WWE WrestleMania 39 Night One Live Blog 4/1/23

 

1. John Cena vs. Austin Theory

ER: Just once I want one of those Make A Wish kids to go into business for himself. Eventually, one of them has to realize that they have full diplomatic immunity, a Get Out of Jail Free card that has unlimited uses. One year we're going to get a MAW heel turn and that kid will burn out a legend. Cena and I have the same exact bald spot and he has the exact same Miller's Outpost jorts that I had in 6th grade, so clearly I'm pulling for him. Cena sells Theory's punches very generously but I like how Theory bit his way out of the STF. Theory throws stomps with the same physical movement as Randy Orton, but doesn't have the finishing strength of Orton's stomps. Cena's stumbling and staggering is what's making this. The way he staggered down to a knee when Theory jumped on him during the sleeper, but I'm not sure any of it was as good as his Namaste prayer hands before doing the five knuckle shuffle. The fistdrop itself was thrown better than he typically threw it over the last decade. 

2. Street Profits vs. Alpha Academy vs. Ricochet/Braun Strowman vs. Viking Raiders

ER: Otis looks fatter since last I saw him, which shows he's a man who truly understands the Grandest Stage of Them All. You want to play to the back row? Fatten up my boy. Ivar's dumb spin kick hit harder than I expected, Erik's knee lift looked good, and the fucking Doomsday clothesline was fucking murder. The tandem powerbomb on Ford looked great but goddamn replay that clothesline. They really should have built longer to Gable hitting the rolling German on Braun. I mean it looked cool, but how cool would his Dead End have looked towards the end of the match after already trying it a couple times? His missed splash is full commitment and so is Ivar's missed moonsault, and capping it with a treacherous shaky Braun top rope splash that hits was sweet sweet icing. Braun's splash looked like the kind of splash we don't get enough Today: messy, and performed by those who do not normally go to the top rope. The tower powerbomb spot was unnecessary and beneath what they had been building to, even if I liked the twist of Ricochet riding Ford down like Clark Griswold hanging onto his ladder. They had been doing a good job mixing up pairings and they took too long tying up every man. But Braun's long stretch of ringside shoulderblocks being blown up by Dawkins made this great again. Dawkins hit Braun as hard as he could too. That shoulderblock would have given me a lifetime injury. Then Ricochet hits the most gorgeous springboard shooting star press balls first into Dawkins' face. For a wrestling company who forgot how to film wrestling a couple decades ago and has seemingly got even worse at it, they set up and shot the shoulderblock and shooting star perfectly. Ford's pin breaking and match winning splash was good. This was good. 

3. Logan Paul vs. Seth Rollins 

ER: I haven't watched any WWE program since Elimination Chamber, but the hype video for this match has made me more excited than I've ever been to see a Seth Rollins singles match. I also know really next to nothing about Logan Paul, only that I've loved everything he's done in pro wrestling. I don't think I'm ever going to understand what Seth Rollins' vibe is supposed to be. Is he like if Willy Wonka was a farmer's market jock? A hipster mom who is obsessed with being the one in the friend group who keeps up with trends? Is he just a guy who misses a big stomp by about 7 feet while wearing attention pants? He's the kind of guy who wears big eyeglasses without needed eyeglasses?  

I like how Logan Paul uses his boxing sparingly. I bet most in his position would do feet shuffling Shane McMahon bullshit. Paul understands to use 1-2 punches to mean something, doesn't have enough of a Wrestler Brain to do unnecessary strike exchanges. He makes his punches into actual turning points of the match. Rollins' triple suicide dives look better than normal, because Paul walks into and towards each one. Usually Rollins' opponents just stand still waiting for contact, leaving Rollins to just lightly bounce off, looking like he was trying not to hit the guy he was trying to hit. Paul walked into these and took growing, appropriate bumps backward in reaction. Find me Rollins dives that look better than these and we'll see a pattern with the opponents' catches. The KO punch nearfall was great and Paul's high leap into the sitout powerbomb was like prime Juventud. 

Bye Bye Bitch is a line that can be pulled off by John Early, but it can't be pulled off by Seth Rollins. High end nearfall after the pedigree and Paul's missed splash through KSI, who I have heard referred to as Logan Paul's Business Partner. Michael Cole calling for YouTube Phenomenon KSI to Capture Another Viral Moment is a 0.6 on the Fallon/Hilton Scale of poor shilling. Literally every nearfall in the match worked great, and the only thing wrong with the match is the company's insistence on keeping the old tired stars at the top at the expense of the young hungry rising stars. I wonder what the actual percentage of WWE in-ring employees are actually pissed off about how much better Logan Paul understands wrestling than they do? Or do they not actually realize this, because they don't understand wrestling as well as he does? 

4. Dakota Kai/Iyo Sky/Bayley vs. Becky Lynch/Trish Stratus/Lita

ER: "You gotta take the WWE Universe out of this early," is such a sucky commentary sentence. Becky Lynch is better as a heel because she's better at taking offense than doing offense, so the match being structured around Damage Control cutting her off from a low energy Lita was smart. She hung in for Sky's nice springboard dropkick. Lita always manages to look like she's never actually gone running in her life. Lita has the worst body language of anybody in the ring so it's a weird choice to keep such an extended heat segment on her. Trish is more explosive but also sells way better. Her reactions to Bayley kicking at her and talking shit would have had the right kind of glowering eyes reaction. Lita just kinda flops around like a fish, like she's trying to make a baby laugh. Trish's assisted handstand rana to the floor gets some set-up excuse because the finished product and Kai's crash into Sky looked good. Hats off to Trish for running face first into Bayley's baseball slide too. After praising the camera work in the tag scramble, I gotta wonder whose decision it was to keep the camera on Lita during this match's breakdown. Mae Young's stomach kicks never looked as bad as the kicks Lita threw here. If someone wants to volunteer their time to a Segunda Caida project that I personally do not want to do, your feature here can be documenting every single part-time model WWE ever employed who threw a better stomach kick than Lita. Remember all those Diva search competitions that I assume some people watched? How many of them were actually worse than Lita here? I can't imagine many were. Dawn Marie and heel Torrie Wilson only look like Fujiwara-level legends in comparison. 

5. Dominik Mysterio vs. Rey Mysterio

ER: Seth Rollins can wear all the try hard entrance jackets he wants, it will never be as good as Dominik's shitty spiked Hot Topic Alucard coat and his entrances will never be as good as Dominik wearing that coat out of an ambulance in his father's mask. Jeers, however, for Rey's American Made-era Hogan gear. That's like the second worst Hogan era next to the N-word era, or the Nick prison phone call era. I think those were the same Hogan eras. Rey goes to the belt whipping way too early. My mom used to use a wooden spoon, but you don't START with the wooden spoon. Even she knew that you throw a slipper or flip flop before you go to the wooden spoon. This isn't as good as it should be, and that's too bad. Seeing them doing armdrags and some of these other exchanges feels like them working some other match, where they were still tag partners but were forced to work 5 minutes of a gauntlet against each other. Dominik's mom held back too much on the slap, even the water thrown into Aaliyah's face didn't sting like it should have. It gets better when Dom really starts killing his father with a Michinoku driver, but there weirdly isn't any kind of father vs. son vibe. It just feels like a Finn Balor Smackdown match. The late match interference shouldn't be the thing adding energy to your match. Santos Escobar shouldn't be getting the big dive in your father/son match. This was a let down. 

6. Rhea Ripley vs. Charlotte

ER: I think Charlotte is leaning more into her Drag Queen era and I hope she keeps leaning harder. Has that been the entire point of The Queen run and I've just missed it? I haven't watched for a long time. I love David Arquette's wrestling, and Charlotte could be a really good Alexis Arquette. Her puffer vest robe is incredible, like she's the Cruella de Vil of litigious Aspen ski slope house wives. The shoulderblock exchange looked good, and Charlotte full assed the lariat that sent Rhea to the floor. That's a good sign for this one. Charlotte's knife edge chops do read more like a drag routine strike than an actual knife edge chop. The wrist action is all wrong, which makes it either bad wrestling or too on-the-nose for a drag routine. Rhea is a strong body vice and I liked the way she fought up from her back out of it. Rhea working as poor man's Dump Matsumoto is really good. The Queen Smells Blood sounds like an incredible drag revue, and Charlotte's chops suddenly come to life during her comeback. I like how Rhea staggered and knee buckled to her feet to lift Charlotte, and the head spike DDT reversal looked awesome.  Their showdown strike exchange stunk, but Rhea's stomach kick and foot stomp to stop the nonsense was a good way to snap out of it. I think I like them doing a messy 2003 GHC Title match the longer they do it, but it started iffy. Once Rhea dropped Charlotte on her face with a suplex it looked like Rikio/Takayama. One of the biggest appeals of Takayama's brilliant early 2000s was that he understood the value of a horse faced weird body wrestler getting suplexed on their face. The big nearfalls worked even if the moonsault press is still going to be overshot. Middle buckle Riptide with a high folded pin is a good 2003 NOAH finish. I'm happy Rhea won this. The shot of her holding the belt with the Actually Cool WWE Babylon Oscars stage lording over her was a great visual. 

7. Sami Zayn/Kevin Owens vs. The Usos

ER: This starts real slow and I'm not sure Jey's side headlock was good enough for the slow start. Sami's big bump to the floor and Jey's elbow suicida kick it into gear though. Jimmy is better cast as the guy who cuts off the ring from the apron than the guy controlling the heat, so not all of the Uso control felt like it was working. Owens' hot tag was necessary, swan dive and frog splashes a nice kick back up. This had a tough act to follow but I'm surprised at what a Regular Match this feels like, even with Owens' dives. Sami's big splash felt a little anti-climactic after Owens had already done like 5 variations of that same thing, but this crowd loves Sami and that's cool. I just wish it didn't feel like such a major step down from where he was at Elimination Chamber. I didn't feel the drama of all the superkicks, and there was a mistimed Sami kickout that was supposed to be BIG but the crowd reacted dead silent. The reaction was there for the 1D kickout and Jey was good enough at the in-ring monologue portion of the evening. Some of it felt too I'm Sorry, I Love You and I knew they had the potential to hit there I'd rather them lean into more ass kicking. All of the Usos tandem superkicks were really well timed. They threw a half dozen of them and they all managed to connect at the same time. That's a really impressive consecutive success rate on that. This is easily Michael Cole's best call of the night, as his energy - which usually feels like an alien trying to blend in - actually captured the mood the more the crowd began to Believe. 

Best Matches: 

1. Logan Paul vs. Seth Rollins

2. Rhea Ripley vs. Charlotte

3. Tag Scramble

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2021 Ongoing MOTY List: Bryan/Otis vs. Nakamura/Cesaro

16. Daniel Bryan/Otis vs. Shinsuke Nakamura/Cesaro WWE Smackdown 1/1

ER: Here’s a little gem from the new year, as if the calendar turned over and these four decided to celebrate by working a quick stiff tag. Bryan and Cesaro are always going to be a cool match, but the other two are wildcards. Nakamura and Otis are both capable of coating, but their New Years resolutions must have been really motivating because they had a lot of my favorite moments of the match. Bryan had some cool amateur takedowns on Nakamura and really looked like he was refusing to let go of a waist lock, until Nakamura threw a back elbow at his eye. There’s a great rope running sequence where Bryan runs under a Nak high kick and elbows Cesaro off the apron, runs back under a Nak clothesline and hits a dive into Cesaro...except it gets even better as Cesaro catches this super fast dive and tosses Bryan into an uppercut. Brilliant sequence there. I wish we could have seen what happened right after, as the commercial break cut into Otis running full speed around the ring after Cesaro. 

Nak and Cesaro were strong in keeping Bryan isolated, Bryan taking a couple big bumps to the floor and Cesaro working him over with a smothering headlock and great elbowdrop, Nak getting a few kicks in at Bryan’s head. Otis’s hot tag is explosive as hell, everything he threw looked awesome. His avalanche has real impact, and that 360 clothesline is finisher worthy. The home stretch is filled with cool cut off spots, like Otis breaking up a Nakamura armbar with a diving headbutt to Nakamura’s chin, or Cesaro sending Otis back on his heels with a stiff uppercut before Otis punches him in the side of the head. Otis and Cesaro each take nice bumps to the floor to set up the finish (this match was filled with nice spills to the floor), and while I was hoping for one more save to set up an even bigger finish, this was a cool way to start off the wrestling year. I love a match where everyone has a legitimate claim  to best performance. 

PAS: Really fun all action tag match. Nakamura has been sleepwalking through matches for years now, but looked engaged and inspired here, and Cesaro/Bryan is a tremendous match up. I really loved Cesaro catching the dive and throwing him up into an uppercut, and I really wish we could have seen the heat section during the commercial. I thought Otis was a fun hot tag, although I could have done without him killing the momentum for his dumb worm spot. I actually liked the finish, so many of these WWE TV matches end with a rollup, so seeing Bryan countering into the Yes lock for the kill shot was really cool. 

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST

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2021 Ongoing MOTY List: Smackdown Fatal 4-Way

15. Dolph Ziggler/Robert Roode vs. Rey & Dominik Mysterio vs. Otis/Chad Gable vs. Street Profits WWE Smackdown 4/9

ER: I love when they pull off one of these fast paced quick tag escalating move matches, reminding me of the best kind of 2000s indy spot tags. Every time someone new entered the tag it felt like the wrestling version of the Soul Train dance line, each person making the most of their screen time, and yet this never felt like anyone was trying to upstage anyone else. This gave us a great sampler of dance combos the whole runtime, never lingering on one specific pair. Every combo was great, every team got cool moments. I kind of hate when Ziggler has a good match like this, where he has a cool attention to detail, and Roode has that same attention to detail in a match like this (and is less hateable than Ziggler). Both keep working from the apron when they're not in, and both do a good job cutting off the ring. Rey has looked a bit washed this year, one of those things I haven't wanted to admit, and I've been waiting for months for a REY performance. 

This really felt like a classic Rey performance, so the reports of the middle aged legend's demise have been exaggerated. His misdirection was great, and his timing was as excellent as ever. He looked like he was directing traffic in there again, and back to being the guy you had to have your eyes on at all times. Dominik is coming along well, and is improving nicely for being maybe the most prominent guy thrust straight onto TV since Maven. The spot where his dive was caught by Otis, and his big frog splash that lead to him getting squashed on a save where great moments. Dawkins had a great hot tag, Ford bumped around huge for suplexes and a Roode tornado DDT, Otis was a great base with a couple of big power moments like his 360 lariat and that pinfall save I mentioned. I also loved Ziggler going for the Famouser and the faces he and Roode made as he was caught, like when heel Ricky Morton would get caught trying a headscissors. The build throughout was great, and this whole thing felt like an overproduced HD AIW tag. 

PAS: This was pretty fun stuff, sadly a bit chopped on TV. I liked the opening with Gable working Dominik's arm, would have liked to see 90 more seconds of that matwork. I haven't been watching much WWE TV in the pandemic, but man is it great to see Rey again. He looks just as fast as always, and I really want to see more of this Otis feud they are talking about. The bang bang at the end was fun too. Montez Ford gets crazy height on all of his dives, and that frog splash was killer (although it kind of showed up Dominik's a bit). I agree that this had the feel of an AIW four way and I really miss those. 

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST

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WWE Royal Rumble 2021 Live Blog

Nia Jax/Shayna Baszler vs. Asuka/Charlotte

ER: I thought Charlotte and Nia looked like a real mess throughout their whole Raw match earlier in the week, and they seem to have less chemistry a week later at the Rumble. I think it's pretty shocking how much Charlotte especially has regressed in the past couple years, and I wish they would hurry up and get Asuka away from her. I've mostly been a high voter on Jax but she's been noticeably slow and lazier in exchanges since coming back (ACL tears in both knees will do that to you). Things get clunky whenever Charlotte is in this one, and part of that is Baszler and Jax not being great at getting into position for Charlotte's offense, but a bigger part is Charlotte requiring people to too often be in specific position for offense that doesn't look great. She made a great diving save to break up a pin, but every one of her stomach kicks looked like she forgot what move she was supposed to be replicating. I'm also well beyond the point of needing to see Ric Flair on TV more than once or twice a year, and do not care about this angle with him and Lacey. I don't think this match ever came together as anything resembling a satisfying tag, the Asuka/Charlotte pairing does nothing for me, and the Baszler/Jax pairing has been very underwhelming. They need to separate all four of them and see if that helps freshen any of them. 

Goldberg vs. Drew McIntyre

ER: I am here for MMA shorts Goldberg. Really, I am here for Goldberg, so. This didn't really have the same kind of impact or sustained heat of the other Goldberg comeback matches, and ended really flat. It had a lot of promising steps throughout, like the spear nearfall to start, or the spear through the barricade, and I fully bit on the jackhammer kickout. Once Goldberg hit it I actually thought they were giving us another Goldberg run. And while I liked Goldberg's missed spear chest first corner bump, McIntyre needs to find something a little more interesting to do than making dumb Edge faces in the corner for FAR too long while Goldberg sells damage. I know part of the modern WWF dogshit style is to make dumbshit faces in the corner for too long before hitting your finisher, but this felt way too long, and ended this on an unfortunate note. 

Carmella vs. Sasha Banks

ER: A lot of this match really was not hitting for me, until things picked up with the Reginald involvement. It felt like they kept skipping steps within the match, like there weren't any kind of transitions between offense, they just went right to moves. Except Carmella was doing the moves deliberately slow, because heel I guess, and then when Sasha took over she was already doing "frustrated by only a 2 count" faces. It all felt really underbaked. The Reginald involvement added something unique to the match, loved him catching Sasha and eating a headscissors, this guy rules. But he's quickly sent to the back and Carmella does a dive that lands her right on her face. It used to be Sasha's job to almost break her face on dives, so Carmella is trying to do the equivalent of stealing her rival's finisher. Ending felt abrupt and not set up super well, with Carmella getting a couple nice reversals of big Banks spots, but then just getting tapped anyway. This was not a strong title match, and there aren't any weaker Banks title matches coming to mind. Major disappointment. 

Women's Rumble Match

ER: Bayley/Naomi is a good way to start the Rumble, but MAN has Naomi been a complete afterthought for seemingly 2 years. Her whole career has felt like her having a big showing on one of the big WWF PPVs, then them mostly not doing anything with that. She really could have been a major star a few years ago and they just repeatedly stall out on her. This is the first time she's been in any kind of match for 5 months, but I'm not sure if there were injuries or just a lack of interest. This really should be Bianca Belair's match. It has to be. If they just pull the trigger on her, come on baby! How awesome is Belair, skipping to the ring and removing her earrings for a fight? I've really been enjoying Billie Kay's solo run. I thought she was sunk for sure, but she's done far more interesting things than Royce since the split. Still would like it more with them together again, but oh well. I don't love Shotzi coming in and just doing all of her offense, the way she would entering a tag match. Everyone running at her, one at a time, the way you would in a hot tag or in a ninja movie is just dumb. It's one of the main reasons there aren't many good battle royals anymore, because "working a battle royal" is not the way most wrestlers work battle royals now. I don't like regular match in my battle royal, I get that in regular matches, which are plentiful. Watch a Rumble match like '89 or '90, and it's all those guys just filling the time with fighting. It's all punches and clotheslines and choking with boots. Now it's offense and I don't think it's better. 

Jillian Hall seems to be doing a Judy Tenuta thing now, and I think it works? Maybe it's an indication how well Peyton Royce is doing post Iiconics that I had no idea who her entrance music was for, and the Titan Tron video took forever to say it was Royce. Ohhhhhhhh shit I've been typing about it this entire time and I just realized they might get the Iiconics back together for this and I fucking want that so bad. It's a good way for them to get back together. Let them eliminate a couple people together and it's a great way to organically show that they're better when they're together! It would actually be a smart way to freshen up the roster, get an interesting team into the lifeless Asuka/Charlotte and Jax/Baszler stuff. But, of course, they don't do any of that. Royce almost immediately blends into the background of the match, and Kay is eliminated a few minutes later. A fruitful storyline abandoned without mention. 

Not a fan of the early and tossed off Toni Storm elimination. I've kind of unexpectedly become a big Toni fan over the past year. I am not interested in this becoming The Charlotte Match. But it really feels like a dumb thing WWF would do. "Ric had what we've defined as the Greatest Rumble Performance so now we need to give Charlotte her Greatest Rumble Performance." Please don't give us that. Too many people have been entering with missile dropkicks. It is stupid that so many have entered the match by immediately climbing to the top rope, and nobody has been punished for climbing to the top rope in the Royal Rumble. The ring is FILLED with people, someone should knock this person off the top rope while they are voluntarily standing there! This is another reason why people cannot work battle royals. The handstand set up for it was dumb, but I did like Dana Brooke hanging off Ripley's neck in a headscissors while Ripley tried to shake her off from the apron. Brooke was memorable in elimination. The layout of this has been weak for long stretches, like a couple instances of someone getting eliminated right before a new entrant, losing any impact of the elimination. BAYLEY'S elimination happened DURING Mickie James's entrance!! Who fucked that up!! Bayley was clearly one of the favorites to win this match, and they moved on within three seconds!! They showed her elimination as a replay, because the cameras were on James and not the arguable biggest name in the match being eliminated. That's really really bad layout for a Rumble. 

WWF could use Alicia Fox back. She would be a fun NXT act at minimum. Give me a Foxy/Aliyah pairing, that would be great. Strong inside cradle on R-Truth to get the 24/7 title back from Fox, good weight on the back of the thighs. I love Dakota Kai, and goddamn did she get eliminated. Ripley just dumped her face first on the apron. Not happy seeing Mandy and Kai eliminated back to back. I'm jinxing the hell out of my personal favorites. They do ANOTHER elimination RIGHT BEFORE a new entrance!! It has to be intentional at this point, and that is so stupid! Nikki Cross gets eliminated one second before TAMINA comes out. Eliminations with zero fanfare are a battle royal curse. There is a way to make eliminations sink in and at least let the announcers talk about the implications a bit, no need to be doing all of these at the exact same time as a thing that everyone is more interested in. The Naomi/Bianca stuff was good, they need to focus more on how long both have been in and they've been a little background, but I like how they're getting more screen time the longer they're in. 

They're going to do dumb Alexa Bliss stuff, aren't they. Yep. But THAT is a good elimination by Ripley! Thank god they had at least some Rumble decency, to have a dozen people in the ring just watching someone go through a long "transformation" without doing anything about it. I am so happy we didn't have to spend more than a minute on that. Ember Moon is yet another person coming in and doing all of their offense like a a normal match, but she dropkicks Naomi right in the face in a way that didn't seem intentional. Ember Moon looked really bad on her elimination, with that slow motion "setting up a spot" run she did to get backdropped by Shayna. Loved Nia's "I can't, she's family" excuse to not go after Tamina, but her hockey fighting with Shayna after Tamina's elimination looked bad. I'm not into the Nia/Shayna thing, just doesn't feel like it's going anywhere and the journey to get there isn't interesting. Do I hate Natalya's new gear? My instinct says yes, but is there an element of it I'm underappreciating? Perhaps. I'll level with you, I did not know there was important emotional history with Natalya and Lana. Was that elimination effective? I could not tell you. I have not been closely following the Natalya/Lana relationship. Charlotte has felt like a complete non-factor the entire time she's been in the Rumble. She was not working to stand out at all, so I am fully not interested in her valiantly battling against two foes, and I also don't understand her treating her elimination like a drunk sorority girl getting thrown out of a bar that overserved. 

I'm a big fan of Bianca going to WrestleMania, it's a great choice and the most interesting direction to go. But I wished I enjoyed her and Ripley's final two. I thought a lot of it looked real bad, like them doing really slow reversal sequences and slow thrown missed strikes. Ripley was hanging on the ropes dangling, and Belair just stood there waiting instead of kicking at her hands, literally standing there waiting to do the spot that came next. Working battle royals as a normal match suuuuucks. So I thought their final two stretch was not good, but the end result was great, and they did a genuinely great job of making it look like either Belair OR Ripley had a chance. That's important. Bianca's winner's speech was the kind of thing that would have been nice to see in front of a live crowd. 

Kevin Owens vs. Roman Reigns

ER: This didn't hook me until they started fighting up into the "crowd", and I liked some of the stuff up there. Owens had all these nasty chairshots to Roman's knees. He was jabbing the edge of a chair into Roman's patella, then just bashing them from the side, all really nasty stuff that should be sold throughout a match. They looked really hobbling but Reigns didn't treat them as such a moment later, which is disappointing. Owens had a nice bump off the riser and a good moment of him beating the 10 count. But once they went backstage it just felt like the same kind of slow Shane McMahon prop show that they've been doing into the ground. This whole thing is going too long, and I am so tired of these slow epic brawls that always make 20 minutes feel like 30 and 30 minutes feel like 45. These matches are more "ideas" matches than interesting fights, but none of the ideas are as good as any of the homebrew shit cooked up in the Last Battle of Burke. Sitting through an endless 25 minutes with a handcuff spot at the end taking up over 10% of the match is such a punishing waste of time. Michael Cole was right when he described this thing as brutal. I thought it would never stop. 

 

Men's Rumble Match

ER: I have not been following the storyline here, and that is just cruel to start this thing with Edge/Orton. This feels like they're fucking with me. Edge is at least a more compelling character now that his gimmick is that his body could break at any minute. Sami Zayn is looking, dressing, and wrestling more and more like Buck Robley, and I think it could make him one of my favorites. Has Mustafa Ali had his first name back since joining Retribution? Is Retribution a stable where getting back your own name is important, and that's why most of them have names like their parents were "child can choose their own name" parents? Edge has a better spear now than he did 10 years ago. When I'm not too into a match, I usually don't find myself saying "You know I bet this thing could get better if Dolph Ziggler got involved." I want to see a run from super gassed Carlito!! He looked like peak 80s gas Jimmy Snuka with cool Dick Anthony Williams facial hair. 

These things kind of stink now that the moments are all planned in the exact same way. Guy comes in, does his signature offense while people run at him one by one, do pose to hard cam, storyline for next elimination starts once new entrant is done with his offense, elimination culminates with 10 seconds until next entrant. They have gone to that exact same pattern in this and the women's rumble, and it sucks. 

Kane comes out looking more like the local guy playing Kane on an Australian knock off indy. That other guy might look better in ring at this point though. I wish Otis would have been in the match longer, thought his discus clothesline and capture suplex looked really great, but at least his elimination bump was the nastiest of the men's rumble so far. Dominik got big height, and Hurricane would be a nice guy to have back somewhere, but this rumble is not great. There are no compelling stories here, and it's felt like it's been full of restarts. Christian return is cool, and here's a thing I cannot believe: When Christian, Riddle, Big E, and Bryan all teamed up to force Lashley over, that was literally the first time in EITHER rumble that a group decided to go after one person. It's been all these stupid paired of "stories" that aren't really interesting, instead of people actually thinking like someone IN a rumble. That moment actually felt like a rumble, like a few people suddenly remembered a rumble strategy. What I said earlier about Edge having a way better spear in 2021 than he did in 2010? Still holds, as his spear on Styles looked great. Victoria Beer, seen in the background of every lucha match I've been watching lately, is now sponsoring Royal Rumble entrants? Nobody else got sponsored? Kane and AJ Styles were in there, StopTheSteal didn't want to sponsor them? Christian and Sheamus always had great chemistry. I'd love to see a 2021 Christian/Sheamus match. 

Cesaro lifting and throwing Strowman over the top would have been far more interesting than Strowman eliminating Cesaro, and Sheamus deserved better. Bryan and Riddle really laced into each other during their portion, and Bryan would be my easy pick if asked "Who would you like to win this rumble?" This is the first time these two have had an exchange of any kind, and it all looked really great. What looks riduculous is every person still left in the match lying around the ring while Bryan and Riddle can just have a 4 minute match. Nobody should be lying on the mat for that long, let alone four people at the same time. I thought the finishing run was pretty bad, thought the Bryan elimination was a pretty big nail in the coffin. The Edge story is not something I can get too interested in, but all of his spears looked great in this match, and I could actually see him being a part of a good match now. I'm not expecting it, but he is slightly more interesting now than a decade ago. 

ER: Disappointing show top to bottom. Both Rumbles were really uninspired and badly laid out, the Last Man Standing match felt endless, the tag title match was bad, and the Sasha match was below her level. That's a bummer of a show right there. 

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WWF 305 LIVE: KAMALA! BOOGER! HEAVY MACHINERY! AUTHORS OF PAIN!

Kamala vs. Bastion Booger WWF Mania 6/27/93 - EPIC

ER: When you see on paper what match you're getting, and you're the kind of person who would be excited by this match on paper, I cannot imagine you leaving this one disappointed. I didn't even realize they were in WWF at the same time (there was about a month of overlap) and had no idea this match existed. Even in match lists it doesn't turn up on most searches (if you go to cagematch they only list a couple of house show matches and no TV match) but it doesn't appear to have aired on Europe-only TV so who knows why the Deep State has been hiding this match from people. On Superstars the day before, Vince referred to Booger as "a disgusting endomorph" which sounds like a hilarious bodybuilder bubble HHH insult (like when he called Punk "skinny fat"), and so we have a disgusting endomorph vs. a Ugandan Giant, obviously that is going to be epic. Booger bumps around in real fun "can he get up!?" ways for Kamala, with the best parts being these sick cross chops Kamala threw right to the Adam's apple and lead to fast back bumps from Booger (and I love Booger's back bumps because he is so round - one could call him an endomorph, in fact - that he bumps like someone threw a jello sculpture to the mat). I am filled with glee as Kamala chokes Booger over the middle rope, as I picture the white rope as a sentient rope who just has a big frown on his face as the two fattest dudes lean their weight on him. They brawl to a double count out and Booger takes a nice ring posting, and obviously there wasn't going to be a clean finish when you're dealing with specimens like these. It was either going time limit draw or double KO baby. 

Heavy Machinery vs. Authors of Pain NXT 7/12/17 - VERY GOOD

ER: We have a major dearth of fat guys in pro wrestling these days, so I imagine this will be one of our later 305 entries. These guys are four of the biggest guys that have ever appeared on NXT, so thankfully they gave us at least one TV match together. What's cruel is that they know exactly what they are giving us, because every time they show a graphic for this match throughout the episode they talk about how much damn beef is going to be in the ring at once. There are so many small people in NXT, they obviously knew what a treat a match like this was going to be. Confusingly, it was taped before 4th of July and easily could have aired around the holiday. That would have been a good reason to turn the match into a hot dog eating contest or something cool and patriotic like that, but instead they just had them wrestle a normal match with no competitive eating. 

Akam and Rezar don't do a ton for me, but I really like their knees to the face and it's cool that they go to that a lot. There was a long heat segment on Tucker and a lot of it was him trying to get to his feet while getting clubbed and taking short knees right to the face. I could probably be won over by a team that did nothing but big clubs, decent clotheslines, quick tags, cranking cravats, and knees to the face. The hot tag to Otis is the real highlight, with him coming in throwing hard shoulderblocks and lariats, with my favorite lariats being the ones he throws just to block AoP lariats. It's a cool visual when two huge guys are throwing arms as hard as they can while trying to block, and I wonder if either wound up with some big bruises on their inner biceps. Tucker really muscles one of AoP over the top to the floor with an even better lariat, and Otis chucks one of them with a big boy belly to belly (and you know his belly is REALLY up against that belly). Wish a little bit of an extended stretch this could have been a real standout tag, but just went things are really looking to get on fire they go home quick. I liked AoP's DDT and their lariat/legsweep finisher works well with their size, but it's disappointing when you know something was close to being awesome and only didn't get there due to not having an extra 75 seconds.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE 305 LIVE

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WWE TLC 2020 Late Blog

My sister is moving in a month, so I spent the weekend with her packing boxes and moving things into her garage. A stunt show PPV I can have on in the background and pay partial attention to sounds like it could be fun. Not super familiar with the card so I'm kind of going in blind, which hopefully leads to being pleasantly caught off guard. Am very excited for Sasha/Carmella.

Daniel Bryan/Otis/Chad Gable/Big E vs. King Corbin/Cesaro/Shinsuke Nakamura/Sami Zayn 

ER: Bryan keeps shaving the sides of his head higher and higher, and he continues his career trend of Always Having the Hair of a 10 Year Old. Otis is wearing a Vader singlet, and this match looks like something that can't miss on paper. These 8 guys in a 2000s NOAH setting would light things on fire, so I'm high hoping this one. And it was actually really good. It had a great Coliseum Video feel to it, the way it was worked, and the way it was 4 babyfaces vs. 4 heels and they're mostly aligned because of being either a face or a heel. Zayn was avoiding Big E and running around the ring and hiding like Jimmy Hart, and it was balanced well with quick tags and a brief cool down to build to the big finish run. Corbin is good at working cool down (that's an actual compliment) and good at inserting himself in the hot finish, Bryan glues all this together to build to the big Otis hot tag, and the finish stretch move chaining all looked good. Cesaro hits this awesome deadlift Dr. Bomb and just lets him go, Corbin hits a great spinebuster on Otis, we get our big showdown between Big E and Zayn and Zayn gets caught. It's all very satisfying pro wrestling. 

AJ Styles vs. Drew McIntyre

ER: I really liked this, but thought the ladder stuff really took away from the match at points. I liked the first 8 minutes when no weapons were used the best, with Styles bumping big around the ring and ringside. He took hard hits into the buckles, got dropped ribs first a couple times on the barricade, got thrown over a table with chairs on it as if he were in a fight in a closed bar, and it was great. Setting up tables and climbing ladders changed the pace of the match, which they made up for by building to hard landings (Styles gets tossed hard on a ladder and thrown over the top through a table at ringside), so everything looks like it really stings. But I think the ladder climbing really took me out of it as the climbing doesn't feel anywhere near as climactic as had they just been wrestling. Miz cashing in his briefcase and then doing the slowest possible climb really made this stip feel stupid, though I think the fight choreography when they got to all three fighting on the ladders was good. Styles working over McIntyre's leg lead to a couple nice moments, like the calf slicer through the ladder. Styles' bump off the ladder to the floor looked sick, and Miz was made to look like an absolutely tremendous fool. Also, I do not need Miz in the title scene and him losing in this kind of fashion is perfectly fine for me. A match that lost me, but one that also had a lot of good (front loaded), but needed an editor. 

Sasha Banks vs. Carmella

ER: I thought this was really good, as good as I was hoping it to be. It had a couple twists and turns, made Carmella look like a worthy challenger, built to a feverish home stretch, one of those matches where a better opponent helps bring out the best parts of Carmella. Sasha is really great at this point, so much that it always bums me out that none of this is playing in front of live crowds. Sasha feels like she'd be the biggest thing in 2020 wrestling if there were live shows. I'm really glad this was a straight match and not worked under the TLC stip, a straight match was the right choice and the drama over nearfalls and submissions is more interesting than climbing and falling. The involvement of Reginald was good, loved him catching Carmella on a dive, ducking Sasha, and tossing her into a headscissors. And the payback was well played late in the match with Sasha hitting a meteora and then getting blasted by a couple superkicks for a genuinely strong nearfall. I thought Carmella could actually win it there. Sasha was great at running into everything Carmella had, and both kept things real close on sunset flips and small packages. It's really nice seeing such fine execution on pinfall attempts. I loved both of Carmella's submissions, both of them look like sick lucha maestro subs and are both somehow locked on just as smoothly. Both of those subs would look awesome applied by Negro Navarro or Blue Panther, but it also looks awesome applied by Carmella. It makes me happy. This whole match was fun throughout, really made me smile and enjoy the wrestling the whole time. A very tight build and explosive finishing stretch, just another great Big Match Sasha performance. 

Shelton Benjamin/Cedric Alexander vs. Xavier Woods/Kofi Kingston

ER: This was good, and kept up the same fun energy the entire rest of the show has had so far. This has been a very fun show, everyone feels like they're trying a couple new things in the ring, it's made things feel special so far. This tag was no different, and it made me realize that I appreciate that The Hurt Business actually seems to be growing as an idea. I like that it wasn't one of those ideas where WWE seems on board with it for two weeks and then loses all interest, instead it seems like they're letting it grow naturally. It's given new life to Shelton Benjamin and made him as relevant as he's been in 15 years. If they want to they could let him ride out a couple more years as an upper card tag worker and he'd be great at it. It's also been good for Cedric Alexander, who instead of being one of several similar 205 Live babyfaces, his style feels more focused for being in a regular tag team. Both teams worked a fun fast big bumps style, and kept the match to a brisk 10 minutes for maximum impact. I love how definitively Hurt Business won the belts. There was no bullshit, just a dominant team catching the champs. Benjamin hit a pop up superplex that should play in Hurt Business highlight videos, and the Alexander backcracker finisher is the premier use of that overused move, and shows that an overplayed move can still be used effectively. I'd love to see the Hurt Business continue to evolve and even add members, and would love to see them have a run with multiple title holders in the stable. This whole match really got me into the potential of them, so I'd call that a huge success. 

Nia Jax/Shayna Baszler vs. Asuka/Charlotte

ER: I was just thinking the other day that I had not missed Charlotte, and yet I was happy to see her here just because I will take any new face in this match rather than see Lana in the main women's program on Raw. It's poorly executed, it's obvious, the commentary screams all of the bullet points for how we're supposed to feel about it all, but I just don't want Lana in these matches anymore. That said, I wish it didn't feel like Charlotte was immediately Superwoman again. It felt like she just ran through Nia and Shayna, and while I admit the Nia/Shayna hasn't lived up to its potential, they should be a pair who are on Charlotte's level. You can make an argument for the surprise factor, they weren't expecting her, but they just got outmatched and I didn't like that. Asuka automatically feels like the smaller banana with Charlotte around, as she had to spend the match being the one to take a lot of Nia and Shayna's offense. But Asuka is good at that and I liked the way her hip attack took Nia out of things at the finish. Still, this match played into my worse fear, that we're going to go straight back to a Charlotte-dominated scene. 

Roman Reigns vs. Kevin Owens

ER: This didn't feel far off, but this didn't work for me. I didn't like the Uso interference, and Uso made to look as effective as a manager only type. There were a lot of big spills - maybe too many - yet I thought several of the biggest ones were shrugged off in the name of blocking someone's climbing. I was not into the slow climbs no matter how earned they were with big bumps. I thought going to Uso for every big Reigns comeback came off weak, and that it would have been perhaps more played out to have the interference happen in only one big moment instead of all through the match, but it would have made for a better match and made it appear Owens had more of a chance. Roman going through the barricade looked fantastic, and was one of the best looking "leveled barricade" spots they've done. No matter how I felt about the match layout as a whole, I thought that looked the best. Owens took some nasty falls into ladders (Roman too), but these slow paced Roman walking matches have not been my thing. 

So, I had a really fun time watching this show, and the vibe seems to be turning with those last couple matches, turning into something much less good. The tag match and Reigns match were not my thing but I also don't think they were bad. BUT. It feels like I would be tossing a lot of goodwill and pleasant memories right out the window if I put myself through a Randy Orton/Fiend match. I mean what kind of psychopath would I have to be to do that? 2020 has been difficult enough, why would I put myself through all of that? Let's go out on a high note, and be happy for the fun stuff we did get. 

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WWE Hell in a Cell Approximately Live Blog 10/25/20

I think this show has a chance to have a couple big match deliveries, as Sasha/Bayley and Reigns/Uso both have strong on paper potential. Phil has a rare Sunday evening free so will also be sitting in and contributing to a couple cherry picked matches. And Jeff Jarrett is there? Jeff Jarrett is with WWE now? Is it weird I want to see Jarrett wrestling in NXT? 

R-Truth vs. Drew Gulak

ER: I don't follow the 24/7 title so I do not understand any of the Little Jimmy references that Drew Gulak is making. Does Truth have an imaginary child friend that accompanies him? I don't know about any of that. Is Drew Gulak bringing his Chikara mime training into the WWE where I don't want it? This is perhaps the most Chikara match I have seen Gulak work in WWE, and it's a bummer that it feels like he had those great silent era matches with Daniel Bryan and then opted to take him off TV. Now he's bumping for Truth's John Cena cosplay (which might also be a regular thing? Again I haven't seen 24/7). This looked like they would get the comedy out of the way right at the beginning and then work their way into a good match, with Gulak twisting Truth's ankle and dropping down with Indian deathlocks. But the Cena comeback jokes came really early into the match, and went right through to the end. During the straight faced moments of the match they had real nice chemistry, and that delayed sunset flip snare was pulled off by two guys who could have turned several cool sequences. I don't think we're ever getting that match though. 

Jey Uso vs. Roman Reigns

PAS: I think this ended up being a bit much. Samoan acting is more visceral than white boy acting, so this match was better than the super dramatic NXT matches. It came close, and I bought most of the emotional beats of this match, but it was really long and there was long sections of conversation and emoting and not a ton of wrestling. I also really need more violence in the Roman goes-too-far section of the match. That stair-assisted dropkick looked like something that Tommy Dreamer didn't cleanly hit in a comedy hardcore match, not something that showed Reigns lost his soul or whatever it was supposed to convey. I thought the spears looked great and Roman has a nasty guillotine, and that the finish worked well. It needed to be about 10 minutes shorter and Jey's white pants needed some blood for it to totally work for me. Afa and Sika at the end was awesome though, and I imagine this leads to Rock vs. Roman for the true head seat at the table which should be incredible. 

ER: Is this really the first WWE I Quit in five years? But I am not really enjoying this. I am not a fan of these Marvel battles where guys speak dialogue to each other before taking theatrical bumps and gnashing their teeth at the lights. If they were doing this on a windy green grass hillside cliff I could possibly get into it more. It does not work for me as pro wrestling, and it does not work for me as high drama. It was like they were doing a musical so the story took 5x as long to tell itself, ended up going way too long, and had too much dramatic build between each bit of wrestling. The spears were spaced well and I enjoyed things like Jey scrambling to choke Roman with the strap, but this dialogue thing is boring as hell to me. I don't think guys sound cool while barking one sentence "in a fight" platitudes. I think this stuff is really terrible, at least this presentation of it. I think I Quit match structure can already have a lot of lags and downtime, but they were dragging things down with dialogue AND I quit back and forth, which means we got a ton of lying around, far too much talking, and far too much of the ref asking if Jey wanted to quit every couple seconds. The only benefit of having this long slog of a match first is that the show still has plenty of time to recover. I liked the Wild Samoans appearance at the end and even though this match bored me to tears I would be undeniably excited by a Reigns/Rock match. 

Elias vs. Jeff Hardy

ER: I've been into comeback Jeff Hardy, and I'm fully into appreciating Hardy as an all time great at this point. But this kind of thing feels like a Raw angle and not something that needed to be on PPV. 

The Miz vs. Otis

ER: I really liked this and how it felt like a late 80s Saturday Night's Main Event match. They worked straight and that benefitted the match, and I loved everything after Otis's big babyface shirt tear. This was a strong Otis babyface performance. He ran into a Miz boot and looked tough as Miz was laying in kicks to the chest. But the wild man shirt tear Otis was him having the fun kind of breakout that will keep someone memorable and durable, like Jim Duggan. Otis hit a great spinning lariat and smashed into Miz, felt like a guy who would be getting huge potential reactions if we had crowds. It isn't hard to picture Otis catching on as a durable cult character with crowds, the same way Santino was but even more pushable as a wrestler. The Tucker turn could have gotten a surprised reaction from the crowd too, like or love where they go with it. This was pretty easily the best match so far on this show, but I hope we get something stronger. 

Sasha Banks vs. Bayley

ER: I am very very excited for this. For the past year plus Sasha has been one of the only people in WWE who actually makes me WATCH. She has had several stretches like this over her career, and has been a consistently great wrestler and character for the better part of a decade now. I think her work in this Bayley feud has arguably been the best of her career. And I liked this match and much preferred their method of storytelling, even if they didn't quite take things the direction I would have wanted. I liked the emotion and I liked a lot of the brawling and selling, but I didn't love the stretches where it became a propped up weapons showcase. When you actually fighting each other gets way more heat than making arts and crafts weapons, just go for the easier option of fighting each other. Sasha contributes the best parts of this for me, but they're a good pair. I loved Sasha's tope and her being crazy enough to get the back of her head whipped into a chair on a sunset flip. She's a CZW wrestler doing joshi drama and it rules. She gets trapped in the ring skirt in a cool way and is a strong enough salesman that the beatings she takes are always more convincing. All of the fighting was great, and all of Sasha's assorted meteoras looked awesome. But the prop set up slowed things unnecessarily, as a strong match was right in front of them with much simpler weapon usage. But Sasha was great at throwing herself face first into ladders and chairs, and her comebacks always played strong. The finish was great, with a Banks Statement around a chair a nasty worthy way to end a long title reign. Banks could honestly be the biggest female star in WWE history. I think she has great potential to break out on a big level. 

PAS: I thought had some very good moments, but ultimately went too long. It felt like a big time Indy wrestling stips match that didn't know when to end. They had a bunch of cool ideas and crazy bumps, and if they had picked four of them and built the match around those four moments it could have been awesome, instead they had twenty ideas and it kind of just kept going. I thought the finish of the match was awesome as was all of Sasha's double knee variations into parts of the cage. They undoubtedly took a ton of cool looking punishment, but at some point twenty five concussive shots with weapons just drags on.

 

Bobby Lashley vs. Slapjack

ER: Okay Bobby Lashley vs. SLAPJACK might be one of the weirder singles matches to land on a WWE PPV. Shane Thorne has never been on a WWE PPV, and hadn't even appeared on a TakeOver in four years. But here he is, debuting on PPV as Slapjack, and I think that is a kind of fun odd thing? It's a fun quick match, with Slapjack bumping around nice on Irish whips into the buckles and flies around for every Lashley throw. His comebacks were convincing and the big schmozz finish was used better here than the Hardy/Elias match. This was a nice palate cleanser and honestly the most interesting use for Retribution might be as a jobber stable. A stable of masked jobbers who all bump makes a ton of sense. Their faces are even covered so you don't have to see their shamed faces. WWE doesn't need revolution angles. They need 6-8 masked jobbers to flesh out their undercards and get fucking worked over by more interesting people. A dedicated crew of people who never win and nobody expects to win, bringing back showcase squash matches and 90/10 mildly competitive matches to establish new offense and alternate finishers. Do that and it will be a more successful idea than whatever Retribution ever leads to. 

Drew McIntyre vs. Randy Orton

ER: This was boring and not at all what I want from pro wrestling. They do not do this high drama wrestling as stage craft bullshit well, and it is infecting these shows. This show especially feels like ACTING has been featured far too much. They're taking advantage of the Our Town set up and getting a little bit too confident with their stage chops. This was slow and masturbatory and I couldn't stay engaged in any way. The end. 

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

Jack Gallagher vs. Akira Tozawa NXT 5/6

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


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

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

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

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

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WWE Money in the Bank Mother's Day Live Blog

I visited my mother yesterday (my parents are hell on a 6' space, my calves are burning from all the backpedaling I kept having to do) and gave her a cool gift, so that excuses me to watch wrestling of potentially questionable quality on her special day. Let's hope for something good out of this show so that I can at least justify my not calling her to hear repeated stories about dumb things my father has done during quarantine.


Jeff Hardy vs. Cesaro

ER: So Hardy misses an entire year with an injury, they bring him back to Smackdown two months ago, spent the interim showing weekly documentaries about his rehabilitation (which hardly anyone gets, let alone several weeks of them), and then put him on the pre-show? I know that card placement matters less in no crowd era, but it's still really odd. It doesn't really matter to me, as the pre-show are almost always good, and they're worked in a way that makes them feel like good Velocity or 09-10 Superstars matches. They almost always hit the match length sweet spot and the layouts always feel so much less produced than main show matches. That feels like it shouldn't be the case, but there's too much of a sample size at this point. And this was really good! This was a much better singles match than I expected Hardy to physically be able of delivering at this point, but the longest straight time off of his career seems to have really done him good. He's moving quicker and more fluidly than he has in the past many years, but he's still taking the same level of awkward painful bumps so I'll just enjoy this while it lasts. He works quick enough here to convincingly fluster Cesaro, but you knew the best moments of this would revolve around what Cesaro does once he catches him. Cesaro catches him leaping off the ring steps and splats him ribs first over the barricade, later shoves him hard hip first into the ring apron. Hardy always seems to take damage on the least padded parts of the human body. Hardy's hard landings here were really entertaining, loved how Cesaro played off him (his big Fuerza bump over Hardy on the ropes was awesome), really liked all of this.

Big E/Kofi Kingston vs. Gran Metalik/Lince Dorado vs. The Miz/John Morrison vs. Wesley Blake/Steve Cutler

ER: This was good, but it feels like I've been seeing this exact match every week for the past several weeks. When they were running this on TV I just assumed the PPV version would have some extra gimmick or stipulation, but it was just longer. Still it was good overall, not always the tightest multiman, not always the pairings I wanted to see, but good. I really like Forgotten Sons, and I realize I'm in the minority on that. Gimmicks aren't the thing that sells me on a worker, ring work is the main thing I care about, and their ring work is more interesting than most teams in WWE. Their double teams are rock solid, neither skimp on small things (Cutler has far better stomps and kicks to the stomach than anyone else in the match), but also add in big bumps (Blake is always good for at least one big bump to the floor per match). Also, big fan of their double team hiptoss to an opponent draped over the ropes, and they're good at coming up with logical spots like that. I'm completely tired by the Miz/Morrison team at this point, and New Day isn't far behind them on people I wish were featured less. But it's cool seeing them work with the Sons and LHP. Dorado and Morrison pulled off a cool dragon rana, Metalik looked awesome with his while hair flowing around his mask (while working too fast for Kofi who looked like a stumblebum side by side), we got a big Morrison Spanish fly to the floor (while far more people than necessary awkardly stood around like goobs), and this was plenty good.

R-Truth vs. Bobby Lashley

ER: This match was nothing anyway, throwaway match as part of a feud I could not care about, so it's not much of a crime that I was distracted throughout this. Because once I noticed that the announcers ONLY refer to Bobby Lashley as "Bobby Lashley", it was all I could concentrate on. This is a promotion that has been weirdly obsessed with changing someone's name to a single word name, and yet we can't go through ANY part of the match with hearing "Lashley with the slam" or "Lashley with the pin", it ALWAYS has to be "Bobby Lashley with the pin!" Bobby Lashley, Bobby Lashley, Bobby Lashley. They could not stop saying this man's full fucking Christian name for 5 seconds. Nobody else gets this treatment. They either lose one of their names entirely, getting called - very normally - by ONLY their last name in a match because we know who this person is at this point, or have some kind of nickname that you can alternate with (Roman with the slam! The Big Dog with the spear!). But they can only and ever call this one person by their full name. Whose direction is this, any why? This can not be an accident and now we all have ONE MORE reason to hate Bobby Lashley segments.

Bayley vs. Tamina

ER: You have seen me write about this before, and as long as they keep doing it every year I will continue writing about it, but I cannot stand the 2-4 month period of every one of the last 10 years that WWE insists on telling us that Tamina matters and we need to be serious about Tamina and here's your yearly Tamina PPV match challenging for a title before we realize "well she's still Tamina so we didn't learn". There were people like Ruby Riott, Liv Morgan, and Sarah Logan, the former who was returning from a long injury, the latter two who have been quietly overdelivering on syndicated TV matches and house shows for years...but we're going for our 10th go round on Tamina, so you gals will have to back up a bit. You can tell she's really trying, but every year it's the same bad gear and the same way of cumbersomely getting into position for opponent offense. However, this was a real class Bayley performance, as her working aggressively and outpacing the larger Tamina made the match much more interesting than it should have been, and made Tamina's monster moments feel bigger because it's not just her badly dominating a match, it's her using a couple things in spurts. Bayley outsmarts her and it makes Bayley getting the tables turned into some interesting stuff. Bayley bumps big for her when she does eventually go on the rampage, including a big flying bump over the announce table. Tamina still comes off klutzy throughout, but the layout is really smart and she at least does her best within the layout. She does a clumsy missed superkick, but the spot is Bayley catching it and turning it into a kneebar, so her clumsy kick wasn't the important thing in the spot. The match felt carefully constructed to be about spots where her clumsiness was out of the way quickly because it set up something better from Bayley. Bayley's high cradle finish looked great, a legit pin that looked like anyone on the roster would have had a hard time kicking out of, and it went just the right amount of time. Post match is even good, with Tamina immediately picking up Bayley for a samoan drop after losing, but Sasha drops her with a great chop block and then throws a stiff kick to her chest in high heel boots. I'm calling this an easy best case scenario for a Tamina singles match, could not imagine a better version of this particular match.

Braun Strowman vs. Bray Wyatt

ER: I'm happy this was kept short, I just can't get into Bray Wyatt. I actually liked the Fire Fly match, but it's not enough to buy him any kind of goodwill. Still, this was kept short and that's good. Strowman took a few really cool big man bumps (great missed charge into and over the announce table, real sturdy shoulderblock getting thrown into the ring steps), and then got in the ring and got hugged for a long time so I could look at Twitter for a bit. Then Strowman finished him, and I like that.  But honestly this had the same amount of time to do something as Bayley/Tamina had, and this came nowhere close to accomplishing what they did.

Drew McIntyre vs. Seth Rollins

ER: Didn't feel like this one, but I'm sure Rollins talked about his destiny several times and had a Seth Rollins match, which I'm sure are for somebody. I feel bad for McIntyre that this is how his title reign is going, but I wish him the best. I saw the finish of Seth Rolling hitting a superkick by being bounced into the ropes by a nice headbutt, and the superkick causing McIntyre to bounce into the ropes and hit the Claymore kick. Claymore kick looked good, but guys hitting moves because they got hit by moves is the dumbest most played out shit at this point.

Money in the Bank

ER: Oh my god they're doing the Money in the Bank matches CONCURRENTLY!? This has potential to be a tremendous trainwreck, one of those ideas like World War 3 that you can't focus on anything. But World War 3 could have had great potential as a recorded match, as the worst thing about it was knowing there was probably something cool happening somewhere in those 3 rings, and you were likely missing it. Filming one of those and showing the finished product with the best moments chosen from the camera angles would have been a way more successful version of that match. The whole thing has this fake Michael Kamen score that makes it feel like a bunch of backyarders made a movie combining Die Hard and Rat Race. The comedy doesn't work anywhere near as consistently as in Rat Race, but there were tons of great moments and a fantastic lead performance from Otis. The cameo jokes were almost all poorly written (Stephanie plays comedy too smarmy and broad, Brother Love stuff felt forced and pointless, Johnny Ace at least at a pie to the face well), but I smiled a lot and laughed a few times. Otis is the guy who really went for it, and really it shouldn't be much of a surprise that he thrived here. He's someone who can do Looney Tunes spot well, and was constantly saying funny stuff like in the weight room before the match started where he was just saying "sets and reps, sets and reps". It was funny hearing Carmella's sneakers breaking silence with different sounds, milking a squeaky waxed lobby floor for laughs and then doing the same by doing an overly long moonwalk on office carpet. Otis absolutely plastered Heyman with a dish in catering, and Heyman mugged while covered in sticky rice. Otis and Nia smash Rey between their bodies, Dana Brooke slips on a wet floor and is never seen again, Shayna weirdly feels like the least featured person in the match, and things get decidedly less fun once they get out on the roof. The roof stuff was fairly uninspired, other than two casual murders that never get mentioned again. I'm happy with the two winners, as I wouldn't have had money on Asuka or Otis, but think that those two have been two of the best performers of the silent era. I like when matches seem to reward performance.


This show went by quickly (though there was some small help from the fast forward during the Rollins match) and had no high end matches, but had some nice performances, some over-deliveries, slightly better than expected overall.

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WrestleMania 36 Night 2 Live Blog

Big shoes to fill on Night 2, and if tonight is anywhere near as entertaining as Night 1 then I will be a happy camper. This does not have Gulak or Bryan on it, and it does have The Fiend, so the odds are stacked against Night 2. Still, I'm excited for the Brock match and weirdly excited for Otis/Dolph (because Otis is my boy).


Natalya vs. Liv Morgan

ER: This was good, but felt like it really needed Liv Morgan to make all of Natalya's stuff work. Natalya got to drive a lot of this with her offense, but I don't think her offense would have come off as well without Liv's selling. Liv's screaming and grunt selling was much better than Seth Rollins' weird pleasure moans, and I thought Liv worked sequences much tighter than some other Natalya opponents. Natalya has been working the exact same sequences for years now, so it's really easy to see what different opponents bring to a "Natalya match". Earlier this year when it was Asuka's turn, she chose to just beat the hell out of Natalya. Liv plays underdog and her roll ups all looked really tight and well placed throughout. She let Natalya work through her few pieces of offense (and I do like when it looks like Natalya really stomps vertebrae when she does her stepover to seated dropkick combo). I thought Liv's quick pins were peppered nicely throughout and I like the way she built to her finish. Nice opener, but after their high end performance in last month's Chamber match it's pretty messed up that Ruby Riott and Sarah Logan aren't on the show, but fucking TAMINA is.


Charlotte Flair vs. Rhea Ripley

ER: This is the brightest color I have ever seen on Ripley, but she pulls it off. And I thought the bulk of this match was great. I don't always love big match Charlotte, and just as I didn't like Kevin Owens' overproduced "How this for a WrestleMania moment?!" I didn't not like some of Charlotte's bad trash talk. But the work itself was super strong, especially every single attack Charlotte threw at Ripley's leg. Every pump kick, every awesome chop block, that nasty leg snap over the top rope, they all landed hard and the way Ripley sold them really made them even better. Ripley's leg buckling totally made this, as several of them looked like she was coming out of this with a torn ACL. I loved it. They held up extremely well on slo mo replays too, so maybe Charlotte was just trying to take out Ripley's knee. Ripley sold really well throughout, though she didn't seem to be laying into Charlotte to the same degree. Still, the stuff like her big dropkick to Charlotte's face worked well, and her short arm clotheslines looked and sounded great with the arena acoustics. And just like I thought Ripley's selling was good, Charlotte's selling off strikes was great. Early on Ripley kicked her while in a tree of woe and Charlotte was convincing enough to make me think she took an errant shot to the throat; later she got dropped in a pancake and Charlotte sold it like she chipped her veneers. The only thing that really hurt this for me was that Charlotte always wins, and from a storyline perspective it probably would have been better if Ripley had looked a little more dominant. Charlotte trashing her throughout for being a lesser champ and then just beating her fair and square doesn't leave a whole lot left to explore. Still, the work here was strong (even if it probably went a little long) and I probably nitpicked a bit much considering how much I loved all he stuff with Rhea's leg.


Aleister Black vs. Bobby Lashley

ER: Has Lana even been on TV since that abortion of an angle that everyone knew would be awful from miles away? Is there a reason these two are fighting or is this just one of those "getting people on the show" matches. Is Lashley a secret member of The Skulk and is trying to pay Black back for the Black Mass he laid on Leon Ruff a couple weeks ago? I could not get into this one, no matter how cool I thought Lashley looked in black and gold tights. This is a 2nd hour Raw match that showed up on WrestleMania for some reason. Lashley looked good, Black looked good, but it's weird something like this is on the show getting more time than something brilliant like Gulak/Cesaro.


Dolph Ziggler vs. Otis

ER: I've actually been into the Otis/Mandy stuff so this was one of the Night 2 matches I've been looking for. But I'm not sure how good of a friend Sonya is if she was trying to trick her friend into a relationship with Dolph Ziggler of all people. Sonya is the friend who would convince her Ted Bundy's car is a way quicker way home than the subway. One real annoying thing about Ziggler is that he wrestles every match the same, no matter the circumstances. He went for the same kind of layout here as he has in any other match this month, a guy who will go out and work the same match regardless of stakes. I liked all of the work from both, but outside of the actual involvement of Mandy and Sonya this didn't feel like they had been through any kind of personal drama. Dolph flew around nicely once Otis made his comeback, smashing his face into the middle buckle off a catapult, running hard into the buckles on Irish whips, and I loved Otis throwing him to the floor with a fallaway slam and smashing him with a great lariat. The finish was the easiest way to wrap this, and I had been wondering why Mandy wasn't out there from the beginning anyway. It was all pretty basic but the match itself just didn't feel like anything that was built to, and it should have. And if Otis has any doubts whether Mandy likes him or not, the fact she kissed him on the mouth during a pandemic should be a real confidence booster.


Edge vs. Randy Orton

ER: I had forgotten this was Last Man Standing and that makes me even less interested. It feels like the counts have gotten slower and slower on those, and it always takes me WAY out of a match when every time someone takes a back bump we get 15 seconds of paused action. Also, lol at Edge working a match with like three people at ringside, and not doing a quick check to make sure the guy who frequently hides to sneak attack people is not one of them. And just like the Boneyard Match was so insanely good and infinitely better than an actual in-ring Taker/Styles match would have been, THIS match would have benefitted from ANY other format. A 10 minute in ring match between them, with each doing the same spots they did in any of their matches 15 years ago, would have been so much better. Because folks, this was bad. And I thought it actually had some promise early on, because Randy was throwing hard right hands and Edge had a bunch of actually painful looking clubbing offense. But this whole thing weirdly played out like they were doing it all live, because you assume had it been taped in advance that this would have been edited down to at LEAST half the runtime. And the crazy thing is that you know this actually WAS edited. A group of people watched THIS and thought they had kept it tight enough. Which means that the original match was probably somehow EVEN LONGER. This came off like a joke brawl that they forgot to write jokes into, and the longer it went on the longer it felt like they were just playing a prank on anybody who actually works in the Performance Center. How many disinfectant wipes are going to be needed to clean off all the surfaces these sweaty germ machines are carrying? Also, the announcers have been yelling over everything on both nights and suddenly they decide this match to speak in hushed whispers, probably because drama and acting like this shouldn't be distracted from.

I actually like a LOT of the landings in this match, and thought Edge was throwing some of his best actual strikes. He was always a lousy striker, and here it looked like he was really battering Orton's chest and ribs. The problem is the stipulation lead to an abundance of moments that relied on the acting of both men, and Edge is one of the worst actors in wrestling history. The drama required to make a 30+ minute match work was not going to be found in Orlando this evening. And I typed all of this before the referee tried to reason with Orton. THAT right there might be the dumbest thing I've seen in wrestling. "Randy come on, he has a family!" Hey dummy, if either of them actually cared about their families they wouldn't have subjected them to any part of this match. This was abysmal, they didn't have nearly enough decent ideas to justify a match even half as long as this, and as predicted the Last Man Standing stip made a long match into Shoah. Every single person involved in the making and execution of this match made exclusively wrong choices.


Angel Garza/Austin Theory vs. Street Profits

ER: Another match that felt like a 2nd hour Raw match, nothing at stake, nothing that made this felt like it was a "big show" match. Garza hits a nice moonsault to the floor, Ford does a nice tope on hilo that was caught almost entirely by Dawkins, and I guess I'm wondering what Austin Theory was supposed to bring to this? If this past week has taught me one thing, it's that Austin Theory not only cannot catch a dive, but there's a chance he might not actually know what a dive is. I guess he can jump high? This would have been more interesting as a 6 man with Vega and Bianca added to the match itself.


Sasha Banks vs. Lacey Evans vs. Tamina vs. Naomi vs. Bayley

ER: Again, I must point out that Ruby Riott and Sarah Logan both actually looked great at Elimination Chamber and somehow they're not on the show but TAMINA is in the title picture. Matches with odd number participants always have an uphill battle, they easily could have just had Riott and Logan in this one and Tamina could have watched at home. Tamina is always put into these situations where she gets all her offense in one clump right up front, before everybody teams up to get rid of her, and they always do that because Tamina has somehow been on the roster for a DECADE and still gets crossed up doing one minute of offense. So this marks yet another time where they bring back Tamina, immediately insert her into a big match, but seemingly realize that she is still actually bad and get her out of there right away. It's easy a "what does she have on Vince?" joke, but it has to be something. It can't just be weird family murder cover-up loyalty, because we never got a decade of Deuce getting put into title matches. And Tamina was just one part of what made this not work. Nearly everyone in it was made to look like a chump: Naomi's great comeback reactions from earlier this year seem like a distant memory, Bayley retaining after she's already shown to be a completely uninteresting champ, Sasha loses at Mania again, etc. The only interesting thing was the interaction between Sasha and Bayley, I actually loved their moments of working together. Sasha coming back at the end to help Bayley in spite of getting eliminated by a nice Evans' Woman's Right. Also I watched this match after watching a feature length Edge movie, so now I'm just grumpy.


Firefly FunHouse

ER: This show has been terrible, I mean the attitude I had when watching Charlotte shoulder tackle feels like hours ago. This show desperately needed HUGE performances from this match and Brock/McIntyre, and seeing Bray Wyatt come up when your team is one out from elimination is the last thing you wanted to see. But then this match goes out and has their Travis Ishikawa in the 9th moment, and has the first actual creative and fun segment of The Fiend gimmick's lifespan. Cena being Luke Skywalker battling his demons on Dagobah was highly entertaining, and wonderfully different from the Boneyard Match. John Cena reliving his greatest failures and greatest successes was tremendous, and the editing of all the old footage integrated it was fantastic. John Cena whiffing on Ruthless Aggression punches, getting cricket sound effect reactions opposite his best rhymes, and him acting like a malfunctioning Ultimate Warrior robot on Saturday Night's Main Event were just some of the great moments, WWE improbably coming up with two outrageously entertaining cinematic matches on back to back nights. Seriously, John Cena doing lightning fast curls had me in stitches, and if they had smoke come out of his ears I probably would have howled. Just like the Boneyard Match, just think how lame this would have been as a straight match. Instead, this was awesome, and hey, it was a third the length of one of the worst segments in Mania history. I can't believe they did it, but they did it.


Drew McIntyre vs. Brock Lesnar

ER: This was a good moment for Drew, and it's cool that they're going through with it for him. He's been a good soldier and them getting behind him would be cool. And I love Brock, but I think he really needs a crowd to mock and feed off of. Brock crowds always react, even on the coldest shows. Brock gets noise, and Brock reacts great to noise. He's great at reading a room, and he's incredibly fun to watch which he reads a room, and this had no room. Brock has crafted several excellent and unique matches built around finisher spamming, but two guys trading finishers in an empty room just kind of feels like move practice after awhile. You need that reaction of shock, you need that excitement. When the whole story of the match is "It is shocking that this guy kicked out of this" over and over, you need to hear shock. I don't think this kind of match was going to work here, in this situation. I think this match probably would have worked really well with a stadium of people living and dying with it, and I wish I could have seen that version. This was just a longer Goldberg/Braun, and Brock can have a much better match than that.


Well this show was nowhere close to Night 1, and without THE FIEND match - of all things - it would have been one of the weakest cards of the past couples years. But the stupid Firefly FunHouse put a big smile on my face, and left me on the other side feeling positive about all of it. We endured whatever that Edge/Randy Orton match was, we slayed that dragon together. We experienced that shit together, and it was maybe the most united I've ever seen wrestling fans. And in 10 years, if one person tries to nostalgia gif us with "You know what match never got respect but was actually great" posts, that person will get collectively shouted down and humiliated by every person who lived through that in real time.

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WWE Big 3: Lorcan, Gallagher, Gulak 12/29/19-1/4/20 + Bonus MOTY List Lorcan

Smackdown 1/3/20

Drew Gulak vs. Otis

ER: I really wish we can get an actual, meaningful 8 minute match. I figured this would only get 3 minutes tops - which it did - but an actual full match with a long Gulak control segment and two different Otis comebacks would no doubt still be one of my favorite TV matches 363 days later at the end of 2020. This one won't be remembered, but it was two guys I love to watch just making me want to see them tangle more. What we got was good, with Otis tossing Gulak with abandon, really planting him with suplexes and launching him with a press slam. Gulak hits a hard dropkick to Otis's thigh and slaps him good, but that was mostly it for Drew. Otis hits some hard bodyslams and crushes ribs with the Caterpillar, then hits a heavy ass Vader bomb. These two really could work a cracking 8-10 minute TV match if given the chance; force Otis to use more grappling and maybe get a good Otis injures a limb story. Here's hoping.


BONUS 2019 CATCH-UP


39. Oney Lorcan vs. Cedric Alexander 205 Live 4/16/19

ER: This might just be the best use of the 2019 WWE trope of giving 205 Live singles matches way too much time. This match goes just shy of 20 minutes, and again it's totally unfathomable that WWE would just be throwing out 20 minute TV matches between two cruiser wrestlers with little or no build. They threw these guys out there all year and let their ring work speak for itself, which was awesome in some ways, and in other ways showed the benefits of giving fans something OTHER than ring work to root for. And this match really made it look like no other guy on the roster knows how to fill time, because they filled this time in tons of interesting ways without ever backing themselves into a corner. Lorcan and Alexander worked a cool back and forth match, odds on victory shifting the entire duration, all of the transitions back to one guy in control making sense. Lorcan attempted to control with tight headlocks, and whenever Alexander would break free he'd pepper Lorcan with strikes: big chops that left nice welts (Nigel on commentary even said those chops were skipping off Lorcan's chest right into his Adam's apple, which is a cool bit of commentary), combos that didn't feel stale or rehearsed (including a great moment where he took Lorcan about systematically, kicking out his knee, drops him to his knees with an uppercut as hard as any thrown by Lorcan, then throws a boot to the chest), and Lorcan would be there waiting whenever Alexander got too showy.

Whenever Alexander would appeal to the crowd, Lorcan was there to punish, and a story of a flier getting punished whenever he shows flash is a cool story to me. Alexander goes for a big tope and Lorcan matadors him right into the barricade (replays showing the back of Cedric's head whipping into the barricade) and then tosses him just as hard into the LED ring skirt; later, when Alexander had Lorcan reeling after a nice strike combo, Alexander goes for a handspring something-or-other and Lorcan is there waiting to fly into him with a European uppercut. Lorcan is really exciting about chaining together offense, and him stacking a flying European uppercut with his cool running blockbuster and *another* flying uppercut will always make for a good nearfall. Alexander would catch him too, and I bought into a nearfall off an surprise Alexander Michinoku Driver at what turned out to be only halfway through this whole epic. The finishing run was so dominant, Lorcan chaining increasingly violent moves together in a way that would have made an Alexander kickout frankly ludicrous. And it all started with them framing their final strike exchange right on the ring apron; ring apron stuff has been the scourge of wrestling these past couple years, but I like that they build to the one (really big) apron moment in the final minute of the match, both men grabbing each other by the jaw and slapping taste, until Lorcan is able to just dump Cedric on the apron with a half nelson suplex. What. The. Hell. Lorcan is a guy who throws protected stomach bump half nelsons in the middle of the ring, but here he is just planting Alexander on the apron with one. And when Lorcan smells the blood of a win in the water it's a glorious thing, as he quickly slides Alexander into the ring, pastes him with a lariat that knocks Cedric a couple directions at once, and then flips him with another half nelson. This was a match that really knew how to build to different notes and peaks, building to bigger and bigger spots while not taking the action too far down in between those builds, ending with the biggest moments and resisting temptation to turn that built to finish into a series of stupid nearfalls. This was a 205 Live match MORE than worthy of its allotted time, and Lorcan's win came off huge.

PAS: This was about as good as you are going to get from a workrate juniors match in 2019. Lorcan is basically a fast Finlay at this point, as everything he does has that same sort of sharpness and he always finds a fun way to put a twist on something. I loved how he was just sniping Alexander out of the air, him catching the in ring dive with the uppercut was one of the coolest spots of the year, I also loved Alexander's concussed sell. I wouldn't have minded if the match ended right there, but that huge offense run by Lorcan did make the victory seem like a huge deal. Alexander was right there with him, making a fun dance partner for what Lorcan was bringing. Alexander with someone else working his style (Ali, Buddy Murphy) isn't much, but he is a cool guy to bring into a styles clash.


2019 MOTY MASTER LIST

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2019 Ongoing MOTY List: Bryan/Rowan vs Heavy Machinery

40. Heavy Machinery vs. Daniel Bryan/Erick Rowan

ER: Fans going nuts for home state boy Bryan is fun to see, and continues the trend of the crowd starting loud for this show and getting louder. I am far more excited for this match than I should be, as Bryan vs. Otis is a match-up I can't help but get excited for. Otis is someone I'm really happy is on the roster, the type of shape that just hasn't been around enough lately (I mean his shape is plenty around, but you know what I mean). Otis' arms are shaped exactly like his legs, he has cool strength, and he seems like a great unique partner for Bryan. And I'm not wrong, as the Otis/Bryan moments are incredibly fun. The whole match is incredibly fun! This is another fresh match and it leads to a ton of new cool stuff. I could watch Bryan kick away at Otis's pork barrel chest all damn day, and Bryan throws more kicks on Otis in this match than any match this year, and Otis hits a big damn press slam, big powerslam on Rowan, big capture suplex on Bryan, the big high angle sitout powerbomb on Bryan was awesome, he passes off a vertical suplex to Tucker, and - even though the fans are booing Heavy Machinery the whole match (and I loved that Otis was somehow getting the most heat of the night so far) - he still did that damn worm. Tucker showed a ton of agility I didn't realize he had, there was this killer early moment where he somersaulted over Bryan to get into position to lariat him out of his boots, and later he missed a big moonsault, took a big bump over the top to the floor, and was a part of a neat double team powerslam on Bryan. I do wish they would have made slight alterations to the match structure once it was so obvious that the crowd was going to treat Bryan like the face and HM like the heels, it made things a little silly when Tucker was fighting to the Otis hot tag while the crowd booed. Still Otis clearly knew what was going on and made a bunch of faces to show that he was just rubbing it in to the fans. His dorky chunkster hype movements while Bryan was lacing kicks into his chest made me laugh, and I just thought the pairing was insanely entertaining the whole match.

PAS: I am not an NXT guy, so I hadn't seen Heavy Machinery before, and they were a bunch of fun. I love that WWE has a guy who looks like Earthquake Ferris, and the fact that Otis was a All-American Greco guy is even better, I hope he ends up having a grappling battle with Riddle or Gulak on some C-Show. He had some great looking throws, and his block of granite stuff with Bryan was a blast. Tucker was fun too, his somersault into a lariat was awesome and I liked his dive. Bryan was of course a king, and I like they way he still worked heel, but relished the crowd affection, reminded me of Bret Hart working in Canada. Finish was a blast with Bryan breaking out his old king of the small package gimmick from ROH. Really enjoyable tag, and I would love to see it run back.


2019 MOTY MASTER LIST

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