Team FIST (Icarus/Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano) vs. The Colony (Fire, Soldier, & Green Ant), CHIKARA King of Trios 2011 Night Three (4/17/2011)

This was the finals of the 2011 King of Trios tournament.

To get it out of the way first, the booking is not ideal. This isn’t entirely a “The Colony won too late” bit, because I understand some of those calls. The Colony weren’t a trio when King of Trios 2009 happened, and 2010’s BDK victory was necessary. The big one is that they should have won in 2008, given how colossal of a failure the big Lince Dorado push ultimately was. There’s also the issue of Claudio’s absence ruling the BDK out of the finals, and leaving Nu FIST as the only other heel act that’s halfway established and good enough to be a worthy foe for this moment. That presents the biggest issue of all, which is that this is a settled issue and has been for two years.

This isn’t a match without tense moments and a few dramatic twists and turns, but The Colony doesn’t have to get revenge on these guys like they do the BDK. That’s a wrong yet to be righted. This is a wrong that’s been righted before. It’s hard to muster up the same emotion, given that that entire element just about telegraphs the result. Given that and the idea that winning of King of Trios hardly feels like the same sort of accomplishment in 2011 that it would have years earlier, this doesn’t feel quite as big as I think they wanted it to.

Now that every problem with this match has been laid bare, this is a great match!

There are four great wrestlers in this match, one good one, and one bad one, and the other five are talented enough and helped out enough by clever layout that they don’t let John Boy drag the entire ship down with him while he fails to swim in deeper waters. Green Ant’s bad arm plays a part, and he’s already good enough to care about it for the duration of the match. Fire Ant The callbacks to the 2009 matches don’t quite hit their mark for the reasons discussed earlier, but they don’t waste a lot of time here and the big nearfalls wake up this graveyard of a crowd. It’s enough to cast any real doubt onto this thing, but they’re enough to make this good as hell along the way to what very obviously comes to pass. Icarus gets beaten with the mother of all Ant Hills.

It’s the third best ever FIST/Colony match ever to this point, at best, but it does everything it needs to do. Not the moment it should have been,

***

Team FIST (Icarus/Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano) vs. Team Osaka Pro (Daisuke Harada/Atsushi Kotoge/Ultimate Spider Jr.), CHIKARA King of Trios 2011 Night Two (4/16/2011)

This was a quarterfinal match in the 2011 King of Trios tournament. 

Good and simple storytelling. Harada and Kotoge (yes, they were Osaka Pro before they were NOAH!) impressed on their CHIKARA trips in 2010, making it all the way to the semi finals in the 2010 King of Trios, along with fellow Osaka -> NOAH traveler Tadasuke, before losing to FIST rivals The Colony. On their way there, they embarrassed the then FIST trio of Icarus, Taylor, and Gran Akuma. Months later, Akuma would be ex-communicated and replaced by John Boy here. 

The match doesn’t exactly do an expert job of working to that, outside of Ultimate Spider Jr. being worked over for a long period. It’s more of a pure spotfest, but that fits in with the skillsets of two-thirds of the match, Icarus and Big Dust notwithstanding. Everyone’s pretty great at that though, and the match could have been far worse than it was, if say, they allowed Johnny Gargano to do more than a few things. He’s pretty terrible in this, easily outworked by Spider Jr. and just about everyone else in the match and on the show, but he’s not allowed to affect this much, and the match carries him up with it like a small boat.

They get into a really delightful fireworks show at the end, before one of CHIKARA’s strongest attributes rears its head for the finish. Companies with less respect for details might use a match like this to try and legitimize John Boy with a clean win at the end of it all, to send everyone away happy, no matter that a heel team was winning. Instead, Chuck Taylor cuts off the flashing lights and loud noises by slingshotting through the ropes and rolling up Spider with a handful of tights to steal it. Great stuff. Tease out something everyone can be happy with it, and rip it away. This isn’t about cool stuff, this is about good and evil, and this particular sort of lower tier hatefully banal brand of evil has only grown stronger since the last meeting. Nu FIST, like Team FIST before them, are not to be admired or legitimized in any way. Actual skill is secondary to the fact that they are a rotten group of young men. They cheat because it’s easy, and do harm when they can, solely because they can. 

You’ll get everything you want some day, but it’s not coming in the quarterfinals. 

A great little match, and more importantly, a really great display of tournament wrestling.

***