This was a Best of Three Falls match for the Bucks’ ROH World Tag Team Titles, with a hypothetical third fall being a No Disqualification Match.
Again with these teams, they’ve been having matches together since 2009, and regularly in these iterations since 2014. Nothing new’s really going on here, nobody is reinventing the wheel in this series and on a B level show like this, it’s very clear that these teams are still saving what one imagines to be their magnum opus for some occasion yet to come. It’d be easy to criticize if that occasion didn’t eventually come some sixteen months later and if it wasn’t really really incredible. Given that that’s the case though, it’s easy to take matches like this in stride though, and put it down as yet another delightful riff session between two of the best tag teams ever and easily the two best tag teams of their generation.
Simply put, this is a pairing that is always going to work itself out if unimpeded, and while not something that goes down entirely clean nor entirely smoothly, there is not enough here to interrupt the core tenants of the thing. It’s the Briscoes and the Bucks, and like always, things have a way of working themselves out. “Force of talent” doesn’t seem quite right because this isn’t an especially forceful thing, but it’s more so an ode to the kind of passive power of extreme talent and familiarity.
For anyone who was skeptical about this match on paper as a result of the stipulation, there’s one simple trick (wrestlers HATE this!) here that helps them out. The trick to a great three fall match here is to just cheat and effectively make it into a two fall match.
Simple enough.
Not in a TWO STRAIGHT way sadly (although at this point, that would just make what remains of show-attending ROH fans deeply sad, as the company is effectively Proto AEW/Bullet Club Pro), but instead through just skipping through the second fall. Following an extended back and forth-y first fall ending in a Victory Roll cutback by Jay Briscoe to go up 1-0, the Briscoes react to the idea of “lucha rules” in the second fall by hitting the Bucks with chairs instead to skip it and go into the no disqualification third fall.
The composition of it all, perhaps not all totally intentional, is a minor little bit of genius. With the first fall coming on a clean roll up and the second on a DQ spot, the match not only protects The Briscoes from having to put the Bucks over more than the once, but it also means that until the end of the third fall, there’s no one big decisive and/or impactful finish. As a result, the match avoids a trap that a lot of the early Briscoes three (two) fall matches fell into, which is that the big climax doesn’t come until the end. There’s a cohesion to the thing, different pieces of one production, rather than the old problem of each fall sometimes feeling like a separate match in and of itself.
Everything works a little better when it’s connected like this.
Beyond that, the match is what it is. It’s not the biggest version of this match, and with wrestlers like these guys, that sort of shows the care this is assembled with. They try some things out, move the pieces around, and add in new shortcuts with Hanger running interference and two different ref bump spots, but in terms of the nuts and the bolts of the thing, there’s not a lot really new here beyond adding a chair or two to some moves. But again, when teams work together like these ones do and when those pieces being moved around are as cool as these ones are, it’s still just a little too hard for me to say this isn’t great.
Certainly not the best these teams can do together, but as far as house show performances go, a hell of a thing. An accomplishment given almost everything else coming out of ROH b-shows at this point.
HANDWERK 