November 2003

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This match is just fucking ridiculous. It's a pretty infamous match in Ring of Honor's lore, mostly due to the post-match, but it's also EASILY the silliest & most ridiculous match they have held up to this point. And I loved it. It's pure chaos & carnage for every single passing second of it -- a full-on brawl with fists flying & wrestlers being thrown into the steel cage walls, and then there's so many absolutely RIDICULOUS, if I may repeat myself, highflying spots from the top of the cage, mostly involving dem boys Teddy Hart & especially Jack Evans. It is 100% worth a watch, even if there's a good chance that you would hate it, because it's such a ridi…

This is part of the aborted Jarrett vs. Hulk Hogan feud that TNA began with the aim of it headlining their first attempt at a 3 hour Sunday PPV (what was meant to be the first Bound for Glory). That match never happens, although the company do get full value form endlessly replaying the clip of Jarrett hitting Hogan with a guitar at the Tokyo Dome. This is essentially the payoff with Sting parachuted in. At this stage Sting had done one tag match for TNA and little in wrestling other than handful of matches for touring company the WWA since the end of WCW, so that at least brings some interest. Early on there is lots of stooging and stalling from Jarrett as was his w…

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This was better than you'd expect given that Momoe can't really work Yoshida's style. It was a bit sprinty since it was a tournament final, and it basically became a typical Momoe AJW match after Yoshida got her shit in, but I was expecting a whole lot worse. Maybe I'm being generous because it's two of my faves. I've certainly seen worse tournament finals.

This was a lot of fun. It was clipped in parts so it was hard to get a gauge for the rhythm, but the third fall was hard fought and featured some great action. Virus, Ricky Marvin & Volador Jr may have been the best trio in Mexico in 2003. This was an opportunity to see them in a different territory, and against guys you wouldn't usually see them wrestle.

Ngl this would've absolutely slapped if we were in Japan and these guys had like 15/20 minutes to do a Michinoku-Pro style spot-fest. Sadly they get five minutes and it's mostly to get the relatively new World's Greatest over. That being said, the two lads do bump well for Funaki and co as Funaki lands a good Ghetto-Blaster, Ultimo gets in a nice pop-up Frankensteiner and the two land a assisted baseball slide to Haas that looked fairly convincing: this is a solid start for what I thought was a enjoyable sprint. Despite Funaki's great looking punches he gets caught out when Benjamin superkicks his leg while not the legal man, allowing him and Haas to get in and just beat …

This is from 2003, my bad! Low Ki vs Christopher Daniels - NWA TNA 11/12/03 Nothing quite says war like catching your buddy doing a split-legged moonsault. Don West calling this a war was well quite the exaggeration. This is just a fun let me run through my moveset for a bit and now you run through yours. I love Low Ki's moveset so this is totally fun. The control he has over his legs is incredible. The Shining Wizard into an Octopus or the way he could convert just about anything into a submission move was breath-taking. This was NOT Triple X explodes, but just a good routine early 00s indy match. Good chain wrestling, the highspot transition with Daniels using s…

Much of this was very good, largely thanks to Ian Rotten. He would take down Bailey and crossface him, hit big suplexes, Kawada-esque kneedrops etc. His hand selling was pretty neat. After having his hand worked over he would stop throwing punches and instead use the back of his forearm. There were also lots of crazy headbutt exchanges and body part work. On the other hand having this go over 40 minutes was simply a bad idea. Watching them take turns beating on eachother simply got old after a while. Bailey is pretty one dimensional and seemed to have little idea about selling. I'll also say parts of this would have looked better if these two were classically trained and …

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One of the best classic Survivor Series style matches in history. Austin's career is on the line against Bischoff's team. Everyone played their roles pretty much perfectly in this match. Steiner made for a great bully jock, Henry was a powerhouse. Van Dam made a good guy to keep the action moving throughout the early stages of the match. Jericho and Christian made for satisfyingly annoying heel stooges. 3D were great filling out the early half with action along with Van Dam but the second half was the Shawn Michaels show. Probably one of Shawn's best performances in his entire career. Once he gets busted open, everything in the match gets tense and intense. His s…

I'm surprised there's no thread for this, either. This is some insane shit. Taker beats Vince bloody, just absolutely beats the ever loving dog fuck out of him, takes the whole match and the only way Vince can win is by sending Undertaker's freak brother who attempted to murder both Vince's wife and son after Undertaker. This match needs to be talked about more, it's an amazing, violent, bloody brawl. This match proves that a one sided beating can be an all time great match if the beating is fun to watch and preferably involves a ton of juice. Truly one of the greatest matches in WWE history. *****

This is probably the best 2-on-2 tag team match ROH had held up to this point in time. It's just full of super exciting tag team sequences & overall kick-ass action -- Joe & Styles wrecking shit n' cleaning house together was so much fun, and The Briscoes were awesome as well, matching the viciousness & straight-up awesomeness of their opponents throughout. Them working better as an unit with the little things and capitalizing on the one miscommunication AJ & Joe made in the end was the most obvious narrative to go with it, and it worked super well, I thought. One big misstep for them caused the loss against the tag champs. This match was such a super good…

This is an awesome little match. The early back & forth is really good, and so is Rave taking over by targeting Daniels' arm. Daniels' initial selling is on point, and him taking the control back by going after Rave's back ruled -- the whole heat seg he did on it was great stuff w/ his full focus being on that one bodypart. Then add the always charming young boy vs. an established cocky superstar of the company dynamic to the thing, and you got yourself a big hit. ***1/2

This is as hard hitting as one would expect and has some neat, interesting bits of storytelling with AJ having to counter Joe's big size advantage. Joe is on top for a lot of the match, and it's of course some pretty great stuff with his arsenal looking brutal as always & AJ bumping like AJ does for it. That's already a winning combination, but then you add in AJ's explosive, vicious n' excellent comebacks, and you got a real kick-ass bout. Going back to that interesting storytelling mention, I also really liked the whole little narrative they did with AJ busting out big power moves on Joe, which ultimately caused him to essentially gas himself out. ***3/4

It's a No Ropes Barbed Wire match to end this feud. When you talk about pure nastiness & sheer violence, this probably ups their previous match. There's some stuff here that's legitimately pretty hard to watch, and I mean that in the best way possible. I don't think it's as good overall as that said Bitter Friends, Stiffer Enemies match-up of theirs though, but it's not far off. One slight negative that bothered me was Homicide going for multiple flash roll-ups in the beginning; it didn't fit the match, and it ESPECIALLY didn't fit Homicide of all people at all. Other than that, this was him & Corino doing pro-wrestling grudge match violence brilliantly, once agai…