When Shinsuke is on, he’s amazing. But he can dial it in at times, and WWE mostly likes strong style a lot less than Japan…
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I’d be saying 85% of the crowd know him from NXT, not New Japan. If he’d came straight from New Japan to Smackdown the crowd would be “meh”.
Just put him against the two other ex-IWGP champions in WWE (one at a time, or both at once). Would be amazing (you got a tease of that versus Styles in the MitB match… the crowd completely lost their shit).
Styles was on a podcast pleading for that moment to happen, and has told Vince if they’re going to do AJ/Nakamura it needs to be massive.
Surely that’s next year’s WM. It should be the main event but it’ll probably be on the pre-show.
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Since the Mizz and Ambrose have left Smackdown I’ve become really bored with The show. It simply doesn’t interest me anymore.
They really miss Jericho imo.
Aerostar is insane.
Cena ethered Roman tonight
OOFT.
So again backstage knows exactly what the problems with Reigns are, they just would rather cut promos against him than fix it.
Mae Young Classic, almost no visible spoilers.
Night 1:
- Well, that was a bit underwhelming apart from the “main event”, where the crowd was hot and the two performers were great characters.
- They did, as in the Cruiserweight tournament, have a distinct variety of styles.
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The result of that final match was a bit surprising: having a foreign hoss cut through the field for a while is a no-brainer. But Abbey certainly sells passion to a crowd, so not unhappy with her winning.
Night 2:
- Xia Li has a great look and presentation, Mercedes Martinez was made to look pretty weak.
- WWE know how to do a promo package: e.g. they almost made Marti Belle interesting. However, her match with Ellering Jr was incredibly awful (blame on both sides)… you could fill an entire Botchamania with this match.
- Adelaide’s Rhea Ripley next… oh dear, an AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE chant. A young face hoss who can work a crowd against a wily small is a good match-up. Ripley wins and looks pretty good doing it: for a 20yo she’s not too green at all.
- Mia Yim main-eventing this episode, no complaints from me on that. Her hillbilly opponent, Sarah Logan, has a future.
Night 3:
- TONI STORM! Not a great demonstration of her skills, but she is money.
- EVIE!!! Sorry, Dakota. Her opponent says the Great Khali has taught her everything, which is a worry. Whoah, Khali never moved like that. Evie gets beaten up and then hits two moves and that’s all it takes. Yeah, visible spoiler. Obviously I didn’t rage-quit this post, so der.
- The first time I saw Evie and Storm was against each other, at an MCW show on the weekend of the 2014 (?) WWE tryouts. They destroyed a stacked card.
- Win by hair strike. Ha.
- Santana Garrett promo package fails to mention the literal dozens of titles she’s won. Crowd like both Santana and her UK superheavyweight opponent. The words UK and superheavyweight just go together really well, don’t they? Crowd liked that.
Night 4:
- Candice LeRae appears to be scared of running fast.
- Spoiler not spoiler: American military wins in WWE.
- No-fuss solid match as lead-in to…
- … Karai Sane. Could they be a bit more obvious in labelling her the favourite? Wait, she comes out first? Well, that’s a swerve: Blanchard gets to be the final entry. Blanchard hits some stiff shots: do that versus a Japanese girl, you’re gonna get ■■■■■■ up, even if they are the smallest waif in the tournament. Would you like an elbow drop with that?
That’s half the matches dumped in one day, and this is nowhere near the quality of the Cruiserweight tournament. Various reasons for that beyond the individual qualities of the wrestlers: for example, the commentary (Jim Ross and Lita) is a big step down, and it matters, a lot. A few too-green choices, especially when put in a physical or style mis-match, can also drag things down big-time (everyone, nearly, has to get their shine in the first round).
Ha, based on the second round match, it looks like I can blame Marti Belle for that first round dud of a match versus Evers/Ellering.
That is consistent with the couple otherwise OK indy matches I’ve seen of Evers.
Jeff Hardy out long-term (4-6 months) with a torn rotator cuff. We’ll see whether Matt breaks whilst he is away…
Enzo as Cruiserweight Champ. Ugh. This is why people can’t have nice things. He is so toxic backstage that you boot him to another division only to strap the belt to him? The division is pretty unsalvageable at this point though through a series of stupid decisions - running the show after, rather than before, SmackDown so the crowds are almost always dead, locking the division so guys can’t wrestle any non-Cruisers (which as a wrestler would have to be pretty boring) and handcuffing them and giving them minimal airtime on RAW and what they do get is usually pointless.
At this point, Vince is like a stubborn baby holding his blanky (Reigns/Brock) and bawling whenever tries to take it away from him. He let the air out of Joe’s tires when he was hot and getting progressively more over and now Braun jobs to 1 finisher, shortly after Vince’s dreamboat SuperReigns kicked out of every variant of an AA finish known to man. It was the same with Punk’s year long reign - I can’t stand Ryback but he was super over in that period and could’ve benefited from a short reign, however Vince was so locked into Rock needing to beat Punk so his boy Cena could look stronger when he won the belt, that they failed to capitalise on guys getting over organically that could’ve benefited much more from a belt run than his chosen options. The only way Roman might get over is a Shield reunion and maybe even that won’t help him
EDIT: Cesaro is a beast. Not only was his match superb, but he wrestled for 10mins a ■■■■■■ mess after he hit the fibreglass ring post so damn hard, that he drove his two front team 5mm upwards into his gum. So he’s in for some fun surgery to remove them from his gum and then more surgery to replace them with implants.
Shield to re-unite to crush Bo and Axel? That’ll get Reigns over.
Shane McMahon must be a psychopath.
Shame jumped off a very high thing… and in those few seconds while he fell, he wasn’t the story.
Let’s hope they get it right. If they’re going down the path of “we’ve done nothing for our two greatest natural faces, let’s solve that by doing nothing for them after turning them heel”…
I’ve pretty much stopped watching it all together at this point…
i got the network the other day(mainly so i could watch old wcw ppv’s that this podcast do reviews and commentary on- Tony schiavone what happened when, if they let him commentate like that back in the day WCW would still be in business) i watched the Shane v.s Owens match. 3 things stood out to me:
1: how clean cut everything is, the cell looks pristine, like as in not dangerous at all. I swear the old one looked weathered and old and looked like if you got thrown into it, it hurt
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How today’s crowds just arent into the product. Just the occasional pop for a big spot or the worst chant ever “this is awesome”
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the commentary…awful is too nice a word for it. Maybe i am just spoilt from hearing guys like JR and King. Shane is on top of the cell about to jump off(which should be a dramatic moment) and they just have no idea about to convey that in commentary.
You watch any attitude era show and then watch today’s product and they are not even comparable.
MCW.
On 11/11, the biggest fish possible is coming to Essendon.
And I’ve got $400 worth of Oils and plane tickets that say I’m not going.
FFS.
The last two nights were the second MCW Invitational Tournament, titled SEVEN given the age of MCW. Twelve man tournament plus assorted other matches around that.
The tournament had a late change after the UK’s Progress Wrestling champ, Travis Banks, pulled out, but hard to be disappointed as Trent SEVEN was a fantastic replacement.
The Friday suffered a bit from “we can’t make these matches too big because three of these buggers are going to be wrestling three times in 25 hours” syndrome.
Highlights of night 1 included:
- Krakerjak returning to singles competition in the tournament, and winning via staple gun to the groin.
- SEVEN progressing in a very fun match against Mr Juicy: seamlessly transitioning from “we’re so fat we can’t do a kip up” comedy to brutal strong style.
- Slex making an open challenge to NJPW, 24 hour deadline to respond. Challenge accepted.
- Main event was Brooksy defending the Intercommonwealth Title versus Caveman Ugg. Yes, Ugg is exactly how you might visualise him. He’s also an extremely good worker for someone with just over a year of intensive experience, and had the crowd Ugg-ing Tozawa style. Brooksy’s better, of course, and retained.
Night 2:
- Jonah Rock vs Matt “Son of Havoc” Cross for the MCW Heavyweight title. Like Ospreay previously, Cross won the main title from a Sydney company in advance… and then MCW gobbled it up. In fact, Jonah now has top belts from VIC, NSW, and SA. Cross ain’t tall but geez he’s built. Muscles on top of muscles on top of muscles. Missed the 450
and brain-bustered for the win. - Preston and Payne finally got their blow-off match. Payne won, and looks to be Jonah’s next challenger. With a slightly sharper haircut, Payne looks like a scaled-up Enzo… except, as far as I know, he’s not hated by everyone. Crowd was hot for the pull-apart challenge from Payne.
- SEVEN, Robbie Eagles, and Champagne Pyro (sorry, Dowie James… your old name was wrestling comedy gold) were in the final. Delivered, as you’d expect from those three. Dowie submits SEVEN after SEVEN threw Robbie into next week on the floor.
Oh yeah, and Okada. Tickets not on sale on the site yet, but front few rows will be gone already as the queue at the end of the night was loooooong.