This was fought under AMBITION rules.
It’s great.
I mean, obviously, right?
Maybe the literal two best wrestlers in the entire world fight in a match contested under rules that accentuate all of their most positive attributes, of course it’s great. Even if it’s a shorter match because of the environment — Inner Circle being a shorter and smaller show during festival weekends, held in the WXW training school’s charmingly small practice facility — WALTER and Thatcher do so much to make their work stand out, in ways both big and small, that I simply do not believe they are capable of anything less than a great match together one on one, provided they are simply allowed to wrestle.
Such is the case here.
This doesn’t look a whole lot like their more famous match together a few months later, between not having a whole lot of stuff together on their feet, not a lot of trading, and generally, having the more realistic and authentic shoot-style adjacent match that the rules of the match demand. It is, however, great in all of the same ways, which is to say everything they do both looks good and makes a ton of sense, even if it makes sense in wildly different ways. Rather than an epic about trying to chop the tree down, it is instead the mirror opposite of that match, with WALTER trying to get off the ground so that he can chuck bombs, aiming for the knockout rather than a submission or a choke out.
WALTER scores first, hauling Thatcher up off the mat and scoring with a real God damner of a Powerbomb, but when Thatcher survives it, WALTER’s given the game away. He swings big with a Lariat, only for Thatcher to snatch him down into the Fujiwara Armbar for the win.
It’s a lovely finish, and one that ties this thing together. Both men strike from a place of desperation in the match, but Thatcher does it in a more sensible way, and holds back just enough to force the big guy to show his hand first, never revealing his strategy in the way that WALTER did (if he had one at all beyond pure reaction), before rushing in in a far more effective way.
Thatcher and WALTER do it again, combining just as well for a shorter and more riff-based singles match as they’re going to as a tag team for the next three days to follow. Even in a more casual and lighthearded setting like Inner Circle, in a match markedly shorter than is ideal, wrestling’s two greatest simply cannot help but deliver a match this satisfying and great.
HANDWERK 