NintendoLogic

I'd mark out pretty hard if the first fall ended in like five minutes with a small package or something like that. Yim/Baszler is my sleeper pick for MOTN. They had a really good match on NXT earlier this year, and they should be able to build and expand upon it. More than anything, I hope the match marks the end of Shayna's strangehold on the belt. Moving her to the main roster makes sense because there's no one left on NXT for her to run through and Becky and Bayley both desperately need fresh challengers. Yim/Shirai would be a dope title feud even if Mia is just a transitional champion to move the belt to Io.

Shanya Baszler has some pretty cool ones as well. She wore a Bolt Thrower shirt earlier this year. And she was wearing a Bad Religion shirt when she knocked over Kairi's treasure chest last year. Anyway, the latest Observer contains the following tidbit: “Hobbs and Shaw” with Johnson and Jason Statham as stars was, by far, the top box office movie both U.S. and international this past weekend for its open. The movie did $60,038,950 in the U.S. and $119 million outside the U.S. It was No. 1 in 52 out of 63 countries that it was in. The movie did well, with it rated A- on average, with 90 percent positive reviews and drew a 58/42 male skew. The audience makeup across the board was right on target with The Fast & Furious movies. Six of the eight Fast & Furious movies had a better opening weekend. I saw the movie. It was a lot of fun because you know what to expect and that’s what it is. Reigns had a small role as one of Johnson’s brothers. He didn’t have any lines. He was listed as Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoai in the credits. One thing I saw, and everyone I spoke with who saw it mentioned the same thing was that when he was on the screen and delivered his Samoan drop and had a close-up, or even was shown, there was no reaction. Here’s the most pushed guy and considered top guy in the company. I’ve seen wrestlers with name recognition who have small parts in movies and there’s always a buzz when they are on the screen, even in a cameo. It really shows how far off the mainstream radar wrestling is to the non-wrestling audience WWE has moved heaven and earth to try to make Reigns a star and he's not even a blip on the pop culture radar screen. Meanwhile, when something they can't take complete credit for like the Yes chants breaks into the mainstream, they go out of their way to avoid acknowledging it. Their star-making process is fundamentally broken. But I'm not telling any of you anything you don't already know.

@Matt D This was a fun Young Lion scrap. For the most part, they kept things basic and chippy with a liberal dose of trash talk and cheap shots. Wrestlers working like they genuinely dislike each other goes a long way in enhancing my enjoyment of a match. Takaiwa yanking Nagata down by his hair and then stepping on his head was Finlay-esque, and I will never not enjoy the illegal man getting knocked off the apron. The main issue for me was the lack of a strong storyline hook. In a lot of junior and joshi tag matches, someone will get worked over, they'll make the hot tag, their partner will clean house, and then the match will essentially reset. The work in this match wasn't quite that egregious, but there was never a sense that a team was placed at a sustained disadvantage by a member getting beaten down, which is an essential element to generating drama in a tag match. Ohtani and Nagata did what they could by focusing on Takaiwa's leg, but he never showed the slightest inclination in selling any accumulated damage. In particular, Nagata kicking Takaiwa's leg out of his leg during a bridging pin attempt seemed to be an attempt to get him to start selling, but he never took the bait. In fact, the finish was almost lucha-esque with Takaiwa submitting immediately to a hold (Boston crab) that had no real connection to anything that had preceded it. But I can't be too hard on them since they weren't setting out to have a classic tag match. It was all about showing fighting spirit and demonstrating mastery of the basics (other than leg selling, I guess). At that, they succeeded.

Gotch's only contribution of note to the business was that "Simon Gotch buries Enzo Amore" clip that ended up in the recommended videos feed of seemingly everyone who ever watched anything wrestling-related on Youtube.

It looks like Chael Sonnen wasn't a fan of the show. He held up Hulk Hogan as an exemplar of realistic wrestling, so he has to be working us. I mean, he can't possibly be that stupid, right?

It's not like the date for Summerslam snuck up on them. There's no excuse for not having something planned out for them well in advance.

Roman/Bryan has been dropped from Summerslam according to PWInsider. So neither guy currently has a match scheduled for the second-biggest show of the year.

The Ki/Danielson series was the wellspring that pretty much every 2000s indy wrestler drew from to a degree. Trying to argue otherwise is pedantic hair-splitting. I wouldn't use that as the sole or even primary reason to favor Jumbo, but it's something I can't help but hold against Bryan in the back of my mind. Then again, I don't think Bryan's direct output holds a candle to Jumbo's. I mean, come on. People in this thread are trying to argue for the Miz feud, which was actively awful by any measure, as a point in Bryan's favor.

Consider this: the style Jumbo helped develop begat Misawa, Kawada, and Kobashi. The style Bryan helped develop begat Davey Richards and Seth Rollins.

Cena hand-picking Bryan was also lame, and I think it played a role in Bryan's drawing power not matching the reactions he received from live audiences. Granted, WWE did so many things booking-wise with Bryan in mid-to-late 2013 that would have sunk just about any other wrestler that it's hard to pick out any one for emphasis, but it seemed to be intended to establish him as a cut below the real stars.

Since when is it the champion's job to track down challengers for his belt? You come to the champ, the champ doesn't come to you.

I still don't understand what makes Seth so uniquely terrible as to warrant a thread specifically dedicated to dunking on him. Is it because his matches are built around action and movez at the expense of drama and storytelling? The same could be said of 95% of the roster. Is it because he's a company shill? Roman Reigns just gave an interview to ESPN throwing Moxley under the bus and defending the creative process that tried to turn his cancer into an angle. Is it because he's pushed beyond his capabilities? Trust me, you'd all be hating anyone else WWE put in his position just as much. Nobody gets ahead in the company without proving their absolute loyalty by debasing themselves the way Rollins has. WWE is the matador, Rollins is just the cape.

It wouldn't be pure lucha libre if it were loaded with AEW talent, which speaks to how poorly thought out AAA's promoting of the show has been. They scheduled it for Mexican Independence Day weekend with the idea of promoting authentic Mexican entertainment to Mexican tourists. But I figure most people who travel abroad aren't going to be particularly interested in checking out something they can see back home.

@Matt D Here's something I think would be more attuned to your tastes than most modern New Japan.

Dave really is sui generis. I can't think of any other field where someone is simultaneously the preeminent journalist, historian, and critic.

Oh no no no.

I found out that I can use my library card to access the OED online, so I was able to dig a little deeper. The term "shift the goalposts" does appear to be British in origin (it first appears in print in a Scottish newspaper in 1924). Saying "move" as opposed to "shift" is most likely an Americanism. According to this site, it didn't enter wide usage in the UK until the 1980s, by which point it had appeared in print in the US for several decades.

He's not wrong. The term is American in origin, so it almost certainly comes from handegg and not divegrass.

KENTA beat Ibushi, so they can't use head-to-head as a tiebreaker if there's a three-way tie between Okada/KENTA/Ibushi since they'd all be 1-1 against each other. I'm pretty sure the tiebreaker would go to KENTA in the event of a four-way tie with them and EVIL. He and EVIL would both be 2-1 against the other two while Okada and Ibushi would be 1-2, and KENTA has the head-to-head advantage over EVIL. Same deal if Tanahashi wins out and creates a five-way tie. KENTA would be 3-1 against the others, Okada/Ibushi/EVIL would be 2-2, and Tanahashi would be 1-3.

He didn't say it's not a real term. He said that the idiom derives from (American) football and not soccer.

Race himself regretted inventing the diving headbutt and asked other wrestlers to stop using it. Too much wrestling on TV killing interest in the product also looks to be the right call in hindsight.

My wheelhouse is matches I can either praise to the heavens or rip to shreds, so I tend to come down with writer's block when a match doesn't strongly move me either positively or negatively. But I'll try to be more proactive now that Matt's started to crack the whip. Jetlag's selection was a match between Epydemius and Charles Lucero in what was apparently in commemoration of the former's fifteenth year in the business. It should be noted off the bat that the match was pretty heavily clipped, which made it hard to get a feel for how well it ebbed and flowed. The first fall is contested mainly on the mat. Llave-style matwork is mostly whatever for me, but I did like Lucero throwing a knee to aid with a reversal. Lucero wins the fall with an STF, which surprised me somewhat as that isn't a traditional lucha submission. The second fall is rather brief and ends when Lucero is disqualified after hitting a martinete, which Epy sells like his neck has been broken. Several ringside attendants try to carry him to the back in a quasi-stretcher job. But since there's no actual stretcher, it looks like that time in CZW when Low Ki got dragged to the back by security after throwing a tantrum in the ring. In any event, Epy rushes back to the ring and demands that the match continue. Unfortunately, the third fall is really hurt by all the clipping, which makes it come across as a series of mostly unconnected spots and sequences. Epy gets the win with the nudo lagunero. This match would've grabbed me more if Lucero had taken some nutty bumps like in the Hechicero match, but I can't blame the guy for not wanting to kill himself for what was almost certainly a dismal payoff in a garage with a leaky roof.

I wouldn't put it past them to bring Enzo in for Janela to get his heat back after what went down at the blink-182 concert.

What the hell is this crap?

Leading them to what?