WWE BIG 3: Gulak, Gallagher, & Lorcan, 6/9 - 6/15

With their number of different weekly shows WWE has gotten to an almost WCW level of matches per week. One big advantage of this is that some of the best guys in the fed - Jack Gallagher, Drew Gulak, Oney Lorcan - often get multiple chances a week to have long matches on shows no one watches. Well we are going to start watching now, and I am looking forward to checking out what those guys will deliver!


205 Live 6/11

29. Jack Gallagher vs. Chad Gable

PAS: Man was this really good, I think Gable is still an imperfect worker, but Gallagher is such a master that he can carry a guy with some fun spots and explosion to a real banger. Early mat work was really cool with Gable dominating with his explosiveness and Gallagher using guile to get some cool escapes. It builds to a bigger finish with both guys hitting some awesome suplexes including a super long delayed suplex, and Gable with gorgeous rolling belly to bellys, the snap Gable has on his suplexes is just unreal. Finish was very cool with Gallagher attempting a tope, getting caught on the floor, dumped with a german suplex and failing to beat the count into the ring. Super physical match, Gable was bleeding from the mouth, and Gallaghers body was covered in bruises. Match seemed to set up a rematch which I am very excited for.

ER: Aw man this ruled. I'm not sure why the possibility of this match never actually crossed my mind, as it feels like a perfect pairing. Gable is a pitbull but Gallagher hits harder, and Gallagher keeps almost luring him in to situations that end with Gallagher throwing his best-in-fed (and arguably best in current wrestling) stomps to the head, short hard forearms, and a lariat that feels like it's thrown by a man 100 lb. larger. Gallagher has such a cool arsenal that he doesn't even break out his world class headbutt or violent dropkick, fully able to have a match more on Gable's terms while finding little ways to subvert Gable. The crowd still doesn't seem to know what to do with these guys, so I appreciate them showing off actual unique gifts that literally forces the crowd to respect them. Gallagher holds Gable up in one of the longest delayed vertical suplexes I've ever seen in a WWE ring and after 8 seconds you can really hear buzzing and by 20 seconds they're fully giving it up for these two. I love Gallagher's pale body as it makes every hard shot really read, you see a big bruise on his leg, later on a bruise on his back, but Gallagher is a real Gentleman (not the fedora type of Gent, but a guy who can actually look good in a suit) and doesn't want Gable to feel left out, so he bloodies his nose. Gable throws maybe the most gorgeous belly to belly suplexes in wrestling history. Off the top of my head I am thinking Gary Albright, Scott Steiner, Alexander Otsuka and, perhaps oddly, former bay area indy worker Tony Jones (a former wrestler with incredible throwing strength). Gable's are thrown closest to Albright's style, an impossibly tight pivot into a high 3/4 release, and the snap he brings to the floatover makes him look like a sleek robot programmed to wreck skeletons with suplexes. The finish was really cool as it's very difficult to work a "caught" move without looking like the person on the receiving end just no sold a normal move, but they get the spacing right so that it feels like Gallagher came up just short enough of the dive that Gable was able to fully negate it, and I appreciate the fact that they treat getting suplexed on the floor like an actual thing that could keep someone down for a 10 count. Totally fine with seeing these guys run it back.

16. Drew Gulak vs. Humberto Carrillo vs. Akira Tozawa vs. Oney Lorcan

PAS: Another killer match, what a show this episode of 205 Live was. Gulak was super aggressive and that real intense smash mouth style really helped temper the craziness of the other three. Gulak and Lorcan took it back to 2014 with some great exchanges including a really nasty slap fight. Lorcan is so great in these spot fests because he is so good at crazed intensity. He is one of the best guys in the world at working fast and making it look like a fight, rather then just someone performing high level acrobatics. Hadn't seen Carillo before sans mask (seen a couple of Ninja Jr. matches) and he had some really fun stuff, a super cool spot where he yanked Tozawa off the mat into a Japanese armdrag, a cool flip dive and a nuts bump where Gulak pushed him off the top rope and flew super high and hard chin first into the guardrail. Tozawa is of course an old hand at these kind of spotfest, and is very good and bring his personality into these matches. I could have done with out the Ariya Daivari run in, but otherwise this was this kind of match done about as well as it could be.

ER: Total banger, an immaculately laid out spot fest that actually paid mind to how much damage each guy had taken, and built so that every single guy felt like they had a shot up to the finish. Gulak and Lorcan are absolute glue for a match like this, but I like the elements that Tozawa and Carillo bring as it's more exciting than having 4 similar workers. Carillo looks like a hispanic Michael Ian Black and hits about as hard, but he makes up for that with some wild bumps (huge bump off a massive Gulak lariat, gets shoved to the floor by Gulak and aims to rearrange his body on the barricade) and breaks out some flashy offense like a handspring in the ropes that sees him hook Tozawa's arm on the way back over into a Japanese armdrag, or his springboard dropkick on Gulak late in the match. Tozawa brings life to matches like this, and I genuinely appreciate the work he puts into making his fireman's carry slams actually look difficult to pull off. We're deep in an era of over-cooperation in wrestling where literally any move is very easy to hit, so seeing Tozawa buckling his knee and making it look like he's deadlifting everyone only makes the moves feel more impressive. It reminded me of when Cena would pay extra attention to slowly lift tables and ring steps to give them even more heft. Tozawa is great at making overused offense look good, and I dug the spot where he and Carillo superkick Gulak and then Tozawa superkicked Carillo, both looked great and like an actual kick that mattered. Tozawa's boss senton off the top to break up a pin looked fantastic, with Lorcan feeling it in his back and Gulak getting squashed beneath. Obviously any time Lorcan and Gulak teed off it was going to be class, and that strike exchange was a really slugfest, totally nasty with no turns taken whatsoever, just a battle of dudes landing hard shots without waiting for openings, winging their arms at face and body. We got a few cool moves off fireman's carries, not just the Tozawa stuff but an absolute beast of a spot where Gulak tossed Carillo off his shoulders into a Lorcan uppercut to the neck. The dives were outstanding, big flip dive from Carillo and an even more unhinged one from Lorcan, but the money spot of the match was Carillo kicking Gulak off the apron and Gulak doing a really perfect stumble sell off the apron and into the barricade. And then Tozawa just PASTES him with the best possible running cannonball off the apron. Sadly the finish ends in confusion, with Tozawa and Gulak both having their shoulders down after a superplex, so I guess the only solution is to run this whole thing as a rematch. Sigh. Crowd knew they were treated to an absolute gem here, and it was great to hear their appreciation.

NXT 5/18 (Aired 6/12)

Drew Gulak vs. Kushida

PAS: Match started out super promising, with some really nifty mat wrestling with Kushida gaining some advantages by using his speed, really great looking reversals and scrambling. Match lost its thread though, with Kushida doing a bunch of springboards and cartwheels which didn't look great and took away from what the match was trying to do, at one point they have a lame forearm exchange (which Mauro says is a tribute to Frye vs. Takayama for fucks sake) and a silly spot where they do Malenko/Guerrero rolls in a match without pinfalls. Gulak had some cool shit, including maybe the nastiest ankle lock I have seen, but for a match billed as a mat classic, this was mostly just an OK juniors match without pinfalls. I know it seems silly to expect a shootstyle match on WWE TV, but we have actually gotten stuff like that recently with the proliferation of shows, so this didn't live up to my weird expectations.

ER: I liked this more than Phil though agree with the moments that looked bad. I have no idea what that Malenko/Guerrero roll-up loop was, with both men stuck shoving the other through pinfalls instead of actually trying to pin the other, that was just dumb. The forearm exchange was meh but I also watched the match on mute so no doubt it would have been worse with Mauro calling it. Also there was only one handspring, not a bunch, and it was fine. I think the okay spots just looked that much worse because the first several minutes of this are FIRE. The mat rolling was so cool, all flash but when you do flash, this is how you do flash. There was a ton of cool rolling and fast go behinds, and I especially liked a slick as hell rolling fisherman's cradle by Kushida. There was a ton of great stuff here, even if it was front loaded, and Gulak is good at taking Kushida's offense, really leaned up at just the right time for his rolling low dropkick. Outside of that glorious match opening scramble my favorite thing was easily Gulak's ankle lock, as I'm not sure I've ever seen someone cinch in an ankle lock and then throw in a couple stomps to the kidneys. Front end of this seemed like a lock for the list, back end drops us down into "overall a very fun cruiser match" territory, but this still had a lot to love.

37. Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch vs. Kyle O'Reily/Roderick Strong

PAS: This was a really great sprint, all four guys are really good at pace pushing, and this was stiff and intense and never kills a million finishers like so many workrate tags. Lorcan and O'Reilly match up really well with each other, I love how they mix in different kind of strikes with uppercuts and and body shots a slaps, I also really love how O'Reily uses knee on the stomach to control on the mat. This actually had cool double teams too, that were more about violence then prettiness. Strong and Burch were fun too, and if this had a better finish I could see this pretty high on the list. Even with the finish it had, this is list for sure.

ER: Hot damn this match. These guys all beat the hell out of each other and there are suddenly a ton of dudes in WWE who are way into lean protein diets and all weight like 170. These dudes are all my size only their bodies look like they eat turkey and almonds and broccoli for every meal and I look like I sit in a chair and type about wrestler's bodies. No wonder Erick Stevens suddenly popped back up, probably angling for a NXT nutritionist gig. And all of them are absolute ass kickers, doing something actually interesting with the new "constant motion" style that's all the rage. The thing with constant motion BS is everything is so planned out and phony and cooperative and sleek. These guys actually know how to do constant motion wrestling but have it be slightly out of sync, slightly messy, slightly uncooperative. That's not by accident, it's that these guys are all great enough to realize that you still need a little messy uncooperative wrestling that hits at hard angles. That seems like a pretty obvious thing to me, but some pretty bad stuff appears to be en vogue these days. This felt like a real coming out party for O'Reilly. I don't think I've ever enjoyed him as much in a match as I enjoyed him here (and his stock has risen for me since he joined NXT). He was just a mean asshole hear and I've never seen him outright torture a guy the way he tortured Lorcan. He throws hard shots to the head and then aims to bruise Lorcan's kidneys and make him piss blood by flying into him with several knees, dropped them hard into the lower back and side, a wicked running kneedrop low and quick off the ropes, and then just scrapes his knee heavily across Lorcan's back every time he passes to his other side. This is an O'Reilly I want to see opposite Gulak and Gallagher and really, against anyone.

Roderick Strong has been kind of quietly one of the best wrestlers in the world for the past decade. He keeps things snug and works fast, really lays it in and can do complicated stuff while making it feel plausible. He had a over shoulder backbreaker in this that made me go take ibuprofen. Lorcan is one of my very favorites, a guy I've been lucky to see live several times and always delivers. He comes off like one of the hardest workers in the biz, and there are few people I'd rather watch fling their entire body into someone. His tope con hilo is always him launching himself thoughtlessly, and his dropkicks and flying back elbows look like he's trying to knock over a soda machine. There were several moments where someone would walk in a pop someone else right in the face with a hard slap, or a kick to the ribs, or a freaking headbutt to the chest. Even the run in interference lead to two big bumps, with Strong especially flying out of the ring when Burch shoves him, and the rolling cradle was held in real tight for the finish. They can just go ahead and keep running these kind of tags every damn week. It's the best.

ER: Three of these matches are landing on our 2019 Ongoing MOTY List, which is a real nice haul from 2 hours of TV. But go on and keep wishing guys would leave WWE so they'll finally be allowed to wrestle.