AJ Styles vs. Rey Mysterio vs. Ricochet vs. Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Robert Roode, WWE Raw (9/23/2019)

This was an elimination number one contenders match.

I’m not gonna tell you you have to see it.

You don’t, really.

What it is is thirteen or fourteen minutes of cool moves, that’s constructed incredibly well and led by two of the best wrestlers of all time in Rey Mysterio and AJ Styles. It’s not going to make a single list, except maybe like best WWE TV matches in this specific September, maybe. It is, however, less talked about — both overall and in hyper-niche circles full of people who know about deeper WWE TV cuts — and a match that impressed me more than a lot of the other big multi-man WWE matches this year (primarily those prestige ass gauntlet attempts that are never ever able to recapture the 2013 Bryan magic) and a bunch of other stuff that I watched and either was not moved in the slightest by or found too boring to write about in what is, essentially, just combing for anything this year I didn’t get to initially.

Basically, I liked it more than I expected to, and since I had never heard about it, I thought someone out there might too.

AJ Styles and/or Rey Mysterio is almost constantly in the ring holding the hands of everyone else in there, and the match is relatively short enough for how many people are involved that the less skilled or currently skilled guys like Nakamura, Ricochet, and Roode really only have to do a few things here or there. Ricochet only has to the big sensational things, Roode has to do a few things and be a base/foil for Rey in the last ninety seconds, and Nakamura really only has to hit a few knee strikes. Everything else is either offense from one of the greatest offensive wrestlers ever, a bump from one of them, or something set up between the two of them (and while again limited, AJ and Mysterio seem more and more comfortable together every time).

Mysterio beats Bob Roo with the 619 and Frog Splash.

Really good and borderline great television bullshit, light and breezy and full of cool stuff but exactly short enough to not ask anything too overzealous, anchored and built around two of the best television wrestlers of the century so far. Inessential, but another reminder of just how easy it all can be.

three boy

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

Roderick Strong vs. Bobby Roode, WWE NXT (8/30/2017)

After losing the title to Drew McIntyre at Takeover a week and a half prior, Bob Roode heads on up to the main roster, but not before giving the Rod Dog his win back to end what was a far far far better and more interesting story.

This is not as great as the title match.

It can’t be, for a number of reasons. They’re all results of decisions made by the company and brand, it’s not like a hurricane hits Full Sail and they have to wrap it up in a tight seven while everyone gets evacuated, but not every one of these decisions is the same. The fact that you can’t come out of nowhere a second time with how great this pairing weirdly is compared to every other Roode match in his NXT run (or in his career period since like 2012) is nobody’s fault, really. The fact that Roode has been moved up to the main roster and has lost the title, so this match has an obvious outcome and feels less important, that’s a little in somebody’s control, but not the fault or Roddy or Bob Roode exactly.

What holds this back, independent of what feels like factors a little less within anybody’s control on a more structural level, is that this is just more of an NXT match, whereas the title match felt like, in most other years, it would simply be the year’s best TNA match (this is a compliment, as it was simple pro wrestling booking enhancing a clear and direct normal ass pro wrestling match that likely would have been pretty average without certain decisions made).

Instead of giving Roddy the less typical leg injury to work with, this is a match that instead has Roode working on the neck and back, in a far more ordinary set up that allowed Bob Roode to revert back to a more casual form. The more casual shift in focus also allows them to get a little deeper into NXT-isms at the end, big facials, Roddy blowing a kiss goodbye before hitting his finish twice in a row to win, making a production out of everything possible in a way that doesn’t feel all that organic or natural, which is something that their first match was shockingly great at.

Still, this is a match that gives Roderick Strong fifteen to twenty minutes of television time and a slightly above replacement level opponent with which to work, so we’re still talking about a great match.

First things first, in a mechanical sense, well, this is a Roderick Strong match. Everything lands perfectly in a visual sense, and comes with a big smack or a special snap on it as well. Roode even gets into the spirit of the thing by throwing some of his loudest right hands in recent memory. I’ve been watching Bob Roode matches since, like, the 2002 Super 8, and these matches are the first time I’ve ever really thought he had a hell of a right hand on him.

The focus of the match is also pretty great, and if not as interesting as Roddy’s hurt leg in July, still ultra functional and approached in a fun way. It’s not attained through pure fluke and accident and unfortunate chance like the ankle injury, but it works on the same level, with Roode shoving Roddy away a few times and it never being clear if he knows the post or steps are nearby, or if it is once again blind luck going against Roderick, only in a way he can fight back against much more easily not. There’s also a fun little side effect of the lazier choice of focus, where it feels like Roode is dabbling in magicks he doesn’t understand, and so Roddy can not only fight back with much greater ease — both because Roode now doesn’t take away his explosiveness and because Roddy knows back work better than anyone in wrestling — but pay Bob back in his own coin. It’s a nice little story, Roode biting off more than he can chew to be as humiliating as possible, and directly paying for it.

So, while this isn’t a match that achieves all it could, it’s still one that just naturally works. The finish is a little lame, but after the last year and especially these two Strong/Roode matches, it feels good to see him get run over like this. Roddy hurls him in a particularly fun little way with the End of Heartaches at the end, not throwing him like he would a junior heavyweight, but just hoisting up the dead weight and barely chucking it over. It feels a little more painful and a lot more hateful, and it’s a real nice finish they come up with.

A less successful sequel to one of the year’s surprise hits, but “less successful” in this sense simply means that it doesn’t quite hit that shockingly high level. For the second time, the secret best wrestler in the world grabs a hold of Bobby Roode of all people, and overachieves at a stunning level, delivering a sequel that is satisfying and still worth your time, if not quite on the level of the original.

***

 

Bobby Roode vs. Roderick Strong, WWE NXT (7/5/2017)

This was for Roode’s NXT Title.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked much on here about the NXT Title, since Kevin Owens held it over two years earlier. While the reign of Finn Balor was hardly bad, and while that Joe/Nakamura/Roode lineage was hardly the world’s most offensive wrestling, none of it has really been either interesting nor great enough to talk about. That’s not to say I haven’t watched a lot of those matches just in case, but they were typically the sorts of matches that either I was initially right about being pretty dull, or in the case of some of the Balor/Joe matches or, recently, Roode vs. Hideo Itami, I just didn’t have a lot to say about beyond “this is good, ***”, which is really not something either you, The Reader, nor I, The Writer, have all that much interest in.

However, in secret while hidden on a shelf in Orlando, Roderick Strong is still one of the best wrestlers in the world, and has a way of breaking through in situations like these.

To be entirely fair, this is not some all Roddy carryjob.

Bobby Roode, genuinely, turns up and delivers the best performance I’ve seen him give in close to half a decade.

Now, that’s not the highest standard in the world. I’m not sure the fifth best Bobby Roode performance ever is a top one hundred Roderick Strong performance. I’d bet my life it’s not a top fifty Roderick Strong performance. All the same, he showed up here and was pretty good in the ways Roode can be pretty good. Aided by booking and doing a basic heel routine well, coming off as genuinely contemptable, and getting the little things right. His selling of the back after Roddy’s initial onslaught and through the end of the match is genuinely very good, and his control work on Strong’s leg is really good in a very specific kind of a way. It’s tight and mean, but never this virtuoso performance that (a) would inhibit the Rod Dog in ways that would hurt the match, or (b) that undercuts what Roode essentially is as a character, a jack of all trades and a master of none conning and blustering his way through life and being more lucky than great. In the later stages of the match, the match simply asks character work of Roode and he’s genuinely very good at that too. He’s not only despicable with the cheap shots at the very end, but has one of the better NXT Kickout Faces in recent memory, managing to convey shock, but without it feeling like some Shawn Michaels community theater performance.

It is an aberration, aided by setting, the ability to edit, and the environment of NXT from crowd to these stories told to this opponent, all of it. There’s no one thing to point to a to why, this one time, Bobby Roode had a performance this good, but that ultimately doesn’t matter all that much. He simply had a performance this good, period. The joke has long been that Bobby Roode’s NXT push came as a result of him always clearly being a huge Triple H fan and modeling so much of himself after him (even down to gross old man looking knee muscles), and a match like this feels like the sort of thing that I not only wish we got more out of Roode’s career in terms of both character and performance, but out of Hunter’s as well. it stands out in a career full of performances that have felt like he’s wanted to do something like this but either didn’t quite know how, or didn’t have the help he needed to get there.

Then of course, there is Roderick Strong.

Everything he does is great, yet again. If you’re reading this blog, I do not imagine this will come as a surprise. There’s more to it than just mechanics, it’s not a 2008 Roderick Strong match, but the mechanics are pristine. Every piece of offense is crisp and it’s fast, and it seems like it happens at exactly the right time and in exactly the right way. Beyond that, Roderick is also a tremendously emotive performer now that he’s cast as a hero again, not over the top in a phony way, but always coming off as the sort of person you’d want to cheer for, following up on those famously great 2017 NXT vignettes.

Roderick’s knee selling in the back half of this match is also unbelievable.

I complain all the time, or at least I fear I do, about people in action-centric matches who have their knees worked on and go through their stuff anyways without too much of a problem. It’s not the worst idea in the world, but it’s so often misapplied to people who aren’t great at communicating this idea while still having the match they want to have.

The exception to that, or rather the example of how to do this perfectly, is Roderick Strong in this match.

Strong is hindered but never rolling around and crying after everything that goes wrong. His approach to conveying pain is the same as his approach to being a kind of people’s champion babyface here, believable and likeable, but never over the top, and even more likeable for the way he guts it out while still acting realistically. He makes the most of his steps, he makes big strides, and is the rare wrestler who can have a match with a lot of knee work and still run and jump around in the last third of the match and have it work without any real issues. He hits all the obvious notes you’d expect when landing on the bad leg or coming down hard, but it’s the smaller touches in between those moments that most wrestlers forget, and that Roderick Strong excels in.

Independent from individual performances, it is also just incredibly well put together. It’s done so in a way that really benefits a match like this, with only one actual great wrestler involved. The way Roderick’s knee gets hurt is especially great, coming less as a plan and more as an accident when Roode shoves his hands off of him when Roddy is on the steps, and Roddy happens to fall real artfully with his left leg in between the steps and post. Rather than having Roode earn that, it’s something so much more perfect, Roderick suffering another unfortunate twist of fate to his detriment and Bobby Roode lucking out yet again, because nothing is quite so despicable as pure luck in the favor of somebody horrible. The same goes for the end of the match, where Roode just barely gets his foot under the bottom rope, and the referee isn’t fast enough about telling Roddy it doesn’t count, allowing Roode to recover and cheaply knock the Rod Dog off the apron into the railing.

Bob Roode keeps the title with a Glorious DDT outside, and another one inside.

A fantastic individual chunk of pro wrestling, and small venue and different color scheme or not, this is still a WWE production and that is an accomplishment in any WWE production. It’s the build up match to a Roddy title win that never comes, and that’s obviously very frustrating given how great he is and given how this is the only time the entire Bob Roode in NXT worked at all, but this is the WWE and again, if you ever find yourself expecting anything beyond an immediate moment, you are playing a sucker’s game in which you are the sucker. Buy the ticket, take the ride, all of that, and given that, this was an unexpectedly fun ride to go on.

Roderick Strong is (probably) not going to make a Wrestler of the Year list in 2017, the hits are too few and far between, but a performance and an achievement like this has a way of making it clear just where the power still lies and who the best wrestler in the world might really still be.

***1/4

 

The Wolves vs. The Dirty Heels, TNA Impact (7/1/2015)

This was the fifth match in the Best of Five Series for the TNA World Tag Team Titles.

Unfortunately it was a thirty minute Iron Team Match.

This was bad. It’s not to say it’s without positive moments, as Eddie Edwards cared enough to sell a leg throughout the rest of the match after an early attack on it, and the last five to ten minutes had a lot of of exciting action. It is however an iron team match where they don’t score a fall for the first twenty minutes plus and where the action is nowhere near exciting or interesting enough to carry that burden for them. It’s a match that goes as far as possible without doing much of anything, either in story or on a mechanical level.

It’s lazy and boring, and after the previous three matches that have all been pretty good to great, that just isn’t an acceptable outcome.

TNA is reaping the benefit of the last thirteen years of shooting themselves in the foot at every available opportunity so you can’t say any one thing hurts them at this point more than the toxic brand they’ve cultivated, but it says SOMETHING that they followed an exciting gimmick match in Match #4 with this. It’s an unbearably dull attempt to force an epic, but involving talent who didn’t seem to care at all about having one.

Still, they get two or three great matches out of this series, which is more than I ever expected out of TNA in 2015.

 

The Wolves vs. The Dirty Heels, TNA Impact (6/24/2015)

This was the fourth match in the Best of Five Series for the TNA World Tag Team Titles, and it was a FULL METAL MAYHEM match.

In this specific case, this is now just an indie style TLC match where the match type is simply a description of the weapons they are encouraged to use. Yes, not even a year prior, this company held a Full Metal Mayhem match where you had to win by bringing down the titles. In the past, a ladder match in a Best of Five Series was also in the middle of the series, so you can’t say anything to the effect of “well what would they be pulling down?” either. It’s just that this is what they were doing this time, and it changes all the time based on situation, the people involved, and maybe just what direction the wind is blowing in. You can call it Impact Wrestling and be on good behavior a lot of the time, but it’s stuff like this that means it will always spiritually be TNA.

The match rocks though.

It’s easy stunt show stuff, with a few nice little offensive innovations from Aries and the Wolves. Roode again sticks out like a sore thumb when they try to move a little faster and get a little more dangerous, but he again knows to stay out until the match asks him to do cheating or one of the set spots he knows how to do. There’s a delightful extended spot near the end in which Aries has a garbage can over his head for a minute or two straight, and they go in some new directions with it. They’re all brutal and violent, but also enhanced by the pure physical comedy of the moment.

A perfect finish follows that, as Roode shoves Richards off the top to block a Powerbomb double team, low blows Eddie Edwards, and lets Aries fall off of him with the trash can still on his head before covering to take it to the obvious and deciding fifth match.

To that point about TNA always being TNA, this is yet another great tag team match that achieves that status independent of every other horrible or embarrassing thing around it.

The same as it ever was.

***