September 2008

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This is a cage match where the only ways to win are by pinfall or climbing over the top of the cage to escape. I've never cared for escape rule cage matches due to the inherent silliness of winning a grudge match by running away from your opponent. They only really work for me when they're done Bruno-style where the babyface beats the living shit out of the heel and then calmly walks out the cage door. Here, they made it work by keeping the escape attempts to a minimum. Notably, Claudio never tries to climb out himself and only goes up to cut off Brodie's attempts to escape. Overall, this is a pretty fantastic hoss fight where everything feels rough and uncooperative. Bot…

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Shawn Michaels vs Chris Jericho - WWF Unforgiven 2008 Shawn Michaels' amazing 2008 campaign continues as he delivers another triumphant performance in the best blood feud in WWE history. At Great American Bash in July, Jericho bloodied Michaels with a wild back elbow that landed on the injured eye. Jericho ended up winning by TKO after Michaels could not defend himself from the barrage of punches to the open wound. Michaels came out at Summerslam to announce his retirement due to injuries, but Jericho came out and wanted to Michaels to admit it was due to Jericho. Michaels admits the injuries are at the hands of the evil Jericho, but Jericho needs to admit his family…

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"ROH's greatest rivalry has come to Japan!" - a fun tagline by Prazak there. It is a very fun match! Nowhere near their best, but it didn't need to be. Lots of fun work on the mat by Danielson early on, as he busts out some awesome, vicious looking creative holds. The match very naturally builds with its intensity too, as by the end they're trading some terrific big strikes & bombs. I fuck with this match quite a lot. More so than I remembered. It lowkey feels like a touring version of their big match, which combined with the unique atmosphere of it being in Japan makes it a very charming deal all around. ****

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A really good TV match. Nice bruiser vs. monster narrative with Finlay simply getting overwhelmed for the majority of the bout and, after an opening, violently attacking Henry's arm to get himself back into the match. Strong selling by Finlay and offensive work by Henry. Neat post match selling of the arm by Henry too. Probably the best Henry match (and performance) I seen outside of maybe the 2006 Rey ones. *** 3/4

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The Claudio/Bryan exchanges are awesome, loved how aggressive Claudio was. Great stuff to advance their feud. After he got himself DQ'd, Bryan is the FIP against Shiozaki; Shiozaki's work during his control segment is quite meh, but Danielson makes him look like million bucks by selling his ass off for him. After Danielson's 1st comeback, Go's work gets a lot better too! His work went from very meh to FANTASTIC out of the sudden. He does everything with a sense of urgency & shows some personality while doing so. Great stuff. Great match. ****

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This was great as expected. Great work on top by Nigel (as usual), his arm work on Roddy was really good, Roddy's selling of it was fine & his early shine + last comeback run before the end was fantastic - that Gibson Driver nearfall was legitimately fantastic. ****

- Fantastic match. Danielson was fantastic working over Nakajima, targeting that arm, softening him up for the Cattle Mutilation, Nakajima sold it fine - he really didn't do anything to "sell" it, but he didn't do anything to no sell it either. Nakajima's work over of Bryan was just as good as that of Bryan's over him; loved the leg targeting, there were a couple of moments where I thought Bryan's selling of it was a LITTLE spotty, as in there were a couple of moments where I thought he could've sold it more, but all in all I thought he sold it pretty damn fantastically. A lovely war of attrition. ****1/4

WOW! This was a really fun grapple-heavy junior bout. It was worked almost in a "maestra"'s style which is really something that more of the japanese girl's shouldve gotten hip to. Plenty of tricked out sequences and counters. Yabushita uses her judo and is pretty great with unpredictable transitions into armbars, Bolshoi goes for the leg and busts out a Lucha-meets-Honda rolling cradle submission that had Rey Hechicero eating his heart out. Bolshoi really has an awesome moveset (dig that carne seated chokehold) and is just such a fabulous military clown grappler luchadora veteran wrestler. You'd think Lucha would have an awesome weird clown technician but instead Bolshoi…

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As far as i can tell this came about as the end of that METAL VAMPIRE storyline. Not that it matters, because the selling point for this is that it's Dick Togo in a cage match. He's just perfectly suited to do this. Most of the match is a bloody brawl before Togo misses a wild senton from the top of the cage and Takagi hits the two moves that he can hit really well to win. It sounds simple but it just builds in a great way and the early brawling is all very compelling.

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