wrestling / Columns
Wrestling’s 4R’s Monday Edition 10.25.10: ROH, Superstars, Impact & SmackDown Reviewed!
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In HD where available…
By: Aaron Hubbard
ROH on HDNet 10.18.10:
QUICK RESULTS:
Davey Richards def. Tyler Black [****1/2]
RICHARDS vs. BLACK IS THE SHOW: This episode was unlike any other in the show’s history, as it was almost entirely dedicated to the storyline of Davey Richards vs. Tyler Black. Tyler Black was the former ROH World Champion making his final contracted appearance for the company, and Davey Richards wanted to fight him and beat him before he left for greener pastures. They did a great job of hyping it up as a “love of competition” vs. “love of money” storyline, with Black showing the stronger side of his promo abilities by heeling it up and talking about the great opportunity he had and how Davey wouldn’t amount to more than the cheers of a few hundred people. Richards offered to pay Black money to wrestle him, but after calling him “a little b****”, Black agreed to face him for free.
The resulting match was a classic that is, in my mind, the leader of the pack for Free TV Match of the Year, inching out Richards vs. Edwards and just squeaking by Beer Money vs. The Machine Guns 2/3 Falls Match. While not in the league of their Death Before Dishonor VIII match due to several factors (a less rabid crowd, being taped instead of shown live, having a more intense pace, bigger moves and overall better selling), it was a tremendous thirty-minute plus match that reminded me of why I love professional wrestling. Richards was able to make Tyler Black submit to the Texas Cloverleaf, but Tyler looked fantastic in the loss. They proved two things with this match: they are both tremendously talented pro wrestlers and ROH can still deliver great matches. No complaints, this was pure awesome.
NOTHING OF NOTE.
OLD PROMOS: After the opening promo and before the match, ROH showed us the excellent video package for Death Before Dishonor VIII that built up Black vs. Richards as a huge match, and we got a promo from The Briscoe Brothers rehashing the fact that they hate the Kings of Wrestling and they will make them pay. This was fine, but overall I felt bored until the match started, as there was just nothing new here. I get that having Richards vs. Black be the only match on the show makes it seem more important, but honestly I would have preferred an entertaining squash match to kill some time.
NOTHING OF NOTE.
Literally a one-match show this week, ROH gave us a tremendous thirty-minute match with wrestling spelled W-R-E-S-T-L-I-N-G. It was the TV match of the year and probably in the top ten overall for the year as well. However, I did find the show boring until that match, so I’m going to have to dock it a few points. This was still a great show. SHOW RATING: 8.0 |
By: Jeremy Thomas
iMpact! 10.21.10:
QUICK RESULTS:
Robbie E. def. Amazing Red [*]
AJ Styles def. The Pope [** ¼]
Beer Money def. RVD and Sabu [** ½]
Mickie James def. Sarita [**]
Kaz def. Mr. Anderson [* ¾]
IT’s HARD FOR THEM TO SAY THEY’RE SORRY: Impact kicked off with Mr. Anderson making his way down to the ring with his arm all slung up. I gotta say, anyone who can get the crowd to chant “WE ARE ASSHOLES” makes me chuckle a little. Anderson wanted Jeff to come down, though he said it in much less polite fashion and he got RVD instead. Both men were pissed, and then Jeff showed up on the screen and proved that the crowd hasn’t quite turned on him yet by drawing a bit of a pop. Jeff did a fun little pre-taped promo about how we’re all messed up and Jeff did both of them wrong. He had a nice little smarmy grin as he asked them to forgive him. I won’t be convinced that Jeff can pull this off until I see a really good live promo from him (last week’s live promo was just tolerable), but I enjoyed the little twist of his character here.
This whole thing led to Bischoff coming out and crassly advertising Reaction before he asked Anderson for forgiveness and offered him a shot at the title if he could survive an X-Division match against Kazarian in, then booked RVD and Sabu against Beer Money. This was a much better start to Impact than last week; while last week had the weight, this week got the matches set up and finished itself out before it ran overlong. Can’t argue with that.
AJ STYLES vs. D’ANGELO DINERO: Earlier in the show we had a promo where the Pope was in a strip club talking about how he was going to start at the top of Fourtune, and thus was calling out AJ Styles. So question—if Fourtune is basically a sub-faction of the Immortals, and D’Angelo had been arguing against the whole Bischofff/Hogan thing, wouldn’t it have made more sense (in his mind, at least) to start with Hardy if he’s starting at the top? Just saying. Anyway, Pope always brings the promo skills and this was no different. We later learned while Flair was getting Iced that Bischoff had set the match so that if Fourtune got involved, AJ automatically lost the title to the Pope.
Okay, so I pause for a moment to say it here. Good lord, is TNA trying hard to be the adult wrestling show. And good on them for trying. We’ve been asking them to show that they’re the alternative to WWE’s product for years, and they’re giving it their best effort. Granted, I would rather it be by way of wrestling and not dorky storylines, but TV-14 vs. TV-PG is a way to go, too. I do think they’re trying hard with Dixie dropping S-bombs, all the Icings, Cookie’s crudity and Pope showing up as a strip club, but it’s at least something. I won’t say the execution’s been great, but I do appreciate that they were trying even if they aren’t necessarily going in the right direction.
Anyway, we had the match toward the end of the first hour, which was a Street Fight. I had decent expectations for this, to likely be scuttled by a chintzy finish. The chintzy finish happened, but it didn’t ruin the match. These guys took it right to each other and sold the hatred between them nicely, and it worked well for a street fight on free TV. The match could have been longer obviously, but beggars can’t be choosers and it certainly could have been a lot worse. These guys work well against each other and while they didn’t bust out every trick in the playbook, they made it as good as they needed to be. I’m curious why they have Dinero lose this early, but it put over the Immortals and that’s what it needed to do.
JEFF JARRETT SPEAKS…AGAIN: To begin the second hour, we had Jeff Jarrett making his way to the ring talking about how sorry he was and how he needed to apologize to Kurt. Yeah, I think we knew that there was going to be no actual apology. Jeff had hella heat with the crowd, and he started off with his apology before twisting it how we expected it to be twisted. I thought this was another good job by Jarrett. I’ve always thought JJ worked better as a heel and he delivered a great little promo here about how he took everything from Angle, before Joe came down but got ambushed by Security. This resulted in a beatdown of Joe, albeit with a nice little reversal by Joe that almost got him out of trouble. The announcers’ bitching directly at Jarrett was a bit much, but otherwise I dug this.
RVD & SABU vs. BEER MONEY: Earlier in the show, Van Dam made his way to the EV2.0 locker room, all paranoid about Bischoff’s mind games. He got all bitchy with the guys, asking if they’d been talking to Eric and Raven awesomely told him to “go smoke another bowl.” What drug policy? Seriously, I get that RVD is a known pot user among the IWC and the High Times crowd, but is that something you really want to be advertising when you’re looking for mainstream acceptability? Not so much. So, my big problem with this whole teased Sabu/Immortals thing is that I don’t ever buy Sabu being a member of Immortals. It doesn’t seem appropriate to his character and frankly, I don’t see why the Immortals would want him. I would see Richards, Dreamer or even Raven as more likely to turn, they had success in WCW and/or WWE and so the Immortals would be more likely to work with them. The match was actually fairly impressive up until the miscommunication ending. Can’t argue with this one.
MICKIE vs. SARITA: Earlier in the show we had Sarita actually deliver a very nice, brief little promo here about Mickie and how she hadn’t accomplished anything in TNA yet. Why she doesn’t get more mic time, I don’t know because she’s not bad at all. On the other hand, Mickie’s promo on top of the bull wasn’t quite as impressive. It wasn’t bad at all, and I did like the little mutual respect thing they had in their promos. Not top-notch work, but I respected their efforts.
Okay, so I have to say I don’t know what I hate more—Sarita’s ring gear or Mickie’s entrance theme. They’re both really bad, and Mickie wrestling in a flannel shirt and cut-offs? Hey, that actually works for me. I actually dug this match. It wasn’t any kind of five star classic and it was too short to earn my true respect, but at four minutes it blew anything that the WWE Divas division has been doing right out of the water. They didn’t bury Sarita like they could have and this actually did a good job of putting both of them over. After the match we had Tara come down to beat on Mickie and that shows that they’re going forward with Mickie’s push toward the title, which is fine. I’d like to see her have to feud with Tara for a solid month first before going to Madison, but this was a promising in-ring start in TNA for Mickie.
ROBBIE E. vs. AMAZING RED: Before this match we saw the TMZ footage of Cookie talking some trash about J-Woww. We also got a little recap of the incident from last week with voiceover and a quick “behind the scenes” sound bite with J-Woww herself. So that brought us to this match…well, until we had to see another recap. Let me be clear here. They gave us a recap, and then while Robbie was coming down to the ring, showed us another recap of the same material. And we needed that…why? This was a squash to put Robbie over and it did that well enough. It was pretty much a textbook squash with Red getting a brief flurry of offense and one near-fall before the Fist Pump finished it. This accomplished what it needed to, although the promo after the fact wasn’t particularly good and the crowd was crapping all over it. That dragged this down into the low end of puRgatoRy.
KAZ vs. MR. ANDERSON: This was honestly screwed from the get-go. They had Anderson playing the injury, and then Fourtune beat Anderson out and left him laying on the ramp for Kaz. I understand that the point of this was to put Anderson over and show how dangerous Fourtune was, and this did that well enough. The problem was still that you had an Ultimate X match with a one-armed man. There was no way that Anderson was winning this, despite his valiant efforts. That killed any and all suspense in the match. The in-ring work was as good as the injury would allow and I would love to see more between these guys, but this just didn’t work for me.
ONE WINTER NATION: Okay, I’m a huge, huge Katie Lea/Nikita fan. Have been for a long time. I was actually a bit more excited to hear she was coming to TNA than when I heard Mickey was. That being said, what was this? I kinda liked the BP’s blowing off Miss Tessmacher, and then Lacey and Velvet left. All of a sudden Winter was standing behind Angelina, possibly as a figment of her imagination. As near as I can tell, whoever came up with this whole idea fell asleep on a photo of Mickie James kissing Trish while watching WCW around Halloween Havoc ’98 on one TV and The Terminator on another. Katie Lea’s delivery was deadpan and stilted, the weird supernatural stuff didn’t work and this came off cheaply. Again, I love Katie Lea/Winter, but I really didn’t like this.
We actually had a decent episode of Impact here. Sure, I didn’t like the main event and I think that the One Psycho Winter Lesbian Stalker Nation is probably going to be a disaster, but outside of those there wasn’t a hell of a lot to complain about. Jarrett’s promo delivered, the wrestling was actually pretty good for the most part and even when it wasn’t—Robbie E, I’m looking at you—it was short and there for squashing purposes only. We’ve had stronger episodes of Impact, but we’ve had much, MUCH worse. SHOW RATING: 7.0 |
By: Nick Bazar
Superstars 10.21.10:
QUICK RESULTS:
Santino Marella/Vladimir Kozlov def. The Usos (**)
William Regal def. Darren Young (*3/4)
Cody Rhodes/Drew McIntyre def. Chris Masters/MVP (**1/2)
SANTINO MARELLA/VALDIMIR KOZLOV vs. THE USOS: Fun match that was definitely better than I expected. Marella and Kozlov work pretty well together and they are over with the crowd as a team. Most importantly, this match gave Marella a clean win heading into Bragging Rights with help from his Cobra. It may not seem like much of a credibility-building win, being that it took place on Superstars, but it’s the thought that counts.
BARRETT- NEXT WWE CHAMP? Another solid promo by Wade Barrett. He will become the 40th WWE Champion and join names such as Triple H, Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart. However, he is better than all of those superstars and will become the most dominant champion in WWE history. Simple and effective. I think it’s a nice change of pace to have stuff like this on Superstars every once in a while.
CODY RHODES/DREW MCINTYRE vs. CHRIS MASTERS/MVP: Solid, harmless match, which is really all you can ask for from Superstars. Masters is a sad story: he started off green as “moss on a Mississippi tree stump,” but with a pretty big push. Now, he has developed into a very solid worker, but is relegated to Superstars and squash matches on Smackdown. He had a nasty contusion on his eye after the match too. It’s a shame that Rhodes and McIntyre have no team to feud with- instead, they have been losing in singles matches left and right. At least they finally got a win here.
WILLIAM REGAL vs. DARREN YOUNG This is the kind of match that Regal loves out of rookies. He punched and Young punched back harder, so to speak. I was not a big fan of Young on NXT, but he has impressed me during this little singles run. I also approve of the new haircut as I think his old one played a role in my initial dislike of his character. However, the action was nothing to write home about and I would’ve liked to see Young get the win.
NOTHING
NOTHING
Not a bad Superstars this week. Two solid tag matches, a good promo by Wade Barrett and a forgettable confrontation between William Regal and Darren Young. Even though no one will purchase Bragging Rights based on Santino Marella’s win and Wade Barrett’s promo, it was nice letting those who watch Superstars know that the show isn’t completely without use. One more thing- TALK ABOUT MASTERS! MORE! SHOW RATING: 6.5 |
By: Steve Cook
WWE SmackDown 10.22.10
QUICK RESULTS:
Big Show, Kofi Kingston & Rey Mysterio d. The Miz, Sheamus & Ezekiel Jackson (**½)
Jack Swagger d. Santino Marella (*)
Alberto Del Rio d. John Morrison (**¼)
Edge d. CM Punk by DQ (***)
Natalya & Kelly Kelly d. LayCool (*)
Randy Orton d. Kane (***)
SHOW, KOFI & REY vs. MIZ, SHEAMUS & ZEKE: I’ve always had an irrational love for six-man tag team matches. Lucha libre promotions book a lot of six-mans to build up feuds and give people a little taste of what the future singles matches will be like. It also helps get more people on the card, which is a good thing for the wrestlers. This match was a taste of what the Bragging Rights 7 on 7 will be like, except with less people and without elimination rules. Kofi Kingston ended up doing most of the selling for the Smackdown side, as Rey Mysterio got to come in early and do his thing while Big Show cleaned house with his hot tag at the end. They all looked impressive. Miz was ok, Sheamus was good, Big Zeke looked a little rusty but that should be expected since he’s coming back from injury. It’s smart to put him in these types of matches while he’s still getting back on track. Good match, and I enjoyed the ending with Rey splashing Miz off of Big Show’s shoulders.
ALBERTO DEL RIO vs. JOHN MORRISON: This was a fun back & forth five minute sprint with ADR once again owning the universe. JoMo’s ok enough, but he’s no Alberto Del Rio. Nice to see Alberto bust out a bridging German suplex…there was a time in WWE where everybody was using Germans and nobody really cared. In small doses, it’s a devastating maneuver. The finishing sequence was good, with Alberto kneeing Morrison’s shoulder on a Starship Pain attempt, setting up the flipping cross arm breaker. I’d like to see these guys have a longer match.
EDGE vs. CM PUNK: The match itself was pretty good, and even though the finish was lame it led to one of those fun “everybody hit your finisher” sequences that always get a good reaction from the crowd. Edge & Punk have a lot of history for guys that have only faced each other a couple of times that I can remember…Punk won his first World title by cashing in the MITB on Edge, and they were traded for each other not so long ago. Also, Punk ripped off his whole gimmick from Edge. Straight Edge. Yup.
RANDY ORTON vs. KANE As much as I think wrestling announcing has gone downhill since the glory days of Gordon Solie, Lance Russell & that JR guy, the crew did a really good job of hyping up this Champion vs. Champion contest as a big deal throughout the show. I don’t think most people would consider Orton vs. Kane a dream match, and it seemed obvious there would be a screwy finish, but Grisham, Striker & Cole did their best to make people care. Both guys looked pretty strong in this match, though the ending with Kane being distracted by Undertaker’s Dong was a little lacking.
JACK SWAGGER vs. SANTINO MARELLA: This was actually better than I was expecting, but still ends up here due to the mascots feuding. The highlight of the match was Swagger & the Soaring Eagle running around in the ring before Santino came out, and Swagger showed some aggression by breaking the ankle lock just before the five count. Swagger could use more victories like this and the one he had against MVP last week to re-establish himself as a championship contender.
NATALYA & KELLY KELLY vs. LAY-COOL: It wasn’t long enough to make me have much of an opinion on it. I will say that impressions are not Layla or Michelle McCool’s forte.
TYLER REKS DOES NOTHING: This night was all about building up Team Smackdown, but they forgot the one guy that needed it most. Tyler Reks just randomly came back last week and earned a spot on the team by defeating Kaval after he’d been beaten up by Big Show for five minutes. The majority of the good people of the WWE Universe either don’t know who he is or remember his ECW stint and weren’t impressed. The rest of the Team Smackdown members either have multiple title reigns to their credit or, in the case of Alberto Del Rio, have been heavily pushed since their WWE debut. It’s going to take a lot to get people to buy into Reks, but if he had been placed in one of the Raw vs. SD matches or had gotten the chance to squash a jobber, his cause could have been helped a little bit. Instead, he’s just that random guy who kept us from seeing Kaval on PPV.
NO KAVAL: People were telling me last week to quit my complaining because Kaval would obviously take his spot back from Tyler Reks next week. Well, he didn’t. He didn’t even appear on the show. After thinking about the whole situation some more, I arrived at the conclusion that the angle would have made more sense if somebody else from NXT 2 had taken Kaval’s spot. There would have been some previous history and it could have led into a nice little feud. I would have been all for a “Show Time” Percy Watson return…OH YEAH~!
HORNSWOGGLE vs. SWAGGER SOARING EAGLE: I was afraid of this, but was at least hoping they’d hold off on it until after Bragging Rights. Why was Hornswoggle helping out Santino Marella, a proud member of Team Raw? Hopefully Big Show pulled the little guy aside later and told him to check his ego at the door and remember whose side he’s on.
UNDERTAKER PULLS KANE INTO A HOLE IN THE RING: Of all the ways to go home before a PPV, Undertaker pulling Kane into a hole in the ring was certainly the most recent. I did appreciate the flashback to 1996 when the Deadman did the same thing to Diesel, but I’m pretty sure I appreciated it more when I was 12. Perhaps that’s a good sign and all the 12 year olds will get their parents to buy Bragging Rights.
This episode of Smackdown did a lot to make Team Smackdown look like the most dominant team on paper since the 2010-11 Miami Heat. Maybe it was a little too much, because now I fully expect Team Raw to win because of the WWE’s Even Steven booking plan. There weren’t any must-see matches on this show, but most of them were fairly decent and the ridiculous stuff at least didn’t last very long. Overall, it was a solid though unspectacular show heading into the PPV. SHOW RATING: 7.0 |
…and remember to stay grounded!
