Finlay v Bobby Lashley (Smackdown!, 5/12/06)
Is Finlay Lashley's best ever opponent? I remember that Cena match from the Great American Bash 2007 being a really good WWE Style Main Event, but I've seen a bunch of Finlay/Lashley matches now and they all felt really rugged. You get the sense the Bash match with Cena had a Pat Patterson laying things out beforehand and Cena doing the rest. The Finlay matches feel more like uncooperative fights. This is probably the best of those matches, and while Lashley hangs around and looks pretty good hitting his stuff and being roided out of his eyeballs, it's more or less a Finlay show. He controls most of this by doing a bunch of super nasty looking shit. Even when he's working a headlock Finlay looks like he's trying to hurt you. When he grabs hold of it he makes sure to really clamp his arms tight around your head and jerk your neck. He works a Fujiwara armbar and digs the point of his elbow into Lashley's shoulder joint. Then he just hauls off and punts him right in the spine (sounded like a gun blast). Lashley's a guy that never really seemed all that imposing despite the fact he was made up entirely of human growth hormone and built like Conan (that's Conan the Barbarian, Conan with a 'C'; not Konan with a 'K', shittiest wrestler in the history of the universe...although he was jacked to high Hell as well). Maybe it's because he sounded like a 12 year old and had the charisma of a tree stump. It's not like he was Mark Henry-level imposing here, but he hits real hard (pretty much a pre-requisite against Finlay) and busts out a great looking gutbuster from a gorilla press. And his spear looked as good as I've ever seen it, too. Basically he was a decent compliment to the best wrestler in the world at the time, and that is about all I can ask for.
Finlay Project
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