A lot of people have had problems with quarantine wrestling, but not these two. It helps, of course, that the first match between these two that I ever saw was also conducted in front of twenty or so other wrestlers in a small building.
Of course, that was a charming little environment (Beyond Wrestling’s Secret Show set up), and this is WWE NXT continuing to run shows during a pandemic while also co opting one of the trademarks of the deceased father of the opposing company’s founders for a pair of shows clearly only done to counterprogram said opposition, meaning that this is perhaps the least charming environment in the history of wrestling.
Still, if you’re gonna do all of that, you may as well throw on one of the best match ups of the last decade.
If you’re going to buy up almost all of wrestling history and only bring things like this back out of spite to fuck with someone while still openly despising the sort of thing the Great American Bash as a concept represents, you may as well do something as weird as running Oney Lorcan against Timothy Thatcher in a near-authentic Grapplefuck style match in front of a Great American Bash logo. If you’re going to try and buy up every possible wrestler and collect toys so that nobody else can have them, you may as well use them like this, in the way that they’re supposed to be used. It’s the most correct the WWE’s gotten a thing on NXT in some time, almost entirely because they didn’t try to do anything but simply present this fight.
It works. It works completely.
It’s the only NXT match I would actually personally recommend since it moved to actual television.
They fight hard, smack the hell out of each other, and it all feels like it matters. Small things in the middle of the match come back around at the end, like Oney reinjuring an elbow slammed into the apron a few times earlier on. Tim gets a little lucky, but not in a way that diminishes him at all. Everything flows perfectly from what came before it. The goal is a Thatcher showcase, again using Oney Lorcan for that purpose, but there’s nobody better in this role than Oney Lorcan. Just because it isn’t as viscerally satisfying as something like their final EVOLVE match in 2015 or their WXW slugfest the previous year doesn’t mean this isn’t still blowaway great.
It’s not as good as their best work together ultimately because there are certain quirks to it that just feel off. It’s a WWE match. The worst commentator in wrestling doesn’t help them, but it’s also their only match with a commercial break thrown into it and despite WWE largely letting them work their style, something about it still feels off in an indescribable way. There are these little moments that tell me in the tiniest ways that this is the WWE version of the match. It’s not quite Arrested Development Season 4/5 levels of deep unease, but more along the lines of the final season of Community on Yahoo Screen. Enough pieces are there from what worked before. Just enough is correct that it still works. It’s not perfect, but it’s WWE. The WWE version of a thing is almost always a worse version of a thing.
Still, a worse version of Tim Thatcher vs. Oney Lorcan is better than anything else the WWE is going to run outside of allowing the greatest wrestler of all time a full platform, as they have elsewhere in 2020. If you had to watch a WWE match from 2020 that didn’t involve Daniel Bryan, this is the one.
***1/4
HANDWERK 