(photo credit to @TGD287 on Twitter.)
This was a submission match.
It’s a delightful follow up to the sleeper match of the previous weekend.
During the ten minutes of that match, Eagles and Purrazzo crafted one of the great master and would-be successor stories in recent memory. The match not only showed Deonna as a quality heir apparent, but did a lot of real interesting and satisfying micro level things to show that she still has a ways to go. It was a match about mentality as much as strategy, the experience of Eagles teaching her to go with what a match offered up against Deonna very specifically wanting one exact sort of a win, all things that gave them a whole lot of material for this second match.
As was maybe real easy to expect given this having more time and being in front of the regular SHIMMER crowd, this is not only just a little better, but it is markedly better, and my favorite SHIMMER match since the Eagles/Matthews blowoff some two and a half years prior.
Part of that is the act of simply having more time, it’s true.
Three more minutes may not seem like it makes all that large of a difference, but in hands as capable of these, three minutes feels more like five or six, and has the utility of ten. It’s not to say their first match was ruined by being somewhat rushed, but it matters so much more when they have the luxury of taking their time here. Having more time to riff around in the first half makes it feel like a bigger success when a point of focus is finally found in the second half. Having a little more time to get into that point of focus not only allows them to play with that a little more, in terms of raw material, but also feel more vital and important for the match, rather than being simply a short of shorthand for the larger story that it was in that first match.
Really though, it is just an outright better wrestling match. It is crisper, they hit harder (or at least have a production set up in a much smaller room that allows it to sound that way), it is more effective, they do cooler things, there’s room for a really sensational Madison Eagles arm selling performance, and it also has a much better ending.
It is also one that holds a far greater stylistic and ideological appeal for me.
Seven days prior, it very much felt like a match that made certain decisions to have a broader appeal to the many more casual fans in the area for WrestleMania weekend, getting up off the mat midway through and trading some bombs in more of a classical indie style affair. On the other hand, this is some deep-in-the-weeds sicko grappling focused stuff. Not entirely that, there are some bombs thrown and really wonderful sounding elbows hurled out there, but it is a much more thoughtful match in general. Great wrestlers being great wrestlers, both versions of this match up are great matches, but it’s not even a contest.
Give me this one every time.
The style is less the deciding factor and more so how well they do it, and Eagles is as great at this as anybody in the world. Deonna holds her own, of course, no match this great is even a little bit one-sided, but the match’s coolest moments and most impressive holds come primarily from Eagles in the first half. She either invents or sweeps some heavy dust off of like three or four super complex holds while they’re chain wrestling in the first half, each of them not only incredibly cool, but also so painful looking too.
Madison Eagles in the first half of this match is as close as U.S. indie wrestling has had to true alchemy in years, pulling absolute gold out of places that you would never imagine it, as seen below.
Everything in this match feels like such a struggle too, as also seen above.
There’s even this little fight over a rear chinlock, where Madison reaches up with her hands around Deonna’s head and shifts it from side to side to get out. It’s just a small little moment in here and not something that matters all that much or that they tried to get a lot out of, but it’s sort of emblematic of the entire enterprise. Look at any hold in this match and you can say the same. Nothing happens in this match that doesn’t feel like it requires effort and that it isn’t some kind of smaller scale fight in its own right, and when even the smallest aspects of this match possess that quality, the larger aspects feel that much more important.
Narratively speaking, it is just as much of a delight.
While Eagles tries to search for something all match, not really being in her strongest element in a match where the Hellbound cannot immediately net her a submission win, Deonna knows one hundred percent, again, what she wants out of this.
As opposed to a week ago, this time, it’s to her benefit.
Purazzo stays on the arm, and this time, it pays off. Not only in the sense that it helps her hold work like she wanted it to a week ago, or that it disables Eagles from locking her hands late in the match, so the STF she’d occasionally won with before isn’t able to work, but also in terms of what it brings out of the veteran. Eagles tries to go to the neck and back, using brute force instead of any one piece of more scientific focus. She briefly gets there, only to get real overzealous, miss a repeat shoulderblock in the corner, and hurt her arm even worse, never totally recovering.
Eagles makes the other big mistake of the match too, and after surviving another Fujiwara Armbar attempt, tries to repeat what worked for her a week ago. The DVD into the top turnbuckle gets hit this time (after super smartly being a set up for Eagles to do something else earlier in the match, another great little bit of wrestling shorthand to show Eagles’ mastery and later set up Deonna’s growth), but Deonna dodges the head kick. She rolls Eagles back into the Fujiwara Armbar, and when Eagles tries again to repeat a successful trick by forward rolling out of it, Deonna rolls with her and turns her back over and Eagles gives it up.
Deonna not only gets her victory, but gets in the exact way she wanted it.
It is maybe just enough at this point that Deonna wins period, but there’s a fun little statement to it too. There was no major moment where she succeeded this time where she failed a week ago, so much as a series of small ones. Dodging the kick, being more effective in pursuing the arm, and just generally taking advantage of the things the match presented in a way she wasn’t a week ago, and that Madison was. She won simply by staying present when Eagles panicked in a few moments, and in one of my favorite ideas wrestling can offer up, it’s a match Eagles loses as much as it is the one that Purrazzo wins.
Very much, it is a match that feels like was building towards a rubber match. The submission element of the thing gives Eagles a slight out, as despite clearly being one of the best technical wrestlers in the world, she wins far more often with the Hellbound than any one hold seemingly. Couple it with the statement in the preceding paragraph, and there are still questions there and material on the table for something truly definitive.
Unfortunately, Deonna Purrazzo would be off the independents and collecting dust on that shelf down in Orlando within a few months, and Madison Eagles would have a series of problems in the ensuing years. Hell, SHIMMER is, as of March 2023, more or less officially dead. We have never gotten a third American match between the two, we may never, and if we ever got lucky enough to get there again, it likely would come at this from a totally new perspective, rather than continuing the story of these two SHIMMER matches.
Do I wish there was more?
Not so much of the match individually, but of these two wrestling each other, at least in a dumb kind of critic brain sort of a way, always thinking of what the best version of a thing looks like, absolutely.
The story told is outstanding, but I think it could have landed even better with more separation between the two matches, and especially with another match in between the first one and Deonna’s success. It’s not to say her winning is unbelievable, as the match(es) did a tremendous job leading everybody there, but it is to say that a mere week doesn’t totally feel like it was exactly enough time needed to learn every lesson, given how the first match went.
Still, given all that happened, at least we got this little two match series between them, and while not perfect, it is truly outstanding.
It’s mean, crisp, interesting, and above all, always deeply interesting. A match that rewards you for paying attention, one of those things in which all the pieces matter, but also one that just flat out whips ass too.
The second or third best SHIMMER match of the decade, the second part of a stellar two-act production, and a genuinely really impressive thing.
As opposed to so much else from SHIMMER that is either hidden behind a paywall or hard to find on your basic free internet (i.e. I am gatekeeping you if you dont know how to pirate without a blog providing you a link, no reason for that stuff to get yanked just because you need someone to do the work for you), this one is on SHIMMERs official Youtube channel. You might not like it as much as I did without seeing the first match, or watching so much of the company and growing the affinity for Eagles that this match clearly utilizes for full effect, but given that it just might wind up on a year end list, I see zero reason for you not to at least give it a try.
HANDWERK 