Motor City Machine Guns vs. Apollo 55 (Prince Devitt/Ryusuke Taguchi), NJPW Circuit New Japan Soul Day One (7/5/2009)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from friend of the program Eamonn. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Shelley and Sabin’s IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Titles.

I’ve always been very partial to this series from 2009, in large part because like a lot of things from New Japan for a few years before the thing blew up, it seems like it’s largely been forgotten save for a few longer-term fans, even among the sorts of people (most of you reading this) who would absolutely love some Devitt vs. MCMG.

Machine Guns vs. Apollo 55 is a lot like the Time Splitters vs. Young Bucks feud/general Time Splitters arc, in that its larger goal is the elevation of the next Junior Ace right up until the singles series that would take him there (Omega/KUSHIDA, Marufuji/Devitt, but instead of being slow cooked for years, this one is hurled in a microwave as a result of both the Guns’ TNA commitments and also probably the need to speed this up given the state of the division, and done over the course of a trilogy instead. The goal is the same though, and given the constraints, it may be even more impressive, if not as rewarding.

Of their three together, my favorite is the conclusion in September, but this one too is magnificent, and following an undercard major show sprint in the first match in April, a major step forward, not only a great Korakuen Hall main event, but one of the better New Japan matches of the year too.

The match is a fireworks show through and through, and like the best of those matches, works on the level it does for two reasons.

Number one, it is astonishingly well put together.

Even by Machine Guns standards, I think this match (and the sequel) stand out among a handful of their very best. It’s what this sort of looks like in its ideal form, on every level. Mechanically, it’s as crisp as always from four guys who rarely ever disappoint in that way. Performance wise, working more from above and theoretically, as someone representing another company with New Japan’s titles, Shelley (if not Sabin as much) is again a real rude boy, even if the match isn’t entirely about that. Most of all, the construction of the thing feels like a marvel. It’s not overly loose, but they real confidently go into the big fireworks show without too long of any real period in control, but it’s never a mistake. The length of the match certainly helps them at twenty-one minutes, the perfect amount of time for this sort of wrestling when handled by guys like this, but every single thing feels correct. They hit the big moments and have these wonderfully showy counters, but they also get the things right that a lot don’t, like cut offs and teases of moves before they get hit so it feel like a forward step simply to hit one of these moves, or the way the match has enough dramatic nearfalls to get the heart pumping, but also manages to end at what feels like the exact right moment. These formulas aren’t lost, exactly — you’re reading about one you can find for yourself and look up, and hell, the Guns themselves are still doing it at a fairly high level — but you watch a match like this, and look at a whole lot of others to follow in its wake and trace its footsteps, and sometimes, it feels like they are.

Number two, vitally, there’s something behind all of these wonderful things, not just a reason for how and why things happen like they do, but forward progress in a classical kind of wrestling story.

Devitt and Taguchi have been a full time tag team for less than six months, and so much of this series is simply them learning how to be a tag team. Throughout their matches so far, including the first between these two and this one, the goal is always to get someone one on one against one of the two, with only a few real moment of teamwork or double teams on display. It arguably cost them against, at worst, one of the five best and most cohesive tag teams alive at this point, and the aim here is the same. The Guns go for what usually works, the classical twenty-first century strategy (I tend to mentally credit to the Briscoes as they were the first to really master it, but it has roots everywhere) in a tag in this style, spending the back half constantly cutting the other man off while pouring offense on the one left. It works again here,  with Fergal and Taguchi’s try failing, until the moment they finally begin acting like a tag team, and not two singles wrestlers competing together.

Apollo 55 spends all match trying to get that together, and it’s only once they do that they can finally succeed.

Ryusuke Taguchi shoves Sabin off the top to break up a double team, something they hadn’t quite been able to do before, before moving into their own two-on-one portion on Shelley. A double team Dodon’s Throne sets up the rarer, pre-Bloody Sunday finish from Devitt, the Prince’s Throne II (a Go to Cheech style set up and spin to the double knee gutbuster landing), and the boys win their first set of titles together.

This one’s always doomed to be a little bit forgotten, not only happening at a time where less were paying attention to the place, but also existing in an already stacked back catalog for anyone catching up years later, and the same can really be said for Apollo 55. Still, it’s always felt a little strange that wrestling this accessible — literally and stylistically — never seemed to get that much praise, because not only is it the kind of wrestling that so often does, but to me, one of the better versions of this sort of wrestling. I have a hard time explaining why something like the Apollo 55/Golden Lovers match fifteen months later caught on but this match and the follow up never did, it’s the same sort of wrestling, but longer and more grandiose and with even more famous names, but it didn’t. Still, if any of this interests you, this and the other matches between them are on Youtube in glorious 240p quality, waiting for you to dig in, and I highly recommend that you do so.

Still only the middle of a trilogy, something of a surprise and sudden victory before a third that ends any questions, but what a middle part and what a trilogy.

***1/2

The Briscoes vs. Murder City Machine Guns, ROH Good Times, Great Memories (4/28/2007)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from friend of the program Eamonn. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for The Briscoes’ ROH World Tag Team Titles.

It may come as a surprise due to being a real big public proponent of both teams, specifically on this site, but I don’t actually love this match. I’ve always wanted to, it was one of the first times in my time as a fan that I really felt that sort of disconnect, which had/has a way of breeding some resentment that was not totally deserved, but it’s never been a match I’ve been all that interested by. To put it more succinctly, if not for the commission, not only would I have probably never watched it again, I likely never would have even had the thought that I might want to watch it again some day.

Like Bryan Danielson in 2006, my least favorite version of The Briscoes came in 2007, during their big sort of rigging-the-WON-ballot prestige wrestling run with the ROH Tag Team Titles. While you have the undeniable stuff like the Steen/Generico feud or the PPV match against Claudio and Sydal, there’s also so many dull overlong epics that drag it way way down. Even more obviously than Bryan, it very much feels like a mandated thing, Long Matches Are Great Matches, this sort of checklist being ticked off in a way that feels maybe not outright phony — it is still The Briscoes after all — but that always felt so much more manufactured than the majority of their work before and after. This is nowhere near the worst offender, I do actually like this match problems and all, but as a half hour plus epic where clearly twenty-ish is the natural wheelhouse of everyone involved, it suffers under the weight of those certain expectations.

It is also just kind of weird, in ways that aren’t just about having or choosing to go so long, but that are made worse by it.

More than anything, the match feels like a large collection of ideas. Like they came up with every potential thing they could think of against each other at this point and just did all of them, without the sort of thought put into shape and form that you usually get from both teams at almost every other point in their careers. Shelley and Sabin — at least at this point, something like their 2009 NJPW work sees them improve so much in this regard — are not an especially good heel team either, cheating on occasion and doing a few stooge spots early on that feel sort of performative, but the match also feels like it’s hesitant to ever do more than pay light lip service to this being anything more than a prestige epic semi dream match.

There’s the idea that, in theory, this is about the Guns mocking Mark’s recent head injury from botching a Shooting Star Press and being heels, but they’re only ever really lightly aggressive and the head never comes into play. It’s why the SSP getting hit only for a nearfall isn’t as upsetting as I used to find it, but the dissonance between what this occasionally is and what it mostly is is also real distracting. Not helping that is that there are like five or six switching control periods in a row, which isn’t inherently wrong, but neither ever really gets the time to develop, so only one hot tag (the final one) really lands with any impact. 

Hypothetically, if I had to point to a match to show why the old Gabe hype phrasing of “state of the art” wrestling was usually some real bullshit, this might be the match I would point to. A lot of stuff, resulting in far far less than it ought t.

Ultimately though, the real problem is that on top of the Briscoes going long being a Gabe Thing in 2007, the Guns also weren’t exactly the Guns yet either. It very much still feels like a team of singles guys rather than the perfect unit it would become over the next year or two, figuring things out and experimenting. Watching them here — and kind of the match as a whole — feels like watching a super team in the NBA or a brand new high level recruiting class in college. There is something there, the design is maybe not perfect and not everyone is playing to their strengths, but on raw talent, you know they can figure it out eventually.

You know they can because in the last quarter or so of the match, they do.

The ultimate testament to these teams is that problems and all, in a few different ways, this is still great. Just barely.

When the switch does flip, the fireworks show is amazing. A bunch of really really cool ideas (for the jumble of stuff presented here, almost all of the individual concepts whip ass), and when they finally just present it as a pure display of stuff and hit the gas entirely, it feels like the match people always say it is, like all they saw was a 90s Japanese TV version of it that only had the last ten minutes. The crowd is obscenely into it, making nearfalls far bigger and more engaging than they might seem on paper, and in what is essentially a cool moves arms race, the coolest and sickest move in the Briscoes’ old Cutthroat Driver/Flying Legdrop move gets the win, as it should.

Really, that’s what gets me.

That what’s there is still as good, and sometimes as great, as it is.

You’re never disappointed in people who can’t do better, it’s the people who can who always do it. Not only in the great work done by both teams before and after this match, but by another match a year later, and also in the ways so many of their best matches were great. Hell, in the way that this match eventually became great itself. It doesn’t feel natural, it takes like three-quarters of the thing to really come together, and BECAUSE it was as great as it was when it really did begin to connect, one cannot help but wonder what might have been, had these two teams met each other at a more equitable point. One both where the Guns had it figured out and where they would simply get to be, like 2009 or 2010, or maybe even 2022. We’ll never know, and it’s nice that we at least got some idea, but this will always been one of those might have been scenarios.

I haven’t seen it in at least half a decade, but at this point, I think I might like their pure fireworks show sprint the next year better. It isn’t necessarily smarter, but from my memory, it is more honest, and given that that usually isn’t something either team struggles with, a match like this feels a little more disappointing every time I see it.

three boy

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Generation Me, TNA Final Resolution (12/5/2010)

This was a Full Metal Mayhem (TNA speak for TLC) match for the Guns’ TNA World Tag Team Titles.

A little over a year and a half before their first relatively famous one, the Young Bucks have their first great ladder match, unsurprisingly against the team that they’ve had their most reliable success with yet to this point.

You know how this goes.

The combination of the phrases “Young Bucks” and “ladder/TLC match”, especially when used as a combination together, ought to have told you, for the most part, if this could be for you. For the most part, you would be correct. If you’re maybe a little like me though — which is to say if you haven’t enjoyed the Bucks much in the last five years (basically from AEW on) but have a certain fondness for their earlier work — this might be something you could enjoy.

I certainly did.

This isn’t to say it’s their best match with the Guns. It isn’t even their best match with the Guns this year, or their second best really. Honestly, it isn’t even their best pay-per-view ladder match involving the Guns, although you have to wait almost six years for that. It does, however work for a lot of the same reasons as that Ultimate X match, combined with a lot of the reasons for the Bucks’ later artistic successes in the years following this TNA run.

Firstly, there is a ton of cool shit here.

All four have some great ideas to put on display here, often hitting that wonderful area in between cool and terrifying that can make for such an exciting feeling. The match doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but they find a lot of novel ways to use that ground. It’s a match that, in smaller ways, still feels really modern thirteen years later. Not so much that cliché about still being a few steps ahead of its time, but like, kind of just barely still ahead of its time. If it happened tomorrow — September 9th, 2023 — I would still call a lot of what happens in this match inventive.

Secondly, it’s really mean.

Like so much of the Bucks’ best work in the first half of the decade, there’s a real meanness of spirit to this. All the big shots and moments where a chair is swung or a ladder is thrown feel like they come with parenthesis containing some kind of shouted insult. It’s not a big brawl, but it manages to feel hostile in its own way.

The other major thing the Bucks got so right in the first half of the decade in these big brawls, beyond still getting that they are unlikeable freaks who should always be built up to be punished in big blowoff smoke & mirrors gimmick matches, was the design of the matches. The craft and construction. For the most part, save one single moment of setting up a table for no reason near the end, this is almost always a match where it feels like someone is either (a) trying to win, or (b) trying to punish the opposing team. Even the big piece of construction, a table bridge on top of three ladders to create a scaffold in a janky ass TNA fashion, is properly set up. The first half of the match is filled with moments where one of the guys tries to climb, but the belts are a little too high unless you stand on the very very top of the ladder. It’s maybe counterproductive of the match — and commentary with it — to point out that these are not tall guys, but it leads somewhere in the match, to a finish set up that might have otherwise felt a little hokey.

Another thing I liked a lot about this match was that, like the Ultimate X match and like the big gimmick matches (Ladder, Cage, & Ultimate X) against Beer Money over the summer, the gimmick and a familiarity with it really does matter in the end.

Generation Me is not as behind as they were in Ultimate X, this is not the Guns’ environment in quite the same way, but they are still behind, in a way more in line with the overall theme of the feud that sees ambitious kids overreach against the best in the world. They know how to use the ladders and succeed with big spots using them, but are always a little less successful in setting up moments to climb than Shelley and Sabin are, and more often than not, are the ones who pay the price for big set ups, as opposed to the Guns, whose big idea (table scaffold) pays off in the end.

Sabin and one of the Bucks wind up on the scaffold at the end, but true to the idea of the match and the series, the Jackson is nowhere near as comfortable up there. Sabin dodges a chair shot, hits his own to the back to send the kid off through a table below, and brings the titles down to win.

Not their best, but an impressive match, and one that I had personally forgotten all about. Maybe you have too. That’s not so much me saying to go watch it immediately or anything, but you know, if you come across it and are the sort of person who might like this or you saw one of their matches and just want to see more of these teams together, you can do a lot worse.

One of the better big stipulation matches the Bucks have ever had on semi-major pay-per-view.

***+

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

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Generation Me, TNA Destination X (3/21/2010)

This was an Ultimate X match.

For fifteen minutes tops, the Guns and the Bucks break out every flashy, silly, implausible, and wonderful thing that they can think up.

It absolutely whips ass.

When I go around and write things like “quality fireworks show” or find myself defending the idea of matches like these from some of you water brained freaks, this is the sort of thing I really mean to defend. This is what it ought to look like. Yeah, it’s 2010 TNA, you aren’t getting this with a great world of build or institutional support (although by even doing it and giving them half-decent time, TNA provides more than a lot of other companies might, could, or have before), but they get the mix pretty much perfect here.

Not only is there no attempt to disguise what this match is about, to lie about its intention before the bright lights and loud noises begun to erupt, but they manage to both structure the match very very well while also offering some genuinely spectacular sights to behold. Not only in terms of what they do with the trussing and the high wire act, but offensively in general. Even by their later standards, the Guns and Bucks’ work against each other here feels a decade (and counting, realistically) ahead of its time. 

Alternately, if you’re the type who needs a little narrative meat on bones this colorful, this match kind of slyly has you covered too, provided you have any sort of wrestling literacy whatsoever.

Most obviously, the point here is that experience in a new style of match matters. Mike Tenay is helpful enough to point out that this will be Sabin’s fourteenth Ultimate X match as well as Shelley’s fifth, while the kids are brand new. They never seem to quite get the right times to climb, and frequently lose any advantage when they do. They get it a little later on, but still really struggle, while the Guns always seem to know both when to climb, but also how to stop either Buck before too long. The match also makes a little something out of basic numbers too, with the Guns splitting the Bucks apart so they would always win the one on one matchups, but primarily, it’s a great display of how to make the stipulation really matter in a match like this, even if the clear goal of the match is much more about showing off as much cool stuff as possible. Even when it doesn’t matter, it always matters, which is a big component of every great Ultimate X match.

It even matters in the end, as one of the Buck tries to echo Chris Sabin’s strategy of getting all four limbs up on the wire and army crawling, but Sabin is a thousand times more comfortable, and stomps them in the chest from that same position, until they fall down. Sabin comes down with the X yet again, with the match doing nearly as much to illustrate how to win matches like this and that experience matters as it does to offer up a lovely little time watching some explosions.

The key, as always, is that the fireworks have to stand out. Go too long, throw too many of the same kind or color up there, and it stops feeling special. Get it totally right — or even just as right as a match like this manages to, even under these circumstances — and you have a real hard time forgetting it.

Even if, again to the credit of these team and somehow, this promotion, it’s only like the third best MCMG/Bucks match of the year.

***1/5

The Addiction vs. The Young Bucks vs. Motor City Machine Guns, ROH All Star Extravaganza VIII (9/30/2016)

This was a LADDER WAR for Daniels and Kazarian’s ROH World Tag Team Titles.

It’s easy to doubt this match.

In all fairness, there’s an especially fair complaint here about Shelley and Sabin kind of seeming like third wheels. Some 75-80% of this feels like an Addiction vs. Young Bucks match, it feels like that’s the real issue throughout, and while Shelley and Sabin obviously have a lot to offer this match (themselves once upon a time having an exceptional ladder match against the Bucks in 2010 TNA), they often seem like these bonus pieces that disappear for long swaths of the thing.

Again though, it’s one of those times in 2016 where I’m going to praise a match and I 100% understand you, The Readers, not getting it if you haven’t seen the match. Sabin has not been what he was in some time, the Daniels/Kazarian team has always been something of a “and then the bell rang” team for all their wonderful promos and stories, especially in this ROH run, and I’ve gone over the thing with 2016 Young Bucks again and again. There’s a version of this that does absolutely nothing for me.

Thankfully, that’s not the version we get.

Part of that, admittedly, is a real gnarly spilling of blood from Christopher Daniels. ROH being ROH, I don’t believe it to be intentional, especially when it comes right after a ladder shot right to the top of the forehead, but ultimately intention doesn’t matter quite so much to me, especially when the result is something this visually spectacular. I have been and will always remain in the camp of “a lot of blood can make a match better”, and this match is an absolutely stellar example.

The other part, beyond the bloodletting, is that this is just a really well assembled match of its kind.

Despite every problem or minor complaint I’ve had with any of these teams in recent memory, this is an absolutely stellar example of just what it looks like when a match of this style and caliber runs at something close to full strength, and what it looks like when everyone involved cuts as much of their shit as possible and delivers the goods to the fullest extent of which they are capable.“`

More than any of Ring of Honor’s prior LADDER WARS or even more then the Bucks’ PWG ladder matches, this is functionally just a full ass TLC match. Tables, ladders, a few chairs, and a sort of a match that is more focused on story, big moments, and more on making the really big things stand out. In that regard, it is a complete and total success. The sort of a match that is assembled with a stunning amount of confidence and executed in such a way that makes it clear that this match is confident for a reason. It is measured in all the right ways, insane enough in all the right ways, and with enough time to really breathe in ways that matter that allows the match to get the most out of every truly insane, dramatic, or brutal thing that happens in it.

Following a Cutler Driver (if you call it the Indytaker/Indietaker, you are either uninformed or the police) off the ladder through a ladder bridge, the Bucks get the titles down and finally regain the ROH Tag Titles. A long overdue win after clearly being the focal point of the division for a year or two and the company for the last nine months, but nobody ever accused 2010s ROH of being exceptionally fleet footed. They get there in the end, at the very least.

A banger, and a classic display of real professionals turning it on big time for a pay per view main event. One of the year’s better matches of this time.

***1/4