This was the second match in a Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, with Beer Money up 1-0 and was a Street Fight.
It’s the clear least of the bunch.
Being entirely fair, it seem like a lot of that is out of their control. It’s not especially long, and they have neither the benefits of the blood and violence or even just intensity befitting of a street fight (which given the matches all four have had throughout their career, feels like something that could have been achieved with great ease) nor doing a bunch of cool stunts that would make up for that. It’s a match lost somewhere in the middle of either version of this a great match, possessing few enough qualities from either side that it is instead simply very good.
Clearly, it’s a very horrible curse to simply have a very good match on free television in between a great one the previous week and three great ones to follow in the next three consecutive weeks.
A horrible burden.
Still, there’s a fair amount to like.
While unable to fully live up to the potential of the gimmick, they at least get the spirit right, and it’s the correct amount of escalation and evolution from the previous week, especially when the Guns start the match real mad. Likewise, the continuation of the thread from the last match of the Guns being screwed because of a ref bump and Storm stealing the match with the beer bottle to the head, this time just leading to a pinfall to go 2-0 is another positive, rather than paying it off in the second match. And, you know, while it’s clearly not what it could be, it’s still a match with some pretty cool highlight reel bits to show off.
It’s just that on this particular episode, it just so happened that the great match one can easily see given past and future work and the raw material of these teams together got squeezed just hard enough in between all the various sides that a mere very good match wound up happening instead.
The least of the five, something of a victim of its environment and all they couldn’t do, and still a real easy match to like.
HANDWERK 