Friday 23 November 2018

Survivor Series Cherry-Pickin'

I enjoyed the show overall, though watching it in smaller chunks at a time probably helped. These PPVs are loooong man. That double shot to finish reminded me of those big inter-promotional Wrestlemania Dream Matches they'd run in the mid-00s.


Ronda Rousey v Charlotte Flair 

So Rousey's 2018 is the best rookie year in wrestling history, right? It's sort of absurd how good she is considering this is, what, her eleventh match? That's Han/Tamura crazy. And she was awesome pretty much straight out the gate. I still like the Wrestlemania tag a bit more, but this was really great too and her best singles match so far. I love how scrappy and intense she is and those early tie-ups looked real gritty. When Charlotte shoved her you and I and everybody else knew it was on. I don't want this to be a creepy joshified love letter to Ronda because Charlotte was great here as well, but I loved basically every single thing Rousey did. Her selling and bumping is always so good and her grasp of the little things that really puts something over the top is outrageous. Everything she does feels like a fight, how she'll wildly fling herself into armbars or shit talk before a flurry of body shots. She works holds as well as anybody in wrestling because there's never any down time. There's no sitting there idle, she's never resting on her laurels and it more or less forces her opponent to follow suit. And Charlotte totally brought the violence on her end. It might be my favourite performance of hers and I bought her needing to step up big time, not just because she's in there with a badass, but because she's sort of being taken for granted in the wake of Becky's rise. She was the ace and now she's only on the marquee because the new ace threw her a bone. I don't know if the elbow to the mouth was intentional (it made for some visual either way), but in general she matched Ronda and plausibly hung with her every step of the way. They had so many cool moments, like the amazing transition where Ronda fucking headered the bottom buckle, the punch v chop battle that left Ronda's chest all purple, the GREAT nearfall off the spear, the fight over the Boston Crab, just lots of neat stuff. And while I fully expected a fuck finish, I didn't expect it to be an awesome one. That was an absolutely killer beatdown and Rousey took an almighty shit kicking, welts for days, cuts everywhere, bruised, bloodied, probably splintered to hell -- the sort of thing you can imagine the old-timers watching and saying truly solidified her as one of the family or some carny horse shit. What's the deal with that crowd, though? Have they been getting cold on Ronda recently or is this fallout from them wanting Becky and when they don't get her they'll shit over the next person down (kind of like they did with Bryan, I guess)? I'd probably rather Ronda/Becky for Wrestlemania, but the fact they've managed to create a scenario now where there are three women who feel like proper main event potential stars is cool. Rousey staring folk out post-match unamused was great, btw. She's gonna be unfuckingbelievable if they handle the eventual heel turn properly.


Brock Lesnar v Daniel Bryan 

This felt like one of the true dream matches left in wrestling. Like, how long had people been clamouring for a Lesnar v Bryan match? A few years ago it looked like a real possibility...then Bryan retired and a bunch of folk got sick of Lesnar and I guess we all just assumed the moment had passed and it'd be thrown in the same pile as Bryan/Eddie or Kobashi/Hashimoto or whatever. They've so far whiffed on Bryan's return so it was never going to be as huge as it would've been had they run it during the peak of his popularity (can you imagine how stupid ridiculous the heat for that would've been?), but even still, even heel v heel, it was Lesnar v Bryan. And for the most part I thought it delivered all ends up. I know people generally don't care for Lesnar's suplex city bit at this point, but as someone who watches about 5% of what WWE pump out on a yearly basis it's hard for me to get too burned out on stuff like that. I mean I don't have any interest in watching this year's Wrestlemania main event again, but I think there's a way to fit it into something compelling. And maybe it's Bryan's very real history of concussions giving it a sort of morbidity that I couldn't look away from, but that stretch where Lesnar was flinging him all over the place sure felt compelling. Didn't hurt that Bryan selling the whole thing was amazing (and that initial lariat looked ugly as fuck). I actually wish they gave us a bit more of Bryan horseshittin' it up early and maybe even built on it a bit, because I can only imagine how interesting Bryan would've made that, but what we got was fun. Some of those Lesnar suplexes were unreal and I loved him shit talking through it. I think at one point he called someone in the crowd a "fucking moron" and another fan front row was yelling for him to just pin Bryan already. And for a spot I'll hate ninety nine times out of a hundred, Brock pulling Bryan up at 2 after the first F5 was great. Everything after the ref' bump was what took this up a level, though. If Bryan is going to be the dude who just punts folk in the dick then I'm all on board because that was the perfect transition. When Lesnar can be arsed he's still amazing as well. Some of his selling in the back half was tremendous, like his initial shock at the ball shot, but it was his leg buckling leading into the Yes Lock that was the moment of the match. Bryan was about as violent here as he's been in his entire WWE run. The stomps to the head that legit left the imprint of his sole on Lesnar's face, those brutal crossface swipes as Lesnar was turning the colour of an undercooked chicken, the kicks to the body and legs as Lesnar was curled up on the mat, just awesome stuff. He came out of this putting up a fight and not kicking out of a single F5 but ultimately looked better than Reigns ever did despite kicking out of, like, three hunner. Heel Bryan should rule. This match did rule.

Thursday 22 November 2018

NXT Takeover: WarGames II (11/17/18)

I actually watched both Takeover and Survivor Series in full over the span of a few days. I enjoyed Takeover a bunch overall even if Gargano/Black wasn't really my thing and WarGames went on forever and didn't feature anybody I actually, like, care about. It did have an absolute corker in Ciampa/Dream, though. Survivor Series I thought was really enjoyable and outside of Rollins/Nakamura (which lasted an hour and a half prolly) and the tag match where the wee fella pissed himself I had at least a little fun with everything. I thought that stretch from the cruiserweight match through to the end was really strong, including even your lame battle for brand supremacy which I figured would drag on forever. And that one-two punch to close the show was just dynamite. I guess I'll write about both of those tomorrow.


Shayna Baszler v Kairi Sane

I knew going in that this didn't go long. Maybe if I'd been expecting it to I'd have been disappointed - as most generally seemed to have been - but I thought what we got was a hoot. I didn't even know until a week ago that these two switched the title back and forth over the summer, but I've seen a couple of their matches before that and thought they were decent. This had a sort of greatest hits vibe to it, probably because of the length, but I like a greatest hits version of a match-up when it's done well and I thought this was done well. Sane still feels a bit vanilla even though she's clearly over and charismatic, but I liked her fighting uphill against Baszler and her girls. Dakota Kai booting Jessamyn Duke clean in the teeth was wild and Shirai's moonsault, while kind of dumb when you think about how long it takes to set up when she could just punch someone in the face there, looked killer. I actually liked the finish as well. You could see Baszler shifting her weight as she was readying to catch Sane coming down off the elbow, so it never felt like she just shrugged off the move and instantly rolled her into a cradle. I guess this leads to some six-man tags with Kai getting THE absolute shit bullied out of her so I guess that could be nifty.


Johnny Gargano v Aleister Black

I also did not know Johnny Gargano had turned heel. He didn't really wrestle this much differently to how he wrestles babyface, but there were enough moments sprinkled throughout that it didn't come off like a total exhibition. Just...mostly one. I like Black well enough and Gargano's had a couple matches this year that I've enjoyed a bunch, but this was kind of hokey. The WWE-style melodrama didn't bother me, it was that the match was mostly about striking. Missed strikes, counter-strikes, strikes being reversed into moves, elaborate strike sequences. That poses a couple problems, the first being that I don't think either guy is a particularly great striker. Black will hit a few now and then that look good and those two Black Mass at the end were suuuper crisp (first one especially), but he's not really the guy I want to see in a match largely built around that facet of pro-wrestling. I mean, it’s unfair to compare him to a Shibata or Suzuki let alone a fucking Ishikawa or Ikeda, because at the end of the day this is not Battlarts and it is in fact very much a monkey show, but still, that knee strike was cool and everything but Takeshi Ono will uppercut your nose through the ceiling and when you’ve seen that it’s sort of hard not to have the bar set somewhere around there permanently. The second problem is that it just came off way too choreographed. NXT are usually really good at walking that modern juniors epic line without crossing all the way over into something I can't be bothered with, but this had too much of what I'm not into. I did like the early parts with Gargano coming off super cocky, like he had Black's number for everything, but before long all those reversals lost their charm and it crossed over into Stomp the Yard territory.


Tomasso Ciampa v Velveteen Dream

Full disclosure: there was pretty much no way I wasn't going to like this at least on some level. Dream is my favourite wrestler in the world right now; one of those guys that I get truly excited about watching no matter what, and there haven't been many of those over the last ten years. I didn't know the result going in, either. And then he came out in the fly Hollywood Hogan get up and I pretty much knew then and there that I was going to love this. I thought it built great. It was probably helped as well by coming right after Gargano/Black, just because it provided such a stark contrast between what I don't like and what I do. There was nothing fancy about the first half of this, nothing especially elaborate. Dream is always a hoot when he's fucking with opponents and Ciampa was like a FIFA player ready to launch his control pad off the wall. The Hogan cosplay is hokey, but it was carny as fuck with all the "YOU" and finger-pointing hokiness that I can get on board with. Plus I loved how he teased the big boot into legdrop in the first half then eventually paid it off down the stretch. Ciampa has also gotten really good now. A couple years ago I couldn't really have cared less about him as a singles guy, but I like his psycho paranoid hermit shtick and he'll dial the heeling up to eleven now and then. I loved those airtight chin locks where he was wiping drool over Dream's face (Dream doing the choked out Fujiwara drooling sell job ruled as well), patting himself on the back when he did something especially nasty, hobbling around with one boot on, flinging Mauro's notepad at him when I guess Mauro dropped one too many goofy Gang Starr references. But really, everything from the ring post figure 4 - one of the all-time great spots in general - had me on strings. I figured Ciampa's subtle tap out was going to be their take on a phantom pinfall and there was no way he was losing after that, but they drew me all the way in with the concrete DVD-into-Purple Rainmaker and I was about losing my mind for the nearfall. Maybe there were one too many big kickouts, maybe Ciampa was up a bit too quickly after the DVD/PR, maybe whatever. I was as into the finishing run of this as I've been for anything in at least a decade, and to me that counts for a whole lot. Maybe my favourite match of the year.


Undisputed Era v War Raiders, Ricochet & Pete Dunne (WarGames)

This was not a brief endeavor and I guess it had some good stuff, but it’s rare that I can be arsed sitting watching a 45 minute match at this point. Especially when I don’t particularly care about anybody in it. I don’t even know who the two fatties were. Had never seen them before. Cole is fine and I still end up liking him more than I expect I will considering I’ve never cared for him otherwise. Kyle is actually growing on me as well because he has a super dislikable wee arsewipe of a face and I suppose that’s a pretty decent quality to have if you’re going to be a heel. He also clearly has a hankering for the stooging and you can never have enough folk who want to be wee stooge bastards. Ricochet is fine for a match like this because he’ll jump off and on and around shit with aplomb. Dunne doing that Marty Scurll finger breaking horse shit is unfortunate as the legit finger-bending looks exponentially more painful and also I think Marty Scurll is pig flu and I’d rather not be reminded of him. But THEN AGAIN I was on the cans for Velveteen Dream throwing out Hollywood Legdrops left and right so who am I to rail against the carny bullshit aspect of the pro-wrestling? Who indeed, brothers and sisters.