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