrestler pushed too far, this man dragged down to Abby's level, and him finally grabbing a chair and smacking him with it was great. I'm confident you'll be seeing a lot more Destroyer on these electronic pages.

TKG: Maan, I'm a fan of the Destroyer and am pretty sure there is another match between these two that I dug a ton and he just passed, but this match left me empty. Abby normally brings more structure to a match and this felt like it could've been Destroyer working this match vs anyone. A good chunk of this is Abby bumping rudo missing stuff as Destroyer evades him. It's not Rayo doing Ole spots as rudos tumble. And Destroyer has neat evade moves, especially liked the spot where Abby wants to take it to the streets and goes to toss Destoryer out of ring only for Destroyer to land on apron (real early in match), and Abby is a fun rudo tumbling....and then the final AJPW no finish out of control brawl, doesn't feel that out of control.

Dos Caras/Canek/Villano III vs. Negro Navarro/El Signo/El Torre Infernal UWA 10/31/92

ER: This is not an important match, not a spectacular match, but a match I instantly swooned for because I actually had no idea we would ever get footage of ROADBLOCK working Mexico, The Towering Inferno himself (which is a GREAT name for a giant fat gringo in lucha), the man with some unexplainable gaps in his pro wrestling career, but someone who managed to have stays in Japanese garbage feds, big lucha feds, and the biggest company in wrestling for several years. He's an odd footnote who probably should have been a bigger deal, the classic "if you were born 10 years earlier" kind of guy, but also a tall fat guy during an era when Vince still loved tall fat guys, but apparently didn't love Roadblock. He would have had to have been on their radar, so perhaps there's a semi-interesting story about why Roadblock never went north? Anyway, Roadblock is a fun towering inferno in the center of this very standard match, bullying much smaller men into corners, missing elbowdrops to give them comebacks, falling into fans in the front rows during tecnicos comebacks, takes his mammoth bump over the top to the floor in spectacular fashion, and somehow gets to pin one of the biggest stars in lucha history TWICE. There are better wrestlers in the match, but they couldn't possibly have the presence of El Torre Infernal. Villano III had some wonderful athletic moments, loved how high he stood in the air before delivering a monkey flip; and we got some great Misionarios moments, with my favorite being Negro Navarro getting armdragged to the floor and taking that smooth feet first through the ropes to the floor lucha bump, causing him to give El Signo a baseball slide dropkick. But this was about The Towering Inferno, who looks like a truth giant while getting his hands raised by the tiny ref. There are other Roadblock UWA matches, and I will be reviewing those, obviously.

TKG: They line this up at the start with Roadblock v Canek, which makes sense as you expect the big spot to be Canek bodyslamming Roadblock. And Roadblock's a guy who you always loved as the guy in a match built around "can an opponent with a power offense lift this big motherfucker" (Luger opponent setting up Luger v Giant). And it's bizarre cause that Roadblock v Canek match up never seems to be as heated as it should be. On the other hand every Villano v Roadblock and every Roadblock v Dos Caras interaction is fire. Should also be said that Navarro starts out matched with Dos Caras and Villano III starts with Signo and Navarro seems more fired up when working Canek and Signo with Caras. Signo pulls out a fork or some type of foreign object way early in first fall and him thowing blows with the shank is violent but also kind of out of place. Roadblock as bumping big rudo is fun and yeah it's a shame he didn't get a longer big run somewhere.

MD: Did we know that Roadblock was in WWC in 1991 as well? I didn't. Also, he'd been wrestling since 87? Trained by Larry Sharpe too? All of these are things I did not know. Look, I liked his presence here. A lot of times when you get bigger guys in lucha, they're short but fat, your Brazos or whatever. Even Kraneo is only billed as 6'1". Sometimes you'll get a really tall guy who isn't fat like Thunder or Marco Corleone. Rarely do you get a towering guy like Roadblock and it was a nice visual to see him up against everyone else. You got the sense that the Missionaries were glad to have him in their corner and to sort of use him as an element to shape the match around. So, I liked that, and yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing him more, both here and in Puerto Rico. But yeah, this was pretty sloppy all around and not just Roadblock. Villano III looked great. Roadblock had, as I said, a super presence. Things even sort of built to a fun moment where he faced off against Caras that was better for the anticipation than the actual payoff. That's all I've got though. Still, I'd see more if there is more.

Bobby Ocean/Drake Evans vs. Bobby Fish/Fit Finlay IYFW 5/18/12

MD: Good, grounded local indy tag match. I've seen less Bobby Fish than you have, but I was at least somewhat happily surprised here. He lost focus a little bit at points, relative to Finlay who was casually laser-focused (casually everything actually; more on that in a moment), but his stuff looked good and appropriate and I have no qualms.

Finlay was great. Completely nonchalant while still being as violent as ever. The targeted offense to Evans' leg was nasty, especially the bodyslams into the ropes. If you're going to have a smaller ring, use it. I loved how he crossed his heart in front of the ref to show that he had made the tag when he had not and how he just encroached into the ring later on when there was no chance at all that he'd get away with it. There was a hint of mischief there that you'd see much earlier in his career but not in his WCW or WWE runs.

This was structured well enough with a double heat and a couple of relatively hot tags for the crowd size. The babyfaces were fine and played their part well enough. The time limit restart was weird and unnecessary and hurt the flow a bit but overall, it was fun to see Finlay in this setting, a setting which probably did Fish some favors as well.

ER: I really liked this, and thought it was a tremendous Finlay performance. The bulk of this match was Finlay beating Ocean and Evans around the ring, and he looked as good here as he ever looked. It's truly amazing how he was able to come back after several years and still look like the best guy in the ring, age be damned. This was among his very last pro wrestling matches ever (you know, unless he decides to show everybody how he's the best AARP eligible wrestler in the world any day now...) and his skill level is still just off the charts, one of my absolute favorites, a guy who I always love seeing control a wrestling ring. There were a lot of gems from his indy run (and seeing Finlay/Thatcher live is a cool feather I get to wear in my cap) but I also really liked matches like this against guys you hadn't heard of and would otherwise not check out. Finlay sports a WCW era singlet and beats these two like he was working a WCW syndicated show. You're obviously going to love him dropping a knee to Evans' temple, doing a big butt splash right onto the inside of his knee, throwing the hardest short arm clothesline in wrestling, stomping on Evans' hand when it was lingering on the mat for too long, and slamming him leg first into the ropes. 

My favorite little Finlay moment was Evans reaching out for a hot tag and Finlay kicking his arm. Fish was fine enough as a generic indy kicker, and I dug he and Finlay cutting off the ring. Really this whole match was like 90% Finlay/Fish in control, and you couldn't get much of a feeling for Ocean or Evans until Evans late match tag in. That said, both were professional and handled their end of things well. I especially liked Ocean doing an across the ring leap for a hot tag, and really liked Evans' hot tag offense: he threw a couple of hard stiff arm lariats at Finlay's clavicles and hits two really nice spinebusters, and that's easily enough to make me like a guy. We get a goofus 15 minute time limit bell out of absolutely nowhere (and also only 12 minutes in) that leads to a clunky restart, and things would have just looked so much better had they just done the 2 minutes post restart without any kind of stoppage in between (obviously), but no matter, this whole thing was still a ton of fun and a great look at what a total badass in his mid 50s could still do on ANY card.

TKG: Being a Finlay tag partner is thankless, because Finlay is so fucking sharp that I'm just going to end up watching him on apron while you do whatever you're doing. Finlay always getting ready to break up pinfalls even when he never does was my favorite Finlay on apron move. Finlay bodyslamming Evans into the ropes was nasty as fuck but also Evans really made it look like his leg was fucked. It is so great that we have this.

PAS: This match was posted on Bobby Ocean's youtube page, which is a great thing about 2019 wrestling, we get a chance to see one of the last matches of an all time legend like Finlay because a random dude decided to aim his Flip video at the ring and post it on youtube 7 years later. Finlay and Fish were a really fun heel team, dominating most of the match working over Evans's knee, with some classic Finlay offense, loved all of the slams into the ropes, it is such a simple move and so brutal looking. I also loved his butt drops on the knee and nasty indian death lock. We did get a nice pair of hot tags, and I dug Evan's spinebusters. I agree with Eric and Matt that the restart was really unnecessary, but otherwise this was a blast and new Finlay is all we could want.

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NXT TakeOver: WarGames 2 11/17/18

We went to the NXT Tapings/House Show in San Jose on Thursday, had a great time, and have dug every single TakeOver I've watched so far. Plenty of potential on this card.

Matt Riddle vs. Kassius Ohno

ER: Well this was not quite how I was expecting to start off TakeOver, but Ohno *did* sound pretty whiny on the pre-show, so he kinda had it coming. Mauro says the match lasted "about as long as a Hollywood marriage" which was probably a pretty hot reference when Drew Barrymore married some bartender 25 years ago.

Kairi Sane vs. Shayna Baszler

ER: Bummed I didn't get to see Shayna live on Thursday, but she was there with her Horse Girls. I'd never seen Duke or Shafir wrestle (and have no clue how much they have wrestled), but they were fun. I knew they would get involved here but wasn't expecting it so soon, and I do like the trope of a heel getting an immediate pinfall advantage in this kind of match. 2nd fall was fun with Baszler attacking immediately with a knee to the chin, and the knee looked good enough that I thought they would be running two incredibly short matches in a row. Baszler always looks good in control, although Sane isn't an interesting seller, just kinda flops and rolls around no matter what happens. But things ramp up when Baszler eats a crazy DDT on the ring apron, really planting that head in a great visual. I also liked the Horse Girls interference backfiring, especially Duke missing a kick and hitting the ringpost, and Sane doing her wild elbow off the top onto all of them. Things get pretty silly from there with the match basically serving as the background for Dakota Kai and Io Shirai running out and taking out the Horse Girls. Kai looked good, really booting Duke in the face, but Shirai does that super dumb thing where you run out to save your friend, and instead of attacking them when they're 4 feet away, takes all the time in the world to slowly climb to the top and hit a moonsault onto all of them. The visual looked good, but it's really dumb when you think about it for one second. The finish I don't think worked at all, with Sane hitting her elbow but Baszler immediately rolling her over for the crucifix pin. I don't get how the elbow can finish all her matches, but also be instantly ignored and reversed into a pin. Maybe it wasn't supposed to hit and it was supposed to look more like Baszler catching her? Whatever it was, it didn't work, and this whole thing underdelivered. I guess they're focusing on this as a trios match instead down the line, which is a match up that can be fun.

Johnny Gargano vs. Aleister Black

ER: They start with a bunch of cat and mouse that feels directly inspired by Low-Ki/Red or like they were jacking Anderson Silva highlights, but I thought it was cool, Gargano using head movement to dodge jabs, eventually getting caught when Black faked a jab to get Johnny to duck and then nailing him with a kick. Also liked Black doing his little yogi pose and Gargano running right in to kick him. The whole first several minutes are a bunch of fun bullshit, but a modern indy twist on stoogey bullshit, using a lot of constant movement without really gaining ground. But it's tougher to make that kind of swing dancing bullshit work when you're getting into the meat of the match, as you start taking big bumps that then get kind of immediately ignored for more ladies night square dance spots. Black eats a crazy DDT off a Gargano tope, and then back in the ring eats another DDT that leaves him suspended vertically on the mat for awhile, but seconds later they're back do-si-do'ing and springboarding into superkick trade-offs. A lot of it looks cool, but a lot of it also feels like total nonsense. Sometimes I find really fast spotfests exhilarating, but this feels like they need to be letting some of this breathe a bit. A lot of the stuff would still look great if it was slowed down a bit, and things do get better when Gargano stops Black with a couple of big flying knees. But there's just not a lot of space here. We go into a formula strike exchange that ends with Black teeing off on Gargano, but Gargano immediately shoves him to the floor, and Black immediately no sells a bump to the floor by kneeing Gargano out of the air on a tope. Again, a lot of the stuff they're doing looks cool, and almost all of it feels completely hollow. Even the finish seemed to come almost out of nowhere, as Gargano had been running around the whole damn match barely fazed by anything, but then goes out like a light. They went for go go go, and a lot of it just went went went in one ear and out the other. Also, I'm trying to write more 1980s Gene Shalit punchlines in my reviews now.

Velveteen Dream vs. Tommaso Ciampa

ER: Dream's 1998 Hollywood Hogan gear is fly as hell. He was Macho Man when we saw him Thursday, and did a ton of great Macho axe handles including a great one to the floor. I mean he's clearly a Savage acolyte anyway so it's a pretty lateral transition. And as I'm typing that I'm realizing that means we might see him doing a bunch of Hogan cosplay here and....and  man that sounds lame. But Dream is one of my absolute favorites this year. I think he's improved incredibly in the past two years and if he can make some Chikara horsehit work then he might be top 25 in the world. It's a big if though. And there is some Hogan cosplay, but mainly with a legdrop and boot, which is something you can work into your offense. He's not out there working a death days Charlie Haas gimmick or anything. And I like a lot of this but really loved the moment where Dream locks in a ringpost figure 4 on Ciampa's chronically bad knee. Not only because ringpost figure 4s fucking own, but we get a surprising tap from Ciampa while the ref isn't looking, and it's cool because maybe he did it to break the hold, maybe he did it because Dream beat him. Once Dream starts working the knee it gets really good, and I liked the figure 4 drama, liked the big dramatic spill on the floor...but fully expected and was fully annoyed by Ciampa limping around on one leg, but still doing every single bit of his offense that involves dropping Dream onto his own hurt knee. "Oooooooo my kneeeeeee!!! Whelp, time to powerbomb a guy onto my knee!" The finishing stretch was both hot, and kind of long winded. There were some awesome moments and awesome nearfalls. I loved how all of the DDTs were set up: Dream jumped off the top but stopped short and caught Ciampa's boot, got kicked to the floor and got planted with the DDT coming back in. Great set up for that DDT. On the floor both flew over the announce desk but Dream caught him with the rolling death valley driver and rolled him in to plant the elbow for a great nearfall. The Dream DDT on the belt looked great, we got Dream crashing and burning to the floor on a crazy missed elbow, tremendous bump, and the match finishing hanging DDT on the metal joining the two rings was an awesome use of a ring. That metal grating is never there otherwise, and it feels like a great Finlay idea to utilize that into a unique finish. But I think there was some unnecessary excess and wasted time, and I think we had some unrealistic kickouts instead of creating actual drama. I don't think this was far from being a really good match, and I thought Dream looked fantastic (getting a little bored with Ciampa's whole thing at this point), but I don't think this quite got there.

WarGames Match: Undisputed Era vs. War Raiders/Pete Dunne/Ricochet

ER: Man those shark cages are dorky as all hell. And Adam Cole was not at all the guy I wanted to see wrestling this entire match. But at least they're smart and put the heels up 2 to 1. It's insane how often that gets screwed up. Everybody screw over Roderick Strong on his entrance, doing all of their selling at the same time in the ring farthest from the cage door. So Strong runs in like a house on fire and has to run through a fucking Double Dare obstacle course to get to everybody standing around watching him like an idiot. And this whole match is just a reallllllll...slog. First off, you know a WarGames with no blood is just always going to be lame as hell. One of the first VHS wrestling tapes I rented from the video store was the big beautiful Great American Bash '87 clamshell, with two different WarGames: THE MATCH BEYOND matches. I was WWF only at this point in my life, and the wrestling I was so used to was so much more...grimy and violent than I was used to. I knew most of the wrestlers in those '87 matches, most had been in the era of WWF that was my first wrestling, but it felt so different than the wrestling I had been watching. This didn't feel grimy or violent. It felt like a series of uninterestingly laid out spots. It had some of the sloppiness of a big CZW cage match, but without any of the grime or violence. There are always going to be good moments from something like this, but my god I was so young when this match began. Mauro says "It must be a nightmare for all involved" and it's the only time he's made sense tonight. This match is a neverending nightmare of a match. If I was King of the References Mauro Ranallo I would say "This match is such an unending nightmare that I'm begging for Freddy Krueger to appear and rip me apart asshole to throat!" Ricochet had some big flying spots (including 7 guys managing to miss catching him on his huge backflip senton), and there was an awesome moment where Rowe alley-ooped Fish into a killer Hanson powerslam, but man did this whole thing draaaaag. I can't decide if the stupid 8 man dude Christmas tree powerbomb off the ropes was really really stupid or just really stupid, but I was laughing hard enough that it didn't really matter.

ER: This was easily the worst TakeOver that I've watched, with few positives. Velveteen Dream delivered huge, but a lot of the match structures felt like they failed huge. And really, Mauro turned in a show long atrocious performance. He stinks.

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