2023 Ongoing MOTY List: MLW War Chamber!

 

AKIRA/Rickey Shane Page/Dr. Cornwallis/Delirious vs. Matthew Justice/Manders/Mance Warner/Alexander Hammerstone MLW 4/6/23 (Aired 4/18/23)

ER: MLW's Reelz run was short and fairly inconsequential in the pantheon of 20 episode wrestling television runs of our lifetime, but I will always love when pro wrestling is on television, especially when it's on a channel that runs no other pro wrestling programming of any kind. Somebody somewhere fell asleep during their daily COPS marathon and maybe they woke up during a cool Lio Rush match, saw Alex Kane suplex somebody on their head, or saw a match like this featuring several tough guys getting the edges of chairs thrown at their heads and faces while bleeding out, then falling asleep again and waking up during a daily marathon of JAIL. The War Chamber is basically just an open cage War Games with one ring, and it's an overall satisfying 30 minutes of fighting because it never forgets that the fighting and punching and bleeding is the most important part of a match like this. The worst of the indulgent NXT WarGames are a nightmare of time spent lying around or reacting to Big Moments. War Chamber has flaws and had some drag, but it knows exactly what it is and delivers more of a classic War Games feel than WWE has been giving us. 

If you thought wrote out a list of the 10 modern guys you think would be great in a classic WarGames, three of them are in this match: AKIRA, Matt Justice, and Rickey Shane Page. AKIRA spends the entire match kicking people hard in the face and chest, and then getting hit with chairs. Justice is a great guy to enter a WarGames early, and he's the one who brings in and starts throwing chairs, takes a great cage beating, and uses his body as a weapon (like letting Manders powerslam into RSP and AKIRA). Page is the guy they had start this thing, the first guy bleeding, the guy taking the disgusting suplex through chairs on a table, and the guy who had to have taken the most head trauma, while also being the guy stabbing people in the mouth and head with a fork. 

Beyond blood and punching, you know it's a good WarGames when a the most muscled up guy in the match gets a legit leg injury, and there's a big fat freak in a mask and bloody apron. I have no clue who Dr. Cornwallis is, but he looks more like Leatherface than Corporal Kirchner did, is fatter, and would have been incredible in W*ing. Kirchner could have kept Leatherface and just teamed with this guy's Buddy Bacon from Slaughterhouse. He moves well for a fat guy, and he fits well in the middle of all the chair throwing. Goons in cloaks and gas masks introducing a table into the ring feels like something you'd see in NWA Anarchy, a fed who knew how to do the best WarGames, and the big bumps and splashes that happened back to back to back at the finish was a great sudden escalation. Blood, fat guys, more thrown chairs than a Necro Butcher comp tape. Also, the team with the obese butcher is another Raven vague and undefined religious cult thing, so Raven stands at the top of the ramp the entire time looking like an old bloated Malcolm McDowell and their intro video heavily features that one photo of the Heaven's Gate cult leader, and I love that Raven's cult references are just so firmly rooted in 1997. 

This was MLW's crowning achievement on Reelz, the best thing they put on television over 20 episodes, and it looked like a promotion that belonged on television. 

 

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Matches from Limitless Actin' Up 5/28/22

BEEF vs. Jake Something 

ER: Fun way to open up a show, just have the two biggest guys on the card block shoulderblocks and throw clubbing arms and elbows. I'm so used to seeing Beef play a brick wall, that I really liked how Something was the brick wall while Beef was the injured shark swimming constantly forward. There's a great spot where, after a couple shoulderblocks go nowhere, Beef tries a leapfrog and Something just runs right into him, knocking him flat back out of the air. Something goes after Beef's knee with a couple of straight kicks, and would use that hurt knee as a way to bully through some offense. He keeps playing brick wall, stopping Beef cold with a back elbow, and when Beef's head is hanging a bit too horizontal he gets caught with a mafia kick. Something choked out Beef in the ropes with his boot, choking him all the way out of the ring, extending his leg under Beef's chin until the big man plopped elbow first onto the floor. I liked Beef's big crossbody off the middle buckle, and the fight over Something's powerbomb was cool: Beef almost reversed it into an Alabama slam, but Something tipped the weight and kicked Beef's knee out to hit a cool messy sitout bomb. Beef had a cool missed low crossbody into the ropes, and a nice quick surprise piledriver for the win. They kept this under 10 minutes which let them keep a quick pace, all fun stuff. 

Rickey Shane Page vs. Rip Byson

ER: Man, RSP is a real pro and might seriously be in the discussion of best "hands" on the indies. He has great timing, personable charisma, plays comfortably to the crowd, and he takes action to all sides of the ring while blending that coherently into a match. He's a smart worker, and an entertaining one. He stalls on the floor to start, getting hit with a Byson suicide dive to get things rolling. I never totally bought Byson as RSP's equal and don't think he did anywhere close to enough to believably stop the big man, but he had a couple things I liked. There was a cool spot where he caught the much larger Page on a leapfrog and rotated into a powerslam, but most of this was him taking a bunch of cool RSP offense. Page does fun small things, like causing Byson to trip himself on an Irish whip by placing one of his feet behind the bottom rope before sending him. It's the rope running equivalent of tying someone's shoes together. Page throws several nice right hands, a big superplex, falcon arrow, a cool bridging vertical suplex, and his rope walk frog splash is one of the great moves in modern wrestling. Honestly it's crazy Page doesn't finish matches with that frog splash, as this one just flattened Byson. Time to start writing more about Rickey Shane Page on here. 

11. SLADE vs. Manders 

ER: Slade/Manders is the match that drew me to this card, and that's a match that will draw me to literally any card. Phil wrote about the match over at The Ringer, and I love just the idea of Slade being exposed to a broader audience. Compared to the end of the fight, this starts out downright genial, with "only" hard punches and elbows. It all goes south real quick when they brawl around the vets building and surprise a poor man exiting the bathroom, his guilt-wracked face revealing that he surely didn't wash his hands. I start to roll my eyes when Manders goes on a long walk to the other side of the room to take a big convoluted run at Slade, but this match understands what it is and it understands that Slade wouldn't stand for that brand of  impertinence. So, Manders takes a long run at Slade that deservedly ends with his face getting introduced to a chair, then gets introduced to a ringpost with a chair around his neck, then gets bashed on the top of his head with a chair. It's not long before Manders' face is covered in blood, and he has that show off run to blame. Also, he signed up to face a psycho. 

This gets real gritty, and my favorite visual was Slade pulling Manders jaws apart while Manders tries to get his thumbs into Slade's eyes. There's a quick and violent Manders comeback with a stiff back elbow, spike DDT (which Slade takes with a tucked head!) and a running powerslam through a door that crumples Slade. One thing I most love about Slade is that he doesn't always take offense like a trained wrestler. This is not an insult to him, quite the contrary. I love how he takes offense and can make things look even more dangerous than they really are. This man actually looked like he got DDT'd onto the top and back of his head, and his matches benefit from it. Manders beats Slade with his cowboy boot, but Slade laughs, flexes, and welcomes the boot. You see, Manders didn't know that Slade's step-dad used to beat him with a boot, right up until Slade did time for murdering his step-dad. Manders takes a couple of disgusting uranages through set-up chairs, the second bending both the chair backs and the back of Manders, and the finish is an awesome Slade finish. Slade puts handcuffs on himself for the sole purpose of getting leverage to choke the life out of Manders, letting the cuffs chain dig into Manders' throat while he pulls back on the chin with his hands. I swear, getting booked to fight Slade is like getting booked to fight Anton Chigurh. 

2022 MOTY MASTER LIST

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