Alex Shelley vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi, Impact/NJPW Multiverse United 2 ~ FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (8/20/2023)

Commissions continue yey again, this one coming from longtime reader Bren. 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 Shelley’s Impact Heavyweight Title.

Having known me/followed my writing for some time, unless I am mistaken and this is a totally different guy with another name, I know that this was picked with love.

Alex Shelley and Hiroshi Tanahashi are two of my favorites ever.

They’re both not insignificantly responsible for some of the ways I think about wrestling. Sometimes people say I’m something of a harsh critic, which has never been anything I’ve aspired towards or intended, but if I made a list of guys who I consider myself very forgiving towards and/or whose matches I tend to naturally want to look on the positive sides of, Shelley and Tanahashi are both on and probably near the top of that list.

Unfortunately, time finally came for Hiroshi Tanahashi, and it probably came like a year or two before this match.

Really, I wish this happened like four years before it did, around the time of that great Tanahashi/KUSHIDA match. Hell, I wish it happened ten years before it did, around the time that they were having six or eight man tag matches together in New Japan. But that is not where they are. Tanahashi finally seemed to give in to Father Time at some point around the 2021 G1 Climax. He can’t run, he has problems bumping here and there (you may notice in this match a few times where a younger wrestler might do a fall onto a knee or crumble down, but where Tanahashi kind of awkwardly seems to opt for a back bump instead), and no longer is able to do what he did for so many years, possessing just enough to cover up for how hurt he is. Were Tanahashi at his physical prime, were his body still capable of keeping up with the mind that — as this match shows — CLEARLY still works great, this is probably a great match, like a lot of Tanahashi’s good to great Ring of Honor work around that time.

It’s still genuinely pretty good.

What works about this match are all the more abstract things that Shelley and Tanahashi can still control.

Both veterans of the double limb match, Tanahashi and Shelley have a lot to offer on both ends. Shelley’s ideas to attack the left arm are all both good and occasionally even still inventive (if 2004 Alex Shelley felt twenty years ahead of his time, 2023 Shelley still feels like a year or six months ahead with some of the transition ideas he works with). His selling of the knee is genuinely very good, and another case where real life physical knowledge very obviously helps him out, adding in stretches in down moments that feel and probably are genuinely things a trainer or PT guy like Shelley might tell someone to do to help with a hurt leg.

Tanahashi has less to offer here outside of selling the arm, but he still sells the arm very well, and shows what still works upstairs in moments where he clearly never has to show pain but still chooses to, or a moment later in the back half where — after being initially hurt via the classic double stomp to the arm holding the top rope transition — he has it there for a moment, but takes it away after half a second, not wanting to get burned again. Tanahashi is also great in some early moments at playing with the crowd, reacting to one guy cheering for another kick to the knee by repeating it until a bunch of people begin cheering for simple kicks to the kneecaps, turning a “ONE MORE TIME” cheer into holding up five fingers and getting a big reaction for kicking Shelley five more times in the leg. At all times, you can see the mind of one of the all-time greats, even if the flesh is lacking.

As a non-regular and more end-of-the-year catch up binge Impact watcher (fool me 400 times, shame on me), Shelley also does a great job at what feels like a slower turn, or at least the display of a harder edge. Small reactions at moments when the crowd sides with Tanahashi up through the end run, where Shelley throws a Boma Ye and Rainmaker out there in succession for a nearfall in what a guy who was there at the time knows is a bit of an insult. It’s not a one match heel turn, this isn’t Shingo and Gargano, but it feels like either a nice gradual escalation of something slowly happening on TV, or if I misread it entirely, a sort of slightly harder edge that comes out in more heated competition.

So, while not a great match, due to the limitations of Tanahashi in a match like this, pure mechanics and technique, still a match that I got something out of, and that I’m glad that I watched.

Alex Shelley keeps the belt with the Shellshock.

Not a great match, but one that still feels real good.

Kenny Omega vs. Moose, Impact Against All Odds 2021 (6/12/2021)

Commissions return again, this one coming from longtime reader Bren. 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 Omega’s Impact Heavyweight Title.

I suppose this is what the commissions are for. Making me watch a match that I absolutely would not have written about otherwise. Usually, I intend for that to be like 70s stuff or French Catch or old Chicago footage, and not a match that happened in a year I already talked about and that, instinctively, repelled me so much that I didn’t even consider watching it.

There’s a version of this that works, maybe three or four years earlier when Kenny had a genuine Midas touch. Moose works heel, throws him around, add in some props, and take it home in fifteen or less. Maybe not great, but, you know, breezy and watchable.

Unfortunately, they met at the worst possible time for these two to ever meet.

First, it happens in the middle of the pandemic. The first thing about this that stands out, now that this period has been over for a solid two years and counting, is how much I don’t miss pandemic wrestling, and how much it sucks to watch at in retrospect.

Yes, I wrote a lot of positive things about a lot of pandemic era wrestling, when that was all that was available on TV from the two big companies (and also Impact, I guess). Given what the situation in the world was, there wasn’t a reasonable alternative, so everyone made due. The best wrestlers made something of it, using the lack of anything else to focus on very good wrestling, and when that happened, the things that made it so hard to watch — the emptiness of the buildings, the community theatre black box style atmosphere with other wrestlers pretending to be a crowd, the total lack of atmosphere — had a way of disappearing. It really had a way of emphasizing, at least in a purely mechanical sense, what good wrestling was and what bad wrestling was.

On a nuts and bolts level, it’s no good. Overlong, boring, full of work with no real point as both the work on Omega’s back and Moose’s arm are both never interesting to watch or executed all that well or sold very well and barely even matter. There’s a lot of sloppiness here too, as Omega is very clearly wrestling hurt as he did throughout this entire run, which really has a way of hurting a guy whose greatest virtue is/was his athleticism. On a level beyond that, it is also bad.

The other thing is that, independent of the environment, it is also just bad wrestling, as Omega meets a real average-at-best wrestler at his own creative nadir, at a point where any version of the smoke and mirrors show was not only not available to them, but because of what he was doing as a character and how that was shown in the ring, he also wasn’t in a place where that sort of match would ever have happened, or at least in one where it wouldn’t have made any sense. The addendum to the commission was that, “this was the best that the Kenny Belt Collector bit worked”, and I don’t know if that’s true or if I have any hard opinion about if it was or wasn’t or what match I would say it worked better in (maybe the title loss to Christian?), but truthfully, that was a bad bit that saw Omega focus on all of the things he does poorly (being a convincing heel in the ring, being a convincing heel outside of the ring, basic striking, etc.) resulting in the worst run of his career.

Looking at it from farther away, I maybe get it.

The idea of a guy big enough for Omega’s (godawful phony bullshit) heel routine to feel like less of a put-on against, leaning sort of into Kenny’s obvious injuries by having him struggle to lift Moose for his move and also having Moose attack a bad back in the first half, all of that.

But like the idea of Omega as a long-term heel champion itself, it falls apart when you actually have to look at it from more than a thousand miles up in the sky.

Moose is bad at all the things this match asks of him, so much so that it feels like nobody putting this together (or maybe at any point in his TNA run) ever got why or how he worked in ROH to the extent that he did like five or six years earlier, and like all of his matches in this run, it also asks Omega to do the opposite of everything he’s actually good at too. It’s an empty house, a model home to show off that maybe looks nice at a passing glance, but with nothing actually inside. 

It’s bad pro wrestling.

Not the worst thing in the world, lord knows Kenny has had many many worse matches than this, some in this very reign, but the exact sort of match that in the process of writing about and trying to deliver what I think a commission warrants (rather than what I would likely do had I seen it of my own free will, which is turn it off after like five minutes, realizing I would get nothing from this, and forgetting about it within 45 seconds), I like less and less the more time I have to spend thinking about.

I have no idea why anyone would like this or what they would see in it, but I appreciate the money.

Aerostar vs. Taiji Ishimori vs. Drago vs. El Hijo del Fantasma, Impact Wrestling (5/10/2018)

Fireworks.

Despite that in real life, I do not get anything out of actual fireworks shows anymore and really haven’t since I was a teenager, I always have time for a good fireworks show in wrestling. Throw some sick dives and cool moves out of the air at me in a tight little package and more often than not, I am going to be pretty happy. It might not always be great in some bullshit star rating sort of a way, and this match does not quite achieve what the six man tag the week prior did, but it’s a lot of fun to watch three real exciting wrestlers show off their wares for a while.

Taiji Ishimori is also in this match.

Andrew Everett/DJZ/Dezmond Xavier vs. Aerostar/Drago/El Hijo del Fantasma, Impact Wrestling (5/3/2018)

People who need their wrestling to be smart or grounded or thoughtful every time out to enjoy something, avert your eyes. This is all bright lights, loud flashes, and incredibly cool combinations of both. One for the perverts.

It is a match packed full of incredibly cool and occasionally super inventive offense, carried off cleanly, and constructed in such a way that they get the most out of pretty much everything that they do. A lot of times, these matches can become really boring if I’ve seen some of the bits even like once or twice before, but this was rarely ever a match that I stopped paying attention too.

One could say more about it, talk in further detail about spectacular bumping, go in deeper depth on the construction of the thing and how they plugged a lot of the holes a match like this could have had, the strength of solid television editing, the precision of all six and how vital that total cohesion was to this working, all of that. However, like I didn’t exactly watch this match to see a display of grappling or some deep display of narrative excellence or deep wrestling psychology, I don’t think you clicked on this specific review for anything all that wordy either. Sometimes, a review ought to match the thing it’s for, and so I’ll leave it there. This was just a God damned blast.

Purely and simply, it whipped ass.

The best Lucha Underground match of 2018 so far.

***

Trevor Lee vs. DJZ vs. Taiji Ishimori vs. El Hijo Del Fantasma vs. Brian Cage vs. Dezmond Xavier, Impact Redemption (4/22/2018)

A whole lot of flashing lights and a whole lot of loud noises.

There are so many pretty colors on display in this match. Five (four and a half really, Ishimori is weird) of the six wrestlers are constantly doing really spectacular stuff here. They’re also doing it inside of a really well constructed package and doing it real crisply. The standouts are obviously Trevor Lee and DJZ, themselves already having had one (1) entirely great match against each other already in 2018, but the others are all real capable too. Fantasma ain’t exactly King Cuerno, but the dive works. Ishimori is present and the match asks no more of him than he can give. Xavier is also spectacular yet again in 2018 when given the chance, not a standout capital-s Star exactly, but a real nice little highlight reel wrestler.

Brian Cage is also in this match.

Unfortunately, the goal of the match is to highlight him, and so it lowers its ceiling significantly in a classic TNA/Impact/GFW/Impact Wrestling unforced error.

He is the least spectacular and least interesting of anybody in the match, throwing out the same power spots he’s been throwing out for the last five to seven years, the same stuff everyone gets bored by after the third or fourth time that they see it. Everyone gets fed to him, so it works because this is also a match with five absolute certified bump freaks, but it cannot help feeling like a large scale waste of talent, given that anybody who’s watched Cage knows how this is ultimately going to end up in six, twelve, or eighteen months. He does not Have It, and all the positive build in the world will not be able to mask it when he is eventually asked to go one on one with whoever he’s being built up for. He also fucks up the first real complex thing he has to do in the match, falling off the middle rope trying a springboard moonsault, and it stands out especially big in a match where everyone else is doing a hundred more complex things and pulling them off perfectly.

It’s honestly one of the better Cage matches, and maybe performances, in some time now, but it doesn’t really change anything (again, unless it is your first time seeing him, this is always impressive in a match like this), especially when like ninety five percent of the positives of what he’s involved with some from everybody else, and ninety nine (point nine nine nine nine nine) of the match’s positives come from every other participant in the thing.

Cage beats Xavier with the Drill Claw.

Name change aside, a classical sort of TNA bullshit, a stupendous little fireworks show, combined with some real dumb guiding ideas behind it all.

***

EYFBO vs. Drago/El Hijo Del Fantasma vs. Laredo Kid/Garza Jr. vs. Naomichi Marufuji/Taiji Ishimori, Impact Slammiversary XV (7/2/2017)

This was for the Impact and GFW Tag Team Titles.

Is this perfect?

God no.

Marufuji is wildly out of place in a match like this, although between one earnest flip dive to try and fit in and an uncharacteristic display of stepping back to let everyone else shine, it winds up being one of his more palatable performances of the decade. EYFBO (I am not calling them LAX, fuck you, they’re not my real LAX) always walk a line with their double teams in between good and clearly overcomplicating something for the sake of doing a double team. The others are not always the smoothest, with Drago taking a real rough spill off the top in particular.

It would be easy for this to be bad, or simply to not come together all that well.

It just does.

Everything — save those smaller bits — works out as well as it can. Fast and cool offense, pretty well laid out with things like building up interference from Diamante and Homicide and building up the big Fantasma tope suicida (the best in the game) for a big spot near the end as the dive all the dive trains kept teasing before paying it off, and just the sort of pure feeling that the best matches like this have. There are a bunch of things that could have gone wrong in addition to the small issues, but none do. There are a bunch of things that needed to go right for a match like this, without the world’s most inspiring line up, to succeed, and they simply all did, just about every single one of them.

This is a big dumb fireworks display, and when conducted with total honesty, in a great spot for a match like that where they don’t go even close to overboard, and in front of a super receptive audience for a match like this, it works.

Santana and Ortiz win with their move, but this isn’t about the result.

A fun little hoot of a match, flaws and all, and more importantly, a great little throwback on Impact’s anniversary show to a time when matches this wild were something much closer to the norm.

three boy

Lashley vs. Eddie Edwards, Impact One Night Only – No Surrender 2017 (6/16/2017)

This was for Lashley’s Impact World Heavyweight Title.

Impact’s ONE NIGHT ONLY specials are not a particularly serious affair. They’re taped months in advance, at best, and their relationship to current stories could be called quasi-canon at best. They are best known, at least in my mind, for either widely reviled womens matches or weird little bits, such as booking Beer Money vs. The American Wolves to pay off a long running super niche joke. They’re house shows put on (I think) pay-per-view for the diehards and overseas fans, and while that isn’t the most offensive thing in the world to me, it is rarely something worth looking into.

Even in this match, things are a little lighter and easier, as seen with the start of the match interplay with Lashley trying to butter up Eddie with a headband to match his own, and failing that, making referee Brian Hebner wear it againt his will. 

However, this is still a Lashley vs. Edwards match.

Like their other work together, including the most surprisingly great match of the year in January, these two rise above what ought to be, and succeed above any expectations I would ever have (as all expectations for Impact reset once a great match is over, I have been watching this company off and on since its inception, I have to protect my heart and mind above all else). If the entire company was up to the standards of these Lashley/Edwards matches, it would be the best promotion in the world, but things are what they are, and instead, this is just sneakily one of the best pairings of the year in a year largely defined by great repeat pairings (Gage/Tremont, Reigns/Strowman, and then some stuff in Japan idk).

There’s no magic touch here. Nothing about this is all that different from their other matches. You get a lot of the same stuff, rearranged of course, and then minor shifts around of where certain things are in the match. It’s a great house show version of one of the best matches of the year, and like a great house show match, I am almost as impressed by a great match that doesn’t have to be great but still is as I am by a match that is great on an even higher level. It shows not just a pure effort that I find so appealing, but also a real ability in its own way, to still have a great match without doing every single thing and having this entire apparatus of booking and big gimmick match layout to assist like they did the first time this year.

Eddie comes close to overcoming Lashley’s power and strength edge through speed and intelligence and mostly through guts, only to get caught when he makes one (1) mistake. It’s a classic story of the more confident heavyweight playing around too much, almost getting caught yet again (something I absolutely love about these matches is that they never forget Eddie’s title win over Lashley in 2016 and that the possibility for that happening again is not always ever present on commentary, but in the way both men react during these matches), and learning his lesson.

Bobbo catches Eddie repeating a dive, hurls him on the floor, and then quickly back inside for the Spear to keep the title.

(For like two weeks before losing it to fucking Alberto El Patron and kicking off a run of title holders that would include Austin Aries, Eli Drake, Johnny Impact, Brian Cage, and on down the line, because TNA/Impact/GFW/Anthem Presents Impact is completely incapable of sustaining anything great for too long a time before stepping over their own feet and shooting themselves in the dicks. But, you know, the whole Lashley run did objectively rule.)

Impact’s greatest one on one pairing does it again, resulting in maybe their least vital and, save for Impact’s best match in years between them in January, their most impressive outing to date.

***

Low Ki vs. Sonjay Dutt, Impact Wrestling (6/15/2017)

This was for Ki’s X Division Title, in Sonjay Dutt’s final ever challenge for the title.

It’s not the best match.

That’s not to say this is anywhere close to a bad match, but Dutt doesn’t quite have it so much anymore and the Low Ki you get in 2017 is not the Low Ki who is going to go absolutely psycho to make up for that, or at least he’s not about to do that in a ten minute TV match where he loses the title.

The strengths of this thing are not in the bell-to-bell aspects.

Instead, once again, it’s one of these times TNA/Impact Wrestling/GFW/Impact Wrestling/Anthem Presents Impact Wrestling/Impact Wrestling goes above and beyond and elevates ordinary performances through the strength of all of the other things that go into pro wrestling on television.

Sonjay Dutt makes his final ever challenge for the title after fourteen years of trying off and on and never getting over the hump. This is all put together in a wonderful and simple video package before the match that specifically shines when highlighting all the times Ki beat him in his 2006 reign with the title, and contrasting him to natural winner Low Ki (who’s been around barely a little longer and held the title a handful of times, going back fifteen years between the first reign and this one, on top of all the ones in between) standing in his way yet again.

Oh, and these tapings also take place in Mumbai, India, meaning that it’s not only a really hot crowd that doesn’t see a lot of wrestling like this in front of them, but a crowd that is dying to see Sonjay do it like no other crowd has ever wanted to die to see Sonjay Dutt do anything.

The match doesn’t do a lot more than live up to those expectations, step on the X’s on the stage at the right moments, and not let the overall production down. That’s fine. Low Ki is still as casually mean as ever even in a C+ level effort. What Dutt’s lost in athleticism and motor, he’s retained in likeability and charm. It’s all that’s necessary to make this work exactly right enough to make it to the end, and when Dutt blocks a Ki Krusher into a Tornado DDT and then splashes Ki off the top, everybody rejoices. Wrestling’s pretty good sometimes.

Once again, this is maybe not a great match, but it’s such an endearing total package that it doesn’t matter all that much. A lovely little chunk of pro wrestling TV.

Low Ki vs. Trevor Lee vs. Andrew Everett, Impact Wrestling (5/18/2017)

This was an Ultimate X match for Low Ki’s Impact X Division Title.

If you’ve ever laid eyes on this thing before, then you ought to already know I adored this.

Certainly, this match is not on the level of the great Ultimate X matches in the history of Impact Wrestling and TNA before it. It’s no AJ/Sabin/Petey, or MCMG/Beer Money, or one of my dark horse favorites in Low Ki/Daniels/Sabin/Shane. It’s certainly no match for LAX vs. AJ and Daniels in the fall of 2006, my personal pick for the best Ultimate X match ever.

It is, however, easily the most interesting one of these in years, if not ever.

While something like MCMG vs. Beer Money worked on a level beyond the usual stunt shows for fish out of water reasons, this is even more than that, both kind of setting this match back to what it ought to be or at least what it should be once or twice to really make it count again, and then delivering something real novel for a match like this.

First, it’s the hardest fought Ultimate X match in a really really long time.

Similar to ladder matches that have opted to re-insert some sense of struggle before any climbing comes into play, this is a match that takes the time and care to build up the climbing attempts. Not only in that it saves those big attempts for later on so that the match gets as much as possible out of them in terms of construction, but also in the sense that it emphasizes how hard the actual climb and travel along the wires really is. It’s constantly cut off, people are dragged off the top to the apron or the mat, shoved off to the floor, shoved into the steel truss that holds the whole system up, and things like that. The utility of this is also twofold, as it not only makes it into an accomplishment, this hard fought thing, when people are able to get up successfully later in the match, but it also adds a level of meanness and brutality that isn’t often on display, if present at all, in a match like this.

The second reason?

Well.

Low Ki blocks a chair shot from Trevor Lee by punching the chair into his face and sells a real bad injury to his right hand for the rest of the match.

To some extent, it’s some simple WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS BLOG? canon stuff.I love this shit. I don’t know why I love it, even years removed from my own hand injury and the way in which it affected my own physical labor at a far less physical job than wrestling. I just do. There’s something so cool about such an obvious and understandable injury, and someone who puts as much care and thought into wrestling as Low Ki does it absolute justice against Lee and Everett. He can’t grab, he can’t close his fist, he has to pull the glove off after a few minutes when the swelling comes in, it’s all very genuine feeling.

I would love to say that Low Ki doing hand selling is exactly as great as I always imagined, but honestly, I never imagined it. There are some things you never even consider to hope for, you know?

Beyond just that it’s one of my favorite things to see in wrestling though, it also gives this an element that Ultimate X matches rarely have. There’s been one or two with a hurt arm, as I recall, but nothing quite like this and certainly nothing where that injury matters quite as much as it does here. Low Ki not only can’t get out on the wire, but he can’t really even hang onto the truss for support when he’s on the top rope properly, and almost falls off a few times because he’s only supporting himself with the left hand. It’s an entirely new element to a match like this, which paired with a more stripped down and back to basics approach that the match takes even independent of Low Ki’s injured hand makes for such a cool take on this match.

Coolest of all is that, outside of the finish to the LAX vs. AJ & Daniels Ultimate X match from 2006 (if you’ve seen it, you know and if you haven’t, I won’t spoil it), they bring it to a head in my favorite finish to one of these matches yet.

Everett and Lee climb to the middle from opposite sides, but while they do that, Low Ki finally figures out a way to overcome. Using his three other good limbs, he climbs to the very top of the steel trussing, crawls to the middle of it, and slides through the middle to stand on the wires. With the good hand holding him steady and finally on decent footing, Low Ki kicks Everett and then Lee down to the mat below, before steadying himself on the wire, and unstrapping his title, proving once again that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Something about the size of a fighter and the size of a fight.

Low Ki finds a path through both smarts and guts, not only making himself look stronger, but giving a more thoughtful and understatedly violent match like this a finish that it both deserves and that stands out on a conceptual level. This is the good shit, and had this not been cut up by some commercials or opted to go even bigger with some of the louder moments, it might be one of the very best matches of the year.

The most interesting one of these matches in nearly seven years, armed with the sort of conceit that in the fourteen years of regular Ultimate X matches, nobody had quite thought up before. I’m certainly biased given the content of a match like this, but it’s just such a treat to see people actually do something with a match this rich in potential. Leave it to these three to find a way.

***1/4

Matt Sydal vs. Trevor Lee, Impact Wrestling (4/27/2017)

Lovely little thing.

More importantly and more impressively, a lovely little good ass television outing from a company where things are either great or may as well just not happen at all.

In his anger over losing the X Division title to Low Ki the previous week in Ki’s surprise return, Trevor Lee is met with another returning face (one could say returning to America or American wrestling TV after some time away for Reasons, but as the True Maniacs know, Matt Sydal had a brief little run as an enhancement guy in 2004, even being part of TNA’s first monthly pay-per-view, Victory Road 2004 as one of the underneath guys filling out an X Division Gauntlet For The Gold), and is again just thrown off of his game in really fun ways, leading to another loss.

Speaking in terms of mechanics, it is as precise and nearly without flaw as you’d expect from two wrestlers like these two. Sydal looks nearly as good as ever, maybe whiffing on one wheel kick early on, but very much looking like the guy who was top ten in the entire world not two years earlier (that sure as shit isn’t happening to anyone working nearly exclusively for TNA in 2017, but speaking purely of his form), and Trevor Lee is right there with him. Tons of real nasty kicks, slick evasions, and near perfect looking offense.

Lee runs into Helms on the apron, and Sydal hits the reliable Shooting Star Press for the win.

Not the best they can do, but a real light and breezy five minute television match. If not a full assed Great Match, then certainly a real impressive feat from two of the best.