cpst

But think about the branding!

That's what they say. Thank goodness they didn't do a 2 hour preshow like Mania and Summer Slam.

What's the actual beef between Io and Asuka? Thanks for the heads up. I think I'll try to follow Ice Ribbon more closely going forward. The recent changes in Stardom seem like a decent attempt to break up the stagnation on their roster. It's strange that they're running all these good angles on smaller shows, but I don't really know how these sort of things get disseminated in Japan.

If it weren't for the Revival match this would've been a pretty "meh" show.

More Samoa Joe in the NXT main event picture, here we come!

Was nice to see an Asuka match that was a bit different than the template. Mickie James looked really good tonight. I don't think this could have realistically been much better than it was.

He is my champion. Inaugural Arn Anderson Tribute Act Tournament winner?

Lawler had it right. The allure of the invisible chain is much better than the presence of the actual chain.

I feel bad for Thorne bumping so hard for this wreck of a match.

He just looks like he dropped his glasses and is trying to find them.

lol @ this stipulation in 2016

Isn't he from Peterborough? That was probably the best match either of them have had in NXT.

This crowd has blown through an entire night's worth of chant tropes and the first match isn't even finished.

I don't think Asuka's had a truly great match since becoming champ. My favorite Asuka match was probably the Emma match in London. The first Bayley match was a lot better than the second, although I don't think that's necessarily Asuka's fault. A dominant champ is okay in the abstract, but it can be counterproductive when you're trying to rebuild a depleted division.

Edit: Nevermind...

They love that damn Ziggler/Miz KFC ad.

Sounds like the main event was better with commentary. It was a very sparse match that had a quieter crowd than usual for these main events, so there was something missing when watching it on Stardom World. I'm not a fan of these "ref stops someone from doing a move or pinning their opponent" spots. They seem so awkward. Really good match though, and a nice ending to a lackluster card. It's surprising that with Io and possibly Kairi leaving there's no real sign of pushing anyone else up the card.

When Jericho had a conflict with the ref in that match, I seriously thought for a second that he was going to pull out the list and put him on it.

Well, I guess we'll be seeing a lot more of Momo and Kyona.

More depressing Daniel Bryan footage:

The other big instance I can think of is Michael Hayes being behind the trend of spotfest TLC matches, although half of that seems to be wrestlers making fun of him for suggesting that they take bumps that Hayes would never take himself.

If I remember correctly, this became a big discussion point when Meltzer mentioned it around the time that they all got called up to the main roster and started having bad matches. Even if they were actively practicing matches that were laid out by agents, they were still having the best matches on a roster of people who had the same privilege. And when they went up to the main roster, the remaining women in NXT had worse matches, even though they had the same agents and the same time to practice matches. Asuka, who most people would consider a "better worker" than both Sasha and Charlotte, hasn't had NXT matches of comparable quality. You can argue that's because Asuka's booking doesn't let her have truly great matches, but at some point you have to set aside circumstance and judge the actual output. Obviously people have different preferences when it comes to peak output vs. consistency, and especially on a board driven by watching lots of footage there is a desire to find workers that have an underrated consistent output over a long period of time on TV matches, house shows, etc. I do think it should affect how you book people. If you have workers that are great at weekly TV matches, you should use them for that. If you have workers that are great at delivering 6 big matches every year, you should build longterm feuds and angles towards those big matches. The point seems to come up more with the women than with the men, and there are way more male wrestlers on the roster. Nobody's talking about who puts together the Revival matches, and there aren't comments about Arn Anderson's match layouts in weekly WWE TV discussions. I don't think we have enough information about these inner workings across-the-board to judge them for a particular pair of wrestlers.

It looks like they're using the same template for the Bayley and Sami Zayn storylines.

What is Charlotte's best match that doesn't involve Sasha?

I think the general idea is at least consistent with the rest of Dave's views on rating matches and wrestlers, which most people on a board heavily entrenched in watching, discussing, and rating matches and wrestlers from old footage would disagree with. However, I think most of Dave's critics would consider him biased towards present-day New Japan, not biased against it.