anarchistxx

The HBK backlash was a bit crazy, especially around 2006 or something when people were claiming Rosey and Lance Cade and others were better workers than him. Having said that, he doesn't do a great deal for me anymore, and the 2006 DX return was one of the things that stopped me watching for years, even as a teen and supposedly the target audience it was ridiculously embarassing. As a lapsed fan, can't say I'm ever tempted to casually watch some of his matches like I might with Kawada or Samoa Joe or Benoit or 90s NJ juniors stuff. Prefer him heel as a character although he doesn't have the offence or style to pull it off in the ring unless he is taking a beatdown from Undertaker. Has worked some nice tags. Likely wouldn't make a top hundred if I did a list.

Jericho/Orton continuing the grand WWE modern tradition of feuds that start with random beatdowns, according to the videos they showed. Such lazy writing. What is the point in this match? Might as well have Jericho wrestle someone new like Ryback or Titus O'Neill or Rusev. Or use him as a special attraction instead of someone who wrestles every week, he has zero freshness at all for someone who comes back for a nostalgia run every now and then.

This has all been a bit tedious so far. Feels like a slightly above average episode of Raw. They really need to work on making the undercard feel special. Everything is done in isolation as well, they should have a level of interaction between different feuds and characters.

Miz wins the IC title. Another reason not to watch Raw. How the fuck is he still employed.

Haven't got any YouTube's but good introductions to Joshi would probably be: Devil Masami vs. Chigusa Nagayo 22/08/85 Yokota vs. La Galactica 01/05/85 Toshiyo Yamada & Manami Toyota vs. Dynamite Kansai & Mayumi Ozaki 26/11/92 Akira Hokuto vs. Shinobu Kandori 02/04/93 Toshiyo Yamada & Manami Toyota vs. Dynamite Kansai & Mayumi Ozaki 11/04/93 Aja Kong vs. Manami Toyota 11/20/94 The Toyota/Inoue time limit draw from 1995 might be worth checking out as a curiosity, it won the WOMOTY in 95. Thunderqueen was my favorite Joshi match but certainly isn't the place to start. Fuck knows how it holds up either, haven't got an hour to find out.

Not usually. They are terrible at finishing anything off to a decent and logical conclusion.

Fun opener, although the finish was a bit of an anticlimax. Would have liked the ending to a long title reign to be a bit more definitive and well built. Needed a change anyway, The Usos don't have a massive shelf life and are pretty limited as champions. Solid opener - nothing anyone will remember in three months time but the crowd was into it and it was nicely structured.

The list is pretty pointless if it is just us all throwing something out off the top of our heads. People need to be filling gaps and watching stuff and having a varied perspective on things. If you only ever read crime fiction than your contribution to a 'Greatest Novels of All Time List' is at best limited and a worst totally worthless. If I participated I'd need to put in probably 200+ hours of watching if not a lot more to bring myself up to speed. Pimping threads are necessary also. In my opinion a 'Greatest Match Of All Time List' holds more interest and merit, as it provides people with a fantastic reference point for matches to explore, the debate is more specific. Plus it hasn't been done as widely. The best way to do it might be to have everyone make a list, and then the Top 100 is watched by everyone and another ballot is taken on that specifically.

Getting The Rock to work again will be a hard sell. His film career is better than ever, and the injury he got last time probably put him off risking the inconvenience again. It would likely take more than a program with Roman Reigns to bring him back. Maybe they are holding out on their options to try and do the Rock/Brock match at WM, with Reigns, Bryan and Cena in reserve if it doesn't work out.

Roman Reigns vs Undertaker is a viable alternative. They should wait a while on Reigns anyway, we will have a better idea in a year whether he deserves the big WM rub and can handle the responsibility of carrying the company for a while.

Brock must really like working with Big Show. They have this special attraction and keep putting him against a stale character with no heat who he has beaten many times before. A feud with a fired up Dolph Ziggler would draw a lot more. His credibility is pretty low but he did beat John Cena clean, and also he is a fantastic bumper. It would make a cool competitive squash, the crowd would be right behind Ziggler for his comeback spots and it would make a great visual to have him taken apart. Willing to bet it would draw more than a Big Show match too. Even Mark Henry is a better option, and he has storyline beef to want the match also. A Ryback face turn to face him would also work, or just run a hoss vs hoss heel match.

Hard to remember off the top of my head, it hs been so long since I watched any of the stuff. There were quite a few matches that consisted of fifteen minutes of punch exchanges and then run ins and finishes. They weren't the worst in a Scott Hall vs Bradshaw type of way, but they definitely sucked badly. Austin vs Undertaker at Judgement Day 2001 is one that springs to mind. The triple threat with Kane & Taker in 1998 was an abomination. Both probably two of the five worst PPV main events the company ever put on.

Bit of an odd comparison. Regal is a talented but off kilter, difficult, deliberately dissonant jazz musician. Steamboat is the brass on Dark Side Of The Moon or something, easier to understand, reaches more people but still got that critical cred. Hogan is saxaphone on a Phil Collins album.

As a worker Steve Austin had some of the best and some of the worst matches between 1996 and 2001. He was wildly inconsistent, with one main event being a beautifully laid out wild, crazy, exciting match with a load of twists and turns, and then the next month putting on some of the most turgid, tedious matches in history based around ten minutes of punch exchanges and then into the finish. Don't think too many people judge his objectively as an in ring worker when evaluating him, but compared to say Hogan he is light years ahead. His 2001 is truly spectacular, with MOTYC with Benoit, Angle and Rock as well as a critically acclaimed but bloated match with HHH in February, the famous quad tear tag and plus just a ton of fun matches and angles when he was on fire like the Spike Dudley Smackdown stuff, tghe Booker-T supermarket brawl, the Austin Appreciation Night etc. The best worker in the company as a character, in ring worker and mic worker by a mile at that point. In terms of TV matches you aren't going to get too many classics from 1998-1999. One thing television matches weren't back then was boring, because they usually ended really quick and had a lot of heat. These days you get objectively better matches week to week, but you also get a lot more tedium. In 1998 you get NAO wrestling LOD and it is over in two minutes, whereas today they would wrestle a paint by numbers, formulaic ten minute borefest that would have me changing the channel. The match times back then were ridiculously short, but it kept things moving, whereas Raw these days is in a permanent state of replays and pointless stuff to fill time and a sense of deja vu and inertia.

No worries, can see why everyone would want to start from a clean slate. Especially since that 2006 list was almost the result of a decade of consensus and debate, with people at the time complaining that voters were not looking outside the 'acceptable' picks enough. Now the conversation has changed so much.

Smarkschoice results since we;ve been discussing it: Loss's note: I edited this out. Next post has an explanation.

Fuck me, nearly ten years already since the Smarkschoice poll? Crazy. I don't think I'm qualified at all to vote now, without a lot of serious watching. So much wrestling has happened since then and so much old stuff has been unearthed to change the consensus. I think it should probably be expanded though i.e. have a 'Best Matches' poll and some other stuff. That would make it really definite, and with over a year to put it together wouldn't be hard at all. Should do what SC did as well, email and contact all the major IWC players to get lists. Think even Meltz was sounded out before but he declined. Think the amount of Joshi will decline considerably, SC was the board for that.

The problem with academic analysis of wrestling is that you are putting weeks of thought and years of knowledge into micro analysing a scene that might have taken thirty seconds to write, by a booker who has forgotten it next week. An essay on "Nationalism and professional wrestling" would really have to stretch the depths of interpretation to find something to say, because that subject is presented so bluntly and unimaginatively on television e.g. evil foreign heel, hero American face. I suppose you could juxtapose that with wrestling from around the world, but aside from Lucha and Puro the shows are too niche and minor to really be worthy of serious deconstruction, unless you are really trying to get down to the base of the subject.

Famous UK playwright John Godber wrote a play called 'Wrestling Mad' that toured 2005/2006 in the north of England. I saw it, can remember very little about it though. He was also responsible for stuff like Bouncers that is on the school curriculum, think he is the third most performed playwright in the UK. A rather scathing review: http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/wrestling-mad-a-bad-play/ "The play was terrible. Had it been written by an unknown it would never have been staged. The characters were one-dimensional. There was no tension. The dialogue was unconvincing and patronising. The author had nothing to say. It was embarrassing to watch the talent of an otherwise able cast, castrated by an unworkable script. I don’t wish to be ungenerous but leaving this play in production and touring it simply to meet contractual deadlines does no one any good, least of all the reputation of the dramatist." The BBC review is more generous http://www.bbc.co.uk/suffolk/content/articles/2006/05/25/wrestling_mad_review_feature.shtml

It is a shame the WWE has done such a poor job over the last couple of years with Ryback and Titus O'Neill. Two big, muscular, charismatic guys who could draw huge money with Lesnar had they been protected right. You can even work heel vs heel matches with Brock, as his whole gimmick is that he is anti-WWE and wants to destroy everyone and laugh at how low he has brought the company. The Big Guy vs Brock could be the Goldberg vs Vader match that never happened, if only they made decent use of Ryback's assets. The guy is great on the mic, has a cool personality, is a reasonable worker at this point especially in sprints. He is almost a Cena-lite, a guy who looks like a big, impressive wrestler but also has a personality he can bring out that goes beyond typical pro wres tropes like angry monster heel or white meat destructive face fighting off evil. Titus vs Lesnar would make an incredible visual on a big show, maybe the two most impressive looking workers in the whole company.

I think Dean Ambrose would get more out of a loss to Lesnar than he would out of a win. Thinking an Austin at WM13 scenario, covered in blood, refusing to give in despite a violent onslaught by Lesnar, taking shot after shot and not staying down until Brock has to literally destroy him. Jack Swagger would make an excellent short term challenger though: he is useless on the mic, but with Zeb doing the talking for him he can get really hot and get the crowd pent up. Plus he has unfinished business with Heyman from earlier this year so it would be an easy feud to book with lesnar off TV, have Cesaro go back to Heyman for a bit to warm up Swagger. He has the offence and credentials to work a very exciting competitive squash as a placeholder feud. Have to be a hell of a build to get him believable as a Wrestlemania challenger however.

Struggling to think of a time in the last decade when midcarders haven't been booked poorly in WWE.

Not that surprising; just because someone is a great actor doesn't mean they could write a good screenplay, or even direct a film well.

Think people are being a bit harsh on Orton here. It is a fifteen minute PPV match, of course he is going to get his spots in, especially wrestling Roman reigns who has very few spots of his own as of yet to ramp up the excitement. He jobbed completely clean, don't see what the problem is. Less than a year ago Orton was beating Cena clean as a whistle, he isn't some no mark midcarder who stole the spotlight from the upcoming star - from a storyline perspective and in the 'WWE Universe' (urgh) he is a big deal, even if most smart fans consider him to be a bit stale and dull. The only alternative was to run pretty much a squash, and with them doing that in the main event it was prettu unfeasible. Skipped through most of the show myself as have no interest in the likes of Bray Wyatt, Miz etc. The two divas matches were both pretty cool, especially Steph/Brie, they got me with the twist but I wasn't paying too much attention and have seen very little of the product recently. The main event was alright, wasn't as shocked with how it went as some people on here. It was pretty similar in concept to their first match, which saw Lesnar decimating Cena and was a lot more shocking and impactful, although that was ruined by having Cena beat him out of the blue. This had the correct ending but as a match was a lot worse, even if Brock and Heyman absolutely ruled in it.

Even if it was, I view it as the opposite of a Mike Tyson/Wrestlemania 14 situation. On the one scenario you lose money on an angle but it leads you to making way more money and better ratings down the line. On the other scenario you pop a ratings boost with cheap smut but lose a lot of fans through the tasteless, seedy nature of the angle, not to mention all the people who maybe stopped their young kids getting exposure to WWE because of 'hot lesbian action' and the other stuff they were putting out.