Alex Shelley vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi, Impact/NJPW Multiverse United 2 ~ FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (8/20/2023)

Commissions continue yey again, this one coming from longtime reader Bren. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Shelley’s Impact Heavyweight Title.

Having known me/followed my writing for some time, unless I am mistaken and this is a totally different guy with another name, I know that this was picked with love.

Alex Shelley and Hiroshi Tanahashi are two of my favorites ever.

They’re both not insignificantly responsible for some of the ways I think about wrestling. Sometimes people say I’m something of a harsh critic, which has never been anything I’ve aspired towards or intended, but if I made a list of guys who I consider myself very forgiving towards and/or whose matches I tend to naturally want to look on the positive sides of, Shelley and Tanahashi are both on and probably near the top of that list.

Unfortunately, time finally came for Hiroshi Tanahashi, and it probably came like a year or two before this match.

Really, I wish this happened like four years before it did, around the time of that great Tanahashi/KUSHIDA match. Hell, I wish it happened ten years before it did, around the time that they were having six or eight man tag matches together in New Japan. But that is not where they are. Tanahashi finally seemed to give in to Father Time at some point around the 2021 G1 Climax. He can’t run, he has problems bumping here and there (you may notice in this match a few times where a younger wrestler might do a fall onto a knee or crumble down, but where Tanahashi kind of awkwardly seems to opt for a back bump instead), and no longer is able to do what he did for so many years, possessing just enough to cover up for how hurt he is. Were Tanahashi at his physical prime, were his body still capable of keeping up with the mind that — as this match shows — CLEARLY still works great, this is probably a great match, like a lot of Tanahashi’s good to great Ring of Honor work around that time.

It’s still genuinely pretty good.

What works about this match are all the more abstract things that Shelley and Tanahashi can still control.

Both veterans of the double limb match, Tanahashi and Shelley have a lot to offer on both ends. Shelley’s ideas to attack the left arm are all both good and occasionally even still inventive (if 2004 Alex Shelley felt twenty years ahead of his time, 2023 Shelley still feels like a year or six months ahead with some of the transition ideas he works with). His selling of the knee is genuinely very good, and another case where real life physical knowledge very obviously helps him out, adding in stretches in down moments that feel and probably are genuinely things a trainer or PT guy like Shelley might tell someone to do to help with a hurt leg.

Tanahashi has less to offer here outside of selling the arm, but he still sells the arm very well, and shows what still works upstairs in moments where he clearly never has to show pain but still chooses to, or a moment later in the back half where — after being initially hurt via the classic double stomp to the arm holding the top rope transition — he has it there for a moment, but takes it away after half a second, not wanting to get burned again. Tanahashi is also great in some early moments at playing with the crowd, reacting to one guy cheering for another kick to the knee by repeating it until a bunch of people begin cheering for simple kicks to the kneecaps, turning a “ONE MORE TIME” cheer into holding up five fingers and getting a big reaction for kicking Shelley five more times in the leg. At all times, you can see the mind of one of the all-time greats, even if the flesh is lacking.

As a non-regular and more end-of-the-year catch up binge Impact watcher (fool me 400 times, shame on me), Shelley also does a great job at what feels like a slower turn, or at least the display of a harder edge. Small reactions at moments when the crowd sides with Tanahashi up through the end run, where Shelley throws a Boma Ye and Rainmaker out there in succession for a nearfall in what a guy who was there at the time knows is a bit of an insult. It’s not a one match heel turn, this isn’t Shingo and Gargano, but it feels like either a nice gradual escalation of something slowly happening on TV, or if I misread it entirely, a sort of slightly harder edge that comes out in more heated competition.

So, while not a great match, due to the limitations of Tanahashi in a match like this, pure mechanics and technique, still a match that I got something out of, and that I’m glad that I watched.

Alex Shelley keeps the belt with the Shellshock.

Not a great match, but one that still feels real good.

Kenny Omega vs. Moose, Impact Against All Odds 2021 (6/12/2021)

Commissions return again, this one coming from longtime reader Bren. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Omega’s Impact Heavyweight Title.

I suppose this is what the commissions are for. Making me watch a match that I absolutely would not have written about otherwise. Usually, I intend for that to be like 70s stuff or French Catch or old Chicago footage, and not a match that happened in a year I already talked about and that, instinctively, repelled me so much that I didn’t even consider watching it.

There’s a version of this that works, maybe three or four years earlier when Kenny had a genuine Midas touch. Moose works heel, throws him around, add in some props, and take it home in fifteen or less. Maybe not great, but, you know, breezy and watchable.

Unfortunately, they met at the worst possible time for these two to ever meet.

First, it happens in the middle of the pandemic. The first thing about this that stands out, now that this period has been over for a solid two years and counting, is how much I don’t miss pandemic wrestling, and how much it sucks to watch at in retrospect.

Yes, I wrote a lot of positive things about a lot of pandemic era wrestling, when that was all that was available on TV from the two big companies (and also Impact, I guess). Given what the situation in the world was, there wasn’t a reasonable alternative, so everyone made due. The best wrestlers made something of it, using the lack of anything else to focus on very good wrestling, and when that happened, the things that made it so hard to watch — the emptiness of the buildings, the community theatre black box style atmosphere with other wrestlers pretending to be a crowd, the total lack of atmosphere — had a way of disappearing. It really had a way of emphasizing, at least in a purely mechanical sense, what good wrestling was and what bad wrestling was.

On a nuts and bolts level, it’s no good. Overlong, boring, full of work with no real point as both the work on Omega’s back and Moose’s arm are both never interesting to watch or executed all that well or sold very well and barely even matter. There’s a lot of sloppiness here too, as Omega is very clearly wrestling hurt as he did throughout this entire run, which really has a way of hurting a guy whose greatest virtue is/was his athleticism. On a level beyond that, it is also bad.

The other thing is that, independent of the environment, it is also just bad wrestling, as Omega meets a real average-at-best wrestler at his own creative nadir, at a point where any version of the smoke and mirrors show was not only not available to them, but because of what he was doing as a character and how that was shown in the ring, he also wasn’t in a place where that sort of match would ever have happened, or at least in one where it wouldn’t have made any sense. The addendum to the commission was that, “this was the best that the Kenny Belt Collector bit worked”, and I don’t know if that’s true or if I have any hard opinion about if it was or wasn’t or what match I would say it worked better in (maybe the title loss to Christian?), but truthfully, that was a bad bit that saw Omega focus on all of the things he does poorly (being a convincing heel in the ring, being a convincing heel outside of the ring, basic striking, etc.) resulting in the worst run of his career.

Looking at it from farther away, I maybe get it.

The idea of a guy big enough for Omega’s (godawful phony bullshit) heel routine to feel like less of a put-on against, leaning sort of into Kenny’s obvious injuries by having him struggle to lift Moose for his move and also having Moose attack a bad back in the first half, all of that.

But like the idea of Omega as a long-term heel champion itself, it falls apart when you actually have to look at it from more than a thousand miles up in the sky.

Moose is bad at all the things this match asks of him, so much so that it feels like nobody putting this together (or maybe at any point in his TNA run) ever got why or how he worked in ROH to the extent that he did like five or six years earlier, and like all of his matches in this run, it also asks Omega to do the opposite of everything he’s actually good at too. It’s an empty house, a model home to show off that maybe looks nice at a passing glance, but with nothing actually inside. 

It’s bad pro wrestling.

Not the worst thing in the world, lord knows Kenny has had many many worse matches than this, some in this very reign, but the exact sort of match that in the process of writing about and trying to deliver what I think a commission warrants (rather than what I would likely do had I seen it of my own free will, which is turn it off after like five minutes, realizing I would get nothing from this, and forgetting about it within 45 seconds), I like less and less the more time I have to spend thinking about.

I have no idea why anyone would like this or what they would see in it, but I appreciate the money.

Lashley vs. Eddie Edwards, Impact One Night Only – No Surrender 2017 (6/16/2017)

This was for Lashley’s Impact World Heavyweight Title.

Impact’s ONE NIGHT ONLY specials are not a particularly serious affair. They’re taped months in advance, at best, and their relationship to current stories could be called quasi-canon at best. They are best known, at least in my mind, for either widely reviled womens matches or weird little bits, such as booking Beer Money vs. The American Wolves to pay off a long running super niche joke. They’re house shows put on (I think) pay-per-view for the diehards and overseas fans, and while that isn’t the most offensive thing in the world to me, it is rarely something worth looking into.

Even in this match, things are a little lighter and easier, as seen with the start of the match interplay with Lashley trying to butter up Eddie with a headband to match his own, and failing that, making referee Brian Hebner wear it againt his will. 

However, this is still a Lashley vs. Edwards match.

Like their other work together, including the most surprisingly great match of the year in January, these two rise above what ought to be, and succeed above any expectations I would ever have (as all expectations for Impact reset once a great match is over, I have been watching this company off and on since its inception, I have to protect my heart and mind above all else). If the entire company was up to the standards of these Lashley/Edwards matches, it would be the best promotion in the world, but things are what they are, and instead, this is just sneakily one of the best pairings of the year in a year largely defined by great repeat pairings (Gage/Tremont, Reigns/Strowman, and then some stuff in Japan idk).

There’s no magic touch here. Nothing about this is all that different from their other matches. You get a lot of the same stuff, rearranged of course, and then minor shifts around of where certain things are in the match. It’s a great house show version of one of the best matches of the year, and like a great house show match, I am almost as impressed by a great match that doesn’t have to be great but still is as I am by a match that is great on an even higher level. It shows not just a pure effort that I find so appealing, but also a real ability in its own way, to still have a great match without doing every single thing and having this entire apparatus of booking and big gimmick match layout to assist like they did the first time this year.

Eddie comes close to overcoming Lashley’s power and strength edge through speed and intelligence and mostly through guts, only to get caught when he makes one (1) mistake. It’s a classic story of the more confident heavyweight playing around too much, almost getting caught yet again (something I absolutely love about these matches is that they never forget Eddie’s title win over Lashley in 2016 and that the possibility for that happening again is not always ever present on commentary, but in the way both men react during these matches), and learning his lesson.

Bobbo catches Eddie repeating a dive, hurls him on the floor, and then quickly back inside for the Spear to keep the title.

(For like two weeks before losing it to fucking Alberto El Patron and kicking off a run of title holders that would include Austin Aries, Eli Drake, Johnny Impact, Brian Cage, and on down the line, because TNA/Impact/GFW/Anthem Presents Impact is completely incapable of sustaining anything great for too long a time before stepping over their own feet and shooting themselves in the dicks. But, you know, the whole Lashley run did objectively rule.)

Impact’s greatest one on one pairing does it again, resulting in maybe their least vital and, save for Impact’s best match in years between them in January, their most impressive outing to date.

***

Lashley vs. Eddie Edwards, Impact Wrestling (2/9/2017)

This was for Lashley’s Impact World Heavyweight Title.

It’s not their Iron Man match, to be sure and to be clear. While both were technically on free television, in a spiritual sense, one was a major pay-per-view match and the other, this match, is a free TV rematch used to serve two different masters in providing a great match to main event an episode and to go into a different storyline.

Still though, it is pretty good!

Borderline great even, and when that comes out of this promotion, I’m inclined to grade on the curve and just give it to them.

Lashley and Eddie work well together, the power vs. technique thing is very easy to do, and they play off and payoff some things from their previous matches. Nothing revolutionary, nothing I think that warrants a thousand words of praise, but basic good work. Counters from before now being met with their own counter, moves that worked once failing to work in a rematch, things of that nature.

Once again, it is just this beautifully simple and admirable classic wrestling thing. A powerhouse super athlete and an overachieving mostly heart based underdog. There’s a certain kind of natural chemistry here that’s hard to really nail down or at least that’s hard to properly put into words. It’s one of those grey area things in wrestling where this is a performance at the end of the day, and some pairings just naturally have something together. Like so much of the best TNA/Impact stuff of the 2010s, it doesn’t leap off the page immediately, but something about Lashley vs. Eddie Edwards simply works. There are all the mechanical and intellectual explanations about big vs. small, striking vs. suplexing, but at some point, it is more of an art than a science, and no explanation will every completely do the trick.

The match is also home to another nice little chunk of booking from Impact that, likewise, doesn’t reinvent the wheel but that just comes together right. Davey Richards comes down to stop Lashley from using the title belt, and with things entirely even once again, Eddie has it won. Only for Davey Richards to then pull the ref out, kind of snap on Eddie about how it’s always about him, have his wife also attack Eddie’s at ringside, and to cost him the match with a belt shot to set up Bobby’s spear. It’s a great sort of a turn, coming across as something the guy in question (Davey) had thought about (and clearly talked over with the old lady) but not totally decided on until that moment, coming across as far more realistic for that feeling.

Another great chunk of wrestling TV here delivering a great match and a lovely little chunk of booking, and if we’re being honest, a better American Wolves break up angle than anything that ever came out of their ROH run.

***

Eddie Edwards vs. Lashley, Impact Genesis 2017 (1/26/2017)

This was a 30:00 Iron Man Match for Eddie’s Impact World Heavyweight Title.

Genuinely, this is really great.

Being entirely fair, it is not a thirty minute Iron Man in the way we often think of them, as a solid ten minutes are lobbed off on TV. That’s not to say those ten minutes are not also as great as everything we see on screen, but I can only go off of what I’m seeing, and it is more of a great twenty minute iron man than a thirty minute one. Great is great, and that doesn’t matter quite so much to me, but it’s worth noting.

Still, I have not enjoyed a match from TNA/Impact (they are now officially just Impact, ANTHEM OWL and all, although they will spiritually always be TNA) this match in a long time, probably going back to the summer and fall of 2014 with the good Lashley defenses and the Wolves/Hardys/Team 3D series. Truly, I’m not sure I didn’t like this even more than that stuff. If someone said to me that this was the best match in the company since AJ Styles left, I wouldn’t have it in me to argue. I don’t have a real hard stance on that, but yeah man, maybe. It’s a phenomenal achievement not only from a company I don’t expect much from anymore, but also from a match up that I didn’t expect to achieve on this level.

There is a synthesis here, between great simple wrestling and great simple storytelling, that TNA has not had in some time.

Firstly, the story and the booking of the thing is just about perfect.

Eddie Edwards captured the title from Lashley near the end of 2016, when Lashley picked Eddie instead of other challengers, thinking it would be easier, only to get upset. The match wasn’t all that great, but it was a classical piece of pro wrestling booking. This is the receipt for that, the other shoe dropping, but because of how it’s handled and how great the match is, I don’t mind it at all.

This match is as great of an underdog title loss as you’ll find, in terms of how the story is told. Lashley now takes him completely seriously, and the match is a story about how you cannot come out of nowhere twice. Lashley gets him first as a result, following an even first third of the match. He pours it on once he does, with a gnarly suplex over the top and then a Powerbomb on the ramp for a count out. Eddie’s got in him to fight back again, and evens it up with his flying knee and with a flash cradle, presented as still good enough to catch him, but physical realities and smarter wrestling against him is too great a combination. Lashley powerbombs him out of the air and goes into an Arm Triangle to go up 3-2 with two minutes and change left. Eddie manages a front choke in the end as a counter to another Spear that Bob plans as a final message at the end, but doesn’t have enough time to overcome the size difference in a hold like that.

Lashley regains the title and proves something by correcting his previous error, but only leaving Edwards stronger in the process for pushing him like he did. Lashley does it cleanly and fairly, but also meanly enough with the floor attacks and with an ending as cruel as that to give Edwards sympathy in a few different areas. Eddie loses in the most heartbreaking way possible, without a real actual gripe, and undone by the sorts of physical realities that his hard work can and has overcome before, but simply didn’t in this moment.

In a mechanical sense, it is above and beyond anything I would have expected, and that primarily goes for Lashley. It’s been a few years, but in 2011, 2012, and 2013, Edwards was a perennial Wrestler of the Year shortlist guy, so long as he had the material to work with, your classic consistency candidate. Everything he does is solid, he just needs a little more, and with a lot of time and an environment like this, he killed it again. Good offense, tremendous energy, and while his selling isn’t INCREDIBLE or anything, he got it just right for every single phase of the match. Lashley is the real gem here, putting forth what I’d call a career level performance for him. It’s not like he hasn’t been in great matches before, but not at this length and they’re usually against guys we think of a little higher like a John Cena or whoever. There’s also a great character performance element to Lashley here as well, getting pissy at times when he had to work harder than usual, and in my favorite bit, going at the end from wanting to run the clock out to getting mad when Eddie dove after him, and then trying the impactful finish out of spite, only to just barely avoid eating shit once again.

This match is, for the first time in a while, the old TNA Special.

Akin to something like Roode vs. Aries or some of the hits from the 2000s, it’s this display of like, what wrestling is arguably supposed to be. Not the greatest talents in the world and not the flashiest thing in the world, but through a synthesis of performance and writing, they get so much out of it. Two hands working together, with full knowledge of not only what the other has done and is doing, but of what the other seemingly is going to do next.

It is all so much more than what it looks like on paper, a production so much greater than the sum of its parts that, as I’ve experienced, sometimes it has to be seen to be entirely believed.

Genuinely, it is a real accomplishment, an alignment of good simple booking and great performances in one coherent and cohesive package, from a company that hasn’t had an alignment like that, at least not on this level, in some time. 

***1/2

Bobby Lashley vs. Austin Aries, TNA Impact: Destination X 2014 (7/31/2014)

This was for Lashley’s TNA World Heavyweight Title.

It’s not a great match, but it is a surprisingly good one.

Like with most things, the praise for TNA era Bob Lashley was the overblown and desperate praise of true believer cultists, but this is the ideal way to use him. A monster in there against someone who’s smart enough to build something with him and enough of a freak to just about die getting him over. It’s also some stunningly coherent basic ass pro wrestling booking. A newer monster, early in his title reign, runs through a fan favorite underdog. Bonus points for using the same set up (Option C) that led to said underdog’s crowning achievement, only for lightning not to struck twice in the same place. Lashley keeps the title, doing so through that perfect infuriating combination of being both great and then just lucky enough at the right times. Aries has to get five or six things perfectly in a row to beat Lashley, and Lashley only needs one.

I won’t say you come out of this wanting to see someone beat Lashley, he’s not really a wrestler capable of bringing that sort of emotion forward in a vacuum. However, it’s a real decent job that he does here, among his finest ever performances. To what extent that means anything is up to you. I imagine if you think that’s very high praise, then you already loved this match to begin with and are one of those freaks who drops a like on any single review that mentions your obsession (for some this is WWE TV stuff, for some it’s any Nakamura match), no matter if I’m positive or negative about it.

Assuming someone has this show open to see the Hardys/Wolves match, there’s worse ways to spend ten or twelve minutes than watching this.

AJ Styles vs. Seiya Sanada, W-1 (11/16/2013)

This was for AJ Styles’ TNA World Heavyweight Title.

AJ won the title in a lackluster match against Bully Ray at Bound For Glory 2013, and in an unfortunate case of art imitating life, the story was that he had yet to sign a new contract. In reality, AJ’s contract had been extended through December both to do the big BFG main event and climax, but also in the hopes that a deal could eventually be worked out. It was not, and you know the rest of the story.

However in the meantime, to sell AJ as this rogue REAL World Champion following Dixie Carter stripping him of the title, AJ went to TNA-friendly promotions like AAA and WRESTLE-1 and defended it there.

It’s a historical curiosity here, given that Sanada somehow managed to go on to become a big star in recent years for New Japan, and AJ is AJ.

The match itself is whatever, and you instinctively know every reason for that. Sanada is a fucking void. He can’t strike worth a damn, he’s not especially fiery or energetic even here in a role that falls for such qualities, and “mechanically solid” doesn’t really mean a whole hell of a lot. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing here in an eighteen minute singles match against AJ Styles, a situation where many other very average or even bad wrestlers have been able to succeed wildly. AJ himself is wonderful, as usual. Great snap on everything, perfect escalation, and the whole deal got over real easily by the end of the match. AJ keeps his title with the Calf Killer, like he was always going to.

In the end, the main value of this isn’t the match itself (because whatever, Sanada can drag down basically anything), or even it existing as some historical rarity (because whatever, there’s a thousand other ones), but as one more nice little piece of documentation of how silly all the “will AJ Styles be able to get over in Japan?!” handwringing in early 2014 actually was.

Jeff Hardy vs. Austin Aries, TNA Turning Point 2012 (11/11/2012)

This was a ladder match for Hardy’s TNA World Title.

I rolled my eyes for years when people said that these matches were actually great, but yeah, god damn, these matches are great. At Bound For Glory the month before, it was a one man show, but now they’re in Jeff Hardy’s element, and it’s a blast. It’s limited, but they make absolutely no attempt to disguise this or pretend it’s not a stunt show, and I’m always such a sucker for an honest match.

It’s a big dumb stunt show, but it’s a big dumb stunt show with some really cool spots. Barring that, either Jeff Hardy dies on a bump or Austin Aries does. You’ll rarely find a bit in this that isn’t either cool or brutal as hell. The best parts of this are both, which is something Jeff Hardy’s always excelled at and what’s gotten him so much farther than a lot of his contemporaries in this kind of a match or style. So even in spite of both guys being past their primes, surprisingly to a similar extent (a compliment for Jeff, honestly), this winds up working somehow. Aries is a shithead who wants to not be in a match like this, and constantly tries to do it without ladders or as cheaply as possible. The deeper he gets in, the more he winds up paying for trying to play an away game.

The ending is especially great, again hitting that great balance between innovation and brutality.

Far from perfect, but really really fun. They can have it. Another big success for TNA in 2012, somehow managing to look like an actual great promotion provided you only watch the big stuff.

***

Austin Aries vs. Jeff Hardy, TNA Bound For Glory 2012 (10/14/2012)

This was for Aries’ TNA World Heavyweight Title.

It’s weirdly good. Borderline great. Jeff Hardy isn’t entirely shot yet like he is when he comes back to the fed four and a half years later, and Austin Aries is really really really on one. He’s been turned heel in the hopes that the fans will cheer Jeff Hardy instead of him, and while it doesn’t work, it does allow him to totally control the match and he’s delightful. He’s reckless and mean spirited and domineering. Really as good of a heel champion performance as there’s been in TNA in a really long time, probably since Christian in 2007. It’s not incredible strong praise, but it is praise. He really guides this thing, it’s a much more impressive performance than a rating might indicate.

Ending is abrupt and doesn’t feel earned as Jeff is able to manage a swift comeback after being stuffed worse and worse every time he tried it before then. Swanton Bomb gives Jeff the title and a very forced “redemption” win. All the same, this would have fallen to shit without Aries, even if my lasting memory of him is him calling me an f slur at an ROH show when I said I hoped Jimmy Jacobs kicked his ass.

I’m in a good mood. Take it and don’t think about it.

three boy

Bobby Roode vs. James Storm, TNA Lockdown 2012 (4/15/2012)

This was a steel cage match for the TNA World Heavyweight Title.

First things first, it’s an accomplishment that this feels big at all. It’s a testament to the job TNA production did on their hype videos going into this, and one of the rare victories for pre-collapse TNA investing in guys and patiently bringing them up the card. That’s sort of where I’m at with this match. I’m much more appreciative of the ideas it represents than I am about the actual match itself. That’s a whole lot of TNA stuff. This is a bloody cage match in a long feud over a World Title. It feels like it matters, they wrestle like it matters, and there’s a unique ending on top of that.

The match itself just isn’t quite so good outside of all of those bigger concepts.

Roode is again not quite what he wants to be. He still feels like an imitation once the bell actually rings, or even worse, what happens when a top heel grows up wanting to be Triple H instead of wanting to be Ric Flair. The basic routine works better here in a bloody cage match than in a half hour against AJ Styles, but there’s some crucial thing missing to it all. James Storm has a different sort of problem, but it’s still a big problem. He’s believable in his role, he has these great flurries of righteous anger, but then he also does a whole lot of Lungblower sort of offense that doesn’t fit in with the rest of his act or routine much at all. It’s a problem each of them have, not feeling like whole finished products at any point, and it’s why they were so much better as a team than either ever were as individuals.

(and why America’s Most Wanted was a better team than Beer Money.)

The broad strokes work though. They bled a lot and the finish was cool, so I can’t tell you it was bad. It’s just one more big TNA match that works a whole lot better on paper than on film.

I’m a sucker for some good bleeding, and they bleed pretty well. Roode especially gets some nice flow going when Storm’s allowed his revenge at the end. They play on their history well, and it feels like a perfectly acceptable blowoff match, until it isn’t anymore. Bobby Roode is getting up against the cage door, but because TNA’s cage door is in the middle of the cage and wider than usual and because it’s shut behind him, it’s a shock when a superkick from Storm not only sends him back with enough force to swing the door open, but enough to knock him off the apron to the floor, keeping the title through sheer luck alone.

It’s not a new finish, but because of how they put it together and how TNA’s cage is, it’s one of the best ever version of an old spot.

Still, this needed to do a lot more in between those larger moments. There’s a real vacancy to a lot of this that’s hard to describe. this match is a fake version of old territory bloodbaths. The motions are there. The idea is there. But there’s nothing in between all of that. The best things this match does just kind of make me wish I was watching someone else do a better and more authentic version of this.

It reminds me of the sort of vacancy and eerie feeling about that which I get from a lot of Richards-inspired bad indie wrestling around this time, but later much more with Kyle O’Reilly, where they present this illusion of a complete and great match instead of having one. Like these two and their sort of history museum storefront ass recreation of a JCP cage match, it’s because is is all they can do. So, instead of the thing, there’s this fake storefront version of it up instead. It’s the recreation of a great match instead of an actual great match. They put up the front of the things you’d expect in a technical classic. Strike exchanges, matwork, brief focus on a limb, but it’s all sort of fake. The limbwork doesn’t really matter. The strike exchanges kind of suck sometimes. Matwork is passable at best. They go to a limb after the big epic run when a switch suddenly flips and they begin Doing Things. It’s like taking a movie set and pretending it’s actually a house. It’s not. It’s a thing designed to look like a house from far away, but it’s not a house. It’s a thing designed to look like a great match from far away, but it’s not a great match. More often than not, it’s a bad match.

I liked this match more than probably 80% of those matches because these motions (blood, throwing people into a cage) are much better than other ones people can go through and less inclined to send me into a 2000 word frothing impotent rage, but a lie is still a lie.