dawho5

Besides Bryan followed by Rusev I think Cesaro is the best of the new crop of guys as a Cena opponent. I also think that a lot of the commentary hit on things I have thought about Cesaro's character. He's very much a face archetype. Hard worker obviously, but with the hyped up super workout freak thing it's hard to hate the guy. And he's billed as the ultimate competitor, which is also a very face attribute. So why does he keep getting booked as a heel? The match itself was fantastic. Cena running into a physical freak like Cesaro ought to be saved for major PPVs. If the WWE was smart they'd take advantage of Cena's tweener status and turn Cesaro face with a big Cena feud.

I loved this match so much. If there is a better WWE tag match in the 2000s I'd be surprised. I do have to say that I think it's the exact moment where the WWE decided both groups needed to be broken up. As over as both these teams were, I have to wonder at what reason they needed to break up the Wyatts so soon other than fear. They had been teasing the Reigns singles push forever and this was only another step in reaching that goal. I thought this match was a nice departure from Ambrose being the whipping boy of the Shield. Rollins would be great as a face in a main event tag program based on what I saw here. Love the match, hate the implications for the Shield given what came before it. And of course Wyatt is about to get the Cena kiss of death after the main event. I'll just have to watch this and the Raw match every so often to get my fix.

Hansen starts really kicking that stuff into gear in the 94 CC for sure with the rib injury. Then he falls off a cliff in 95 with the Misawa and Kawada TC matches that are not very good at all. Best you get after 94 is his 99 run through the RWTL with Taue as the fan favorite team with Burning (Akiyama and Kobashi) coming in as the bullies trying to keep the vets from winning in the final match. Which is possibly one of the most glorious Hansen matches you will ever see. The tag match against the MVCs on 4/18/91 is also a tremendous Hansen performance you should not miss. Spivey, Gordy and Williams are in the match and fine, but Hansen is on a completely different level. The first time I saw Kawada's tights go to black & gold was 9/30/90. If you go back to the Tenryu days of All Japan he wore zubaz, which is a little trippy when you see it at first. Gordy's singles matches are not great after 1990 for the most part and I've always wondered why. I like him a lot more than Doc during the 1990-93 time period for sure. He had a good singles match with Misawa on 6/1/91. It could be that Hansen was always casting such a big shadow that it was hard for Gordy. He may have been better off doing more of the Hansen out of control brawling, but they had that guy. Williams and Gordy were more technician/brawlers with a lot of weardown holds (that they sat in endlessly) and I wonder if that wasn't a little bit because of Hansen's status and style. Spivey is actually really good in tags in 1991. I would take a Hansen/Spivey tag over a MVC tag in 1991 any day of the week. Spivey holds up his end well enough, but is still a level below most everybody in the matches he's in. But he's not taking the lion's share of the offense and killing the match in the process *cough Gordy and Williams *cough*.

I don't care for CM Punk the wrestler in the WWE. He's certainly a great promo, but for me the WWE is all about execution and working your gimmick around the script. And Punk's execution in-ring is not great. Don't get me wrong, it's not Kofi-level sloppy, but I can't put him up there with top tier WWE guys. Speaking of Kofi, I used to like watching him way back when I watched the occasional RAW/Smackdown in the early 2000s. I have never liked watching Masahiro Chono wrestle. I will qualify that by saying that I've never seen any of his pre-injury work. I have yet to care about a wrestler's sins outside of the ring enough to not watch their matches. Jake, Benoit, Carlos Colon, if somebody praises a match of theirs I'll probably watch it and not even think about the horrifying things they did. Not sure if my ability to separate their work from their personal demons is good or completely heartless. I think Japanese wrestling has been in a slow decline since the early 2000s. The emphasis seems to be on all of the wrong things. When I started watching Monday Nitro, I would venture a guess that half of my reason for watching on a weekly basis was the luchadors. The other half had to be the Nitro girls and the hope that I could stumble on a Sunny segment while WCW had nonsense on TV. I was old enough where you'd think I would have discovered porn, but instead I did wrestling. When I think about how my wrestling fandom has developed from that point it becomes less sad that it's true. Not all the way less sad, but enough.

Sheamus?

Masa Fuchi bending Kikuchi's legs and neck in an attempt to touch Kikuchi's heels to the back of his head, or just Kikuchi taking a beating from Fuchi in 1990-93 The Shield (add Shield vs. Wyatts to this as well) Daniel Bryan taking a hot tag Any well-executed Southern tag in any promotion ever That moment when you come back to a worker you hated years before after they had time to improve and you realize they are really great When two workers blow a spot and it adds to the match in ways that the properly executed spot never would have Goldust as face-in-peril or a hot tag That moment in the Daniel Bryan promo right after Rumble 2014 when Steph asks if the fans all came there to see Daniel Bryan. I know that they expected that response going in, but Bryan's enjoyment of the moment was all over his face. Revenge never seemed so easy or justified. Stan Hansen And lastly, Toshiaki Kawada bodyslamming a guy and kicking him in the back. Or Kawada in general, but that last thing more than a lot of the rest. His knee drops are pretty glorious as well. And when he stops early match when the other guy is fired up and goes over to the ropes to stretch. Cool off, will ya? Seriously, love this guy.

yeah, every time the WWE puts up some kind of hashtag to discuss a match or whatever it might be my mental response goes something like, "#gofuckyourselfWWE." Watching anything from lately makes me wish you had video game type options where you could turn off the announcers volume and certain graphics and just watch some good wrestling while listening to crowd reactions.

So would there be the argument that a career midcard guy doing a bunch of good to very good TV matches could compare to a company ace that had some very good to great along with just as many worthless matches/angles? Does how well a wrestler performed in relation to their card position come into the equation at a certain point?

Nobody has mentioned Kawada or Hansen's theme yet. Makes me so sad.

I tend to agree that Tanhashi is better than a lot of the backlash suggests, and has pretty good match structure if you remove certain aspects. But that's a discussion that seems like it belongs in another topic.

One thing I loved about this match was how the crowd was chanting for Bryan while Sheamus was in the ring. So the Shield takes over and works Sheamus over enough to get the crowd chanting for Sheamus instead. I know everything is heavily scripted, but a part of me wants to think that somebody called an audible. Also, the Bryan hot tag was incredible. And the finish didn't disappoint either. Great TV match.

I've never heard the full story on the Misawa-Kawada heat before. I kind of got the idea that there was some bad blood towards the end of the August 93 match when Misawa just kept suplexing Kawada before pinning him. Didn't seem like a real necessary thing when I watched it first few times and now that I know the ongoing chase storyline it almost seems to run counter to it.

I have to agree with Kawada about NOAH, The longer it went the more I hated watching main events not involving Taue.

Another guy this thread makes me think of is Nishimura. The guy can clearly do way more than what he does in any given match, but he uses the tools he chooses to within a match so well that it hardly matters.

- WWE Universe - best for business - JBL - Superstar/Diva Do I need to explain these? - modern forearm exchanges and one counts (most notably in NJ) I think they get in the way of how a wrestling match is supposed to flow. I don't object to either of these things existing, only their continued use in places they just don't belong. - matches that go longer just for the sake of being longer A match is supposed to tell a story. If you reach the point where that story has been told and just keep tacking stuff on to the ending you ruin the story. Longer does not always mean better.

Masa Fuchi I have three, all of which are on youtube if you search for the dates. There are a bunch of six mans and tags besides these that also give you a good idea of how great Fuchi is, but these really are standout performances for me. vs Toshiaki Kawada 7/18/91 vs Dan Kroffat 10/24/91 w/ Akira Taue vs Misawa/Kobashi 1/15/93

Masa Fuchi puts on a clinic here during a buildup tag to Kobashi vs Taue. Taue and Kobashi do great as well, especially Kobashi, but this is Fuchi's match.

I wanted to like AJ because she seemed to have an interesting character at times. But she was never great in-ring and the character changed too often it seemed like. She did end up saying one of the more confusing and infuriating lines I have heard so far though. On a random Raw or SD she was at the announce table and talked about how the Divas division was a joke and nobody knew how to wrestle. This blew me away for a few reasons. 1. Everybody knows this, the fans, the WWE, everybody. Why did it need to be said? Was some writer a little bit bitter about the fact that they had a few women who could wrestle and didn't care? Is the WWE trying to bury the divas even further? Or do they see it as some kind of heel thing when somebody "breaks kayfabe" to insult other wrestlers? 2. It's AJ. She's at best okay in-ring. If you give this to somebody a bit more legit then maybe it works better. And AJ gets all kinds of heel heat for it, which seemed to be the intention. Because it's really evil to suggest that the truth is...well, the truth. All around dumbshit stuff there. And of course we use that to launch into the Total Divas vs. other Divas feud that is only there to promote Total Divas. Which is the show made so they can keep the women who can't wrestle around. I'm pretty sure somebody's head exploded when they thought up that gem of an idea. I'm sure a lot of the women who gave a shit were thrilled about that one, AJ included.

It seemed like the WWE's stock price going down had some effect on their TV negotiations as well IIRC. I imagine for any publicly traded company stock price and quarterly financials say a lot to any companies that are working with it in any capacity about how said company is doing. Are advertisers going to stick around for two or three bad quarters if the payoff is big come Mania?

If I'm remembering correctly Charles picked up on this watching Mania.

So you combine that with Triple H and you have the creative direction of the WWE for the next 50 or 60 years. Good stuff there.

I think in the case of Stephanie it's really hard to blame her 100% for her major character flaw. Growing up and going to the WWF/E shows she had to get the idea that everything she wanted, she deserved because she was Vince's daughter. I think if you spend too much time inside that bubble it becomes your reality. So if she's self-important well past the point most of us can fathom I think she's not entirely to blame. It doesn't make it any easier to deal with, but that's my take on it.

I doubt it's going to be a big deal. It's just going to get passed around the midcard guys to make it look like it means something after Bryan hangs onto it for a while. The days of titles having meaning are long gone.

I'm with Matt on that point. You guys clearly know your stuff, but the discussion seems to lead you down avenues of thought that you haven't considered fully. Sort of an encapsulation of why PWO is a necessary thing to have for hardcore wrestling fans. I am loving this series so far even if it covers topics I only want to put some heavy watching time into at this point. The educational value of something like this is off the charts.

I would agree with the overarching idea in this thread that these things can all be good if they are done at the right time. But with everything set up for this PPV happens this month, you're not getting that. An example of a great use for Survivor Series would have been Shield/Wyatts after Elimination Chamber 2014. Why not have a 3 on 3 SS type match to settle things on a big PPV? My overall feeling on WWE's booking is that they avoid giving too much to midcard guys whenever possible, so I imagine this was actually pitched and rejected as it might make one and/or both of the teams too big. Maybe that's a part of it. Shoehorning these matches into feuds or certain times of the year ends up killing off any long term good effects they might have on guys getting over that the WWE doesn't care to have over. I think a lot of the time we look at wrestling differently than the McMahons do. We think that to make money you need to put on great feuds with great matches in the right spots. They think that making money is all about getting the fans to buy into them and their guys by whatever means necessary. And so we dissect all their decisions with the logic you would apply to something like the Monday Night Wars or the territory days, where you had to put on a good wrestling show to survive. But that's not the game anymore. The game is changing fan expectations to the point that you can put what you want (if you are a McMahon) and keep the majority of the fanbase despite not giving them what they really want in your main events.