June 2014

John Cena vs Bray Wyatt - WWE Payback 2014 Last Man Standing I would say my favorite trend of 2014 was each PPV having an overbooked, entertaining clusterfuck on the show. It spices the show up and allows more intersection between different characters and ties the matches, angles and character motivations together better due to the booking to be very limited. Unlike the Attitude Era, these matches do not feel as overexposed and the wrestling surrounding the hijinx is better than in that era. That being said while I find these matches entertaining they fall more in the Summer Blockbuster category than Oscar-winning performances. A perfect example of this which is Ce…

Ricochet vs KUSHIDA - NJPW Best of the Super Juniors FINALS 6/8/14 Surprisingly to me at least, Ricochet was more over than KUSHIDA throughout this match. I am a pretty big Ricochet fan. I have seen KUSHIDA at least once live, for some reason I think I have seen him twice. He is a name I see bandied around, but for some reason he doesnt he seem to do too hot on MOTY lists so I have never checked him out. I thought this was a really great juniors match that went off the rails and ventured into NOAH territory with 8 million inconsequential false finishes. The chain wrestling at the beginning was solid and entertaining. Ricochet convinces KUSHIDA that they do a cr…

Match Link Decided to rewatch this after seeing their recent Sendai Girls match and wow does it ever hold up. First off, it's great two see these two in front of a bigger crowd (Korakuen looks full) than usual and getting great reactions which makes them come off a legit stars. They don't mess around and go right at each other at the start. Meiko especially is going full bore laying in some really nasty shots. Hiroyo fires back with her own shots plus hits some big suplexes when she gets the opportunity to really knock Meiko for a loop. The match is short, just under twelve minutes, but they barely waste a second the entire way. The best match of Hiroyo's career so fa…

Apparently this Mashita guy worked Battlarts and Real Japan, it still doesn't ring a bell, I don't remember ever hearing about him. He's basically a poor man's Munenori Sawa here-nothing bad, but nothing especially good either-he throws some kicks and that's about it. Honda is still a joy to watch-the way he grinds a Headlock is a thing of beauty so watching this goof try to escape it over and over again and constantly failing was quite fun. Honda busts some of his signature submissions and pins, not many as the briefness of the match didn't allow him to. A fun and easy watch if you have four minutes to kill. ***

Good little comedy match on the 2014 Mitsuharu Misawa tribute night.

Jun Akiyama vs Takao Omori - AJPW 6/15/2014 Vacant Triple Crown Championship Wow, this is like an exact copy of Kawada vs Kojima 2005 for the Triple Crown. You have the super worker kick the dogshit out of the generic create a puroresu wrestler in really entertaining fashion only to choke in ridiculous fashion to a barrage of lariats. The only difference was that Kojima was actually over. In defense of this match, I think if you plug in a wrestler with more charisma than Omori this match would be a lot better. Omori is about the most bland wrestler I think I have ever seen. He does the bare minimum in almost every regard, but never really excels at any one thing and …

Austin Aries vs Kenny King - Slammiversary 2014 Whatever happened to Kenny King? I thought he had tremendous upside, good look, charisma, trash talker and very athletic. King is aligned with MVP & Lashley. Looks like MVP was supposed to face World Champion Eric Young (I cant believe he won the title and am surprised he is their current champion as of this writing, though D'Amore is booking), but got injured so they set up Lashley vs Joe and now Aries vs King. Another fun shine to start. King disrespects Aries at the opening bell so Aries launches into a full steam ahead dropkick in the corner, which is normally the prelude to the Brainbuster, but King had it scou…

Bully Ray vs Ethan Carter III - TNA Slammiversary 2014 Texas Death Match A fun romp! I do recommend this if you just want something to put a smile on your face. Bully Ray aged way better than you would expect him to. When he was talking about Terry Funk being idol I was like yeah he worked with Funk in ECW and he didnt look that old given it was 20 years ago. Bully was just oozing charisma in this one. He had the crowd in the palm of his hand. He was lapping it up and I was enjoying the hell out of it. ECIII is a gimmick I had heard of and I knew that if this kid even had an ounce of charisma that this gimmick would be gold. Boy, oh boy, did he not disappoint! I was …

Samoa Joe vs Bobby Lashley - Slammiversary 2014 Samoa Joe was born to be a massive babyface rockstar. The only part of this match worth watching is the shine. What a shine! Not quite as good as the Samoa Joe shine at Bound for Glory 2007, but this one was also fun. The way he interacts with crowd and gets them invested is contagious. The dude is a rockstar. They tussle early and then Joe rocks him with that big head kick in the corner and boy oh boy what a shot and what a reaction! It was off to the races. When Lashley powders on the Facewash, Joe goes into torpedo mode and bowls him over with a Suicide Dive. Crowd was rocking. Lashley ground this match to a halt. Te…

This was something else. I loved all the interactions between all 4 competitors - even Marufuji did a damn good job outside of few of those crappy superkicks. Marufuji vs. Meiko was fun, Meiko dodging those quick striking combinations of Marufuji was pretty damn great. Kana vs. Meiko was awesome, stiff exchanges between the 2. And then the main thing. My god. The interactions between Kana & Minoru goddamn Suzuki. Minoru is such an evil bastard, he wasn't taking this joshi lady seriously, no selling her strikes and just being MiSu. Once Kana nails him with a pretty low kick, he gets so angry, he beats the shit out of her. Kana tries to comeback, she lays some of her gr…

IWGP Jr Heavyweight Champion Kota Ibushi vs Ricochet - NJPW Dominion 2014 Ricochet is fresh off winning the Best of the Super Juniors less than a month ago and they waste no time giving him his title shot against the Champ, Ibushi. These two are the kings of the "stylized action violence" style that has permeated the 2010s. The style is polarizing to me. The highspots can be eye-popping or they can be eye-rolling. These are two of the more impressive high-flyers in a generation of wannabes. So the really key highspots WOW: the opening sequence of evasive maneuvers, Ricochet's Swandive over the ringpost, the Top Rope Standing Frankensteiner Somersault Sticks The…

This was FANTASTIC. Honma went after Shibata right away, that was awesome & then Nagata tagged in - goddamn Shibata trying to fight both Honma & Nagata at the same time on their corner was badass. That was shut down pretty quickly though, as the numbers advantage was too much for Shibata. Nagata throws one hellacious looking kick to Shibata on the corner. Eventually Shibata gets the control back, and we get a great Honma FIP segment. Meiyu Tag's work over him was terrific & Honma's eventual comeback w/ those slaps & a Lariat was amazing. Nagata's hot tag was amazing as well - damn his kicks looked DEADLY in this match. The match essentially kicked off into…

WWE Intercontinental Champion Bad News Barrett vs Dolph Ziggler - WWE RAW 6/23/14 Take a pair of semi-over midcarders and tack on a couple nearfalls and you get "This is Awesome". I remember watching this match and thinking this was one of the most egregious examples of the overexposure of the "This Is Awesome" chant. My beef with "This Is Awesome" chant is that it tends to be the MOVEZ~! that are over rather than the individual wrestlers. If Ziggler was so over. how come Ziggler was not being cheered? A lot of it has to do with how the match was presented and laid out. What did Barrett do that was particularly heelish? Really the only reason Barrett was the heel w…

King of DDT final. I really like KUDO. He's a decent grappler and all his strikes are thrown like a real kickboxer. So he has pretty great punches but they look really tight, rather than like the big haymakers of all your favorite brawlers. His kicks are even better. And he actually stands in a boxing stance if need be, I like shit like that. Kodaka is someone who wins me over everytime by either doing crazy shit or just playing face, and he does here. He's always pretty over by just taking a beating any way he can. It's cool. I did think the structure here was pretty rote, with an outside brawl that just sort of happens before they climb back into the ring. There's a nic…