The Thread Killer

I love what they’ve been doing with the House of Black on Collision, and based on the fans reactions, so do they. Brody King especially seems to be getting increasingly popular with the fans. Holy crap! HOB vs. CMFTR next week for the Trios Titles!

Fuck yeah. Now we’re talking.

Well, there you go. Bucks/FTR III at Wembley.

Matt Hardy spends what seems to be an inordinate amount of time on Social Media trumpeting how wonderful The Elite are. I know they are his friends, but it comes across as kind of lame and basically like he’s sucking up to them. (“Give them their flowers!”) For a guy that puts as much thought into his gimmick as he does, he seems to be lacking self-awareness. Unless being a groveling toady is his new gimmick.

Tell me about it. I was finally starting to forget how much I couldn’t stand that jerk, but that episode brought it all back.

You can joke, but I bet with all his Memphis style smoke and mirrors, Double J is one of the few guys who could pull a watchable match out of Jericho at this point. At least it would be paced the right speed for both of them.

I had always heard/read that Kawada was not a big fan of foreigners and not the friendliest guy to meet.

So I am definitely NOT regretting my decision to cancel my Honor Club subscription and stop watching the new Ring of Honor. Supposedly, this past weekend in New Jersey they taped a couple of ROH matches before Collision aired, and then they did the live show. Then they decided to finish the ROH taping after Collision was over. The final match was Dalton Castle and The Boys vs. “The Trustbusters” (Slim J, Jeeves and Sonny Kiss.) There is a hysterical clip circulating on Twitter, of the fans basically deserting the arena as this match goes on, and by the end, the place is practically empty. And that is going to be one of your featured matches on the ROH TV show this week.

That was a fun little bit of hoss clubberin between Nick Comoroto and Miro. Well done. Comoroto got a bit of his shit in, but Miro still looked like a beast.

It’s amazing how much quicker and more efficiently those segments move along when they don’t insist on everybody having their own independent entrance, including music.

Poor Rhett Titus. He went from being a solid midcarder/Tag Team Champion in ROH to working security backstage in New Jersey?!

No worries. Hopefully you get to see the show with no issues.

When it’s 8:00 PM, just log into the app. The options menu at the top will be “Home” “Live” “News & Highlights” and “TSN+” Just click on “Live” That will take you to a list of everything that is being broadcast on the 5 TSN Cable Channels at the time, but it will also have a link to Collision.

It wouldn’t bother me half as much if the new show ROH show hadn’t started out with such promise, only to end up going to shit. You can tell by watching from the first set of TV tapings, that Tony Khan actually did care about this rebooted ROH at one point. And then I don’t really know why, he clearly lost interest. Whether it was poor time management, an inability to delegate, the lack of a good TV deal, or maybe he just caught sight of a shiny object which distracted him…TK clearly just gave up on ROH at one point. And hey…it’s his pet vanity project, he can do what he wants with it… but I am not paying 10 bucks a month to watch his shitty afterthought TV show, and I am not putting down 40 bucks four times a year for a PPV he can’t be bothered to book until a week before it happens.

So at the ROH PPV tonight they did Claudio vs. PAC for the ROH World Title. It’s NOT the Main Event, and it ends with Claudio retaining after a run-in by Wheeler Fucking Yuta. (Because it’s not ROH without Daniel Garcia and Wheeler Yuta. Garcia, by the way, just had a “Pure” Wrestling match with Shibata, which was pretty much focused around Garcia trying to do his little dance. Seriously.) I am officially done with the Tony Khan version of ROH. He clearly doesn’t give a crap, so why should I? This PPV has been just…yeeeaaahhh. The booking and the matches have been pretty much dogshit. Man, I would love to stick around and watch Willow Nightingale in the Main Event of a ROH PPV, but this sock drawer isn’t going to reorganize itself, unfortunately. OK, in truth the Jays game is a late start because they are on the West Coast, so the game has finally started and I can actually watch something good now. But even if I didn’t have that as another option, I would not watch any more of this crap.

Yeah, I am loving that decision. I have grown to really like Aussie Open. Now let’s just hope that they defend the belts in normal Tag Team matches not these ridiculous multiteam clusterfucks. That match was so samey.

Yeah, but I’m kind of liking the whole “You do your flips and dives and never-ending melodramas with The Dark Order on Dynamite…and we’ll have all time classic matches over on Collision” division of labour thing the Bucks and FTR have going now. No need whatsoever for them to have any interaction from this point on.

NO. NO NO NO. LEAVE FTR ALONE MATT.

I don’t disagree with you, but I think part of the problem is that Tony Khan only really seems to book ongoing storylines or angles/feuds for Tag Teams when the Tag Team Titles are involved. I can’t think of the last Tag Team feud that wasn’t centred around the Titles? I don’t know that FTR would oppose being involved in a good long blood feud, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen one of those in the tag division in AEW?

Between Mike “MiCasa” Samuda getting busted and going up the river, and then Hyatte, DEAN and now “The Rick” all passing away…what the hell is happening to all the OG’s of the IWC?

He sure didn’t seem to be in a rush to get down the ramp and literally get into the ring last night. There is a clip circulating right now online of Ibushi rubbing tacks on himself and then taking a deliberate bump in the thumbtacks by himself last night, after the show went off the air. And then he did a little dance…because of course he did.

So PAC gets the ROH World Title Shot against Claudio at the PPV on Friday. Could be an interesting matchup, I suppose. I’m still not sure I am going to bother ordering the show, it feels so slapped together.

Yeah…I was just expecting that to be lame, and it was even dumber than I was expecting. My favourite part was when it was finally Ibushi’s time to enter. He casually wanders down the ramp with ZERO intensity and proceeds to “unload” some of the weakest, softest and lamest punches I have ever seen. That whole thing was just stupid and went on WAY too long. Ugh.

Ring of Honor were doing tapings at Universal Studios at the start, and it was great for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, they had the place laid out really well. The crowds were very small, probably only a few hundred people…but the soundstage was really well designed and had a great unique look with the ROH specific graphics and signs and everything. The tapings had a really unique look, they did not look just like the AEW shows with a couple of ROH signs slapped up. It made the ROH show distinctly different from the AEW product. Secondly, because the tapings were announced well in advance, the crowd was actually there to see ROH specifically. They were very loud, very vocal crowds. They weren’t just AEW fans that were just there because it was something to watch before or after AEW. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, they were taping TV four weeks at a time. That was forcing the notoriously scatter brained Tony Khan to actually book his show out in advance. You could tell what direction they were going, what they were building towards at the next PPV from week one, because they did not have any choice. As soon as they started doing the tapings in conjunction with the AEW shows, they lost all sense of uniqueness, and you could tell he just started slapping together whatever matches he thought up on the spot. Not to mention, when they stopped doing ROH specific tapings, they really cut back on bringing in original ROH talent, and they started relying on the total nobodies that they had on the AEW roster who had just been kicking around doing nothing and were not good enough or popular enough to appear on AEW TV. It might make sense from a financial standpoint, but it still sucks to see Tony Khan have basically given up on trying to present ROH as a unique brand and original product. He had a real chance to do something interesting for a while there. And for a very brief time he did it, but then he blew it.

Apparently that’s because the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FTC) has regulations in place that mandate Canadian channels have show a predetermined percentage of “Canadian Content.” That explains why although TSN has 5 different channels, they still show some bizarre and obscure Canadian sports programming rather than more popular American sports or events. It turns out they have to, in order to keep their broadcasting license. For the past month, both Collision and Rampage have qualified as Canadian because they have originated from Canadian locations and have featured Canadian talent. That is apparently one of the reasons that the shows have prominently featured talents like Ethan Page and Shawn Spears. That was the trade-off for getting them on the air in Canada. Now that the Canadian tour is over, that no longer applies and Collision and Rampage both go back to being exclusive to the TSN+ app. AEW apparently has some sort of deal in place already to keep Dynamite on the air, so that stays the same. At first, I was super pissed off about this whole situation, but having looked into it a bit further I am not quite as angry. When Collision was first announced, I had a Smart TV but it was a pretty old model. OK, it was a very old model. I had some apps on it, but I could not download new ones. There was no way to do it. I didn’t even have Disney+ on my TV because it was not a thing at the time my TV was manufactured. I had YouTube and Netflix and a couple of other apps, but there were so many apps that I did not have on that TV and I could not add any. I have since purchased a brand new TV (not because of this) and in settling it up I discovered a couple of things. Firstly, if you are already a subscriber to TSN as part of your normal cable package, it turns out you do not have to pay extra for the TSN+ app and secondly, on the newer model Smart TV’s you can easily add the TSN+ app to your actual channel lineup. This was not the case with my old TV, so I had no way of watching TSN+ on my TV. I don’t know why, but with the newer model Smart TV’s, you can add pretty much any app to your TV. I now have the FITE, ROH and New Japan World apps downloaded and available to watch on my beautiful new 65 inch Smart TV, which makes things much easier. It means I don’t have to watch stuff on my tablet or phone, because I really don’t like watching TV that way. The upshot is, if you have a fairly modern model Smart TV and you get TSN as part of your cable package, then you can still easily watch Collision and Rampage on TSN+ on your TV. And it is commercial free, which is even better. They do not go to picture-in-picture during the breaks. The bad news is, shows cannot be recorded on your PVR from an app, so if you can’t watch it live, you are going to miss it. The other thing I have discovered is that you can easily download a VPN on the newer model Smart TVs. In that case, you can easily use the VPN to change your geographic location, and then use the FITE app to order AEW Plus. You just have to change your location to Australia, or certain parts of the UK and you can watch all of the AEW programming with no commercials, live as it happens. So while it does suck that Collision is not available on broadcast television in Canada live as it happens, it’s not as bad as I thought. I actually watched Collision live using TSN+ the past two weeks, rather than waiting for the broadcast version at midnight, and it worked out pretty well for me. But in the bigger picture, it’s pretty stupid that AEW does not have a broadcast television deal in Canada, especially since they seem so intent on running so many shows here. It’s a small wonder they had a hard time selling tickets to some of those shows.