Timothy Thatcher vs. Rampage Brown, IPW:UK12th Anniversary Show (9/4/2016)

This was a commissioned review from RB. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out. 

(photo credit to @TWrestlingmag on Twitter, as the Youtube upload of this match has a real ungainly watermark in the corner that I just dont love the look of.)

As one of the internet’s — or at at least this particular sphere of it’s — most ardent and longest tenured Timothy Thatcher advocates, there are few things the Thatchman has done that I don’t know about, or haven’t laid eyes on before. That isn’t bragging so much as it is a statement of fact. Since I first saw him in 2014, almost every time a new Thatcher match has crossed my field of vision, so long as it isn’t like a twenty five minute long Caleb Konley match, I make it a point of watching it as soon as possible. There are fair criticisms to make of the guy, but he wrestles in a way and with an ideology that I find very pleasing, and in a quest to — fucking get this, most of you could use this as a tip — not hate what I spend my time doing, I like to watch Timothy Thatcher wrestle a lot.

So, more often than not, unless we haven’t gone through a particular year on this blog, or in rare cases, if I just didn’t feel like I had anything all that interesting to say about a Timothy Thatcher match, I will have probably written about it before.

Anyways, there’s a reason I didn’t ever write about this without a financial incentive to do so, having already covered 2016 in great detail.

Rampage Brown is a real average wrestler with a great look and this is, in one of the more frustrating bits of the 2010s when it came to Thatcher and one of the more frustrating things in indie wrestling in general, yet another match in which a promotion brought Thatcher in to make some local boy look one thousand times better than they would against everybody else.

Of course, that all being said, Thatcher is really really great in this.

The most obvious thing is that his matwork is great, his holds are killer, and all of that. That’s not to say it isn’t totally and completely accurate, but it’s not all that this match asks of him and it is also the same in every Thatcher match, really. One of the great scientific wrestlers of the generation is stellar on the ground, throw a parade, you know? The real marvel here is, again, how great Thatcher is as a pure babyface. Not just in bumping and selling in believable and sympathetic ways to make Rampage look like something/anything as a heel force, but the ways in which he engages the crowd, mocking Rampage’s early powders or talking about kicking his ass to big ovations. It isn’t quite a revelation, Thatcher always had this in him and it should not be a surprise to anybody who ever paid attention, but a match like this is yet another outstanding example of just how many different things that Timothy Thatcher could do.

Brown wins with a Piledriver, but whatever, who gives a shit, this is Tim’s match through and through. It’s not to say Brown was horrible — as he is rarely worth mentioning in either direction, the least interesting sort of wrestler — but that virtually every piece of this thing that really worked obviously came from Timothy Thatcher, one of the best wrestlers in the world even in a match that wasn’t about him at all.

A loss beneath a wrestler of Thatcher’s stature and abilities, even in something of a down year in 2016, with a match one could describe in just about the same way.

Chris Hero/James Mason vs. Johnny Kidd/Doug Williams, IPW UK 200 (6/5/2016)

This was a Best Two of Three Falls match.

It’s another Johnny Kidd retirement tour match here, but in this case, the stipulation is actually correct. This will be Johnny Kidd’s last ever match in IPW UK. Now, that’s not because he stays retired so much, but truth in advertising in professional wrestling is the rarest of gift horses, and so we do not need to look inside of its mouth.

That’s sort of how I feel about the match.

It’s a lovely little gift.

There’s a real joy in seeing Kidd do his thing against James Mason for a while in this. While we don’t get nearly enough of Hero vs. Kidd here, it is delightful. Doug Williams isn’t as great and/or as fascinating to watch as the other three, but throws a hellacious little uppercut still, and contributes where he can. It’s so cool to see Hero do something different at this point, and as someone who misses a more grappling centric Chris Hero sometimes (we’re talking like mid to late 2000s here, not so much 2003 just bought real gear for the first time IWA-MS “every match has to be half an hour” Hero), it was a lot of fun to see that return, even if he feels like he’s in this far less frequently than the others, an outsider mostly observing.

You won’t find a whole lot of ambition here. It’s not like the Kidd/Quackenbush matches, either in terms of the story or the level of mastery on display. It’s not like the Kidd/Sabre Jr. match either, there’s no real hostility that begins to unfurl itself as the match goes on. That’s fine. Good wrestlers come together and create a charming little piece of old wrestling. It’s a showcase of a bunch of neat tricks and clever ideas, where Kidd gets to win one last time on his way out the door, no matter if he comes back in or not. Good and simple fun.

Everyone who watches this will have a wonderful time, and that’s a perfectly admirable thing for a match to aim for.

***

Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Johnny Kidd, IPW-UK Christmas Cracker 2015 (12/20/2015)

The winner of this match becomes the 2015 Christmas Cracker, fought under rounds rules.

As expected with all of these sorts of Johnny Kidd matches against children, it’s a lot of fun. An overwhelmingly good time in the expected way, and with the expected story. A middle aged man teaches some punk a thing or two, gets taken to task, before he’s able to pull it out at the end. Kidd’s craftiness and heart makes up for no longer having the speed or advanced technique that Sabre Jr. has going for him. Everyone goes home happy, it’s a real reaffirming sort of thing, unless you’re some sort of Zack Sabre Jr. superfan who needs him to win all the time, and if that’s the case, I’d like to ask you where his cell phone is.

Matches like these fall short if they don’t get every single part right. with each man playing it off with smiles and handshakes and all of that, and they do a sensational job of that. Zack can never really feel like an actual good guy to me, but because of him being who he is, it plays just as well as a smirking little display of condescension towards the veteran. Aggression eventually comes in after Kidd takes the first fall on a simple cradle cutback, and is played two different ways by the two wrestlers. You know what Zack’s looks like by now. Petty uppercuts, getting meaner with his holds, and pouting his way around the ring. Kidd plays it differently than that, throwing in little comments here and there about how to do this one right or asking if they taught Zack this one in Japan before he uses some old tricky little thing.

Zack uses the folded arm European Clutch to take the second fall, and gets unbelievably cocky about it. Having seemingly proven something, he abandons it entirely and starts trying to win. He throws more uppercuts than ever at the old man in a row, but it allows Kidd to grab him in a plain and simple inside cradle for the win.

While Sabre Jr. isn’t quite the best loser of a generation, or even as great of a loser as a sex creep who he’ll have many of his best matches with over the next few years, he does have a similar gift for it. He’s a great loser, but it also feels incredibly incredibly good to see him lose. While he’s lost better matches than this, it has rarely felt quite as gratifying or as funny as it did here to see him get totally schooled by an old man.

Like most of these Johnny Kidd rounds matches that pop up with your indie stars, it’s sort of a self affirming thing. If you think you’re going to like this, you almost definitely will, and ought to just watch it already.

An absolute blast.

***1/4

Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Chris Hero, IPW-UK Zack vs. Hero (1/19/2014)

Unfortunately, we have to start talking about British wrestling at some point. It was incredibly easy to ignore for the first four years of the decade, it’s still fairly easy in 2014, but within a year, it’s going to be as unavoidable as it was in real time. The best I can do is ease us all in, and there’s nobody better to ease you in than Hero and no better match up to ease you in than Hero and Zack.

This is a fairly unique match, as it’s a Hero/Zack match in which Hero is relatively skinny and in which Hero is more polite and jovial and not so straightforward of a bully. It’s not the only one of their matches like this, as they had an exceptional match on a WXW show in Union City, New Jersey in 2011, but it’s a rarity all the same.

This winds up being Hero’s best match since his return, because it’s a match that allows him to fully be himself. Not a returning legend there to try and get someone over quick, not him trying to approximate what a 2013 or 2014 indie crowd might want to see out of him and abusing his offense for cheap nearfalls. No, he gets to work a small room, slowly develop something over twenty minutes or so, and to just let something evolve organically. Aside from maybe the ACH match near the end of 2013, it’s the most since his comeback in which Chris Hero has felt like Chris Hero. It’s an IWA Mid South style Hero match, less in that it’s twenty minutes too long and more in the way that he gets to just stretch out and get really comfortable with everything going on.

Hero’s one of the great small room workers ever, and this is one of his better displays. There’s a few things that go into that. First is the ability to not give everything away or go totally wild when you’re a bigger star or presence than the room or setting you’re in, but to not ever have it clearly feel like you’re mailing it in. Hero’s had contemporaries that struggled with this, even if they might be better wrestlers than he is. Another part of it is the interplay with the crowd, and the way he can riff vocally on the match as it goes on in a number of ways. You read “Hero vs. Sabre”, you assume the matwork is great, you assume a certain level of chippiness to it, even some great strikes, and that’s all here. It’s all I came into this expecting to see. What I didn’t come into this expecting so much as a babyface Hero being jovial and light as hell, talking to the crowd and Zack constantly through the match. For much of the first two-thirds here, he feels as much like someone in an athletic competition as he does like someone in an informal seminar.

It’s that sort of attitude that informs the entire match. Hero begins making dick jokes with the crowd and lightly talking shit about holds, both his own and Zack’s. Why one thing is easy for him to escape, and why his hold will be harder for Zack to escape. It’s like he’s still trying to teach him like it’s 2010 or something, but Hero REALLY shouldn’t be trying to teach Sabre Jr. anything else at this point. Because as this goes on, it becomes more and more apparent that Hero doesn’t have a lot to teach him. Zack maybe lacks Hero’s encyclopedic knowledge of the science of the game, but he’s faster and just as inventive, and Hero slowly gets a little chippier about it with his comments. There’s a perfect little moment in the middle where Hero escapes an armbar and makes a comment that Zack likes his armbars, but he does something else with his arms and makes a motion to his right elbow. Zack just sort of nods at it and thanks him for the tip in a real sly manner that would be charming if it didn’t come from someone British.

That comes back around, of course. After getting rocked once by an elbow when Hero gets pushed a little further, Zack goes after the arm. It’s not an extended period of attack, but it doesn’t matter because Hero’s selling is so good. He uses it only once or twice after that, and can never make the most of it. There’s the old constant flexing elbow and forearm injury sell, not being able to grip, all the hits. In the same vein, Hero once again goes more to the left arm and his knees and boots  to try and save himself. An old master playing the old hits, beyond refreshing after he’s looked like a fish out of water in all his EVOLVE work and the PWG match against Adam Cole. Zack gets the armbars on anyways, and it’s when he rolls backwards with one to take Hero over into the double armbar, that Hero taps out in mid-roll in a great GREAT little touch. It’s the sort of thing you never really see, a little change from the ordinary that makes it feel so much more realistic than usual.

This is a match for people who were maybe frustrated by the lack of focus in their later more famous work. People who were maybe annoyed by the way in which Sabre Jr. fluttered (still flutters) around from hold to hold without letting a whole lot sink in. Hero did a better job leading him by the hand than most, but it’s still an innate part of who he is past a certain point. There’s not a lot of that here. There’s a clear line A to line b story here, not much in the way of excess, focused work, and it all ends in a very timely fashion. There are better Zack/Hero matches than this, probably, but this stands out as the clearest and most concise.

Most importantly, it’s the Hero/Zack match from which all the famous Hero/Zack matches spring up from.

Chris Hero’s been back for two months now, but it’s really really great to see Chris Hero actually come back in a match like this. Calm and clear and concise, a beautifully levelheaded and straightforward piece of work. Varyingly light and breezy and then also hard as hell at the right moments for each.

Beyond just the work, it’s a really cool story, the best version of the “you can never really go home” story that Hero’s been trying to tell with different guys for the last few months. Unlike some of those other wins, this was never a fluke or some highway robbery either. Once again, the cruel randomness of the sport is never flukes. It’s in how much changes and how quickly. It’s as precise a telling as there is of one of the best stories that can be told.

***1/2

Sami Callihan vs. Zack Sabre Jr., IPW-UK No Escape 2012 (2/26/2012)

Sami does his best!

This is actually a pretty great match for the first ten or fifteen minutes. Zack Sabre Jr. charging in at Sami for once to cut off his usual start and catch him off guard was cool, and then it became your usual Sami Sprint. Reckless stuff outside, hard shots, casual work at limbs that gradually mattered more and more as the match went on. A lot to like. My feelings were positive, up until a point. Then the Brits once again don’t totally seem to understand why a thing actually worked, so a Sami Callihan match pushes twenty five minutes. These two had a match in EVOLVE before this that was a lot of fun because it was Zack Sabre Jr. shoved into the Sami Sprint. Here, Sami Callihan is shoved into a Zack Sabre Jr. match, and that is way way way way way way less good at this point.

Instead of pacing themselves a little better to more appropriately fill the runtime, it’s instead just a Sami Sprint from the start and then it’s stretched out a lot. Sami does the thing where he casually chips at a knee here and there before getting more intent with it before the end. Zack Sabre Jr. does his thing there he works an arm casually, and occasionally a leg. Sami Callihan does an effective job of selling both when appropriate. I was ready here to talk about Sabre not being BAD here so much, because he has other matches in 2011 and 2012 that I like, I don’t think he’s some awful wrestler simply because he’s still learning, but he’s real rough here. Beyond the poor selling, he repeatedly goes after the wrong arm in what are supposed to be these big dramatic submission spots.

There is also this…

It’s the sort of big that if you can look at it and not immediately wince in revulsion at it, then I don’t know, man. We’re coming at this from two drastically different places and looking for many different things, I think. It’s neither realistic nor cool. It’s one of the worst fighting spirit exchanges I’ve ever seen, and the only real debate I will brook about it is if it’s more funny than bad or more bad than funny.

From there, there’s some more early trademarks of BritWres-ism, as on top of going on far too long, there’s some Booking to add into a match that needed no Booking, and which ultimately doesn’t matter much at all. Project Ego makes their way onto the stage, and Zack Sabre Jr. is briefly distracted to stop a Superplex. Sami throws him to the mat, splashes down on the leg, and goes back to what he had been doing. Except, it’s not the end. For some reason, Zack fights back, does a few more things, only for Sami to get back to the leg anyways and win with the Stretch Muffler. Why have that there at all? At best, it added something unnecessary to a match that was already firmly in that territory. At worst, it made them look like nerds, as their interference didn’t really even do anything. Zack came back and it was Sami who cut him off without help before winning with his hold on the next try.

If you’re going to do something, it should have some sort of impact or reason for existing.

Things should matter.

Otherwise why do a thing?

It’s the central lesson of every Sami Sprint, and one that nobody involved with putting this together besides Sami Callihan ever seemed to get, given that this company soon became RevPro, and dumb and meaningless crap like this has always been a part of RevPro too.

Terrific Sami performance here, and a great display of everything bad about the British Wrestling boom that was still just a few years off. A great example of both how great Sami is at this point, and also every reason BritWres was doomed before it even began. A terrific and staggering display of the British mind.

Fit Finlay vs. Martin Stone, IPW-UK No Escape 2012 (2/26/2012)

It’s the Fit Finlay show again. There are few better shows in wrestling.

Martin Stone is a more capable partner in the show than most other non-stars Finlay faced on this run. Finlay’s not quite so aggressive here, he begins the match working as Respected Veteran before any transition later on, but he still makes Stone fight for everything, as seen here in one of my favorite little spots in a long time. Finlay makes Stone fight for everything, and that includes doing something nobody else does, and simply refusing to go over for the takedown the first time and making him spend another minute or two fighting and earning the bump Fit eventually takes.

When the going gets a little tough, Finlay stops treating Stone with even a modicum of respect and brutalizes him on the floor. Fit moves into hyperaggressive work on the back down on the ground, and it’s SO MEAN. He’s the meanest man, and most impressively, he’s always mean in different ways and at different volumes. If he either genuinely respects someone, like TAJIRI or Mal Sanders, he’s only mean when genuinely pushed back against a wall. If he has no estimation for someone at all, like Martin Kirby, he’s sometimes barely mean at all. He’s never quite as mean as he was to Sami Callihan, but Stone’s still a talented younger wrestler who pushed him, so Fit really turns it up and turns in a brutal brutal performance. Finlay in a match like this is the best possible version of a 2010s mailing it in style Low Ki, in that he’s as brutal and fun to watch eating someone up, but does so in a much more careful and measured way, without the stark difference between this and his bigger efforts.

Stone himself isn’t quite so great on the comeback. His back selling isn’t perfect and his offense is fine. Not great, not bad. It’s simple and to the point, and if nothing else, he does genuinely seem mad as hell on the comeback.

It gets cut off before too long, sadly, and Finlay abruptly wins with the Tombstone Piledriver. It is what it is.

It’s a match largely dominated by a one sided heel performance and with a real abrupt finish, but when it’s Fit Finlay putting forth such a domineering performance, I have no problem with it at all. Finlay is worlds better than all but maybe ten to fifteen wrestlers in the entire world, there’s no point trying to lie to me about it.

***

Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Wild Boar, IPW-UK No Escape 2012 (2/26/2012)

This was a B Block match in some fucking tournament. I’m doing this to do a bit for like five to ten people. Did I watch the show for this? No. There’s a Fit Finlay vs. Martin Stone match on here, and another Sami vs. ZSJ match. But hey, while I’m on it, there’s this too. It wasn’t all that great, nowhere near as good as the FABLED 2018 match from ATTACK!, but not a bad match at all either. Boar’s a little basic, Zack’s still got a long ways to go, but it’s easy to admire the ambition they have and the strides they’re making.

I mainly just want to remind you that this is out there.

Yet another Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Wild Boar match that you haven’t seen.

The Leaders of the New School (Zack Sabre Jr. & Marty Scurll) vs. Future Shock (Adam Cole & Kyle O’Reilly), IPW UK No Escape (3/6/2011)

The rarely discussed first match. It’s not something I’ve ever seen before, but when looking it up, I found that RPW’s on demand service had a two week trial deal. I’m taking advantage of that, and if there’s something on there you want to say without paying anyone, I’d advise you to do the same. 

Don’t watch this shit though.

I liked their 16 Carat match (which happened a week later) a lot, despite the problems that stemmed from youth and a combination of bad European wrestling brains and Kyle just making bad decisions a lot of the time. This has all of those problems without any of the virtues (charm, hot WXW crowd, everything working as well as possible). They start pretty well, with some fun matwork and hard hitting, and then it loses its way and never finds it again. I don’t entirely blame Kyle because there were two opponents and one partner who didn’t reel him in a little more, but he did a whole in this that took me out of it, especially with Zack in some real unfortunate would-be shootstyle stuff. 

The “10,000” hours” theory isn’t really true about pro wrestling, but it’s a lot truer about this style of wrestling than many others, and it’s why this sort of stuff is one of my bigger pet peeves. Nobody does it worse than pre-2015 Kyle O’Reilly though, so, jesus christ man, I’m just gonna go into it. I hate him. I don’t hate him so much anymore, he stepped up a level in 2015 and while he’s been allowed to be schticky and lame in WWE, I don’t hate him the way I did for like five years. 

Young Kyle bothers me here in the way that the young fiery kicker archetype almost always bothers me. Kyle inherited Davey Richards’ kind of hollow eyes that always give away the entire game, so nothing he does feels legitimate, which is a problem when he’s working a style that tries to say it is the most legitimate. He just fucking bothers me and I’ve never been satisfied with how to best explain it. Sometimes, a person can just hit a point with you and everything that they do bothers you, and I absolutely can’t deny that Kyle is there. Every facet of his being makes me at least a little upset. Everything about him feels phony as hell and incredibly calculated. He’s a nerd and like the eyes he inherited, he doesn’t understand subtlety. Everything is big sweeping gestures once a certain switch flips, and all of his big stupid gestures feel like a put on. I’ve always felt a natural aversion to something so obviously being marketed to me, and I’ve rarely felt it more than with this schmuck. Kyle O’Reilly is absolutely the result of extensive market testing, performing the sorts of functions of technical wrestlers who everyone loved, but with absolutely none of the heart or the understanding of why things worked. 

Look at this and try not to become physically ill.

I’d call Kyle the worst part of the match and blame him alone for the reason this isn’t as good as the rematch a week later in Germany, but this also has future Rev Pro style British commentators, so Kyle’s only the third worst part of it. Sections of this sort of preview how good the 16 Carat tag will be, but this is not very good at all. Disjointed and weird, managing to both go too big and too small at the same time. 

At some point, one of these teams used a move to win it. 

I’m gonna level with you, I didn’t finish watching this. I was watching ALIEN: COVENANT on the television with this match on the computer, and I had taken my headphones off at some point in disgust. I just never bothered pausing the match. I checked the tab again after one great scene, and then the match was over. 

I’m not going back. 

I highly recommend ALIEN: COVENANT. Fassbender’s terrific.