Leaders of the New School vs. Jonathan Gresham/Mark Haskins, ASW UK (2/20/2013)

This is as good a spot as any to discuss the way in which I’ll be dealing with BritWres stuff, as 2013 and 2014 is when it really starts to become actually decent.

I am not going to go out of my way to cover the matches of people who I find personally disgusting for having done really vile things, unless I feel that they absolutely need to be covered. I intend on covering the highlights of Scurll’s PROGRESS title reign, and perhaps a few other things in RevPro that are interesting. I don’t see a way out of discussing things like Starr/WALTER (or in the US, Starr/Janela stuff). Apply this to whoever else may or may not be currently canceled and whoever else may or may not be canceled in the future for doing some abhorrent stuff. Basically, unless it’s something that’s either likely to end up on a MOTY list or influence some kind of a WOTY case, I’m not especially interested in covering it, because it’s very weird.

Pederast in this match aside, it’s a hell of a curiosity that I couldn’t not watch and discuss.

This is the best version of the LDRS I’ve ever seen, outside of the one-match heel BritWres TWO MAN POWER TRIP variation we got in PWG in 2017. Playing to a more casual crowd as ASW does, they cut out a lot of the bullshit and work as a pure babyface team. It’s pure formula, but everyone has a blast and the crowd is so reactive that they don’t have to do so much more than that. Haskins is a remarkable stooge and Gresham is obviously wonderful working in control. He’s mean, everything he does looks good, and he’s not so bad on the other end himself. The other guy has a decent hot tag, and while I’m not out to praise him, I’m more inclined to like him in this role as a purely mechanical white-meat babyface than I am in any other. Gresham tries to go to the air to counteract the lie that he’s not as good in other areas despite clearly being the best guy in the match, and eventually eats shit. LDRS beat him with the bad Michinoku Driver/Low Dropkick combo.

Bad finish as always, but otherwise, so much fun. A HOOT OF THE YEAR/CATCHALL (CHRONOLOGICAL) contender.

***

Team CHIKARA (Eddie Kingston/Hallowicked/UltraMantis Black/Frightmare/Tim Donst/Gran Akuma/3.0) vs. Team ROH (Kevin Steen/The Briscoes/The Young Bucks/Jimmy Jacobs/The Bravado Brothers), CHIKARA The Cibernetico Rises (11/18/2012)

This was the yearly Torneo Cibernetico match. For the uninitiated, there are two teams of eight wrestlers, with a specific batting order of who can tag in first, second, etc. Eliminations happen until only one man is left.

This isn’t quite as heated as the 2010 BDK vs. CHIKARA classic, but it’s much more heated and intense from the start than your usual Cibernetico. Most of that is the Steen and Kingston issue but the ROH team has some incredibly goons on it too. The Bravados and Young Bucks are perfect cowards in different ways, The Briscoes are goddamned animals at points here, and Jimmy Jacobs is somewhere in between those poles. The CHIKARA team is weaker, and the match suffers for building around Tim Donst, a total nothing, but the booking and work on the other side is largely good enough to make this stand out anyways.

The chaos first claims Frightmare, dealing with a lingering knee injury that Team ROH exploits for five to ten minutes in the second cycle, leading Big Kev submitting him with the Sharpshooter. The match then gets incredibly frantic in the next cycle, in all the best ways. My favorite thing about a Cibernetico, which you see in the best ones (2005, 2008, 2009, 2010, this) is that you can keep a fast pace up for a long time without blowing anything immediately. You have sixteen people to start with, no reason to not be able to do this and keep it fun and feeling consequential. This has more behind it, but it’s the same philosophy done to perfection. Everyone’s great here, but a few guys really stand out in this phase of the match, especially Eddie Kingston.

UltraMantis Black also goes on an absolute tear. There’s a phenomenal sequence with Jimmy Jacobs, but he also just about runs through the Bravado Brothers too. Mantis is cool as hell, but every once and a while, you get an UltraMantis Black performance where he wants to remind you that, yeah, he’s genuinely really great at this.

Mantis eliminates Harlem Bravado first with the Cosmic Doom and then Lancelot with a Wrist-Clutch Regal Plex of sorts. On a more micro scale, the booking here is incredible too. UMB immediately feels for real again and like an actual force, so when Jay Briscoe comes in and steamrolls him to put it back at six-on-six, it helps Jay Briscoe and also serves as this crushing elimination. The Briscoes also easily handle Akuma and take advantage of rules to get rid of him, before our hero Jagged/Scott Parker manages a roll up on Mark Briscoe (called repeatedly “Brother Mark” by the dullard Gavin Loudspeaker on commentary for some reason) to put it to five on five.

These matches can very rarely be wall to wall insanity either though, unless they’re spotfest masterpieces like 2009’s or are only thirty-something minutes like 2010’s. Once it’s down to five on five, the match calms down significantly, and it’s wonderful. Kevin Steen is a big asshole who keeps running from Eddie Kingston. The Young Bucks, Jay Briscoe, and Jimmy Jacobs all play to their strengths, with the three cowards making Jay now do much of the work in this period. And it goes fine! Jay totally handles everything, and gets another elimination off with the Jay Driller on Hallowicked. Sadly, Donst then sneaks in and grabs his weird From Dusk Til Donst (ugh) hold on Jay to eliminate him, before getting out of there. The match exists in a very weird space where it constantly serves to highlight Tim Donst, but also seems to accept that he isn’t anywhere near as good as the other people he’s in the ring with at this point in the match.

The final run is pretty exceptional too. What it might be lacking in some areas is made up for the overall feeling they’ve built up, the heroics of Team CHIKARA, and the SCUM-my nature of Team ROH. Eddie Kingston has to finally get in and go on a run himself to get it done, and the result is a Backfist to the Future on Jimmy Jacobs and Team CHIKARA having its first lead of the match. The Young Bucks suddenly turn it on to stop his run, and instead of fighting them, Tim Donst dives onto Eddie, turns on him, and begins pummeling him instead. It’s better than Donst wrestling, but something about it just still feels off. You’re not going to get me to want to see this match outside of the year 2007. You’re not. The 3.0 vs. Young Bucks stuff here is better than any of their tag title matches due to the short length and how much of the set up work has already been done. Both Bucks get eliminated by 3.0 members, leaving Steen in there at the end with Shane Matthews. BIG MAGIC forces Steen to use his real finisher on him to eliminate him, and Steen effectively wins, outside of this other CHIKARA story.

King is able to roll up Steen because he won’t stop talking shit, and Team ROH is gone.

But one man always has to win the Cibernetico, and if it’s multiples left on the same team…again, one man has to win.

Kingston kicks out before Donst uses his manager’s loaded European man purse on Kingston for the win.

The first 95% of this is really really great. It came off much better now than I had remembered it. Everyone involved does a terrific job, the pace is blistering, and every single person in this rises to the occasion. Save for the guy who won. The problem I still have with this is the ending, where a big payoff is sacrificed to build up to a match that’s a thousand times less interesting and which highlights the least interesting, entertaining, and all around worst guy in the match.

It’s the sort of bargain that CHIKARA has always made, serving characters and stories first and foremost. It wasn’t such a hard bargain to make with good characters and great wrestlers. Very easy to track the decline of CHIKARA to the moments when these moments began serving stories, characters, and wrestlers who weren’t capable of holding up their end.

Luckily, the 5% of this that wasn’t so good or interesting didn’t wash out everything that came before it. One of the all time great CHIKARA Cibernetico matches, likely the third or fourth best one.

As always, if you want to know everything you need to know about CHIKARA in a given year, watch the Cibernetico. Some big problems, the magic touch is slipping if not gone entirely, but there’s still such an enormous level of talent with most of the top guys that in big situations, it doesn’t matter quite so much.

***1/2

Future Shock vs. Leaders of the New School, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2011 N3 (3/13/2011)

It’s a rematch from a week ago, now in front of a larger and much more lively crowd. In circles of people who have seen both matches, this is The Good One. Even then, this is upsettingly inconsistent. 

I’m willing to chalk this one up to Quarantine Madness, but I had watched this for the first time in years just a few months ago, and I liked it so much more than I did here on the third time. I don’t hate it, and I think it’s just barely a great match, but this is not a style that ages all that well. I’m won over by its charm far more than by the actual content of the thing. 

There’s a lot of the same stuff early on. Maybe finally seeing that first match hurt this. They keep the good parts, the establishing back and forth stuff early on. They keep some of the bad stuff too, of course, Kyle O’Reilly is still in this match. He doesn’t do a shitty little pose in between his mounted palms now, but he still misses most of them by a thousand miles. The control work on Marty is much more pronounced here and far better. Either WXW has better ring mic work than ROH, or Kyle O’Reilly has the best striking night of the first few years of his career here. I’m not sure which one makes more sense. Everyone’s a little extra mean here. A week ago, the meanness was a little thing that occasionally popped up, but it’s less of an accident here and more of what the match is. 

Of course, it’s still a 2011 independent spotfest and the charm and meanness of the first half can only get them so far. Not everything is so great (again, Kyle) and there’s a few more minutes to this than there need to be. There’s a few very bad parts — AGAIN, KYLE — like a dueling sole butt contest (what? why?), or him doing a worse double sharpshooter than Natalya Neidhart. There’s then always the weird sort of disconnect that you get when you see something that so clearly sucks absolute shit and it gets a “THIS IS AWESOME” chant before you realize that these guys could do almost nothing and achieve that. There’s just far too much stuff that feels beneath them in the second half. Quadruple downs into stereo on-their-knees strike exchanges. Whole lot of groanworthy stuff before they pull it together for a good little finish. The LDRS win with their absolute dogshit finishing combo of a basement dropkick/Michinoku Driver, which I’m sure is named after a lesser Godspeed! song. 

All that said, it’s so much better put together than the assault upon my being that was the back half of the IPW:UK match, with the result being less that I hate all four of them and myself and more that I can at least admire the ambition, even if this can never blow me away like it did once upon a time. 

The sort of match that I imagine all four would look back upon now while peeking through their eyes in horror, be it because it was very stupid, because there was virtually no schtick, because it was actually charming, or because it was under twenty minutes and featured nobody staring at their hands in disbelief. Every one of these men eventually became better than matches like this, barely on the right side of a very thin dividing line, before only Zack Sabre Jr. bothered to continue being better than it. 

One of the worst great matches of the decade. 

Alternately, one of the greatest bad matches of the decade.

schrodinger’s ***

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.