Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (8/12/2010)

This was the fifth and final match in the Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, with the series tied 2-2, and was a Best Two of Three Falls Match.

I am almost never going to say a match is exactly as great as everyone says it is, and this isn’t quite among the best of the decade, but I really do like it a lot.

For as much fun as it can be to have a Big Take, sometimes the common wisdom is what it is for a good reason, and it is simply not worth it. Popular things in wrestling can often really suck, but sometimes, you can look at a wildly popular thing and just completely get it. I write the classics are the classics for a reason usually when discussing age old ideas in terms of wrestling stories, narratives, or match types, but sometimes, it applies to the prevailing sentiment as well.

As much as I liked the cage match and found a lot to love in the other matches in this series, the popular opinion here is also the correct one, and this is very clearly the best match of the bunch, and one of TNA’s best of the decade.

There are a few reasons for that.

First are the ones that are pretty easy to quantify and properly put into words.

Obviously, something this match has over the four previous ones is that it gets to go fifteen to twenty minutes, with sixteen aired, rather than having to cap it off at seven to ten. It doesn’t feel like a lot, but I would also argue that five or six more minutes rarely feels a necessary as when it’s used to bring up a great ten minute match to a really great match of this length, doubly so when it’s exactly enough time to have a three fall match that feels (mostly) fully fleshed out and realized.

The design is also real great.

Nobody overthinks it exactly, you get some classic three fall structure with the bad guys winning first, the comeback in the third fall, and then your big finishing run as most of the third and deciding fall. Again though, it’s the smaller touches where the match really shines. While the cage match was unfortunately the end of that whole story thread about Storm’s bottle and referee bumps and bullshit, this match opting instead to be a pure talent kind of showcase on what was marketed as a big episode of television, there’s still some effective larger stuff at play here, like Storm and Roode getting their first clean win of the series in the first fall, only to blow it in the second by being overconfident shitheels. On top of the larger story, these guys with a long gripe finally doing it fairly only to undermine themselves like classic villains often should, it’s also a great mirror of the series itself, with Beer Money stacking the deck only to get in their own way, and crumble under the pressure in the last moments.

In terms of what happens when, the match also gets it so right.

The sense of escalation on the match is almost entirely perfect, and it encompasses the series too, seeing Beer Money try (and succeed for once) with their own risks and breaking out bigger and bigger moves. It’s not always pretty, Robert Roode’s attempt at a flip dive especially, but the sloppiness kind of benefits the match in those moments, illustrating how wildly out of their wheelhouse they are, both making the match feel more special but also showing in retrospect why the lost, because they were the ones trying to keep up with the Guns, with smaller individual performances working hand in hand with the larger ideas on display. It also almost always feels like the match is moving forward, not only in the sense that they constantly top what just happened, but also in that things that worked earlier often don’t work again, or at least not without a greater effort and additional set up.

Beyond the things that make sense though — the narrative work coming to a head, construction, performance, etc. — the match is also the beneficiary of some things that cannot be planned out or controlled or decided upon beforehand.

Sometimes, magic just pop up in the wrestling world.

More often than not, it’s the difference between the great matches and the really great ones, and that goes double for a company like TNA. The Impact Zone is as hot in the final fall here for the big nearfall as they’ve maybe ever been before, the energy pours forward into the ring, and it ricochets off into the audience, and it’s a special kind of feedback loop that makes everything better. I’ve used the term TNA Magic in the past on this site as a shorthand for things like the Roode/Aries Title vs. Title, for things that maybe shouldn’t work half as well as they do, but through careful effort and tons of energy, the atmosphere and feeling elevates everything on screen. I don’t know if this is quite that, giving two great teams the time and space to achieve does not feel half as intricate as some other examples of TNA Magic, but there’s certainly something to this that cannot be fully accounted for.

The atmosphere is there, the energy elevates an already great match and story, the work supports it, and everything just happens to line up as right as it possibly could given the exact circumstances of the match and series.

I can complain, I suppose.

It’s not perfect.

While the match pulled it off and while a lot of modern CMLL proves it can absolutely done in fifteen or sixteen minutes, I would always prefer my three fall matches to be a little longer, especially with the middle fall here being just a little bit rushed. I also wish the series didn’t blow off the bloodier and grittier elements of the feud in the cage and leave this as a prestige wrestling style Great Match. Getting into more minute stuff, I also wish Skull & Bones wasn’t done three times in the match, less because I don’t think it’s a good move or that it should never be survived, but simply that I found it less exciting to end the match and series with the move that had already won one fall and also that was the big final nearfall of the match. The match is otherwise really great at escalation, so that stood out a lot too.

Mostly though, I’m just not interested in complaining, or at least not that loudly or for more than the above paragraph to tell you why I’m not calling it quite an all-decade level match. These issues are still there, of course, but there’s so much more on one side of the ledger than the other.

I just liked this too much.

The match is too endearing, too great, too uplifting as an overall package, and above all, too much of a great example of all that this can very easily be given something close to the bare minimum of time and effort and basic respect for real easy principles. They let the two best team in the company loose for five weeks, especially at the end when it mattered most, got out of the way (say what you will about TNA, but throughout most of their history, the tag division has largely always been a safe haven from some of the wilder ideas), and it absolutely worked.

It was always going to, and if everything ever lines up again like this either here or somewhere else in terms of talent, chemistry, and opportunity, it probably always will.

***1/3

 

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (8/5/2010)

This was the fourth match in a Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, with Beer Money up 2-1 and was an Ultimate X Match.

A fun fourth, if a weird one.

Speaking in terms of the narrative first, which had been the strength of the first three matches in the series, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of connection between this and the others.

It’s as if the bottle shot payoff maybe came too soon, as this is purely and simply a wrestling match. It’s another gimmick match and for the fourth time this year, the Guns again succeed at turning the idea of the match into its own story, but that’s it. As part of the series, it feels kind of out of order. Following three matches with a clear line through them, it feels like this was actually supposed to be the first match in the series, not only because it’s fairly ordinary on a larger scope level but also because of the bells, whistles, narrative function, and desperation at times on display in the cage match.

That being said, this match is also a little bit behind the eight ball in a way that is absolutely nobody’s fault either.

With wrestling being what it is, or really any dramatic artform being what it is, this fourth meeting is somewhat limited by those structures being what they are, and the basic media literacy of most people watching it, unless they’re brand brand brand new here.

You can buy a sweep more than you can buy a series like this ending in four, I think. If you get this far, everybody knows that the series will end on the fifth match, so it’s harder to really get really involved in the one match in the series that feels like an absolute gimme. It’s nobody’s fault, I’m not really sure what you can do to avoid short of oversaturating the market with Best of [X] series that fail to go to the final match, and that probably isn’t worth it. Ultimately, it is what it is, and it’s the problem every penultimate match in an official series like this tends to have.

All they can really do is to do their best with the fourth match, and they do.

The thing I appreciate the most about this match is the honesty of it, especially as it relates to the Ultimate X stipulation, and the way that yet another Guns match this year found an interesting way to take a match that’s usually a pure fireworks show and find something in the material to dig a lot deeper on.

Many other promotions would use this to try and do a tired “opponent adapts to the specialty of the other side” bit (something the cage match very impressively sidesteps and turns around), but given the physical limitations of Beer Money in a match like this as well as how high the bar has been raised for these matches over the previous seven years of TNA putting them on, my favorite thing about this match was the futility of Beer Money’s attempts to adapt.

No point exists in this match where the Guns seem out of control of the match. Even in the first half when they’re going back and forth, before trying to climb (a great approach, given the size and style of Storm and Roode, giving them a reason to not spend all match doing that sort of thing), it’s even. The fight is for distance and even when that distance finally happens, Beer Money feels like they’re spending time trying to stop the climb more than trying to get there themselves. It’s successful, to their credit, as they use their size to repeatedly pull them down when they try to cross on the wires because they can reach up higher where someone like the Bucks or a Sonjay Dutt or Petey William might not be able to in more standard Ultimate X matches, but ultimately, pure defense only goes so far.

It’s when Beer Money finally goes up and tries to win that they immediately lose.

Bobby Roode tries to balance rather than inch across with his hands, using the truss above the wires to grab onto and walk across with his feet on the wires. Sabin’s much much much faster though, the all-time expert in the match, and kicks his feet off to crotch him down on the wires there, before pulling the X down.

The Guns put it to 2-2 at the end of a match that, to its credit, never once tried to pretend that anything else was all that possible.

Another hit, different in its own way relative to other Ultimate X matches, although one that disappointingly feels more disconnected from the series at large than the previous four matches.

***

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (7/29/2010)

This was the third match in a Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, with Beer Money up 2-0 and was a Steel Cage Match.

If there’s a tragedy about this match, it’s that it’s the only cage match they ever had.

Beer Money are not the Midnights or the Andersons and the Machine Guns are not the Rock & Roll Express, but it’s the same basic principle that makes this work, I think. A stronger and bigger classical heel team beating up on likeable cool moves junior heavyweight babyfaces in a cage, the stipulation itself putting the latter up against the wall by robbing them of a lot of what they do best, limiting the space in Shelley and Sabin’s pace and space attack.

The match just naturally works in this tried and true way.

Unfortunately, it is under ten minutes, and while they get so much right, it also feels like it’s really only scratching the surface of what this really could have been, given ten more minutes on pay-per-view. Like the other matches in the Best of Five, it’s a great look at what could have been, had this not been condensed into five weeks and had TNA utilized this division a lot more properly during the three years or so that they had both teams together at the same time.

Like (most of) the other matches in the series though too, it’s still great.

As opposed to the street fight — and more like the ladder match — while sparser than I would like, they still find a way to shove a lot in there in a real pleasing way.

Narratively, again, the thing is a slam dunk. Your basic cage match heel/face story, as written about near the start of this piece, plays out just as you’d want, and the little touches sprinkled in around the action are once again a delight. The hot start from the Guns with their own trick now of entering from the crowd over the top of the cage, the little turns and adjustments, and especially the finish, where Storm’s glass bottle shot finally falls short when they see it coming and he hits Roode with it instead. It’s a great little payoff within the larger story, a piece of bullshit finally coming up and the end of a match that Storm and Roode picked to stop the ability of the Guns to do certain things backfiring when the confined space means it’s harder for them to hide and set up this trick than it was in the last two matches, when the action was spread out more.

Similar to the ladder match, the match is yet again real smart about these quieter ways in which the stipulation matters and influences the match. Not only in the obvious story of the match — Beer Money trying to hinder the Guns but underestimating them as pure fliers, along with it removing the space to do their bullshit at the same time — but in smaller ways too. Something like Roode being busted open early because of the cage (arguably backwards given how these matches tend to go, sympathy on Our Heroes and what not, but I like it as an immediate show of the heels finally getting what they have coming to them, and a visual shorthand for the idea that they might have underestimated the Guns) stands out, but also in the payoffs at the end, as the Guns adapt to use the cage to hit their fancier stuff, which stands in contrast to how the cage winds up hindering Beer Money.

After two bigger gimmick matches for the Machine Guns this year based around being more skilled with the tools provided by the stipulation, it’s not only an interesting change to see them now have to adapt and succeed but also something that leaves them stronger than how they came in.

Speaking of the match more on the surface, it also just rocks.

Yet again, these teams are capable of a billion cool things and this match packs them into both the tightest and most cohesive package yet. You get the formula tag element missing in the last two, which they’re great at together, but also bigger spots with the cage, and a greater feeling of importance with Roode spending the match dripping blood onto everyone and everything around him. Outside of the length of the match, it’s just about everything I would want from these teams in a cage.

In the end, the beer bottle finally misfires when Sabin ducks it to put an already damaged Roode in the way, this time taking him out rather than Storm bailing him out with it as he did the last two weeks. Storm finally gets caught alone, and after the Skull & Bones, the Guns finally put one up on the board to not only stay alive in the series, but to finally get to pick the rules for the fourth match.

The best in the series yet, both cool and interesting. Not quite underrated, the big praise for a match in this series is where it belongs, but given how many other widely praised TNA matches do nothing for me, I’ve always been a little surprised at how this one tends to slip under the radar.

A real overachievement, and TNA’s best cage match of the year.

***1/4

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (7/22/2010)

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.

 

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (7/15/2010)

This was the first match in a Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, and was a Ladder Match.

A decade plus removed from this real celebrated series, the finale is the one that tends to get most of the acclaim (not wrongfully so), but truthfully, every match of the five is pretty good at worst.

Even this, one of the lesser of the five matches if memory serves, is something I find real impressive.

Primarily, I’m impressed the the balancing act that this has to pull off.

The obvious thing is that, yeah sure, it has to be a good to great match because the point of this series is at least 50% to deliver good wrestling on television for the next five weeks. The trickier part is though that this is a five match series (or if you want to play like we don’t know, at the very least, three matches in three consecutive weeks), and you have to balance (a) having a good match period, (b) having a good ladder match that doesn’t feel so obviously held back for TV, & (c) a combination of both that still leaves a lot left over for the next two to four matches to follow.

It’s a tricky act, but the match does all of it.

Firstly, it’s just a really good match.

Nobody is going to tell you this is a ground breaking ladder match, it’s nowhere near even the best of the year, but there’s enough here to work. Like a lot of the TNA television gimmick stuff that’s great, it reminds me of the entire “he gets on base” scene from MONEYBALL. Not fancy, not always pretty, but it succeeds. There’s enough cool stuff to matter, a few things that even thirteen years later and counting feel real current, and the match has a certain grounded nature to it too.

You get your highlight reel moments of course, but there’s also always this feeling that someone’s either trying to win or to use this exact moment to set up a victory in the moment after.

At the same time, it’s pretty interesting below the surface too.

Much like the Young Bucks Ultimate X match earlier in the year, the Guns again impress in the way that it feel like the stipulations in these matches matter and that they’re the masters of these matches. Beer Money almost always pays for it when they try to set things up with the ladders, rarely succeed at using them in general, and when Shelley and Sabin come back, it’s usually because they know how to wield these things and to use the current ladder set-ups both more effectively and in a more inventive way than Beer Money.

Narratively in a larger sense too, the match does a great job in that classic sort of simple and effective TNA way. 

After years of not being able to get over the hump, Shelley and Sabin finally win the titles, only to be confronted with this springing out of a controversial call. In the first match, they clearly prove themselves as better than Storm and Roode only to lose on some real bullshit. It’s the exact correct call here, having them prove pretty clearly that it wasn’t a fluke, only to now be the ones being far more overtly robbed.

The referee gets knocked down, and Sabin pulls the contract down (the winner would get to decide the stipulation for the next match in the series), but with nobody to see it, James Storm breaks a beer bottle over the back of his head, steals the contract, and waves it in the face of the referee when he gets up. Beer Money goes up 1-0.

Easier to forget than the later highlights of the series, but an impressive opening to one of the more celebrated tag series of the decade.

three boy

Cesaro vs. Sheamus, WWE Clash of the Champions (9/25/2016)

This was Match Seven in a Best of Seven Series.

One of WWE’s best pairings over the last five years gets a best of seven, and you’d think I would have covered it a lot more. I would have loved to, had it been more than it was. It’s not to say there weren’t any good to great matches in the series, but most of them were shorter TV matches on Raw, cut up by commercials and just barely great, or in one case, on an overseas house show. It’s a waste of such a good match up and such a great idea, but this is the WWE, and so something like that isn’t really anything I can get upset about anymore, especially when these two have already had their real high-level secret classics in the past.

There’s a lot of things this match and this series isn’t. It’s not the best they can do as such a thing is not really possible on shows where the WWE pays attention to them, but doesn’t give them a main event level of room to stretch out and really get into things. It’s also not the best match that this series deserves on paper or that they deserve, and it’s not even conclusive, instead serving as a set up for them to enter into a largely dull tag team that wastes most of a few years of the careers of two of the best wrestlers in the company.

Luckily, there’s still a lot that this match is.

For one, it’s the kind of match that they were twice denied from having on pay-per-view in their 2014 U.S. Title matches. Those were still some great matches, but always felt sort of limited, both in terms of how long they were allowed to go and them being allowed to do less than they were in their many many many television matches. This match is not limited in that sense, allowing for bigger offense, some huge feeling finisher kickouts from guys who don’t get to have a lot of matches like that in the WWE, and even some major stuff on the outside. Nothing that’s going to be really truly groundbreaking, but it’s nice to see two great wrestlers with a little more room to make the match feel bigger than just another one of their lower stakes meat and potatoes efforts.

The other thing is the more boring one.

It’s still Cesaro vs. Sheamus and it’s just so good.

These two hit each other as hard as possible, and break out every possible trick in the world to somehow keep this interesting despite it being a well the WWE’s regularly gone to for the last three and a half years. Sometimes that’s as simple as changing the order of some stuff and breaking out the rarer and newer tricks. Sometimes it’s as simple as them finally having the clearance to wrestle a lot bigger. Other times, they can get into more advanced things like playing off of prior finishes in the Best of Seven or a small story with Cesaro having a dinged up back.

Another time, Cesaro accidentally brains himself on an overzealous tope, creates a really insane visual, and wakes the crowd up BIG TIME for their finishing run.

This is a match with so many delights to offer the human mind, even if it does end on a bullshit double count out for a draw that only made everyone deeply angry after these two put in the real hard work to actually get the people out of their chairs.

(Even then, there’s a nice little lesson there, which is that you should never become excited for things when you see that little logo in the corners.)

A lovely match, and while not the best they can do, it’s the sort of match that bumps up real hard against the limitations of the setting in which it takes place in in a way that I’m always going to admire.

***1/4

Matt Sydal vs. ACH, ROH Survival of the Fittest 2015 Night One (11/13/2015)

This was the fifth match in their Best of Five Series.

Unfortunately, it’s one of the lesser matches in the series, and causes them to finish the story trailing off with an elipsis, instead of with an emphatic period or exclamation point.

Sydal goes back to the leg once again, and while ACH’s selling is better than it was in the past, it’s still not great. That’s not to say it’s a match without value, because Sydal’s work is mean and beautiful at the same time and all of ACH’s offense itself is still spectacular. It also does a better job of navigating the leg work than other matches in the series. If you wanted to, you could toss a three boy on it, and it’s not really worth arguing for or against. The performances are generally great, if not up to the standard of the previous match in the series.

The main issue is that it’s unable to avoid feeling like a retread.

Sydal’s leg work is different, but it wraps up about the same. ACH fights through it and he wins with the Brainbuster and the Midnight Star. It’s not a new story they tell in that regard. ACH powers through what he already did, and wins in a way he already has. Fine for a one-off, but this is supposed to be more than that. It isn’t, and so it never feels like the major win that it was supposed to be. Fittingly, what’s supposed to be ACH’s big moment and his launching point higher up the card in ROH winds up fumbled, both through the presentation (semi main event on a b-show) and the way the story is laid out and communicated.

A disappointing end to the series, and the reason that this all never quite lived up to their initial meeting a year prior.

 

ACH vs. Matt Sydal, ROH Wrestling (10/14/2015)

This was the fourth match in the Best of Five Series, with ACH being up 2-1.

As their other matches were all on VOD shows or pay-per-view events, this is their only television match, and it showed. It’s shorter than all the others, but that works out, as they have both a differently paced match and a match with a different approach than the previous three. To their benefit, it’s a different match than the others. It’s snappier, crisper, and quicker, and more in like with all that ACH brings to the match, instead of just being another Matt Sydal Fuck Them Kids World Tour entry.

After losing the last two in a row when trying to repeat the success of both Match #1 and their initial 2014 meeting, Sydal now completely abandons the ground game and meets ACH on his own terms.

For much of the match, it feels like a mistake.

ACH is just as fast, but being younger and injury-free, he’s much more explosive than Sydal in addition to being stronger. It’s not to say that ACH dominates the match or always seems to have the measure of Matt Sydal, but it is to say that for once, Sydal doesn’t feel like a master of the craft against ACH. Every other match has seen him either ground ACH or always have an answer for him, but this is much more even now. ACH even briefly digs into Sydal’s territory by working the arm a little bit after Sydal lands a little hard on his right shoulder, followed up by another perfect little selling performance by Sydal in transition. While Sydal has a counter for everything like always, he’s also no longer able to control ACH for any substantial length of time, always seeing the momentum swing back, as ACH throws more strikes and utilizes his physical advantages more and more. “““““““““`

Unfortunately, ACH’s recent victories haven’t freed him of a youthful overzealousness, and Sydal is just barely able to stay alive.

ACH goes on an absolute god damner of a run in the final minute, but Sydal has the same counter for him that ACH used last time. He gets his knees up on the Midnight Star, before the all-time gorgeous Shooting Star Press brings the match back to 2-2.

Easily the standout of the Best of Five Series so far. Sydal is as great as always, but in a match that didn’t ask ACH to do more than he was totally comfortable with at this point in his career, it was finally a match that accomplished the goal of this series and allowed ACH to look just as great. The story of these five matches is that while Sydal is the best in the world at this style right now, ACH is right there behind him, and is learning how to surpass him, even if he can’t do it just every night yet. It’s very rewarding that one of these matches finally found a way to reflect that while still delivering an all-world fireworks display.

***1/4

Matt Sydal vs. ACH, ROH Reloaded Tour: Chicago (9/12/2015)

This was the second match in the Best of Five Series, with Sydal leading 1-0.

On the previous night in the inaugural match of the series, Sydal and ACH surprisingly fell short as a result of ACH not being so well suited to sell a leg injury. He was in their first match, ten months prior, but it was either an aberration, or he had a bad night of it twenty four hours before this match.

Either way, Sydal proves his merit yet again in an arguable career year by adjusting just enough and in the exact correct ways in order to make this a great match again.

The story of the match is the same, and kind of has to be, for the story being told. Sydal is more experienced and more aggressive, and can pick apart ACH. It’s the way he (theoretically) won their first encounter twenty four hours prior, so it makes the most sense that Sydal would wrestle the same kind of a match. However, Sydal adjusts to work over ACH’s left arm instead of his leg, and it makes all the difference in the world. ACH’s issue with the leg is that he’s such an explosive wrestler in the back half of a match that it impedes all of that. He can do it, but not in a reliable way, and the result is often the undercutting of the other great work they’re doing. With the arm though, it’s much much easier for him. ACH struggles with a lift or holds it tight at his side, and it’s enough. The arm selling can exist alongside the huge bombs being hurled out at a breakneck pace without getting in the way of any of that, and it’s why the match works now.

It’s also to the credit of the match that they don’t JUST do the same kind of a match, as the story changes enough to stay fresh, but not so much that it’s a sudden leap from what they did before. Like so many things in ROH at this point, it’s what slower building is supposed to look like.

Sydal having ACH so well figured out after their previous two singles matches now allows him to get a little bit cockier, as opposed to being meaner and maybe with something to prove before. The match does a great job of illustrating why he has the right to get a little overconfident too, as he cuts off pretty much every big fancy piece of offense that ACH tries, right up until the very end. Sydal pays for that though and for deviating from the knee attack, as ACH gets knees up to block the Shooting Star Press. Without any reason for that to give him pause now, ACH can follow up with the Brainbuster and the 450 Splash for the win.

The ideal second match in a series, following up on themes, but still giving people outs and leaving three matches’ worth of stories on the table. Sydal gets too cocky and abandons what worked before, so while ACH finally beating him isn’t nothing, it’s also at least half a match that Sydal deserved to lose. There is still a higher mountain to climb, and two of them at that.

***

Matt Sydal vs. ACH, ROH Reloaded Tour: Dearborn (9/11/2015)

This was the first match in a Best of Five Series, following up their stellar outing near the end of 2014.

Unfortunately, this is nowhere near as great.

Matt Sydal comes to ACH once again with the classic Matt Sydal Fuck Them Kids World Tour match, in which he spends a lot of time working on the knee of ACH. While ACH did a fantastic job with it ten months prior, and will do a good job with it in later matches in this particular series, he’s just a little off here. It’s not to say he ignores it entirely like some others in this spot will, but there’s a lot too much running and flipping and jumping around without pause or concern for it to really be all that it can be.

That’s not to say this isn’t a lot of fun. They nail the theme of Sydal being a faster and more experienced version of ACH extremely well and establish that Sydal can get ACH away from the higher impact stuff that he’ll need to pin him, leading to going 1-0. Beyond what goes wrong, it’s a match filled with cool sequences and fun new ideas, all executed to near perfection. Unfortunately, that’s not quite enough, especially when they had previously set such a high bar both together and through their work separately as two of the best wrestlers in the world at this point.

Given the number of matches ACH has against Matt Sydal within a twelve year stretch, it was inevitable that he’d get trapped in one of these eventually, but it’s still a bummer.