ROAD REPORT: GCW Devil in a New Dress 4/10/22

This Road Report is going to be much more vibes than actual match analysis. This was the first wrestling show I had been to with this many friends (seven people, including myself) in who knows how long. It was a great night, fun as hell, but there's no way I'm going to be remembering full details of a 20 minute Dark Sheik match or what specific Kidd Bandit spots I thought were stupid. The card was changed around wildly and the two people I was most excited to see (Biff Busick and Gringo Loco) were either there and not used or not there for reasons I don't know (travel?). So that was a drag! And yet, we still had a good time. It was fun seeing it with several friends who don't follow indy wrestling, as a couple of my boys were only familiar with Busick, Jacob Fatu, and Suzuki. With no Busick or Fatu, that meant they were seeing nearly everyone on the card for the first time, brains unsullied by the opinions of those on the internet. I told them to "just think of this as early Jersey All Pro" and that set the mood just fine. 

Effy vs. Nick Wayne

ER: If you had told me earlier in the night that Effy would be the guy putting on my favorite performance of that night, then I would have been skeptical. Had it been my Looper, I would have been more inclined to believe me. This was my favorite personal Effy performance and I thought he came off like an honest to god star. The Yellow Brick Road music, the trashy blonde asymmetrical mullet, the fishnets, and the extreme confidence on the mic. For reasons I could not quite make out (it is not an indy wrestling show without somewhat questionable sound), Effy stated that this was a family show and he would therefore be working much less horny. And honestly? Focused ass kicker Effy is much more entertaining than horny Effy. He did a great job bullying a high school junior, caught all of Wayne's dives (including a big tope con giro), and came off like a real complete act. I'm not sure there was anyone on the card who carried themselves like a bigger star than Effy did in this match, and that includes Suzuki. 

My favorite moment of the match - which might sound odd - is how he handled a failing prop spot: Wayne brought the doors into the match, and as Effy was setting up a door on a couple folding chairs and trying to keep Wayne on them, the door just fell off the chairs. As the fans were jeering the extended spot set up, Effy just did the most hilarious hurrr durrrr face with a funny dance to accompany it, immediately shutting down any potential derision. Now, the *craziest* moment came right after, when Effy went up top and Wayne got up way too quick to catch him with a Spanish Fly. Wayne got up so quick that Effy's feet weren't squared up, one of them looked to be slipping, and those knees were shaking hard as Wayne flipped. I was standing near the turnbuckle directly opposite them, and I swear to you I looked directly into Effy's eyes and saw the expression of a man who did not think he was properly making it over on that Spanish Fly. I thought he was going to brutally plant chin or neck first directly into the mat, but somehow he made it over (not really through the table, instead going off course and flattening one of the chairs). People were going nuts after that Fly, and I know I'm not the only one there who thought we almost witnessed an opening match murder. 

Jordan Oliver vs. Jack Cartwheel

ER: The only thing really worth remembering about this match is the bananas finish, but honestly on a show like this having the most GIFable finish is way more valuable than just having a good match. This was a match that I really didn't care for as I wanted to see Cartwheel get punished for his frequent cartwheeling and I don't think it got there. I did not need to see these two working multiple stand and trade spots and reversals of reversals over a too long 15 minutes, and I could not believe how many Cartwheels Jack got away with. We had to have seen at least a dozen of them (conservative estimate) and every single time I wanted them to end with Oliver cutting them off HARD. I like Oliver and liked when he did get stiff with Jack, but Cartwheel is like a bad Dynamite Kid, only replacing the crisp execution and crippling alcoholism with cartwheels. This match felt like it was peaking to a finish, and then kept going, then went to more slapping and missed its window. However, the finish is something that only the most joyless wouldn't pop for, as Oliver bounced Cartwheel off the top rope with a front suplex and then caught Cartwheel on the rebound with a sitout powerbomb, fundamentally erasing the previous 15 minutes from my brain by finishing with the far and away coolest thing they were capable of doing.  

Allie Katch vs. Kidd Bandit

ER: I would be plenty happy never watching another Kidd Bandit match ever again. I hate a babyface whose only quality is being cute, and this was some next level eye rolling uwu waifu horseshit. I wanted to see them get the shit kicked out of them but instead we mostly got them doing simp fingers, making Allie sell for an eternity while they posed, then posed some more, then did a shitty stunner and 619. Her kicks couldn't break paper and Allie was insanely generous selling for any of it. The best parts were Allie trying to snap Bandit in half with a Boston crab and battering her in the corner with a lariat, hip bump, and big cannonball. I did like Allie's match finishing piledriver, draping Bandit over the ropes and sitting back with it, but Kidd Bandit's act is 100% not aimed at me and that is fine. I do not want to be a member of that club. 

Jimmy Lloyd vs. Masha Slamovich

ER: Out of everyone on the show, I think my friends left this show as bigger fans of Jimmy Lloyd than anyone else. They liked plenty of people on the card, but the different boy just connects...differently. I was excited for Masha/Busick - the originally scheduled match - but this was a fine replacement. I dug the story of Jimmy trying to outpower Masha at the outset with a powerbomb, but when all it did was fire her up, going immediately to the weapons and pushing things to more dangerous places (and Masha being totally fine being pushed there). The floor brawl was cool and lead to some nasty spots, with both throwing chairs (Lloyd is someone who is going to lean into chair shots), Masha running up the apron with a tornado DDT on the floor, and Lloyd hitting a nutso death valley driver off the apron through a door. They broke some doors in this one, and when they took it back in the ring was when Lloyd started breaking out his biggest bumps. He was really good at selling and taking damage from the smaller Masha, never feeling like he was overbumping and mostly selling her shots appropriately. When he flies into a door, it's because he got hit with a high impact missile dropkick that sent him flying across the ring. 

Masha didn't escape damage, as Lloyd powerbombed her across a trash can and brother, that trash can barely took any damage. The can won that battle, and Masha's future back problems will be testament to that. Lloyd leaned face first into her running kicks, took and sold a nasty suplex across an open chair, even took a piledriver onto some open chairs. We don't get to see a lot of classic piledrivers in wrestling these days, so seeing one dropping a guy head and neck through a chair is insane, and I love how she finished with another one right after. It's hard not to be a fan of the different boy after this match, and the boy came off even more lovable later in the night when my friends kept seeing him in the crowd, not always knowing if it was Lloyd or any one of a couple dozen wrestling fans who look exactly like Lloyd. After the show, when most wrestlers were hanging around ringside and the merch area selling polaroids and gear, Lloyd was just chilling in the crowd sitting alone. A different boy even among peers. 

Titus Alexander vs. Midas Kreed

ER: This was kind of a local showcase, although I'm not sure you'll be able to call Titus a local guy much longer, as clearly bigger things await him. The Bay Area scene is not where you stay if you want to grow your career, all the big ones get out and move east. Titus stood out in a big way on this card just by actually working heel, doing things that got actual heat, and sticking to it. He wasn't out looking for MJF "I'm a HEEL" type heat, he did some actual hateful stuff like getting right in the face of the female ref when she made him break a count. He moved into her personal space so quickly that I think it actually caught a lot of the crowd off guard and really got them turned against him. Titus knew how to get heel heat and comedy heat, which is an important distinction. He was good at setting up spots and not paying them off with what the crowd wanted, like clearing a section of crowd to throw Kreed through chairs, only to throw him right back into the ring instead. It's an old trick, but one I'll laugh about every time. It's an especially funny trick in GCW, since every person in the crowd knows there's a chance any match will spill into the crowd and a minimum four guys are going to get thrown through a section of chairs. 

Kreed had some flashy stuff, like a 450 splash that connected (even though he's a small guy) and a really cool pendulum swing reverse DDT that Titus took right on the back of his head. It was like a Sliced Bread, only Alexander really got drilled into the mat. Alexander has a nice moveset: a spinebuster, a couple kneelifts to the face, and a big rolling Chaos Theory German suplex that threw Kreed across the entire ring. These guys were probably the least known on the show, and post-intermission is sometimes a rough spot to connect to a crowd (which typically correlates with how long the intermission is, and this one wasn't bad at all), but these two won the crowd over pretty quickly. 

Matthew Justice/Mance Warner/AJ Gray vs. Juicy Finau/Journey Fatu/D-Rogue

ER: I was excited to see my boy Justice live. I've seen him a couple of times live, and I just really connect with him as a big time babyface. He wasn't really a babyface here, but he's got that same kind of working man's charisma that Jimmy Lloyd has, that same kind of guy who will bleed and wreck his body for the fans, with the major difference being that Matt Justice fucks. He also did not let me down, as he hit some of the absolute LOUDEST chair shots I have ever heard. He was pasting these Islanders with shots (even broke a cane over someone's head!), hitting them so hard in the head and back that I bet his hands were getting hurt just as badly. Justice wasn't just wrecking people with chairs, he also caught a big D-Rogue dive and got flattened by a Juicy splash from the middle buckle. When Juicy told the crowd he was gonna hit a 450, he climbed to the middle buckle and slapped his belly: "THIS...is 450" and then made Justice disappear beneath girth. Earlier, Juicy had threatened to do a dive to the floor, and Mancer got on the house mic and said he had a bad leg and there was no fucking way he was going to stand there and catch that motherfucker's dive. Jacob was gone, but honestly Journey isn't much of a step down in quality. He hung in for stiff shots, ran Gray through a door with a running powerslam, threw headbutts, basically everything I would have expected from Jacob. 

All the stuff in the ring was even crazier than the stuff on the floor. SGC combined forces to suplex Juicy through a table, Gray threw his lariat as hard as possible at Juicy, Justice and Mancer made the perfect bug eyed dumb faces when Juicy grabbed them in Tongan death grips, and we got a cool finish with Justice and Gray nailing D-Rogue with Superfly splashes from opposite corners. The deservedly loudest pop of the match was when Mancer wasted Journey with an unprotected chair shot to the dome, and Journey roared his way through it because, well, the brother is Samoan. This was probably my favorite match of the night, a great mix of violence and personality and big spots. 

Dark Sheik vs. Joey Janela

ER: I am not a big fan of these 20 minute Joey Janela matches, but I recognize that I am likely in the minority, and even though they had the longest match on the card they managed to keep the crowd's interest for all of it. That means something. Still, this felt like a match that was about to wrap up around 12 minutes in, so of course it shot right past that window and yep, we were locked into 20 minutes of move trading, back and forth. If you have the offense to fill 20 minutes of time then more power to you, but a lot of times there felt like no rhyme or reason as to who was in control. Joey catches her with a kind of blue thunder bomb, and moments later Joey is eating a big Sliced Bread on the apron. Joey eats a brainbuster and big guillotine legdrop, but Joey is the one setting up the prop spots just moments later. There was some entertaining bullshit with Dark Sheik's valet, SF drag star Pollo Del Mar, that ended with Del Mar putting Janela through a table with a powerbomb. At the start of the match Janela had hit her with a cheapshot and this was a good way to pay that off. 

After the powerbomb, Sheik hit a big coast to coast missile dropkick, and that's what I thought would be the finish. You know, the cheapshot at the beginning got paid off in a big way, Sheik hit a big impressive finisher, felt like a good time to end all of this. But we still needed another 9 minutes of prop set-up, bad strike exchanges, and even worse kneeling strike exchanges! Janela did hit an insane running elbowdrop through a table, running from the stage and leaping  FAR off it, far enough that I wasn't actually sure he would clear the distance. Great spot. It looked like Janela would pull this whole thing off after a piledriver and top rope double stomp, but nah, we needed to get to some of that kneel and trade that never looks good. If I remember correctly, Janela eventually lost when he suplexed Sheik through some chairs, and Sheik just wound up pinning Janela. They went all out and had a bunch of big moves, and that's great, but man was I ready for this to be over and done with long before we got there. 

Minoru Suzuki vs. Speedball Mike Bailey

ER: When we got to the venue (The Midway, great building for wrestling that I had never been to before) and started wandering around scoping out a spot to stand, one of the first things I noticed was Suzuki just hanging out by the bar, leaning against it and silently surveying the growing crowd. He was wearing a track suit with his name on it, and a sunbeam was coming down from a skylight, giving him a perfect spotlight to lounge in. I swear, I didn't see another sunbeam shining into that entire (large) venue, and here's Suzuki basking in his own personal warm glow. 

Suzuki has a pretty great thing going with his US appearances. He knows what the fans want to see, and he knows the exact bare minimum he can do to scrape by while still leaving everyone happy and excited that they got to see Minoru Suzuki live. Sometimes you get forearm exchange/silly faces Suzuki, sometimes you get that plus a little extra. I think we got the latter. There were a lot of forearm exchanges (way too many), and you can see his personal formula for them when you're watching up close. He throws 90% of his shots totally worked, but knows to payoff his killshots with real stiff killshots. This leads to a bunch of dull exchange where guys are pulling everything and meandering through their 5th, 8th, who knows how many stand and trade sequences, but they always end with an absolute jawbreaker. It's like Suzuki is using George Costanza's High Note Theory, where he knows he can sleepwalk through most of an exchange before throwing one tooth loosener, and everyone will mostly just remember all the big endings to those endless exchanges. I really liked some of their mat exchanges, and thought this would have been a lot more fun if Suzuki kept tying Bailey up with arm and wrist work, leading to Bailey forgoing his arm and just attacking with kicks. We didn't get that, but I would have liked that. 

Suzuki had a hilarious misread of the room, as he kept getting into the female ref's face when she asked him to break holds, I guess thinking that him telling a woman to get out of his face was going to get him cheered? After Titus Alexander used the exact same thing to draw strong heel heat just a couple matches earlier, it was completely brainless to go in thinking he'd get anything but awkward reactions for backing down a much smaller woman. He won them back pretty easily with a funny spot where he ducked a couple of Bailey head kicks, stuck out his tongue to mock Bailey, and then got kicked in the face. Bailey had a few cool spin kicks that stopped Suzuki cold, a couple to the chest and one that wrapped around his head. He also hit a big moonsault to the floor and had a near fall off his flipping double kneedrop that got me to bite. Bailey wound up missing the same kneedrop, only off the top rope, mine own knees crying out in eternal pain just witnessing it, and Suzuki planted him with his Gotch piledriver. The match had far too many strike exchanges, but I don't think it would have been as bad if four of the other matches hadn't had the exact same strike exchanges. If you're on the undercard of a show Suzuki is headlining, it seems pretty dumb to have a shitty stand and trade sequence in your match, but that did not slow down all of the worst strikers on the show! Even thinking that a lot of the strike exchanging in this match was cumbersome, I can't deny that this was a bigger Suzuki performance than I was expecting. The guy is a legend and has some of the most contagious charisma in wrestling, and I couldn't be happier that he's getting the biggest paydays of his life while basking in sunbeams. 

After the show we battled the strongest winds I have ever personally experienced in San Francisco, and drove a couple miles to go to one of the great SF restaurants, Papito. Papito is a great taqueria with a French chef owner-operator, and this is the first time I'd been to their new location (around the corner from their old location). My favorite music venue in SF (maybe anywhere?) is Bottom of the Hill, and Papito is a nice steep uphill walk a few blocks away from B.O.T.H. As I have not been to any concerts in SF since March 2020, I have not been this close to Papito in over two years. The original location would have been a logistical nightmare with a five person party as there were only a few tables inside. Now they have 3-4x the space and we were seated immediately. Glorious. I filled up on their excellent chips and salsa, ruining my appetite for their incredible hamburguesa, one of the greatest burgers I have had in my lifetime. My plan, however, was ingenious, as I took most of my burger home and wolfed it down the next night, regretting not requesting some of their orange salsa to go. 

As I was the driver on this trip and therefore chose what we listened to, my friends' ears were blessed by a 3-2 Giants victory on the radio, some Gene Vincent, Grateful Dead's excellent 4/8/72 show at Wembley Empire Pool (with awesome tonally shifting 30 minute Dark Star, among other highlights), The Brides of Funkenstein's disco classic Never Buy Texas From a Cowboy, and Charlotte Adigery's amazing new album Topical Dancer. 

Even though this was not the card I wanted, there was not one person in our group who was disappointed by this show. Even the matches that were firmly Not For Me had memorable moments, and the people I was excited to see totally delivered. Every one of my pals had a great time too, and when GCW announced they would be returning in July, we made plans to do it all over again. 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death Week of 1/10-1/16

AEW Dark 1/11 (Taped 1/8)

Eddie Kingston vs. Joey Janela - GREAT

MD: The leg selling here. Kingston teased it early. Janela capitalized later on by catching him with a dragon whip as he was coming back in. And the moment of comeback was Kingston stuttering midway through a tope run only to sell for a second and then finishing the motion. It was a little thing but it told the audience everything they needed to know about Eddie in one moment. He was hurt. He was in pain. He was taking a risk and was too hurt to manage it. He did it anyway and it worked. That's Eddie Kingston in a nutshell. Sometimes he pays for it later. Sometimes he doesn't. Janela tried to steal the show here, bumping big, including bumping himself off the top rope to distract the ref so Rossi could hit her big standing moonsault on the floor. He stooged for Eddie, chopping and posing and getting killed, going for the Flair strut in NC before getting kicked out of the ring when he went for the figure-four, etc., but he still managed to come off as a compelling if not convincing threat. Also nice to see Eddie dig into the 90s Japan bag of tricks for a finish he doesn't use as often. Good TV match.

PAS: I really enjoyed this. People assume Janela is one of the guys whose contract is going to expire, but I really like him as a Rip Rogers flamboyant enhancement guy, really a perfect Dark wrestler. This was a Northeast indy main event somewhere, so Kingston gave him a bunch of moments to shine, but of course this is another brilliant bit of Eddie. All of the leg selling totally ruled and I loved the standstill tope, where he just says fuck it and flings himself at Janela. I also really liked the contempt he showed for Janela's striking, firing back with a nasty slap on the outside in response to a chop, and powering though his superkicks. Janela can finds ways to work an advantage on Kingston, but the idea of him trading shots with him in a fight is silly, and Eddie treated it that way. Too many times in wrestling everyone sells every shot by every guy like it drops them for a back bump. I like when people have strengths and weaknesses, and Kingston isn't going to act like Janela can out punch him even a little. 

AEW Dynamite 1/12

CM Punk vs. Wardlow

MD: This worked better on a second watch for me, though the ending was overwrought and, despite the crossing of the legs, the finish was a little hard to buy. Otherwise, it was Punk doing everything he could to help put Wardlow over and Wardlow holding up his end. When Wardlow managed to catch Punk, Punk paid. When Wardlow overreached or gave Punk an opening, Punk used it. It was a strange match as MJF's distraction hurt both wrestlers. Punk continuously had Wardlow's number anytime he went for the powerbomb right up until when MJF distracted him after the corner knee, allowing Wardlow to wrench Punk out of the corner with the first bomb. Everything after that could have lost about two whole minutes, which doesn't sound like much but when it's pure drama and power bombs, it really was.

ER: I really liked this up through powerbomb number five, loved all of it. Wardlow was really running over Punk and Punk was really good at building sympathy and then laying it in stiff when trying just to budge Wardlow. I really loved when Punk started throwing everything he had at him, throwing several stiff arm lariats off Wardlow's chest and back, and a solebutt that drops Wardlow to a knee. The story of Punk avoiding the powerbomb was simple, and I thought once Wardlow caught him in the corner and hit the first one, then planted him with the second one, that this was getting great. Punk sold the powerbombs really well, splaying out his limbs and rolling to his side and getting dragged back up to his feet. The MJF extended finish felt too overindulgent and the more powerbombs Punk took the more silly I knew the eventual finish was going to look. I would have gotten a kick out of Wardlow taking the victory for himself, and then when Punk won with a real sad small package, I wanted that finish even more. The bulk of the match was still a success, and a good confident Wardlow performance that he'll get a chance to do even better. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 12/16/20

What Worked

-My WCW muscle memory kicked in when the snow started falling after Cody's win, and I actually said "Glacier" aloud, to myself. 

-I actually really liked The Acclaim's rap AND Kazarian's rap before their match. Honestly, the raps probably made me enjoy the match more than I should have. I don't think the match was very good, but the wrestling on this show has been dreadful so...I thought Christopher Daniels's jabs looked really good?

-Diamante decided to have her whole butt hanging out of her trunks so that seems like it works? 

-Omega/Janela was about as dumb as it gets, nothing but stunt spots segueing into stunt spots with no flow to them. BUT the stunt spots look good so fuck it, need to populate the top side of this write up a bit. Janela's tope looked good and Omega plastered himself into the guardrail a couple times, Janela took a bulldog face first on a chair, got hilariously into place for an Omega top con hilo, etc. Every spot was a restart, but the landings looked sick enough and Don Callis on house mic commentary was great. This is the best Omega's V Trigger knees have looked in lord knows when, really looked like he was going to cave in Janela's face with them. After seeing those 1/2 speed knees he through past Moxley's head last week I was thinking Omega had lost his speed, but I really loved the aggression he used to wreck Janela. 

What Didn't Work

-Opening trios was pretty disjointed and didn't have any kind of flow to it. It slowed down at weird times and never felt like it had any kind of consistent (or good) pace to it. NOAH knew how to throw six random guys into a trios and have a nice high floor, but this had very little going for it. It's great that Alex Reynolds is confirmed Alive after definitely not being knocked out cold, and Hangman had a couple nice lariats (including one that Kassidy bumped onto the side of his head). But a lot of this had bumps that felt a little too disconnected from the offense they were supposed to be taking, and it never came together in a meaningful way. 

-I think there is a potentially good Cody/Angelico match, but this was not that match. I'm not into match layouts where one guy does his stuff, and then the other guy decides to stop taking offense and start doing all of his own offense. I liked the Angelico wrist control do-si-do arm drags but didn't love much else. Neither was great at taking the other's offense, and that's going to hurt a match that's nothing but guys taking turns on offense. Angelico is good at taking headstand plants on cutters or DDTs, but the way he just stands there waiting to take something never looks good. Cody had kind of a similar thing where he would just stand there waiting for Angelico to run into his offense, and it all sucked brother. 

-Lance Archer interrupting Eddie Kingston's Airing of Grievances like 30 seconds in while wearing the shittiest ripped and distressed jeans I have ever seen is a big damn heel move

-I like when Butcher wears his butcher's apron, but why is Blade out there in one? Wearing his dirty jeans, t shirt, and apron he just looks like a Whole Foods burrito bar employee at the end of his shift. 

-12 man had the same problems the other matches have had so far, real weird energy and a lot of people on a different page. Jericho/Pillman stuff was decent, and I loved Jericho's straight right hands more than anything else in the match (other than Sammy Guevara's awesome folded over his knees sell of a Trent kick), and that's because most of the match didn't work. When you have a match like this and a bunch of guys who have never been in a match with 11 other people, you're going to have a bunch of people getting in each other's way. There were several guys who didn't look ready for prime time (not sure I've ever seen a sloppier slingshot legdrop than whatever it was Griff Garrison did), but I did laugh a bunch when Jake Hager - on the apron for most of the match - finally got in the ring. Not only did he trip over the ropes, but then he hit one of the ugliest, sloppy "F10" finishers I've seen, just a lazy spin that basically resulted in Garrison being dropped in a weak body slam. That's what gets a pin? Total mess. 

-You give me Ivelisse in a tag match and I'm going to want to see that trademark unprofessional Ivelisse work. But this was mostly just Diamante and Swole going through some rehearsed sequences, some of which looked good, some of which looked like a couple people standing around counting out their steps. It's hard to get any kind of heat or maintain much interest when it feels like the in ring is just going through the motions. This whole damn show has felt like it's going through the motions. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 9/23/20

What Worked

-Evil Uno/Hangman eeks onto the top side here just because I still like what Uno brings to AEW. Page has several cool bits of offense and then other things he should drop entirely. Things like his moonsault off the apron that rarely connects, offense like that just looks silly with his character. It's that Silas Young thing where he looks like James Gammon and is a real man, then goes out and wrestles like a bad Chris Sabin clone. Page needs to drop the flips and just focus on cool fallaway slams and big lariats, because those things work well within his character AND are moves that look good. I really liked the fallaway slam where he held a bridge, not an easy thing to do. Uno is someone in AEW who makes little things look good, but here he also gets to splat Page with a huge cannonball off the top. The match wasn't perfect, but Uno made Page's offense look good (Page makes stuff look good, but Uno helped with some things), so this landed up top.

-Uno was selling his head and neck around ringside during the Lee/Cassidy match and that rules.

-Cassidy/Brodie was a good use of bullshit that leaves the door open for Cassidy to get some kind of cage match revenge. I dug Lee knocking Cassidy's block off after the hands went in the pockets, but I am a fan of the hands in pockets spots. His dive that was caught by the Dark Order was a cool trick, and they managed to all impressively scatter at the right time to make it look like Cassidy actually got the worst of Lee's dive. Lee has a few too many goofy twists and turns to his offense still, but he's great at barreling into Cassidy with falling lariats and big boots, and I loved that grounded side headlock he worked during the commercial break (also hit a great elbowdrop during the break, shame some of his coolest stuff was during the break). Cassidy's comeback was good and I liked the way they worked in him dealing with the Dark Order (lots of fun work with him dodging interference in between hitting dives), dealing with them leading to him getting blown up. Run this back, throw them in a cage, give me a Cassidy pockets dive off the top of the cage.

-I like a good "look we WANT to fight you guys, but that wouldn't be fair to YOU because of how beat up you are" and FTR pulled off that attitude well.

-You know? Just keep matching up Thunder Rosa and Ivelisse every week. There have been plenty of AEW women's matches that are just actually bad, so it's way way way more interesting to just have two women in there who look and act like they genuinely hate each other. Having unprofessional looking exchanges is an upgrade over having bad looking rehearsed exchanges. There was plenty of stuff here that was out of sync (including a hilarious moment where Tony and JR are talking about how perfectly in sync Shida and Ivelisse were, as Ivelisse's timing was clearly off on two things in a row), but I'll take a couple out of sync moments if you give me some stiff punches and kicks. Every time Ivelisse and Rosa were in there together was noteworthy and the hate bled through the screen. Ivelisse mounted her and looked like she would have punched her right in the nose if Rosa didn't know how to cover up and buck her off, and it added a sick "what will happen next?" element to things. I dug Shida suplexing Ivelisse boots first into Diamante's face (with Rosa hitting slingshot knees after), and later Shida running across the ring to stop a hot tag by hitting a flying knee to Diamante on the apron. It didn't totally matter much as the finishing stretch fell apart a bit, but the falling apart was some of the best stuff here. Pure hate and actual emotion are things we don't get enough of in wrestling, so I celebrate this unprofessionalism and welcome it to my television.

22. Eddie Kingston vs. Jon Moxley

ER: It's cruel of AEW to make us wait two months for another Kings(ton) Road match in prime time, because of course King is going to deliver. I could watch Kingston sell chops all day, love watching him take a hit and see his muscle memory go to respond with a hit, only for the pain to hit mid throw. Gimme more of Kingston duck walking away holding his chest. You never get rote exchanges with King, the strikes are always mixed up and broken up with unexpected kicks. Kingston hits a lariat and  takes it to the floor, goes after Moxley's ear, yanks his waistband into an elbow to the back, dumps him into the timekeeper's table, and we get a nice tour of the AEW floor. King eats a vertical suplex and they both whip each other into the barricades. I love Kingston faces after he takes a suplex. We get too many idiotic facial reactions in wrestling, Kingston's reactions are the only ones that feel honest. These two kept it close and always punished lag, like Kingston headbutting Moxley off the top after Moxley left space between an elbow, or Moxley powering through a lariat after Kingston gloated a wee bit. We get some big moves, like Mox hitting a piledriver, or Kingston taking a big German suplex before dropping Mox with a backdrop, but there's never the feeling of moving from spot to spot. Kingston matches always feel like a strike battle broken up by occasional bigger moves, but everything is glued together with chops and headbutts and elbows. The sudden finish was awesome, with Moxley blocking a backfist and just pouncing on Kingston, dropping him to his knees with his weight while applying a sleeper that turns into a sick side headlock. Kingston is a man who knows how to make a side headlock look like a finish, turning purple and spitting, and Mox did his part by really hooking that chin. It's almost like Kingston needs to be wrestling on TV more.

PAS: All Japan Eddie Kingston isn't my favorite version of Eddie Kingston, although I love all versions. We are far enough removed from that era, that matches paying tribute to it don't seem as trite, and Kingston does that tribute stuff better than anyone. He understands that what made those matches great were timing and reaction and not just moves, and his reactions to getting hit were even cooler then the nastiness of the shots. Moxley had some cool little moments too, this wasn't just a Kingston showcase. I loved how he sold the downward elbows like he got a muscle cramp, and I really felt like he was excited to be working this kind of match and that excitement was contagious. I wish such a big chunk of this match wasn't in picture in picture, it's better then not getting it all, but they should time things better so your main event doesn't get chopped up. I thought the finish was really cool, no need for a bunch of near falls, that quick bulldog choke felt like an ending. Too bad it took COVID to slot Kingston in the main event where he belongs, but hopefully they realize he belongs there now, and a title rematch between these too - with a big build up - is the most exciting thing AEW could do right now.


What Didn't Work

-Opening tag was a real slog, not at all the kind of debut that made Miro looked like an asset. Miro looked fine in the match (although I couldn't stop laughing at JR fawning over his quads the whole time), but it went way too long, and it was easily the slowest paced match that Janela or Kiss have been involved with in AEW. Some nice individual moments (Kiss took a nice bump to the floor after Janela got shoved into him), but this whole thing felt sleepy.

-Jericho has made some pretty uninteresting on paper matches into interesting or even really good matches, but getting something good out of Private Party might be his greatest task. The promo didn't hit me, but I'll hold out hope.


2020 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 9/9/20

What Worked

-Eddie Kingston used a microphone, obviously it winds up here. I giggled every time he yelled at the Lucha Bros. to separate.

-I like Joey Janela when he is a Jericho punching bag.

-ALL ELITE HEELS IS REAL!!!!! I saw something about it on Twitter weeks ago and thought someone made a hilarious meme.

-Dustin match goes up here, but it was close. Brodie Lee looked really bad here, looking like someone who had no idea where he needed to be and couldn't think of interesting ways to get there. Dustin made this as salvageable as it was, so basically Dustin turning in a typical Dustin performance gets this up here. If I wasn't lazy I would write the Dustin part here and the Lee part down below, but let's call it at 55% good. Lee stumbled his way through things and looked lame enough through parts of this that it made me think there's a chance he is pulling double duty as Luchasaurus. Lee had a bunch of moments where he was just waiting to take moves, with no artistry whatsoever. He telegraphs all of Dustin's offense by just standing perfectly still and waiting for it, just horrible at occupying himself. When he took Dustin's drop down uppercut he literally just bent at the waist with his head up, watching Dustin the entire time while standing still. What a fucking idiot. He was at his best when he was Godzilla, throwing tables and barricades into Dustin while Dustin scrambled to safety, Dustin throwing punches while working to avoid him. But Lee has been bit by that really contagious Dijakovic bug, that makes him chain together a bunch of offense that looks like total rehearsed shit. He make Dustin's bulldog look like shit, and the finish was especially risible. The finishing lariat looked good, but making Dustin bounce back and forth between the ropes and his boot might have sounded like a good idea on paper, but it was hilarious in execution. Dustin keeps this here - barely - and Brodie Lee's stock has fallen every single week he's been in AEW.


What Didn't Work

-You know who stinks in AEW? Luchasaurus. That's a guy who stinks up a match. I really thought he had made strides in Lucha Underground, but he is pro wrestling poison in AEW. He always throws off the timing of a match, as everyone slows down to work in his spots and he does bad slow versions of cruiserweight spots. It wouldn't be SO bad if any of his spots looked good, but the thing is, none of his spots look good. Fenix looked great doing Fenix things, loved his rope work and his big dive into Luchasaurus down the finishing stretch (that Luchasaurus caught by falling over), but the finish of this was as putrid as anything Luchasaurus did. This was one of the more idiotically laid out finishes I've seen in AEW. Lucha Bros. hit a package piledriver on Jungle Boy, the Fenix hits the dive, gets back in the ring, but Jungle Boy is apparently Actually Fine from taking a tandem package piledriver just seconds before, and tricks Pentagon into giving Fenix a flipping piledriver. Incredibly, impossibly stupid.

-I guess I should be glad that they didn't work a physical angle with Hardy, but once I saw Reby there with their child I thought "Oh man Matt Hardy is gonna get fucked up". And I'm a monster because I am left disappointed by a man who clearly got a very bad concussion did not get nuked on TV a few days later.

-Jack Evans has just been on the roster, not being on TV? And he's not even wrestling tonight, just appearing at ringside? There are plenty of chuds on TV every week that should be replaced with Evans. Cassidy/Angelico (oh yeah, they still have Angelico too. I have not watched any episodes of Dark) was ehhhh. I liked Angelico's Jerry bump, but th Navarro sub looked like it was the first time he was trying it, and all of Cassidy's offense landed feather light. Then we end the segment with some Best Friends and this is firmly in the bottom half of the page.

-Not only do we get a segment showcasing Kip Sabian's comedy chops (and an unexpected Puf appearance), but Rusev/Miro is here and lemme tell you people, he's got something things to say about SOME PEOPLE UP NORTH. We know who HE'S talking about!! Get outta here. Bring someone in and do something other than that, ANYTHING other than that. Also, Miro is absolute wedding poison. Nobody should want him anywhere near an official role in their wedding. You'd think he wouldn't even want to be involved. THOSE PEOPLE UP NORTH had me do some stupid
wedding cuck angle. I'm going DOWN SOUTH to also then do a wedding angle.

-Boy, Hager/Sonny Kiss is an ugly style clash. Kiss has been great in trios matches, awkward in tags and singles, and Hager is not going to help him look good. I liked Janela's big bumps to the floor, liked Jericho getting run into a chair, but there was a lot of clunk in this tag.

-I did not anticipate FTR being this toothless in AEW. I'd rather see them Old School Tag Wrasslin on Main Event rather than these weekly talk segments and disappointing matches.

-You know what the women's division was missing? Someone with another awkward style that requires matches to come to a halt just so bad looking spots can be done. Well, they checked that box with Tay Conti! Capoeira almost always translates poorly to pro wrestling (I have been a fan of some Arturo Ruas matches, others I found his capoeira getting completely in the way). He submissions looked slow, her kicks looked bad. She hit one nice knee on the floor. And she's going to be a babyface? She feels like a natural heel to me, but hey, they seem to know what they're doing with this division.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 9/2/20

What Worked

-I tuned in late and missed a Chuck Taylor match. That works.

-The 8 man tag was fine, I guess. I would rather see most of these guys in an 8 man rather than in a traditional tag, so that's a plus. You'd think some of the spot set up would be a little less meh, but a lot of the stuff looked good. I thought this was a good Isiah Kassidy performance, really dug his middle rope springboard rana and thought he was slick at getting up for some pretty complicated double teams, and his partner Quen bumped big for a Jungle Boy lariat. Kazarian's springboard legdrop still lands well, Luchasaurus still looks like a goof doing anything, but this was fine.

-Loved Jericho/Janela, with Jericho beating the blood out of Janela while Cassidy looked on. Janela stood in there and took his beating to put over someone else's match, and Jericho really stiffed him up. Janela looked good in a multiman last week, but I like him getting roughed up by short knees and hard punches even more. Jericho was really clonking him in the temple with big fists, then worked over a cut with more punches as Janela bled. Hell yeah.

-Kingston came out and immediately out-talked and ran right over Taz and Jake Roberts. The in ring schmozz after was entertaining, tons of guys took painful bumps over the top and off the apron to the floor, Shawn Spears was throwing potatoes, Kingston was weirdly paired off with Billy Gunn for a long time, and it kind of lost steam after coming back from break. Still, a fun schmozz, and Brian Cage is a goof for going after Kingston with a flimsy superkick. This guy ran you down, and you run up to fight him with a bad superkick? What a goof.

What Didn't Work 

-Omega/Page/FTR came off like guys who being naught because they drink beerz and say swearz. They all came off like dinks. It didn't make me more interested in whatever wrestling they're building to.

-I didn't even realize Serena Deeb was even wrestling, so it was cool to see her, even if she looks more like Selina Majors/Bambi now. Thunder Rosa is someone with strong execution, who always needs to get her shit in, so you knew that whatever story is being told in the first half of a match will not matter at all. So I really liked the pre-commercial part of the match, dug Deeb slamming Rosa's knee into the mat and dropping her with a neckbreaker over the middle rope. A lot of Rosa's stuff looked good, but a match worked around Rosa selling a leg would have been much more interesting that Rosa roaring back like Deeb hadn't ever been in control. Her dropkick to Deeb's chest in the ropes looked good, she had a hard backfist, dug the battles over a backslide, and the Thunder Driver looked painful. But I can never get into her matches where she takes moves until it's time for her moves.

-Can't call that go home segment with Moxley beating up Mark Sterling. I don't know if I've heard a quieter AEW crowd. I would have called MJF bloodying up Moxley afterwards a win, but AEW already has done WAY cooler bloody builds for TWO other matches on this PPV. You aren't going to beat the blood that has been spilled between Hardy and Sammy, and this MJF segment played almost exactly like Jericho beating up and bloodying Janela not one hour before. Except Jericho wasn't yelling like a doofus into the camera. Bloody angles are cool! But this just came off like them building every singles match nearly exactly the same. MJF is a much better wrestler than a talker. The talking just doesn't come off naturally for me.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 8/27/20

What Worked

-Gauntlet matches are always kind of hard to write about, just because sometimes I love individual matches within a gauntlet, but you really have to talk about them as an entire segment. Overall, I think this match worked. It feels light to have only 4 teams in a gauntlet, and I have no idea how the order of entrants was chosen. Dustin/QT vs. the Bucks was solid, and any show that opens with Dustin (and, honestly, QT) is a good one. They work well together as a team, and I like QT as the Clear Weak Link in any match he's in. Dustin bumps generously for the Bucks (Dustin taking a huge hiptoss bump looked like me taking a hip toss from a 5 year old) and gets to show off as the fastest guy in the match, but also the strongest guy in the match (love that whipping powerslam). The double superkick after QT missed his silly handspring to nothing was timed really great. Bucks vs. Best Friends was better than anticipated, and it played as an extended run of Bucks offense (which is better than an extended run of Chuck Taylor offense). Trent eating a nice superkick and German suplex 1-2 on the apron looked good. The Hangman Page interference finish was weird and I don't want to have to follow these guys on social media or watch their different web shows to see why good buddies might be cranky with each other, but it came off stupid. FTR have underdelivered in AEW so far, and JR's commentary during their matches is unbearable. He always acts like he's saying something profound when he says "you know these guys remind me of an old school tag team" as if that hasn't been their one gimmick for the past 5 years. "You know, Kenny Omega always reminds me of some weeb geek who tugs it to anime." Yeah, no shit. But Cash hits a great snap vertical suplex on the floor to take out Trent, and Dax takes out Chuck's knee, so I am totally fine with this.

-Lance Archer would still be WAY more interesting if he was just limited to backstage assaults on nameless ring boys, but Sean Maluta really made the most of his squash debut and got big height on his bumps. Loved how Maluta flew on suplexes, and the height he got on the chokeslam put this up here.

-I don't know who did it, but I loved the GASP on commentary when MJF brought up Jon Moxley's hairline.

-8 man tag was fine, with the negatives talked about down below. Sonny Kiss looked really good, and as I pointed out after his less than stellar performance against Cody (which JR naturally deems AMAZING), he is a guy who really excels in frantic multiman tags. His stuff with Fenix was really electric (Fenix's rope work that lead to him getting knocked off, hanging his knee over the rope, looked real close to an injury), and I love the way Kiss darted around Butcher and Blade. The scouted  Matrix feint into a powerslam was a cool spot from Blade. Janela had a nice performance too, another guy who is improved just be being in a trios or 8 man. I liked the comedy gag he worked during picture in picture, taking leg kicks from Pentagon, no selling them, before collapsing in pain. He took a couple gnarly bumps, and his big bumps feel like a bigger part of the whole in a match like this (compared to his singles matches which have too many big bumps). Good match, would have rather seen Kingston wrestle than any of them.

-The Hardy/Sammy tables match ruled, and it's a real shame that it was somehow cut into by commercials. It's incredible how week after week they always manage to cut to commercials during actual big moments. I would have liked some more time in this match, felt like they ramped up to the kills pretty quickly. But at the same time I appreciated how they actually acknowledged within a match that going through a table is the only way to win, so they might as well go for that right away. It's a common stupid thing in wrestling to have a stipulation match where the participants work the first 5-10 minutes as if it were a normal match. Guys working armdrags in a first blood match, things immediately not breaking down in a no DQ match, it happens constantly. These men knew they had to put the other threw a damn table, and it was great. Sammy gets busted open, and they smartly take a couple of sick bumps through tables in ways that don't count. Sammy gets busted open (still nothing like that juice he got out of Hardy a couple weeks ago), flies through a table with a missed tope con hilo, Hardy misses an elbow through the table in painful fashion, Sammy gets stuck with a side effect on the apron, Hardy did a disgusting twist of fate while Sammy was wearing a chair around his neck, all of it looked great. This was a quick, violent, satisfyingly economical match.


What Didn't Work

-The commentary - JR in particular - always goes way over the top with comparisons, here comparing Lance Archer to Stan Hansen. JR is always the kid who cheats his way to an A+, not just staying out of sight with a B-. He always has to compare someone to the absolute best in wrestling history, and then you look up and see Archer hitting a so-so back elbow with his goober ass Burning Man braids flapping in the wind and it only makes me want to see Stan Hansen beat the shit out of him. Jericho fantasy books a 2020 Archer vs. 1976 Hansen match, and I wonder if Jericho has even seen 5 matches of 1976 Stan Hansen. What an odd year to pick for the guy.

-The balance is all off with MJF's promos. He's too smug to be stupid, but too stupid to know the right notes to hit. There's way too much school play villain and not enough believable villainy. He doesn't sound like he can think on his feet, as he never has a follow up when his opponent responds to one of his planned lines. I am genuinely curious what MJF has learned from watching Ernie Ladd tapes though, because that's not an inspiration that would have crossed my mind.

-Is Eddie Kingston the FIFTH MAN in a stable of Lucha Bros. and Butcher/Blade?? Seriously? Why sign Eddie Kingston so he can sit on the bench with a towel? He's not Jud Buechler. Plus, it's additionally stupid to have Kingston as the ringside mouthpiece, and then throw most of the match to picture in picture so we can't even hear Eddie Kingston. They constantly have wrestlers sit in on commentary, and Kingston would CRUSH commentary during these matches. It's like they signed him based on reasons that they immediately forgot. The wrestling in the 8 man was good enough, but you know what would have made it better? Eddie Kingston replacing literally anybody in the match.

-What happened here? Is Rebel/Reba supposed to be working a "not an actual wrestler, completely untrained to be in the ring" gimmick? Because she certainly convinced me. I can't remember the last time I've seen someone stumble around the ring that much, just getting in the way of absolutely everything. I can't blame Ford for much of this, even when she didn't look great, because it was always due to Rebal bumbling in where she didn't belong. Britt is a bright spot in AEW, and she could not save this.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 7/8/20

What Worked

-The big tag scramble delivered exactly what I wanted from it, with some fun unexpected double team chemistry from Young Bucks and FTR. Lucha Bros. are a team I was really tired of (well, I got really tired of Pentagon not showing up to work, but Fenix always had the chance to impress) but they've been really strong in AEW, and they had some inventive runs in a match filled with inventive runs. Dax Harwood (I still can't get over how fake their real names sound compared to their fake WWE names) was a real sticky piece of glue here, and a match like this desperately needs glue. The sequence where he got his ass kicked around by Lucha Bros. was masterful, and included a fantastic spit take in the middle. Butcher was really the only one who looked a page behind here, but a quick 8 man doesn't really seem like the right environment for him to shine. Everyone else was on it doggone it, and there was some slick business. Fenix hit a freaking flip piledriver to the floor into the rest of the match participants and it's wild to me how naturally they set up that spot - a spot that sounds so overblown that I wouldn't have guessed it would even approach working - and make it look more natural than Marq Quen made an enziguiri look. Loved the modern twist on the old Arn spot where Blade ducked his way out of a YB superkick right into a Dax DDT, and we got a sick powerplex with a big splash AND a swanton. This was fun as hell.

-Didn't like the match at all, but Christopher Daniels hit this super cool tope on Brodie Lee that looked like he was going to keep floating farther out. Lee caught him up high and it gave this illusion that Daniels was flying out into deep water, and they both crashed the barricade a few feet into the crowd.

-Main event was great, has to be my favorite Orange Cassidy singles match I've seen. Jericho was really good at flying around for Cassidy's high speed offense, and OC came off aggressively wild. He hit bigger than he typically hits, and his misses were just as big. The opening hands in pocket stuff was all really quick and looked impressive, and I dug how after 20 seconds of that he took them out and hit a real crash and burn tope, then punched Jericho around ringside with long right hands. We got more good barricade work from both guys (the night was full of guys flying impressively into barricades), and I liked how the momentum shifted throughout. Cassidy was good at falling hard for Jericho's offense, and Jericho worked fast and landed hard. Cassidy had this huge miss off a flying forearm and skidded across the mat and out of the ring like a skipped stone. Building a match out of big misses is pretty cool when the guys are missing big, and OC takes a big bump from the apron to the barricade, Jericho misses the springboard shoulderblock to the floor allowing OC to wipe out the Elite with a moonsault. All the misses felt like they built logically to a bigger moment. Now I didn't love the fighting from the knees and the kickouts got a little overkill, but I also can't deny that some of these kickouts were hot. I truly thought Cassidy was going to pin Jericho when he hit that satellite DDT, and that's when I knew they had me hooked. Plus Aubrey Edwards slid expertly through a lot of orange juice to enthusiastically count the pin. This was one of the stronger main events in Dynamite history.


What Didn't Work

-The more Marq Quen appears on TV and the less Kip Sabian appears, it might have revealed that Quen is worse than Sabian. Quen really dragged that tag match down, just a guy who constantly looks out of place and constantly requires a lot of moving parts just to get close enough to hit anything. There was an embarrassing early sequence that made nobody involved look good, where Quen was standing in the middle of the ring like a goof while Omega and Page crossed the ring around him, hitting him every time they passed and ending with him doing a handstand out of Omega's rocker dropper. Every second of it looked horrible, and little did I know that it was the first of several spots where Quen would stand in one place while Page and Omega bounced off him. Quen is working this match like the worst possible 1/6 scale Mabel. Page really busted ass to make this match happen, and the sequences with he and Kassidy were the parts that worked. Kassidy really lands with his dropkicks (his baseball slide to send Page crashing into the crowd looked great) and Page really flung himself into things to make them work. But Omega has been wildly inconsistent in AEW and Quen looked out of position for most of this match. Watch your back, Kip!

-Janela really tried to die on a couple bumps but Lance Archer looked like garbage in that match. First, it was silly to have them go 50/50 for so long. Janela wasn't throwing strikes that looked like they should stop Archer, and Archer isn't very good at selling strikes, so that was a terrible match. But Archer is also really bad about doing things to occupy himself while waiting to take a move, or getting into position way early to take a move. There's wrestling, and there's dancing, and Archer was doing a whole bunch of bad dancing. When Janela hit him in the gut from the apron, Archer just stood there bent at the waist, arms resting on the middle rope, waiting for Janela to leap over him. then the second Janela did, Archer immediately turns around and waits in position, middle of the ring, for Janela to go for a headscissors. Archer literally turned around and just held his arms out waiting to take a headscissors. Dancers know how to anticipate movement much better, and wrestlers are supposed to give some kind of idea that they don't know what move they are taking before the guy performing the move even attempts it. Janela crashed hard over the barricades on a spot where Archer basically lost his grip and didn't throw him, and I was happy when Janela splatted him with a heavy ass senton off the top.

-Not sure how I feel about Taz bringing back the FTW title, but it's also cool that Taz still has his belt from 23 years ago. Does the new guy wearing an old belt ever get a guy over? No weirdo is ever going to pretend that the Million Dollar Belt was the thing that made Austin. Also, because of Taz, I thought FTW meant Fuck the World up until maybe 7 or 8 years ago. Every time I would see something at a baseball game like "SF Giants FTW!!!" I just thought they were putting out the image of the Giants just waving double middle fingers to everyone.

-Pretty bad already to run a big multiman tag match after the really great multiman match from 20 minutes earlier, but a really bad idea when it seemed like half the guys were working this at 2/3 speed. They couldn't have done what the earlier match did, but some of the guys worked here like they thought nobody would be watching (I don't follow AEW quarter hours, maybe Dark Order is a real channel changer). Plus, putting half the match during a commercial break wasn't going to help them get more eyeballs. Daniels had a nice showing, Grayson seemed off in spots, Romero kept taking ugly bumps that made Grayson seem even more off, Brodie Lee felt like one of six guys in the match, Kazarian looked ridiculous working 50/50 with Lee...it just wasn't very good.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 6/24/20

What Worked

-AEW realized that nobody in the fed knows how to catch a dive, so I appreciate they made a match into a lumberjack just so 18 guys would be standing close together to catch someone. The set up was clumsy as hell, but it's smart to recognize your weaknesses.

-Super smart usage of Shida, just a quick running high knee and nice falcon arrow and then leaping aggressively into the crowd to smack Penelope around. Shida is someone who fucks up everyone's timing in every AEW match I've seen her in, so quick squashes to build to bigger matches is brilliant.

-Lee/Cabana vs. Janela/Kiss was certainly a pleasant surprise. They kept a hot pace for 8 minutes, and I cannot believe that this is the first actual non-battle royal that Kiss has been in over the entire Dynamite run. He came off like a real star in this one, if not a main eventer than someone who should clearly be a featured attraction every couple of weeks. He and Janela had a lot of chemistry as a team and I liked their quick tandem flying and the way they would run into big Brodie boots or screens. There was really only one hinky spot (where Cabana held up on a roaring elbow and Kiss bumped a little early for it), but most of this was fun fun fun.

-FTR/SCU was a hot tag that started falling apart a bit down the stretch, but I think they mostly did a good job at going home when things started slipping. I think this got good during the picture in picture break right after they did the tandem suplexes over the top to the floor, and thought Hardwood was especially strong with his cutoff punches. I think SCU's double team work was surprisingly more  solid, but I don't really care about FTR as a "double team" kind of tag team, I prefer them more as a cutoff tag team. So it was a complementary pairing with a strong progression. I dug SCU coming back with Daniels' slingshot elbow and Kazarian's big legdrop, and how it lead to FTR taking over later when Kazarian missed with an even bigger legdrop. Even a couple things that missed (like a Daniels flying knee that missed the mark) looked good after Wheeler took a nasty bump ricocheting off the ropes. Don't love FTR cutting gassed post-match in ring promos, but it's at least unique to them and so for now I'll appreciate it as a feature.

-Nice Cage squash. Jon Cruz is the right kind of ragdoll bumper that makes someone like Cage shine, getting insane height on a flapjack and crumpling nicely on everything. I dig Cage's bicep curl spot, feels like something an awesome juiced bodybuilder should be doing. Press slams and bicep curls, fuck yeah. There just needs to be a bodybuilder wrestler who bases every piece of offense on his regular gym set.

-Hardy/Santana was a good pairing and I liked seeing all the cool ways Santana would bump wildly for Hardy. In the opening couple minutes alone he was flying to the floor, all around ringside, and into the barricade. His cutoff work was simple and I liked how he would mix quick reversals in with just choking and stomping away at Hardy in the corner. The flip reversal out of the Side Effect was something I hadn't seen, and I like that it didn't come off fluidly; it came off like Hardy was going through with the move as planned and was genuinely surprised at Santana's reversal. After seeing the abomination that was Wardlow/Luchasaurus and how they kept anticipating every single move a split second (or more) too early, this kind of surprise struggle was awesome to see. I'm into 45 year old Hardy busting ass and keeping up with quick guys like Santana, and dig that he's pulling it off.

-Fine segment to close out the show, really loved how they kept building to the moment where it looked like Jericho was going to pop Cassidy. The through the crowd brawl was real good (also why the fuck are there so many people there in the crowd?? Who are they??), loved the hotshot Jericho took on a railing and especially loved how cool Orange Cassidy looks while bleeding all over himself out of the ear. It's almost like blood automatically makes nearly every wrestling situation better? Jericho's bump was cool, still no clue why so many people were there, but this was a good way to close out the show.


What Didn't Work

-Wardlow/Luchasaurus was a shitty version of a shitty Keith Lee/Dijakovic match, the kind of match that could have been good had they just done shoulderblocks and clotheslines, and instead derailed in hilarious fashion once they decided to pepper in a ton of slo mo dancing. The strike exchanges were all terrible, with Wardlow throwing slow punches from a mile away and both doing pillow soft slo mo Frye/Takayama strikes. Luchasaurus kept showing too much of his hand on bumps, clearly prepping for bumps that never quite matched up to the move Wardlow was delivering. And by the time the match devolved into Luchasaurus doing his embarrassing DDR exchanges it become one of the saddest matches I've seen on Dynamite. Literally every one of Luchasaurus dance exchanges looked like he was throwing them for the first time, without practicing, and without making sure that he could make any of it look good. And none of it looked good. It arguably peaked with him hitting the slowest legsweep I've ever seen, with Wardlow then taking a flat back bump after getting slowly legswept in the shins. Incredible. Luchasaurus whiffed on every strike that was supposed to be caught, thigh slapped when kicks didn't connect, and made sure every single kick he threw looked like a giant pile of triceratops shit. The flying off the stage was a minor bright spot, full props for Marko getting launched like that, but the set up for all of the big spots was so clunky and unnatural  and not a good enough reason to work an entire lumberjack match just to use them as a base. This was a real sad way to start a show.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 5/27/20

I didn't watch one cool second of the PPV, and I'm late to the broadcast tonight because it was my mom's birthday. How old is my mom? 69. How many 69 jokes did I make while visiting my parents? Not a single one.

What Worked

-Dead Stock Stadium Stampede Champions shirts is a funny joke concept, liked Jericho's delivery throughout the bit.

-I also laughed when Schiavone said "Yeah well a lot of us are fans of Wilbur Snyder" because JR brings up Wilbur Snyder the same way my grandpa would tell me the same story every few minutes toward the end of his run.

-Matt Hardy moves like he can't really bend his knees, but I can't deny that he is busting butt in AEW. He looks a little slimmed down, he cracked Kassidy with his big punch, he's quicker, and I loved his moonsault that landed perfectly across Private Party and Janela. I would like it if Matt kept up this Barry Darsow gimmick of cycling through his different eras. We need some plaid tights.

-Lee Johnson is the Job King of AEW, and I now want to see him get more ring time than the majority of AEW guys I see. This guy did not have to take a German suplex on the top of his shoulders, and yet he did. This man is wrecking his spine on buckle bombs and then decided he would also take a powerbomb on his neck. Respect this man.

-Britt "Roll Model" Baker is wonderful. I wasn't sure if something was actually wrong or if she was just playing her role in last week's tag really well, but this is making me an even bigger fan of hers. Although she started her rules for being a role model at #3. Feels like I missed a couple of important ones.

-If they have to put Kip Sabian, Jimmy Havoc, Scorpio Sky, and Frankie Kazarian on TV this much, at least they all end up in the same match. Wait, WHY do they have to put these guys on TV this much?

-Good battle royal with several noteworthy performances. Dr. Luther is a signing that people made fun of, but I've always liked him. Here he threw some nice right hands to send Marko across the ring, then threw him hard and bumped bumped huge for a chokeslam to the apron. Sonny Kiss had some nice stuff opposite MJF and also bumped big to the floor. Really this match was filled with guys taking big elimination bumps. Daniels generously bumped a Stunt rana to the floor, Cabana got tossed, several people did decent "hanging by a thread" dangles, Luchasaurus really went after MJF's throat on a chokeslam, and I liked Luchasaurus' punches and high kick during his showdown with Wardlow (the sequence itself was dumb, with both immediately going through a slow delay stand and trade, but the shots looked good). This was a good battle royal.

-Dug the Inner Circle segment as AEW bringing in a bunch of fighters is a completely awesome thing. Turn this shit into Zero-1 and bring in modern equivalents to Sean McCully. Vitor Belfort needs to come back and just kick the shit out of Kip Sabian and Jimmy Havoc in a handicap match. Give me a bunch of MMA guys with under 5 pro fights and let them shoot punch the Best Friends in the face. Dr. Luther is nuts, let's see Tyson speed bag his big head. This should be awesome.


What Didn't Work

-Hikaru Shida is a master at making her opponents awkwardly get into position for her offense. She cannot go two moves without her opponent needing to scoot several feet into the correct spot. Look at all that stuff on the top part of this show! Everything made it to the top! Look at how tenderhearted I am, praising nearly an entire episode of Dynamite! But Hikaru Shida is very much not good.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 5/6/20

What Worked

-I liked Nyla Rose's cannonball off the top, and her powerbomb delivered a nice flat landing. But somewhere, some man is crying about it.

-I overall liked Moxley/Kazarian, though I liked more what they were going for in the first half than the second half. After Janela's goofy brand of dancing, I was getting into these two just basing a match around heavy chops and headlock takeovers. And I thought the layout was much stronger, even if there was some shady execution on some of it. This should have been Moxley beating Kazarian down while Kazarian does his best to keep up and fight back, and that's mostly what we got. I liked Kazarian utilizing "holding my leg out" two different times, letting Moxley run himself into a boot off the top to the floor and in the ring. And Kazarian took a couple of tough bumps, including getting backdropped out of the ring onto the ramp and landing on sprawled knees. Finish was simple and easy, no need to have someone kicking out of your best stuff, and I appreciated that.

-QT Marshall did his best to make Archer look good, and I think QT has some of the best strikes in AEW. He's exactly where he should be within the AEW hierarchy, but he's become a guy I really like seeing when he shows up.

-Loved Britt kicking Brandi in the stomach and hitting a nice DDT on the floor. But for all of JR and Excalibur showing concern for Brandi when Jake's snake was crawling on her, nobody ever asked how awful it must have felt for the snake to see Brandi wearing snakeskin shorts.

-The peaks of the main event made it work, even though it still had that weird combination of "pretty dangerous bumps but also yuks" that they always go for. Can you picture Buzz Sawyer getting punched in the head and thrown hard into a guardrail, and then hit with an inflatable pool float? No, because that would be pretty stupid. There's always this weird vibe when they do a match like this where they have to do some crazy stuff so that they're taken seriously, but this weird shame where they don't want to be the guys taking something like pro wrestling seriously. I don't understand it myself, but it's clearly the house style. Sammy Guevara took a lot of big bumps and is the best guy to be teaming with Jericho in something like this, to take all of the big bumps while acting as his hype man. Sammy takes a gnarly powerbomb into a roll up door, and leans way into a golf cart bump (much better than Jericho, who JR immediately had to give a "well luckily I think Jericho got out of the way of that cart..."). Omega was much better doing wild stupid stuff like that awesome moonsault off the cherry picker, than he was at simple brawling (I'm not sure why he was throwing punches a foot past people's heads in a brawl, but there they were). Even Swagger takes a big bump through a stack of guardrails. Those type of things kept the match up here.


What Didn't Work

-I really liked the opening of Janela/Rhodes, loved the fast scramble small package nearfalls especially, but disliked it the longer it went and thought it was pretty lousy by the end. The longer Janela matches go, the more he shows that he has no idea how to transition back to offense other than "take someone's move fully, and just get up and go on offense". That kept happening throughout the match, and it looked worse each time. There were moments that were good on paper, like a chop exchange ending with Cody goading Janela into throwing one more, only to have Cody kick his arm as he chopped. But with Janela it's really obvious when a spot is going to miss or hit, as he telegraphs things from a mile away making it clear when something is going to whiff. He started that chop while standing 7 feet away from Cody, made a cool on paper spot look silly. Beyond that it was awkward positioning (like Cody's moonsault off the entrance way that Janela had to casually walk 10 feet to take), or awkward movements Janela's silly little run to miss a ramp charge, or that sad little flub where he couldn't hop up onto the apron to finish a spot). By the end of this I was already tired of Cody hitting something big, Janela kicking out with a dramatic nearfall, and then that nearfall meaning nothing when he just stood up to do his own move. Moves trading sucks when someone just stands up after a reverse superplex. The strike exchange in the home cement was shit dressing on a turd salad.

-Why does Lance Archer pick his weakest looking offense to finish matches? His twisting splash off the middle rope looked better than anything he used down the stretch of the match.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 10/23/19

What Worked

ER: Marq Quen looked fantastic in the opening tag. This guy gets unreal height on everything and connects. His shooting star was gorgeous, and he took some big spills (really flew into a Fenix german suplex, among other things). PP have some really fun double teams but it can result in a lot of waiting around. Still, Quen is a fun guy to watch. Fenix's double stomp to Quen's shoulderblades was disgusting, he also hit a great tope and I dug his ropewalk punt.

ER: Dark Order looked good and deserved a lot better than Jericho taking regular focus away from their offense. Uno is a big chubby boy and was really great at taking the innovative 2005 offense of SCU, threw some stiff shots, actually made me want to seek out some Uno matches. Grayson hit a bananas tope con giro over the ringpost, looked like he was going to fly 30 feet, also bumped around huge for Kazarian's hot tag.

ER: I am into the 8 man tag they set up, and thought the promo setting it up was great. Jericho dunking on MJF's scarf, Jericho saying "don't take one more step" several times, Cody breaking the glass door to get to Jericho, an actual great security break up, totally want to see this match.

ER: Bucks tag was really fun, built nicely, cool moments came off well. I dug Orange Cassidy's hands in pockets dive, both Bucks had some slick chain offense, Trent threw several nice suplexes (you know, maybe not "Gary Albright-esque" like Excalibur said, because that's dumb), even Taylor had a cool northern lights suplex. Bucks had a nice save on what I thought was the for sure finish, and I thought the match length was perfect for the pace.

ER: Britt Baker has been on these episodes way too damn much, but that coal/steel/iron Steelers logo ring jacket using colored molars instead of stars is damn choice. That jacket has been far and away my favorite thing about Baker.

ER: Moxley had a really nice cover in the final minute, really grapevined the legs and sunk it in.

What Didn't Work

ER: Lucha Bros. tag was far too long. Even though it was "only" 15 minutes, it was so go go go that they hit multiple points where it felt like they were doing way too much. You build a match around two teams hitting tandem chain offense, and the longer it goes the more likely it is that some of it doesn't look good. Pentagon is such a slug in these matches, completely terrible at getting into position for big offense. He almost always gets into position, he's not missing dives or anything, but he literally just walks into the spot he needs to stand, or shifts ridiculously across the mat on his back. He's not good! AEW is still somehow missing a few big spots, barely catching a nuts looking Fenix tope at the end. And I think Private Party really should have won here. Lucha Bros. do not need any kind of big wins at this point. Pentagon shitting up the ring for the past 3 years and getting louder reactions than ever kind of proves that.

ER: This fed is really cornering the market on "Guys trying elaborate ranas, slipping, and falling short of their mark". It has happened every week so far, multiple times this week.

ER: All of the teams I don't want to see are the ones advancing. SCU feel like the most 2005 tag team possible, and I wish their stable was called Bald Dudez.

ER: Omega has a lot of offense that looks like it really hurts, but it must not because Janela was always able to get back up immediately and do something that also looked like it hurt, and sometimes Omega would make funny spittle faces after being hurt, but it turns out he also isn't hurt by Janela's offense. The V Trigger that set up the finish looked extra painful, but I'm not sure why that one knocked Janela out cold but the other V Triggers just made him get up and hit suplexes.

ER: I am sure that I am the first one to say that "TV Time Remaining" is a weird way to end a match when there is still TV time remaining...

ER: We sure did see a lot of 450 splashes and shooting stars tonight. How long is that going to feel exciting? This show needed way more breathing room. It was 2 hours of constant matches, almost all of them worked at the exact same pace, almost all of them using the exact same offense. It's too fucking much.

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AIW Monday - Absolution 7/27/18

Louis Lyndon vs. Derek Director vs. KTB vs. Space Monkey vs. Wheeler Yuta vs. Rex Brody

PAS: One of the better "get everyone on the card" scrambles they have done. Even with Space Monkey and Brody we didn't have anyone grinding the match to a halt with their comedy spots, the action really kept moving. Derek Director had some cool moments, including a nasty running knee to the face and a spot where he monkey flipped Yuta into Brody's crotch. KTB had a couple of amazing moments including a spot where he had two guys fireman carried and caught a third in his arms. Yuta looks like he blew out his knee, but they worked around it OK. Fun all action match,

Mance Warner/Jock Samson/Twan Tucker/Parker Pierce vs. Weird World/Philly Marino Experience

PAS: This started in a very Crockett way, with multiple heels bumping for super over babyfaces. We get a good heel beatdown section on Marino, and a really fun Worldwide hot tag. Finish run is car crash wrestling done well. I really love Philly's fat boy Orihara, and Marino's assisted plancha, just an awesome pair of signature dives. Our boy Weird Body takes sick bumps on a tower of doom superplex, and a Steiner Square Driver from the Duke. Our heroes get screwed out of victory by the dastardly heels, and this was a wholly satisfying bit of business.

48. Young Studs vs. The Production (Danhausen/Eddy Only)

PAS: This was excellent, just awesome stiff 2019 tag wrestling. These are four guys who throw heat and will take huge nasty bumps, and they run a pretty great all action tag with those as a base. Eric Ryan is truly certifiable, he takes 90s Foley bumps in almost every match, here he gets backdropped off the ramp and lands spine first on concrete. These guys were wasting each other in the ring too, Bobby Beverly obliterates Danhausen by intercepting an in-ring plancha with a savate kick, Only threw really nasty elbows and punches, there were some big slams and throws, really a bomb fest. We are Production stans here at Segunda Caida, but this was the best they have looked. Loved this.

ER: Yeah this really delivered. I was excited for it anyway - always gonna be excited for The Production - but The Production jumped the Studs on the entrance ramp and asses got kicked for the next 15 minutes. These guys were all ringing bells, hard elbows all around, nasty throws, nasty bumps, no nonsense just asskicking. AIW always brings asskicking, The Studs always bring asskicking, and it was cool seeing Only and Danhausen ALSO as kickers, not just ass kickees. Everybody in this comes off nuts to a degree, but Ryan is probably the most nuts. He throws such violence behind all of his strikes, and then he's crushing Only and Danhausen into the guardrails over and over with topes through the bottom ropes, and then he's splatting off the entrance ramp with a lunatic backdrop bump. My god man. I think they did a really good job using saves and building the action, as tough strikes eventually turn into amped up risk and fun double teams. I loved all of the quick suplexes from the Studs, they would really snap them over and when they'd be hitting snap verticals and stacking The Production like cordwood. There were a couple hitches when they tried getting a little cute (a DDT your partner spot is much clunkier than it should have been, and an Only cutter to the floor looks like both guys realized what a bad idea it was halfway through), but the answer always came right after those spots when everyone would go back to hitting each other hard. Bless this tag division.

Matthew Justice/Scott Steiner vs. Ethan Page/Dr. Daniel C. Rockingham

PAS: Justice brings out Steiner to even the odds, and it is pretty much just the heels bumping for Steiner and Justice, which is exactly what you want from this match up. Dr. Dan takes a couple of big bumps, and Page eats a big overhead throw from Steiner. Not much to say about this match, it does what it set out to do.

96. No Consequences (Tre Lamar/Garrison King/Chase Oliver/Joshua Bishop/AJ Gray) vs. Josh Prohibition/Jollyville Fuck Its (T-Money/Nasty Russ)/To Infinity and Beyond (Cheech/Colin Delaney)

PAS: 2017 Absolution No Consequences 10 man tag was one of my favorite matches of the year, this didn't live up to that level but was still a bunch of fun and had some big highlight moments. Both Tre Lamar and Chase Oliver are nutty fliers, Oliver hit an incredible springboard moonsault at the same time Lamar hit a great ringpost Santo style tope. The structure of the previous years match had the Consequences take an extended beating before making a comeback, here the match was worked more even, it makes narrative sense, NC are all a year more experienced, but evenish is a less cool structure. We do get some solid asskicking though, especially by the Fuck-Its including an awesome Pounce by T-Money where he ran all the way down the ramp before sending Lamar into the stratosphere. The story of the match was Joshua Bishop trying to earn the respect of Josh Prohibition, which isn't a matchup I cared a ton about. Still I will pretty much enjoy any combos of these guys.

ER: So no, this is not quite as good as the 2017 10 man, but this ruled pretty hard on its own. Everybody got their moments and there were some good by god moments to get. Jollyville are my faves and lived up to that here. Russ comes off like a total badass WCW undercarder that I always hope is going to come out those fake air-powered doors through the Mothership's fog machine, throwing hard punches and elbowdrops with his own body, and an absolutely crunching cannonball off the top. T-Money pounces Tre Lamar from the entrance ramp into the ring, in a spot that was only slightly less impressive than some of Lamar's by-choice flying. Chase Oliver was a real standout here. He and Lamar work a hyped up indy style that I hate when it's worn by most guys, but they really pull it off. Oliver can land played out indy offense like standing shooting star presses and make them actually land, he and Lamar hit a bonkers tandem dive that looked like two prop planes that missed a fatal collision by mere feet, and then there's crazy stuff like his rope walk rana. I loved it all. There were a couple hinky moments (Lamar does land full weight on Oliver with a mistimed missile dropkick that they pretend didn't land like that, and the Bishop/Prohibition stuff wasn't my favorite), but TIAB were pro as hell throughout, AJ Gray had some nice flying into and out of the ring, the double Drunken Drivers by Prohibition were a definitive finish, and I'm just going to need them to keep running this back every year.

Tim Donst vs. Joey Janela

PAS: These are two guys I am normally a low voter on, but man it is hard to deny their willingness to absolutely crash and burn in hideous ways. This is a ladder match, and has some slow climbing and grasping which is endemic in all ladder matches, but it also has some truly holy fuck moments. They mention Donst recovering from kidney cancer and how his doctor told him to not wrestle in ladder matches, and then later have him fall directly off a ladder onto a pile of chairs with the legs sticking up. Janela gets chucked through a ladder on top of a table and the ladder just explodes with the impact. Totally gross stuff, but hard not to appreciate the hell these guys put their body through.

Dominic Garrini vs. Tom Lawlor

PAS: This was a dog collar match, and definitely very different from the other matches between these two. There was a lot I really loved about this: the stuff with the chain and collar was pretty awesome, Lawlor hit a superman punch with the chain, Garrini used the chain to headbutt Lawlor, there was a bunch of cool uses of the chain to make submissions look nastier. And this included an awesome ending where Garrini used a chain assisted Gargano escape to choke Lawlor out, with Lawlor refusing to tap and flipping off Garrini as we watched his finger fall down into unconsciousness.  I think if this had just been a dog collar match it would have ended up really high on the MOTY list, however, they used a bunch more props, like thumbtack bats and a board with bottle caps and a board with poppers. All of that stuff didn't add to the match. A dog collar is a great gimmick, you don't need more stuff. My wife's best friend will never just make chocolate chip cookies, she has to throw in gummy bears, and Twix pieces and candied almonds, until you are overwhelmed. This was a match with too many ingredients. I still liked it, but it kept me from loving it.

Franky Flynn/Magnum CK vs. Swoggle/PB Smooth

PAS: Swoggle isn't an act I really rate. Having him in a tag title match is bound to turn it into a yuks fest. Magnum CK is awesome at comedic matches, he has great facial expressions and if someone has to sell for Swoggle it might as well be him. He was also pretty great at the actual wrestling stuff, there was a spot where he goes for a blind leapfrog and gets caught in PB's arm, and he had an awesome look of terror before he was thrown. Some fun stuff, but I am glad the tag titles have moved back into actual great wrestling matches.

Tracey Williams vs. Nick Gage

PAS: This was Gage working a stiff title match, without any shortcuts. It was pretty entertaining, Gage works stiff and has some big over moves. He really dominated the match, and did it with wrestling. There was some pop ups which I didn't love, but I also really liked some of the big exchanges. The finish was pretty shocking, can't believe Gage would tap out, seems like something he wouldn't let his character do. Williams had some great matches during his title run, the start wasn't a great match, but it was nice example of what was to come.

ER: Another AIW show, another couple matches added to the ongoing MOTY List. The Young Studs/Production tag and the 10 man were the kind of things that keep these AIW loving hearts beating.

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Matches from Black Label Pro 8/18/18

C.W. Anderson vs. Filthy Tom Lawlor

PAS: Always excited to see CW, he really should be the next old guy to get the PCO indies push, he is still excellent and doesn't seem to have lost a step at all.  I really liked the opening mat exchanges in this, it wasn't shootstyle at all, but Lawlor is also really good at basic hammerlock, drop toe hold headlock US territories matwork. There is some great punches, a cool guillotine choke counter of a spinebuster and Lawlor doing a go-to-sleep into a sleeper and putting someone to sleep. You would expect this to be a styles clash and it wasn't at all.

ER: I wanted more out of this one, but I like these guys, and overall I liked this. C.W. really is ageless (not only in the way he moves, but facially he still looks really young for being late 40s) and I fully back him getting a big tour of the indies. Really I have no clue how he hasn't been brought in as a veteran presence in NXT. I liked how the two kind of met their two styles in the middle, with Lawlor working more wrestling holds and throwing a heavy, non-stylish German suplex, and C.W. throwing more elbow strikes than normal but not attempting some silly MMA crossover. I love the way Anderson moves in the ring and I loved the build to that big left hand (coming not long after a new thrust headbutt that he's been integrating), and Lawlor grabbing a guillotine choke to block the famous spinebuster was a really great spot.

PCO vs. Darby Allin

PAS: This is an on paper banger, which doesn't fully live up to it's promise. Allin is my WOTY so far, and PCO has become a super hot act. This never fully kicked in though PCO has kind of morphed into almost an Undertaker like monster character, I love the videos, but I think it is a weaker in ring act. The WALTER match worked because it was kind of a wild sprint. This match was kind of ponderous, and even killer Darby spots didn't get as big a reaction. I did love his tope with PCO draped over the guardrail, and his big senton looks great. Destro coming out with the car battery is kind of goofy, and really ground the match to a halt. Some fun stuff, but ultimately disappointing.

ER: Same. I think the PCO hype train is a little off the rails at this point, and really I'd just want to see Quebecer instead of this quirky Frankenhooker character we got now. He moves a little stiffly and slowly, and is also now doing Undertaker no-selling, and it's kinda hard to tell sometimes which he is doing because his staggering sell looks nearly identical to his Undertaker no-sell. He bumps big but there can be a delay to his bumping, so sometimes there was awkwardness waiting to see if he was just going to no sell Darby and let him bounce right off...or let him bounce right off but then also bump. But once this gets going it was good. The very beginning is fun, with Darby hitting a hard dropkick that believably knocks PCO through the ropes, then gets caught on a dive, and Darby blocks a chokeslam by landing feet first on the apron. Coo, sequence. PCO takes a plausible Code Red and we also get some neat stuff with big splats: PCO catching Allin and slamming him into guardrails before powerbombing him into the rail, and then a sick powerbomb across a few chairs. But I love how Darby is a guy you just can't take your eyes off. Once PCO heads back to the ring Allin is leaping over him, catching him on the railing, and then hitting a bonkers tope to PCO while he's draped over the railing. Absolutely crazy spot (I wrote "absolutely crazy spot" before I watched the match, with Allin it's just a matter of where I put it in the review of any of his matches, not if I'll need to). Allin also hits one of his all time great cannonball sentons off the top (shame we didn't actually get a battle of the cannonballs here, mais ce sont les pauses), but here's where Destro comes out to freaking Andrew Lloyd Webber like he's a Wednesday night dinner theater magician, then puts us through an act more interminable than the magician who was working the Wednesday day shift. PCO and Allin - who have kicked the shit out of each other the whole match, are now just forced to lie motionless in the ring, selling more damage than any one of them has ever sold. We've seen Allin get concussed and break his elbow, pretty sure he sold doing his own senton more than he sold any of those actual injuries. And then PCO sees if that's still the case and drops Allin on the back of his head with a package piledriver. There were flaws before Destro did his routine, but that just left my sails totally windless.

D-Lo Brown vs. Joey Janela

ER: This is of interest because we've all seen Janela attempt to break his neck doing crazy things in a wrestling ring, but now he's in the ring with an actual certified neck breaker. But this match was fine. D-Lo is bigger (I appreciated Dave Prazak's speculation that the added size might be because D-Lo was wearing his chest protector underneath his t-shirt), but not crazier like PCO. Still, this was a perfectly fine older star/younger indie guy match. D-Lo had loud chops, dropped a great elbow, took a low and fast dive from Janela (that sent D-Lo sprawling down the entrance). There was nothing spectacular, but nothing bad. They didn't bog it down with comedy, kept the shtick to the opening sequence, D-Lo hit signature spots and took a big bump off the top when Janela tossed him while attempting the Lo Down, and it went the right time. Expectations, met.

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Matches from EVOLVE 106 6/23/18

ER: This show opens with a potentially unintentionally hilarious vignette with Jarek 1:20 outside of the Los Angeles Wahlburgers restaurant, saying he "first discovered" Wahlburgers in Philadelphia, and has since eaten at locations in Detroit, New York, and now LA. This motherfucker DISCOVERED this mom and pop burger joint, I assume in much the same way that I discovered Planet Hollywood in my teens, and then discovered Claim Jumper in my 20s. Keep that information under your hats though, I don't want my discoveries to get too well known. Inside the restaurant he barters with a waiter to give him a free chocolate shake if he successfully pulls off a magic trick and guesses the guy's card. The waiter commits to nothing whatsoever, repeating several times that he'll "see what he can do". Jarek does the trick, the waiter responds with the greatest possible reaction a card trick can get (which is nodding and going "Oh, yeah, that's it."), and then walks off.

Then, in a moment of pure brilliance, Jarek turns to the camera and says "I'm a man who gets what I want."

Holy shit.

Imagine Ric Flair, a man who cut dozens of promos celebrating his wealth and lifestyle, clearly a man getting exactly what he wants. Picture Flair, instead of boasting about bagging ladies on his jet, picture him smugly bragging about boosting a guy out of a $7 chain restaurant milkshake with a completely dead eyed straight face. It's fucking brilliant.

I have seen hardly any Jarek. I don't know if he's a goof or if the wink was implied. I really, really hope the wink here was implied.


Darby Allin vs. WALTER

PAS: This is everything that people were saying the Draganov and David Starr matches were. The pinnacle of WALTER laying in an asskicking to a spunky underdog. Darby is tremendous in this, he takes some uncalled for bumps and gets his chest turned into hamburger, but he also has a real sense of when to mix in comebacks and has really credible offense for such a little guy. The hand work was class stuff Darby hurling WALTER's hand into the ringpost violently was great, as was the ground and pound punches right to the knuckles. I loved how he used it as a last gasp counter and attack, if nothing else was working he could bang at the hand. I thought WALTER's selling was really good here too, his hand was fucked, but he wasn't going to let it stop him from chopping Allin's chest into gazpacho or slapping his eardrum into ribbons. There are some really awesome individual spots here, Darby going for an in ring tope and WALTER shotgun head-butting him out of the air was an awesome King Kong vs. Airplanes spot, I also loved WALTER countering the coffin drop with the Kojira clutch. These are two of my favorite guys to watch, and this felt like both guys apex performances.

ER: What a breathless fight, with Allin taking far more damage that you think would be possible, and WALTER practically getting bored by dishing out a beating. There are only so many ways you can violently throw and strike a body, and around the 10 minute mark WALTER has appeared to have used up all of the ways he knows how to violently throw and strike a body, so just keeps doing the same thing. He chops Allin to the mat a dozen or two times, throws him insanely far with a beal, basically just picks him up a bunch and drops him. Allin's body should crumble, but I love the way he hangs in there and the way he spends the whole match essentially being chased down a hallway and gets his licks by knocking over bookcases and trashcans. WALTER is great at showing all the little ways Allin is a pest to him, all the little moments that leave him briefly unguarded. The stuff on the floor was so great, and Allin exploits every opportunity WALTER leaves him, knowing he'll only be able to attack for a second or two before he's thrown again. Allin attacks him from the apron and pounces on him like Westley jumping on Fezzik, gets splatted on the ground, but then catches a WALTER kick and throws his knee into the post, then with zero hesitation throws WALTER's hand off the post. Allin's zero hesitation was just at its apex here, watch him get rolled out on a kickout and spring immediately into a tornillo crossbody (bouncing off the bottom rope). It was done so fluidly and without missing a single beat, yet looked totally natural. WALTER is fun in how he both takes and blocks Allin's offense, like when he just stays in place for a big Allin crossbody, and Allin just bounces off like he hit the ringpost again. WALTER takes a couple Allin roll-ups really nicely, whips himself over fast on the Santito special, and Allin attacking WALTER's hand was really exciting, just punching away at it and clonking his head off it while WALTER screamed. Something tells me WALTER could get his hand lopped off and he'd probably insist on finishing the match, probably by smacking someone a bunch with his stump. But seeing Allin work that hand gives him a possible finish, and I like how he keeps on it and keeps at EVERYTHING, going with a hanging guillotine and working an armbar, and you get the sense that WALTER just ran out of things to do, got his hand run over, and Allin's tenacity lead to him stealing one. WALTER's big Gojira Clutch always looks like he's really cutting off air, and the Coffin Drop is both a fun move AND a great way for WALTER to reverse, and the roll up from there was a nice payoff. These two absolutely killed it, and there were a dozen cool moments that neither of us mentioned. I keep saying that Allin is one of my absolute favorite guys to watch, and I'm going to enjoy him for as long as I can, which just doesn't seem like it's going to be many more matches. But, I've been thinking that for awhile and somehow, Darby endures.

Timothy Thatcher/Tracy Williams/Anthony Henry vs. Chris Dickinson/Jaka/Dominic Garrini

ER: A good match with good performances from a bunch of guys I obviously really like, that doesn't quite gel into a list worthy match. It's probably better than a few things on our 2018 list, but didn't quite feel list considering who was involved. But it's still well worth seeing if you like these guys anywhere near as much as I do. I love how Catch Point started as a group of fit mat grapplers and has now evolved into a stable of thuggish brutes. They're all meaty guys who complement each other nicely without having the same style, with Dickinson working as a modern crazy-eyed Buzz Sawyer, Jaka as tae-kwon-do Kimala, and Garrini with his growing collection of strikes. This whole thing was a great scrap that went by quick, a lot of quick tags and fast action. We got a great babyface performance from Henry, tons of energy and ran into a lot of nasty shots from Catch Point. Thatcher was a great simmering badass, throwing hard shots and muscling guys down to the mat. I think Garrini is behind Jaka and Dickinson as he still shows moments of hesitation in the ring, but he has a couple of absolutely nasty pinfall breaks here that are awesome, landing a spine altering double stomp on Thatcher's back and coming in with an axe kick later, also love his double handed chop to the neck (feels like a Jaka strike, and I like the idea of teammates lifting from each other). Jaka has a bunch of offense and strike combos, and I like his simple attacks like slapping guys in the back with both hands or big throat thrusts. He doesn't necessarily have KO strikes, but his strikes are pesky and constant. Dickinson has really turned into one of my favorites in the world, just a completely hateable charisma and explosive ringwork; every time he charges into the ring he looks like someone charging out the front door of a douchey club to fight someone on the sidewalk. It's a specific charisma that nobody else has and he's awesome. Love him using a vicious powerbomb to break up a hold, love that heavy enziguiri finisher, just a real great bully. If you like these guys, you will definitely want to watch this match.

Joey Janela vs. Austin Theory

ER: Evolve doesn't run as many shows as they used to, and really the only on paper matches that interested me on the show were the two up above there. But I figure I should at least check out a couple title matches, and I don't remember Janela working Evolve before so that's kinda fun. I don't think the match was great, but the crowd was really hot for it and that made it come off really well. Janela is a fun worker but a little sloppy, and Theory works like a lesser Matt Sydal from 2005. There's a lot of that split second hesitation before Theory does offense, and other stuff that basically requires his opponent to leap at him before doing something. It's like when HHH couldn't do a move without reversing an Irish whip. There were some big things I liked, like Janela's big tope and that nasty Death Valley driver on the apron, but Theory isn't too interesting in the ways he transitions back to offense, as he just takes big moves, kicks out, and then does some improbable offense back. Janela hits a package piledriver for a big nearfall, moments later Theory is giving him a TKO off the top rope that requires Janela to climb up onto his shoulders all by himself. I thought Penelope's involvement was kind of clunky, and Theory going for the belt to have Penelope grab it from him felt like a hack Smackdown finish and not something that should change a title on a guy's debut show. But the crowd was amped and Janela clearly has charisma. I don't have a ton of use for Theory and Priscilla's act, though.

No Rope Breaks: Shane Strickland vs. Matt Riddle

ER: A match where both guys really killed each other with some spots, and were rewarded with a finish that nobody could really like. Strickland has definitely improved over the last year. Just a few years ago I thought he was one of the worst guys getting regular work on the indy scene. His striking has tightened up a bit (there was an honest to god really good punch in this match, popping Riddle's jaw on the floor). But a lot of his big offense really only works against a hyper athlete like Riddle, who is really great at getting into position for complicated stuff. Riddle can move like liquid, and I don't think Strickland could pull off some of the suplexes or transitions without someone like Riddle to pull the weight. There's a Saito suplex that Strickland hits that appears to be almost all Riddle, though Riddle does a great job of making it look plausible. I didn't think Strickland's arm work looked good, but he impressed me in ways that he never has before: he had a nice lariat, a sly catch of Riddle's Pele kick (which I think is a Riddle spot that doesn't always look great, so Strickland catching it was a nice play on that), and most importantly I was impressed with Strickland's snarling intensity. He carries himself very confidently and jawed with fans in a way I haven't seen from him before, and it made him come off far more interesting as a character. The finish set up was too obvious by a mile, as both men clearly adjust positions 90 degrees on a suplex so that Strickland gets tossed towards the ref, who Riddle then accidentally KOs. Eventually they brawl to the back, no cameras though. Strickland gets into it with guys backstage, they all come out, Strickland hits a big dive on everyone that doesn't feel like it fits into this match, and Riddle locks in the Bromission but apparently that KO'd ref was the only ref Evolve has. Nobody is satisfied with this finish, and the overstuffed aspect of all of it took away from the parts of the match where these guys were stiffing the hell out of each other. The No Rope Breaks stip didn't really lead anywhere interesting. There was a lot of good here, and it was harmed by some things that weren't really their fault, which is a shame.

ER: Well, WALTER/Allin is a slam dunk choice for our 2018 Ongoing MOTY List, with Phil and I going back and forth on just how high we should place it. What a front to back excellent match that was a real testament to how good those two are right now. It could have easily looked ridiculous, as WALTER is such a Terminator that having him lose to Darby could have easily looked foolish. They crafted an excellent match though, one of the best of the year.

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