This was the second match in a Best of Five Series for the TNA World Tag Team Titles.
The first match in this series was very much a first match in a series. All about setting the table and establishing themes to play with. Roode being more out of practice in the style that the other three work. Aries having leaned on being the fastest person in the ring for years and being surprised by old enemies. The Wolves being the best out and out TEAM and winning because of it.
As expected, the second match is where they begin to play with that more and get a greener light and a clearer runway to go wild.
It’s also definitely a weirder match, as for the first time, it strikes me that THE DIRTY HEELS are maybe not heels? The match is fairly even, but it’s Bobby Roode who winds up as the face in peril before the final hot tag that goes into the finishing run. It’s not bad exactly, as the Wolves can get mean with the offense and because Aries is still a pretty solid hot tag at this point. It is, however, unbelievably odd. It’s disorienting because TNA is so confusing sometimes and never clear to more casual viewers about what reality is. Is this the way things are or is this just a weird way this match went? If it’s the way things are, why is that their name?! I remember when they first teamed in 2012-2013, when TNA was still a fairly interesting promotion in some ways, fans online named them The Greatest Team That Ever Lived. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but it’s better than Dirty Heels, if only because it doesn’t marry them to one individual role (yes, they could work face ironically, but irony is for children).
Role confusion aside, the match is genuinely a lot of fun.
By that, I mean that Aries, Davey, and Eddie do their best to have a proper ROH style tag banger with multiple controls, counters, nearfalls, inventive ideas, and all of that. Richards and Aries both show the unmistakable signs of time’s arrow moving in an uncomfortable direction as two explosivity based guys slowly being robbed of that, but like most great Wolves matches from 2010 on, it’s Eddie that holds it all together. He’s good at everything, never allows a moment when he’s involved that looks phony or isn’t interesting. Even if that just means throwing out a real hard shot to wake everybody up, Eddie always does it. Like many Wolves matches, it’s a far worse match without him. Bobby Roode is still kind of lost, but he knows enough to know he’s the odd man out and to let them cook and add in what he can. He adds in some of his own decent late match offense, but primarily gets out of the way.
They manage a few genuinely great nearfalls, play on the ending of the previous match, and the sort of unpredictability that comes from the second match in a five match series. Aries and Roode display more teamwork than in the first match and come close, only for Roode to not be able to stop Richards from breaking up the Last Chancery with a double stomp off the top. Roode is again kind of useless in a match like this, and the Wolves go TWO STRAIGHT with the old SD/DR style Powerbomb & Lungblower combination.
A borderline great match made all the more impressive by everything about the setting in which it took place.
***