IWA Mid-South Top 18 Matches, #11: Jonathan Gresham v. Tyler Black 5/16/10

#11 Jonathan Gresham v. Tyler Black 5/16/10



PAS: This was a juniors workrate match in its baseline form. Both guys looked fine, their execution was solid, and they had a couple of interesting ideas. But I have seen this sort of match so many times that I could call the reversals and near falls before they were happening. Also Gresham is a little dude - probably about 5'6 - and at no point did the size differential play into the match at all. Black towers over him, and they work it as complete equals. I can see why people liked this match, but for me to get into this kind of wrestling, something has to pop out, and really nothing did here.

ER: Boy I do not understand the placement here. There have to be dozens of these kind of matches throughout IWA's history. What stood out about this one? Phil beat me to the punch on the size difference, as the announcers talk about how small Gresham is the whole match, but apparently nobody told Rollins that. Phil's giving him a little bit of a pro wrestling boost with his guess as there is no way Gresham is an inch over 5'3", and even though Rollins looks like a behemoth next to him, AND had nastier looking offense, you have a straight faced 50/50 match just worked in a total space vacuum. Big bump to the floor? No matter, get back in and go right back on offense. Match almost ends with a shooting star? No matter, you've recovered fine just moments later. Both guys looked good from an execution standpoint. They have cool offense. They worked a real impressively fast pace for 15 solid minutes. But they didn't make a single moment of it mean anything. Neither man ever had even a 30 second advantage over the other, both guys were constantly "in this thing", and moves were done until one move held a guy's shoulders down slightly longer than other, earlier moves.

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Rifling Through the Trash: The Unfinished Segunda Caida

We here at Segunda Caida all watch a lot of wrestling. We also start a lot of projects. More projects than we can ever ever possibly finish. We start watching something, write about it, don't finish writing about it, and there it sits. We have about 80 unfinished drafts dating back 4 years. Some of them may get finished some day (IWA-MS show reviews, WAR show reviews), others are kind of pointless to ever finish (old CMLL TV write-ups, reviews of WWE Superstars episodes). Still these write ups all took at least SOME time out of our schedules, and it's only fair that we get SOME use out of them. I literally forgot Go Shiozaki was a person.



~Started (and not finished) by SLL on 6/1/08:

Takashi Sasaki, Abdullah Kobayashi, Shadow WX, & MASADA vs. MEN'S Teioh, Jun Kasai, Jaki Numazawa, & Yuko Miyamoto
BJPW - 1/2/2007 - Tokyo, Japan
Fluorescent Light Tubes Death Match

Oh God, this was painful. And not in the good "hot damn, Onita's dragging his back along barbed wire" kind of painful you want from death matches. This was more of the "hot damn, Zandig doesn't even know what a wrestling match is, does he?" kind of painful. Well, maybe not that bad, but still. I'd say something like "you know you're in trouble when MASADA is clearly the worker of the match" but....

1. I haven't seen a MASADA match since before he was in The Carnage Crew.
2. He was actually legit good here. In the midst of guys standing around to set up needlessly complex spots, odd patches of no-selling, and Abdullah Kobayashi throwing the shittiest strikes imaginable, MASADA actually comes off as a guy you want to see more of. Comes off as the guy you would actually need to be afraid of in a death match. He gets a lot of neat spots, including grabbing Miyamoto by the legs and dragging as back around on all the broken glass, and punching the seat out of a chair before using it as a weapon. I've written elsewhere about how the Finlay/JBL match from Mania was conceptually cool because they took the late-90's/early-00's "cookie sheets and garbage can lids" style of benign, mainstream hardcore wrestling, and made it look really hard and dangerous. Getting hit with just the seat of a crappy folding chair is about the same as getting hit with a garbage can lid (and the way Miyamoto no-sells it hammers that home) but the way MASADA sets it up by just punching the seat out of the chair makes it look like he's doing some seriously bad stuff. So there's MASADA's name next to the names of Finlay and JBL, for whatever that's worth.

Anyway, the rest of the match is pretty much ass. The post match with Miyamoto getting all up in Sasaki's mug and Sasaki beating the shit out of him, but Miyamoto refusing to back off, was kinda neat. Got me interested in their match later in the set. I didn't need to sit through Abdullah Kobayashi throwing punches that would make Rob Van Dam shake his head in disgust to get there, though.


~Snippets from TomK reviewing ROH "Take No Prisoners" (left unfinished by Phil on 6/23/08):


Tyler Black v. Delirious v Claudio Castagnoli v Go Shiozaki

TKG: This is a four way for a title shot at the end of the show. Not normally a fan of this type of spotfest four way and so came in with some trepidation. Shocked by how effective this was. Delirious who gets shit on a lot lately really looked like the best guy in this match and everything he did looked solid, but that was beside the point. Whole thing was aimed at getting Black over and no-one was trying to upstage him. Black had two big spectacular spots. The dropkick attempt landing on his feet was especially cool. Unlike most of the time with this match format, there wasn’t any excessive kickouts and match ended in a real satisfying way right when it felt like it should.

Notes for Phil: If you can’t come up with anything else leaving you to talk shit about the everyone stares into the mic and cuts a promo shit, or Nigel on commentary.

Kevin Steen v Roderick Strong

Notes for Phil: Them stealing your idea for how to ue Kevin Steen from DVDVR 166:

I haven't had much to say about the IWS guys before, and I have actively hated Steen, but he seems to have ditched most of his crap and just become a fat asskicker. With his bad skin and flabby body he does look like every single guy in the audiance though, I am guessing ROH books him for the same reason you book Pedro Morales in NYC, he is the regional babyface for fat wrestling dorks. With that I think this match was hurt a little by him working heel, you don't book Putski as a heel in Pittsburgh.


~Snippets from Eric reviewing random matches from 2009 (left unfinished 1/15/10): 


1. Roderick Strong vs. Necro Butcher (IWA-EC, 2/4/09)

I don't really know what the internet opinion is of Roderick Strong. I don't know if he gets talked about as "good" or "bad", or if I would actually trust the opinions of the people that would be calling him good or bad. I know he's blandish, but he's a guy I really don't mind. I can picture him walking down the street wearing khakis and a letterman jacket and some white sneakers, and not everybody can pull off something so clean cut All-American like that. Of course depending on what state you might be in, Necro is also a pretty accurate representation of American society. This isn't about all that, though, this is just two dudes hitting each other pretty darn hard for a good 20 minutes and I really can get behind that.

Roderick takes Necro's corner "punch/chop" combo in the corner better than anybody I've seen. Instead of just flexing up his chest like he's taking Kobashi chops, he acts more like Ali on the ropes [match review just sorta...ends there]

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