Undisputed Era (Roderick Strong/Kyle O’Reilly) vs. Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch, WWE NXT (6/12/2019)

The television sprint version of one of the previous year’s best matches.

It works for all the same reasons, mechanically speaking.

Two of the best wrestlers in the entire world in Rodddy and Oney have ten minutes to unload, and the match smartly orients itself around them, both against each other and as the anchors of their teams. Kyle is again at his best with the Rod Dog setting the pace and direction, and with a guy like Lorcan to bounce off of. Oney is a ball of energy unlike anything else in the company, basically starting the match on a de-facto hot tag run, while also delivering in the back half too, on top of adding in a great in-peril performance in the middle. Roddy and Kyle don’t have the resume this year that they in in the previous one, but their control work is as great as always. Mean and crisp and cool and perfectly assembled.

Danny Burch is also here and, objectively, is fine. Cursed to be a good wrestler in the ring with three great ones, not an active detriment, but clearly the odd man out.

Like their last match though, again, the match is better off for kind of leaning into this, and works in the same way narratively speaking.

Oney Lorcan is now even better than he was then. Narratively, you can chalk it up to time on his own on 205 Live and facing and beating a higher caliber of wrestler than he had in the WWE up to this point. He starts hotter than ever here, is more successful individually against both Strong and Kyle than he was a year ago, but he still has to carry more than 50% of the share, and suffers for it.

There’s a great bit in the first half where it feels like the protagonists set up for a double dive spot, only for Oney to hit a flip dive onto both of them by himself, and basically, that’s the match. Roddy and Kyle also  take over when Danny is unable to hit the same corner attack on Roddy that Oney hits on Kyle on the other side, creating the exact amount of space needed for Roddy to get Oney in a two on one. Even when Burch has the tag at the end, Roddy and Kyle are always able to take advantage of these moments where he recovers slower than Oney by a second or two. Even if the match never sees them clearly have the match won, based on the similarity to a match that they won a year prior, it seem to be treading that way, even if Burch does a little better for himself in the back half.

Unfortunately, it is the WWE, and what seems both in the match and on paper like it’s leading to a genuinely cool development — either Oney’s improvement or Burch stepping up for once pushing them to finally achieving the upset a year later — instead takes a backseat to the push of a cryptofascist ass Blue Lives stable, when the Forgotten Sons cause a distraction that lets Burch roll up Kyle to win.

Frustrating, but accidentally, a perfect look at NXT at the time.

At the end of not only a great match, but a rematch of a Takeover Classic that manages to be both great in a different way while quietly advancing a story dormant for a year, complete with stellar performances from some of the all-world talents stuck down here long past the point that they should have been, the match never gets to reach its true and proper climax, instead turning into a showcase for an act not only filled up with real boring people in and out of the ring, but that also wasn’t over in the slightest and never once in years and years of effort, made any progress on that front. Something that worked, despite no real effort put in in a larger sense, undercut for something almost as offensive as it was boring.

NXT started the war a few months after this, but a segment like this shows exactly what it was that they wound up losing it.

Not the match it was a year earlier in a much higher profile spot and for a brand that was much hotter than it was at this point, but great enough to count, on top of the lovely little snapshot of the promotion exactly as it was at the start of its great decline.

***

Undisputed Era (Roderick Strong/Kyle O’Reilly) vs. Heavy Machinery, WWE NXT (12/26/2018)

This was for Roddy and Kyle’s NXT Tag Team Titles.

On paper, it’s sort of an easy thing to skip past. Otis and Dozer, especially here at this point in time, had not really done much besides a few fun big man tag team squashes. Certainly, they had not done anything that would suggest that this would be all that good or even great, and if so, it would feel like Roddy and Kyle were pulling teeth, which would be more than a little wasteful of arguably the best tag team in the world, and inarguably, of the best tag team in the company over the last six to nine months.

Luckily, this shit does not happen on paper, and this was a blast.

Roddy and Kyle do work up a storm, to be fair. This is not a great match if a worse team is leading this. This is probably only a good match if not for Roderick Strong. It’s not to say Kyle is not a very good wrestler by this point, he’s been responsible for a lot of their best work this year, but this is a match that leans more on Roddy as the one leading their time in control, and the Secret Best In The World once again makes his case. Nasty offense, unbelievably smooth movements into position for things, sick bumps without ever feeling like he’s trying to show off how wild his bumps are, all of that.

The kids also whip ass here.

Mostly, that comes in the form of the Otis hot tag, but Dozer is a pretty reliable face in peril too. Roddy and Kyle are smart enough to only use some light attacks on the leg in transition and not forcing him to sell a limb, and he’s very good at selling a general weariness and exhaustion from a fast paced beatdown. However, again, Otis is a revelation as the hot tag at this point in time, before he hit the main roster and really found himself as more than just a funny guy. He’s active and stunningly fast for his frame and likeable and all of the offense looks and sounds painful on top of that. He’s cut off before too long, but if this match has a non-Roddy star, it is absolutely one hundred percent my guy Otis.

Dozer gets caught at the end and the buzzsaw does not let up. They learned from the hot tag, never let Otis back in the ring, and hack away on the other guy until something works. Following the Sick Kick version of the Total Elimination, a slight change from their usual version with Kyle’s leaping knee strike, the best U.E. team yet again holds onto the titles.

Real under the radar, both because of the match up and the time of year, but a whole lot of fun.

***

Roderick Strong/Kyle O’Reilly vs. War Raiders, WWE NXT (10/17/2018)

This was for Kyle and Roddy’s NXT Tag Team Titles. 

Hey, remember the War Raiders? War Machine, maybe?

War Machine, formerly really good tag team in Ring of Honor and elsewhere for a while. Not like, amazing, largely getting there because of how often they had great competition, including a series with the literal greatest tag team of all time, but a good solid tag team that seemingly vanished into thin air one day, as if they had retired.

Anyways, they’ve been collecting dust on a shelf in Orlando for the last year or so, and they finally get a chance here against the best tag team in the company, and it’s great. 

Largely, again, that has a lot to do with Roddy and Kyle.

Yet again, it’s a masterful performance. Kyle continues to have his career run as the Rod Dog’s latest strike heavy partner, again avoiding many of his worse habits and simply staying focused. The attack on Rowe’s leg gives him a thing to commit all of his attention towards, and he’s fast becoming as great as just about anybody when pointed in a direction like this. On the other side, Roderick Strong turns in yet another performance to show that he still, very secretly, may be the best wrestler in the world. Everything is perfect. Dramatic bumping and stooging without ever seeming showy, movement that never makes it look like he’s ever waiting or setting any pre-planned spot up, offense that manages to be both brutal and exciting, while never ever coming off as admirable or worthy of any respect. His stage isn’t what it used to be or should be, but it’s hard to find any better bell to bell heel than Roddy, even in a fifteen minute sort-of-developmental TV tag ending on some bullshit. 

Having said all of that, Rowe and Hanson are really good here too, and it’s not just the Roddy (and Kyle) show.

They’re such a refreshing change of opposition after all those Mustache Mountain matches, and even the Oney/Burch one. Those matches are all better, two of them being among the twenty five best matches of the year in 2018 (almost definitely), but this is different, and they needed different after probably finding the ceiling on that sort of a match in this environment. It’s nice to see a new sort of match here, the 2010s spin on a classic powerhouse vs. technical heel sort of tag team match. Hanson and Rowe just so happening to have a ton of really cool power spots is a bonus too, as is Rowe selling his leg genuinely very well. The match doesn’t ask much of him once the segment is over, but he always moves with a hitch in his step and struggles in small little ways throughout the back third of the match, while also managing to get off all the big stuff the match asks of him believably while balancing all of this. Nobody’s breaking the doors down for a list of the best ever Ray Rowe performances, but this is probably up there somewhere. 

As always too, the construction of the thing is air tight. Like when TNA began to go off the rails, the artistic decline of NXT in 2018 seems to stop at the Tag Team Titles, because this stuff is as great as it ever was. Everything is in the right place, the shine lasts longer than usual and feels really impressive as a result, and the end run likewise has enough to really stand out, but avoids giving away the farm since the feud is just beginning. It’s a real achievement, balancing the parts of this match the way it does when it could very easily become real unwieldy in any direction if not all, but the match succeeds like it does just as much because of that real even keel it stays on as it does because of all the cool things these guys fill it up with. 

NXT being NXT, WWE being WWE, NXT also being WWE and all, the match does of course end with a little bit of the old nonsense.

Bob Fish returns for a DQ finish to save the titles, but after fifteen minutes that good and with another match still yet to come between these sides, this setting the rest of that up perfectly while also providing one of the most successful previews of the year, I simply do not care.

(folks, where’s the lie?)

Lovely super effective wrestling TV and a great match to boot.

***+

Undisputed Era (Roderick Strong/Kyle O’Reilly) vs. Mustache Mountain, WWE NXT Takeover Brooklyn IV (8/18/2018)

This was for Strong and O’Reilly’s NXT Tag Team Titles.

It is not what it was a month and change prior.

Of course.

While that was not technically the first Undisputed Era vs. Mustache Mountain match, given that the other was more restrained and on a low-hype U.K. special, the old idea comes to mind that you can only come out of nowhere once. Not to say that this being great is a surprise, but that it can only be THAT great as a surprise the once and also that you can only that sort of specific match the one time, a true miracle given some of the talent involved, specifically that one-quarter of this combination is a bad and unlikeable wrestler, each quality existing for wildly different reasons. It should never have been that great, and it almost seems unfair that the bar got raised up that high. Expectations are a motherfucker, and after their last match was one of the best matches of the entire year and up there with the best NXT tags ever (it is not quite Takeover Toronto, but anything else is on the table), they are significantly heightened.

The credit lies with this match that, even in spite of that, this still rules a lot.

As expected, the weaknesses feared originally have a way of rearing their head this time around.

Which is to say that it gets a little goofy at points. Despite the many awesome holds and cool transitions he shows here, KOR is not perfect and with more time and no editing, gets dragged into a few silly exchanges, if no embarrassing wobble selling. Tyler Bate is asked to sell the leg this time and while not done as extensively as the work on his partner the month before, it’s still something he does not handle all that well. Bate’s niche is as a vaguely likeable young man with explosive offense, not a sympathetic limb seller. Seven is a fairly big issue here too, relative to how this match compares. He somehow had a gift for that sort of selling, but in a match that asks him to deliver as a babyface in other ways, such as struggling over whether or not to throw in the towel or carrying multiple hot tag offensive runs, his natural unlikability, both as a wrestler and (allegedly) a person, shines through and affects the match. You can feel sympathy a lot more easily for someone on the verge of being disabled, but a regular wrestler simply making a comeback is far more open to clear thought and that hurts him.

You know who’s here the entire match though and has none of these issues?

Roderick Strong, that’s who.

It is yet again another perfect performance from one of the best wrestler alive. The offense is as great as always, and it stands out in a big way here where he gets to do a lot of it. It not only always looks good and painful, but there’s a snap and precision to it that nobody else has. The match is again full of a bunch of cool little touches, like him pulling holds tighter whenever possible and constantly adjusting. Small things that make anything he does feel more genuine. Roddy also eats shit harder than anyone else in this match on the other end of offense, in particular taking this one flip bump over the top and out off of a missed charge trying to cut the Bate hot tag off. It is the kind of complete end to end performance I think about when considering questions like who the best wrestler in the world actually is, and after a showing like this, it feels impossible to say Roderick Strong isn’t still in the running, just because he only works like one-third as frequently as he could.

The match occasionally struggles under the weight of its own ambition, but the steady hand of the Rod Dog at the wheel combined with the strength of all the many many many cool things Bate and Kyle are capable of, especially in the back half, difficulties and all, makes sure that it’s still one that I really enjoyed.

Kyle and Roddy keep breaking up the Mountain stuff at the end on account of Tyler’s bum leg, and catch the old pervert with their version of Total Elimination for the win.

Another hit from, slightly secretly in retrospect given the hype another deserving tag team gets, maybe the best active tag team in the world, in a display of every reason why I say that with more and more confidence every time they get to have one of these big matches. The other guys were alright here too, even if one cannot help but wonder what the result would be if Tyler had a partner with every quality his regular one lacks.

***1/4

Mustache Mountain vs. Roderick Strong/Kyle O’Reilly, WWE NXT (7/11/2018)

This was for Tyler Bate’s NXT Tag Team Titles.

(Usually with a match this great with a canceled person — your various Starr matches, your big OTT tags, maybe a tag or two with people I am forgetting also, your big Jack Sexsmith SSS16 win, your WALTER/Devlins, etc. etc. — I am inclined simply not to talk about it. Both because there’s not too much of a point, but also because it typically is not among the best of the year, and typically because there’s only one other guy in there. As great as Seven is here — and really, it is his career performance and it’s not even close, nails every facet of the thing, fucking whatever — it tends to not be worth it in other cases. Here though, there are three other guys who are genuinely incredible in the match too, and between that and how great it is as a whole, it does feel like something I ought to at least cover, if not write one thousand words about.)

(only nine hundred or so.)

So, first things first.

Yeah, big egregious Observer rating. Of course.

That’s almost always the case at this point though. It is not a perfect match. They get into some NXTism, the match again falls short because of the decision it makes to try and ask me to feel sympathetic for an unlikeable wrestler and not great person no matter how great the performance is, and while this is not the place for Star Rating Theory (I don’t know what the place is for that. The DMs maybe.), I will not believe you if you tell me this is truly one of the best matches of all time. But, whatever, I don’t care all that much about that, so much as it’s a thing people note  here.

It is genuinely a really really great match.

The match, as a complete package, is as perfect as this could ever ever be.

First, before even discussing the match, the atmosphere in Full Sail during the start of the match brawl is more incredible and more of an assistance to a match’s greatness than it’s been in years and years. Since NXT was good. Probably since, like, the Bayley/Sasha Iron Woman. It’s been that long since they were this good. Not only loud and responsive, full of energy, but the Danielson vs. London level (not quite Hero vs. Joe, sorry. I’ll put them over Philly, but never Highland.) shouting dueling chants are something special in the first half. So often, it feels performative, but when done here, it feels like opposing groups of fans are genuinely trying to shout each other down.

When Roddy and Kyle go to the leg, it is also among their best work ever, particularly in Kyle’s case. Roderick’s transition to the attack on the leg is flawless too and his work typically good even when the match goes outside of his favorite type of attack, but Kyle is the star of this control segment. Being the best wrestler at controlling a match as a bully heel in a Roderick Strong tag match, that’s maybe the most impressive thing Kyle’s done since the last time he had a career performance against a weirdo. He’s violent and believably mean spirited but also focused in a way he often struggled to be when going after limbs before. If the match linked above was the best case scenario for KOR as a babyface, this is the best case scenario as a heel. It’s the sort of performance I wanted out of him for years in reDRagon and in the indies in general, and ultimately, proof again of just why he frustrated me so much for so many years, because this — or at least the raw ability that eventually turned into this — was always there all along.

Bate’s hot tag and long extended run against Strong is also outstanding, and in any other match, would likely be the clear highlight. It’s a clear victory for established systems, the singles in January and all those tags in the weeks before this priming an already natural match up to do their best and most extended work together. Two offensive marvels hucking bombs out at unbelievably high speed and with stunning accuracy considering those speeds. Bate has a Roderick Strong level hot tag, and against Roderick Strong in a fireworks show, looks like a near equal. When I eventually write a top twenty five Wrestler of the Year blurb for Tyler Bate at the end of 2018, that sentence might just be all I need.

The match’s NXTism is also a lot better than usual. Tyler Bate’s facial expressions when his creepy uncle is getting his leg torn off are pretty believable and at least halfway grounded. Not sympathetic or entirely 100% believable, but it feels less like someone doing a wrestling angle than usual. While it doesn’t quite make the bit work like it is supposed to, it does at least make it feel a lot more dramatic than I ever would have expected reading about it on paper, and given the talent involved, that’s an unqualified success.

Uncle Strange Man can’t get out of Kyle’s sick cross heel hook, and Bate throws the towel in to surrender the match and give Our Heroes their titles back. The good guys win in the end.

A great enough match that I hated how much I loved it, even if it’s only Roddy and Kyle’s second best of the year.

***1/2

Undisputed Era vs. Ricochet/Mustache Mountain, WWE NXT (6/27/2018)

Three great ones (aired) in three days.

Of the three, this is the best one. That‘s not to say it is without sin. In the process of moving the match back home to Florida, you get some NXTism creep in, particularly a real goofy NXT Face from Kyle near the end of the match when he gets caught doing something, meaning he stands still for like ten seconds in shock while Ricochet dives on him. There’s the sort of smaller scale goofy stuff you’re just going to get from most of these guys too. For the most part though, it comes close than the other two towards being the best match that it can be. 

Largely, it is just a better version of the six man tag from the United Kingdom Championship Tournament show that aired two days prior.

It has the obvious advantage of increased familiarity and a better aim (a match that sees the British — one of whom is, you know by now — lose, even as protagonists, is always at the advantage to one that asks me to cheer their success), but Dunne to Ricochet is a significant upgrade in a match like this. It‘s a point that could be argued either way in another match, but in a pure fireworks show against wrestlers like Cole, Kyle, and especially Roddy, Ricochet offers so much that Dunne cannot. Not only that he’s a more exciting and more practiced babyface hot tag than Dunne, who could be fairly called wildly wildly wildly out of his element there, but he takes bigger bumps, and on a more basic level, he simply has bigger and cooler fireworks to contribute to the overall show. 

What also really works here that didn‘t before is that the match makes a significant change in the first half in terms of who is getting beaten up this time. You can also put a lot of it down to Kyle being meaner than ever in control or Cole feeling like an even scummier basic moves and cheating grifter than ever, but so much of it simply comes down to putting Bate in that role, rather than Seven or a rotating third man. Now that Tyler Bate doesn‘t have to handle part of the hot tag run like he did in the six man, or like he did in the tag team title switch, he can be the man isolated and put in peril, rather than his tag team match. The zit eater is not without sin, but he is infinitely more likeable, naturally sympathetic, and has flat out better wrestling instincts than the old sex creep on the apron. 

Essentially, this is a match that fixes some of the talent-based and/or role-based issues in the two previous tags, and then that works in the same ways those did as well.

The big final third, our traditional fireworks show, is again real great, and also probably the cleanest and most spectacular one yet. Like how Roddy, Kyle, and Cole being in there helped British Strong Style channel their obvious influences a little better than usual, adding in another guy in Ricochet who has actually done a bunch of high level tag, six-mans, and the like fireworks shows before helps even further. With the numbers stacked more in the favor of people with experience doing this successfully rather than simply imitating the originals, it instead turns more and more into Bate‘s significant talents (and his partner’s more modest ones, I suppose) simply being plugged into another one of those steady and easy hits. 

Following a better everyone-hits-a-strike sextuple down sequence than in the first six man, Ricochet finally gets Cole all alone while in pursuit of his singles title, only for Kyle to pull the referee out to break up a sure thing pinfall. Ricochet dives onto him with one of his more reckless looking/feeling Tope Suicidas ever (this is 100% a positive, and a good thing NXT did for him), only for the Rod Dog to immediately hurl him into the lip of the apron with the End of Heartache. Cole, as he‘s done all match, simply takes advantage of the work of his pals, and pins Ricochet for the win. 

It‘s wonderful and beautiful stuff, blemishes and all. Not exactly Horsemen/Dangerous Alliance stuff here, but the closest thing NXT could ever imaginably come to television like that, simply letting great wrestlers loose for ten or fifteen minutes, led by the best wrestler they’ve got, and seeing what comes of it. The feeling is not quite the same, but matches like this are the closest NXT has come to being an exciting weekly television show (in addition to simply being a functional one) since whoever had to fill his shoes ran out of Dusty’s old scripts some time in late 2015. 

Stellar wrestling television.

***+

 

Undisputed Era (Roderick Strong/Kyle O’Reilly) vs. Mustache Mountain (Tyler Bate), WWE UK Championship Tournament 2018 Night Two (6/26/2018)

This was for Roddy and Kyle’s NXT Tag Team Titles.

Go and read the bit about the six man tag team match from the day before. Pretty much all of that remains the same here. Some problems, annoying bits including asking for sympathy for a deeply unlikeable person (although in this case, it sets up a Tyler Bate hot tag, so the vision is easier to see and understand on some level), but one that still just kind of works through a combination of limiting them time-wise in a way that forces them down to just the essentials and the value of a white hot crowd.

Comparing the two, this is probably a little worse than the six man the night before.

The reasons are boring — Pete Dunne doing moves is better than Trent Seven having to do a lot of moves, but also simply having two more bodies to throw out there in a fireworks style car crush movefest — but they’re true. Sequences flow a little better and feel more genuine when guys have more time to recover, and the obvious weakness of one of the participants has less room to make itself apparent.

At the same time, there’s stuff this does much better than the six man.

For example, Tyler Bate gets to do a lot more in this match than he did the previous night. Also, Roderick Strong and Tyler Bate get to wrestle each other a lot more here. They already had a sneaky little great TV match that almost nobody saw earlier in the year, and it’s here where prior experience maybe does them a world of good. They feel super comfortable with each other, and do a lot of real cool work, even while clearly saving for the future. Kyle and Bate don’t have the same experience together, but also have a real easy and natural feeling chemistry that somehow avoids the worst of either man showing up.

It also features some great little traditional pro wrestling booking.

Following a miscommunication, Kyle gets hit with the same Neck Rebound Lariat/Dragon Suplex combination that beat him the night before, only for Roddy to save. Like another recent UE defense, it’s a classic bit of misdirection, playing off the past in a way both obvious enough for everyone to get and honest enough to not feel like such an obvious Tellin’ Stories set up. The move that worked before does not work now, forcing people to recall other times when that’s happened and the Undisputed Era has rallied to win when given the second chance, only to then pull the rug out on that in front of the most receptive crowd possible for a title upset in this specific match up.

Do I respect it?

No.

Giving this to these rubes rather than an Oney Lorcan team or any team of two actual good wrestlers rather than to Tyler Bate and his weird problematic half-uncle would not only have made me happier, but aged much better.

At the same time, it totally and completely works in the moment, and as an exercise in continuing to get these absolutely filthy shit-swilling rubes on their side in the build up to (fictional show) NXT UK becoming a thing within five or six months, it’s not a decision that is impossible to understand or anything. Almost nobody is going to like every single version of giving the people what they want, and at least this time, it came with yet another Roddy Strong tag team masterclass attached to it.

KOR gets beat with a sick Torture Rack/Flying Knee combo, whatever.

Imperfect, but like the day before, a remarkable example of how things just sometimes come together when in the right place and at the right time (and when handled in part by one of the best tag team wrestlers of all time).

***

Undisputed Era vs. British Strong Style, WWE UK Championship Tournament 2018 Day One (6/25/2018)

On a show otherwise occupied by a mostly middling #1 Contenders tournament for the fictional WWE/NXT U.K. Championship — whose best matches all involved at least one weird sex pervert, in a great show of proof that WWE did in fact respect British wrestling and all of its traditions (this does too, but he is the least important part, and there are five others to focus on also) — this is the actual best match on the show.

Really, it shouldn’t be.

You can think of a million reasons this shouldn’t work.

British Strong Style six mans are prone to comical amounts of excess. There’s reason they’ve had like a million of them in the last year and a half and this is the first I’ve ever written about. Put a lot of that on Dunne and Seven themselves, wrestlers with real bad brains sometimes, and Tyler, who is not that much better. At the same time, Kyle and Adam Cole also deeply deeply frustrate me, even in their better moments recently. One-sixth of this match has what I would call a wrestling brain that is not only functional, but genuinely good.

It does find a way to work though.

Certainly, this is not a perfect wrestling match.

The match asks for far too much sympathy for someone I find viscerally repelling in Seven, and that was even before Certain Things came out. He is a deeply offputting person, and it’s an especially weird ask when sympathetic young Tyler Bate is there. The match also gets a lot silly at some points in the back third, especially when silly boys Pete Dunne and Kyle O get to do some stuff to each other. Both have an unfortunate inclination towards these sequences where like five or six moves happen in a row and all get no sold (to some extent) to do the next thing.

Mostly though, instead of the worst version of this I could ever conjure up, we get one of the better potential versions instead.

A real large chunk of that comes down to a twelve and a half minute runtime, to be fair. Without as much time, there is simply not as much space for the sort of extemporaneous nonsense that so often can doom a BSS or Kyle or Cole match. It is not entirely absent of that, but they’re forced to mostly just do their biggest and best, and the match is better for it as a result. Rather than a match that — as many NXT matches often can be accused of — tries to be a longer Great Match, this instead has a certain economy that helps it feel like something far far greater, a match that simply happens to be great.

The other stuff that can work all does though, beyond just not allowing them as much room for error. The U.E. control work is stellar especially, with Roderick Strong having a real skill for interpreting BSS as guys cribbing work he was around to see the original version of, if not involved with the original version himself, and helping them get it far more right than usual. The match is very much the WWE version of a Roddy Show six man, everyone else clearly plugged in as things move quickly but sensibly, ending in a fireworks show. Kyle and Cole are at their best in these little spurts, throwing nasty shots to the body or stretch holds or, in Cole’s case, hitting cheap shots and taking wild bumps. Dunne and Bate play the hits in the best possible environment for them to look and sound better than ever, and then there’s a sixth guy in here too, supposedly.

Dunne takes Roddy and Cole out with a moonsault, and Kyle gets beat with some silly little rope spring Lariat/Dragon Suplex combination.

A match that was always going to be a little flawed and a little annoying, but something close to a best case scenario.

***

Undisputed Era (Roderick Strong/Kyle O’Reilly) vs. Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch, WWE NXT Takeover Chicago II (6/16/2018)

This was for Roddy and Kyle‘s NXT Tag Team Titles. 

While more than just us maniacs and freaks will talk about the famous NXT Tag Title matches of 2015, 2016, and 2017 for years and years to come, given the acclaim they got at the time and the promotional machine behind them, this is one that always got lost in the mix. I understand it on some level, being a clear piece of filler given the pushes that Oney Lorcan (and his partner, I guess) otherwise never quite received, but secretly, I think it‘s just as great as most of those much more highly acclaimed matches of its ilk. 

Firstly, and probably mostly, it is very nice to see probably the two best wrestlers stuck under the NXT umbrella/collecting dust on a shelf in Orlando/whatever other metaphor or phrase you would prefer — Roderick Strong and Oney Lorcan — get a chance like this. Fifteen minutes or so to open up a Takeover in front of a super super hot Chicago crowd. Not only that, but in the last sort of match largely untouched by NXT Bullshit at this point, a simple kick ass formula tag, casting each man in their best role (bully veteran heel, strangely charming maniac), and letting them rip. It would certainly be dishonest to say neither has had great matches nor impressive showings since both arrived years prior, but it‘s the first time it’s either felt like this, totally and completely let loose on a large stage. 

Secondly, beyond how good it feels, it is also just an airtight and absolutely pitch-perfect version of one of the best formulas in wrestling. A formula tag, but one closer to 2006 Ring of Honor Generation Next tag work than something from thirty years in the past. There is zero time wasted, and yet the entire thing is packed from start to finish with incredibly cool offense, remarkable transitions, and great performances in every role and in every piece of the match.

When I focus on Roddy and Oney here, that isn‘t to say that Kyle O‘Reilly and Danny Burch weren‘t also very good to great here. They were.

Burch is a quality in-peril guy, he hits hard enough and has enough energy to not be totally blown out of the water in either category by his all-world level partner, and I can think of zero moment in which he let the match down or failed to do something. Very much a wrestler running up against the ceiling of his abilities, having a career night, and on occasion, getting his head or an arm or two above that level.

Kyle may not have had his career performance or career match here, but he was also terrific. The bad wobble sell was minimized, and he engaged in very little of his bad stooging either (some people love it, but something about how he does it has always rung false to me, always feeling like someone doing an imitation of something rather than feeling genuine in doing it), but it‘s far more about what he did do. He is not the bus driver on his team, but his individual offense was tremendous. Crisp and timed, perfect for the moment in the match when it’s happening, but also meaner than usual. So often as an antagonist before WWE, Kyle would struggle to feel like an actual bad guy, but it’s not a struggle he has here, or to my recollection, for much of his time in different U.E. tag teams. He’s still not Roddy, this all-time great bully, but there’s a little shade of cruelty added onto the precision that makes all the cool holds and nasty strikes that he has to offer up never once feel likeable, and it feels like a not insignificant step forward.

Really though, this does come down to — or at least is elevated above mere greatness by — the performances of Roderick Strong and Oney Lorcan.

Nobody is a better bully in all of wrestling than Roderick Strong.

This is not a match that sees him give his meanest performance in that role exactly, it‘s not 2015 PWG Rod Dog, but there’s still a natural meanness that finds a way to bleed through. The cut offs are so fast and brutal and, above all, painfully casual. The offense is all perfect. The cruelty comes instead in smaller moments, like grinding his elbow on Burch’s face when holding a move, simply because he can, or choosing an especially emphatic cut off when something smaller and cleaner might have done the same. It’s a perfectly encapsulation of what Strong offers up in the role, clearly capable of more, but getting more out of these smaller things than probably anybody else under WWE contract can. Nobody’s better at being despicable in small little moments, and if you need something bigger and bolder, nobody’s better at crafting/supporting/executing these bomb throwing kinds of tags than Roderick Strong is either. 

Likewise, there may be no better hot tag — although some are arguably equal — than Oney Lorcan when allowed.

It‘s that rare combination of this perfect, brutalizing, and explosive offensive attack and an insane burst of energy. He is not as likeable as a Bryan Danielson or Mark Briscoe as a hot tag, but it works for a lot of the same reasons. Exciting believable offense, executed at a frenetic pace, and all assembled in what feels like a perfect order. Oney’s part here does not quite require the thought or precision or grace of what the match asks of Roderick Strong, but this is a much worse match if almost anyone available is in Lorcan’s role instead of him. 

Beyond any individual performances or marvels of perfect and efficient construction, the match also, in a sneakier way than usual, adheres to one of my favorite little heel booking principles. Adam Cole is ejected after saving the match for the champions, but as the match keeps going for a relatively long time after that, it feels like he stole the best chance away from Oney and Danny, rather than outright causing them to lose. It‘s a principle used best this decade perhaps in Adam Cole title matches himself, and I think one that is so much more effective than outright obvious theft. We get mad when Our Heroes get screwed and shafted at the end, but what’s maybe even more upsetting is knowing it was stolen at a point, before something else ends it, the absence of a real and genuine gripe, but still knowing some real bullshit happened to allow the bad guys an avenue to win cleanly. 

What helps also is that the eventual fair victory comes in a real unlikeable and sympathetic sort of way, even if it is probably not totally the way the match intends on.

Oney still keeps them in it at the end through equal parts explosiveness and pure stubborn refusal to lose, but the problem is that Burch is simply not as good as him, nor as good as either champion. Danny Burch also has his arm hurt by a KOR armbar, and when they have the opening to hit another big double team like the one Cole bailed the champions out of, or the one Roddy saved the pinfall on earlier, Burch does not have the power in his arm to do it. Oney is inevitably trapped at the end, both because he has to keep bailing Danny out and because the other man can also easily take out and/or outmaneuver Burch to get back in, and he can only do so much on his own, especially against a team this good and this fast and this devious.

This gets explicitly spelled out at the end in a really great final minute, in which all four get up and run at each other. Roddy and Oney slug away at each other, neither able to knock the other man down. Next to them, Kyle fairly easily knocks Burch away for a moment, and they can double up. Individually, Oney has a puncher‘s chance against either man, but without meaningful help, nothing can be done, and he loses to a series of heavy strikes, ending with an especially high-velocity Total Elimination. 

Wrestling is at its best when it feels like genuine athletics, and while that rarely happens and especially rarely so in the WWE, as I watch NBA playoff games here in late April of 2023, this is a match that has that feeling.

Not so much in the action, as tight as it is, but in the story they choose to tell with all of these outstanding bombs. It‘s the story you see year after year in any team sport, a fully organized team at the height of its power involving equal level superstars against one clearly led by one player. Oney doesn’t quite have it in him (or, really, simply isn’t written to, he obviously could, but wrestling is fake) to put up the wrestling equivalent of scoring the last twenty five points in a row to win or putting up fifty six against the best team in the league, but it’s a familiar story, and feels all that much more genuine as a result, even if I doubt anyone involved in booking the match ever quite saw it that way. It’s enormously sympathetic, and it’s what makes this match that much more interesting to me, taking it from a normal really great tag and makes it one of the better ones of its time and place. 

Perhaps, really and truly, the most underrated NXT match ever.

Outstanding tag team work, and were it not for an all-time ambitious fireworks display elsewhere a few months prior, it would easily be the best tag team match of the year so far. The real mark of this match‘s greatness is that, five years later, you could call this match the best tag team match of the year, and I wouldn’t really disagree enough to argue the point.

Sneakily, one of the best matches of the year, no qualifiers.

***1/2

Kyle O’Reilly vs. Fred Yehi, EVOLVE 83 (4/23/2017)

Not the smoothest mix in the world, but it works.

Kyle O’Reilly isn’t the most natural fit in the world into EVOLVE midcard grappling meat and potatoes matches, still being weened on the bad version Davey-ism (all limb work is time killing and has no value + a lot of dumb stuff, etc. whereas the good version is rolling Tree of Woe sack taps and dangerous double stomps to the face and trying to kill yourself on every dive). The other part of the equation though is that Fred Yehi is a remarkably adaptable wrestler within the spectrum of different scientific matches, and so he fits really well into a Kyle O’Reilly match.

In a recurring theme of this drop, it is a leg match involving someone who I don’t want to see in leg work matches, and in another recurring theme, it works anyways.

Fred Yehi doesn’t approach the subject with the same tact and light touch that KAI does (one sentence I never imagined myself writing), going completely after the knee. His work is sharp and it’s mean and, as always, Yehi approaches it from so many different fun angles. Nasty cut off shots to the leg, real inventive holds on the ground, counters to Kyle’s holds that get him back down to the leg. None of this ought to be a surprise to anyone who’s ever seen a Yehi match, but it is a stellar Yehi performance once again.

The less expected thing here — not so much a shocker, but something less predictable and that could have gone the other way — is that Kyle O’Reilly turns in a pretty good selling performance to match all of that. Not great, but really good. He does a lot of the right things, holding the leg and shaking it off when he uses it, trouble running sometimes, hobbling, things like that. It’s not perfect, he still throws a little too much with the leg and runs just fine a few times when the match calls for it, but there is enough here to show a clear care and attention paid to this side of the match, which has certainly not always been the case for Kyle O’Reilly in the past. He even avoids any real comical over-sells or silly bumps like you might have gotten in PWG or like you’ll get a lot of in NXT, in a real nice show of completely knowing your environment, and what does and doesn’t fit in EVOLVE.

Another part of this that I loved is while, technically, this is a double limb match, it’s a status the match really has to earn.

What I mean by that is that rather than them establishing these focal points in the first half and trading, Kyle really struggles to get to actually get to the arm and to do any real sustained damage. There’s a lovely little bit here where Kyle gets distracted and goes for a legbar, only for that to be Yehi’s back into control by easily countering into his own legbar. The match forces Kyle to get a little smarter about his attacks as a result of stuff like that, and the story of the match is Kyle having more and more success on the arm as a result of hard work and persistence. It’s the best Kyle babyface performance I’ve maybe ever seen as a result, not just assuming a viewer is going to root for him, and instead giving a reason to root for him in a depressingly novel concept.

The work pays off at the end, and O’Reilly is able to get the Cross Armbreaker on for an immediate submission.

It’s still a little long and the leg selling is not perfect. I am not going to go overboard in praising this match. However, it gets so much more right than it gets wrong, and I loved the way they went about a match like this so much. It’s a unique take on an overly familiar sort of a match, and that makes all the difference.

Just barely great, a testament to Kyle’s improvement since 2015 to some extent if I have to be fair, but so much more than that, a testament to just how great Fred Yehi is at this point.

***