Loss

I listened. Dave does not know who Cena's opponent is. All he said was that his WWE contact told him it's not good news. That wasn't his interpretation of the opponent, that was someone who knows the opponent telling Dave their interpretation of it.

Yes, that was very very bad and I don't know how Seth is actually a face in all of this. I stopped watching Raw after the Braun/Owens match and the Lesnar segment because that was the only reason I was even watching, so I missed the Samoa Joe debut. But I am kind of amused at the reaction to it all because most of it is people marking out for Joe and it seems clear he's only getting set up to lose to Rollins in his first WWE match as a way to further set up HHH/Rollins at Mania. It just strikes me as odd how people are very positive about that when if it had been done last year & Reigns had to go through Samoa Joe to get his title match with HHH at WrestleMania people would have fallen all over themselves to be the first to say Joe was getting buried by having to lose to Roman. Well, people were also excited when HHH won the Rumble last year even though it made it obvious Reigns would beat him at Wrestlemania. People love HHH even though he's supposedly every bit as behind the Reigns push as Vince, unless you believe the political hit theory, in which case you wouldn't cheer HHH anyway. People are sheep. What else is new?

In response to concrete1992: Maybe there's no reason to ever try.

I don't know, it's a can of worms that I already regret opening because it comes across like I'm seeking an argument when I'm really just trying to understand the difference. I just couldn't come up with a nice-sounding way to ask the question.

It's not really a relevant distinction for me. What I said was, and I'll say it respectfully because I think it's appropriate after all, was that I think it's an interesting contradiction how comfortable we are talking about what the best match of all time is, yet if I offer a critical opinion of WWE after following it in some form for the past 30+ years while not having seen the complete episodes of every recent episode of Smackdown, then that's a problem. What is the difference between offering an opinion on WWE booking without watching every show and offering an opinion on the greatest match ever without watching all of the matches people typically say are at that level that are available?

Edited because this is a peaceful thread. I'll just say I don't know what the greatest match of all time is.

He and Bryan also said that we would all LOVE what the Royal Rumble would set up for Wrestlemania. (I know it doesn't transfer in text, but I promise I'm just having fun with that. Maybe that and ****** are the two things so far this year that will follow him everywhere.)

We do have listings but if there are specific recommendations, that would be great!

I have read somewhere at some point that Vince relies on Jericho to call the Rumbles, but I don't know if that's accurate.

All I want to know is if this is what Dave and Bryan kept to themselves that they thought we would love. Because if it was this and plans didn't change, that's hilarious. The way they talked about it is the way you talk about Daniel Bryan being secretly cleared and coming in at 30 to win or something equivalent, not Randy Orton winning a Royal Rumble.

So I really loved this match. Just great. I love Don Montoya. He doesn't look like what people often think of as a great worker, but he can go and this match is really well done. My absolute favorite thing about this is that fans are cheering Horowitz early on, probably because he was the one they knew. The match was being laid out with him as the heel and it just wasn't working. So he just rolls outside, cuts a scathing promo on the fans and immediately, the heat flips and they start getting the reaction they were going for. In some cases, maybe just going with it would be appropriate, but I thought it was pretty cool that they took the wheel and said, "No, *we* are the workers" and insisted on getting the reaction they wanted. Almost a lost art. Horowitz was an excellent heel and had some terrific offense. He works on Montoya's hands for a while, and also gets him with some nasty looking double stomps and a nice gutwrench suplex. I really liked how they built the finish for a good two minutes or so as well. We first saw Horowitz reach for the brass knuckles a couple of minutes before he had the opportune moment to strike, and Montoya continued to get some offense in at first, so they created additional suspense over the finish. I really like that approach, because they can tease the brass knucks as a red herring when they really aren't. And in this case, they weren't, as Horowitz simply moves them to his kneepad and catches Montoya with a kneelift coming off the ropes. Just a tremendous, slow building match that I can't say enough good things about. Any match that so expertly commands its audience and even makes them reverse their initial instincts has my love. ****

This had some good action at times, but I agree it fell short of what I was hoping for just so AAA has at least something going for it. It's a major league promotion that I don't feel comfortable safely ignoring, but it's also tough. Still, we're going to stick with it, because maybe they will surprise us here and there. There was some clipping here and I suspect this would have come across better and more fleshed out in full. Some tremendous highspots, especially from Octagoncito, who comes across as the star of the match.

I think it's inferred in conversations like this that we're always limiting ourselves to recorded footage. But that said, when fancams have surfaced from the 80s and 90s, how accurate have we generally found house show reports to be? I've never really gone back and looked at that. Because if they've generally been in the ballpark, Flair was probably having multiple ****+ matches every week. I suspect that's probably overplaying it a little, but I'd be surprised if he wasn't having strong main events more nights than not on the road. Still, we will never know for sure, and so much of the stuff around Flair is rose-colored memories anyway. Edit: I just remembered the Flair-Bret Iron man house show report from Boston in the WON that got Bret so worked up, that said Flair carried Bret for 60 minutes. I do think Flair outperformed Bret in that match, but that's in no way accurate. But that's the only one I remember. Edit 2: Please forget I mentioned Flair and Bret. Bye. Have a great thread.

Had John Cena had more heels like Steve Corino to work with, he never would have been booed. I really liked the Dreamer vs Corino singles match part of this quite a bit. Corino is really good at feeding Dreamer spots, and he gets the crowd really fired up against him. Not a fan at all of him punching Francine squarely in the face. Pretty tasteless, especially when it's only done for about five seconds of heat before Sandman makes his entrance. And yeah, some friend -- Corino and Victory are in the ring doing a number on Dreamer and you're jamming to Metallica in the crowd with your beer and cigarette and soaking in your moment. The match kinda fell off the rails for me from here, although I think Corino is an excellent heel. I wonder if I'd have a different perspective on him being allowed to get the upper hand more if I just focused on TV/PPV. Doing this full entrance is obnoxious and patterned at a level WWE could never hope to be, and sure made Sandman look like even less of a badass. Yeah, I grew to hate this the longer it went because of that.

This is another match being overdone, although this is more tolerable because the work is far better and they don't rely on props. It's probably also a little unfair of us to make that criticism, considering that we are watching everything and only the most hardcore of hardcore fans at the time were watching all ECW fancam releases. We'd probably say the same about the WWF, for example, if we had all of their house shows. Still, we can only comment on the complete footage picture that we have. This crowd LOVES Tajiri with all of their black hearts. In terms of action, most of what we see is pretty standard, but the crowd reactions show how invested people are in Tajiri as a character by this time, and how strong of a job ECW did building him up as a player. Tajiri again gets eliminated early, which seems to be something to do for surprise sake only. I like giving Crazy and Guido some wins as well, but Tajiri is easily the biggest star of the three at this point and it's a house show, so why not send the people home happy? Still, this is a very involved crowd and I could stand for them to run Wisconsin a lot more often. These fancams really have done a lot for Little Guido. I wonder if I'd see him at the level he deserves to be seen without them. ***

This at least had something a little different with Tanaka absorbing a lot and showing his FIGHTING SPIRIT but there's very little I hate more in wrestling than guys popping up after taking suplexes. Still, even if it's something I hate, I'll take just about anything different in these matches at this point. A Tornado DDT through a table. Again, something different, but wow are they hitting on every cliche in wrestling that I can't stand. This has the distinct honor of being the first match of this project where I've stopped the match to search our spreadsheet to see if it's the last match in the series (We get one-offs in MLW and at One Night Stand in a few years, but otherwise, yes!). Good riddance. I'm being tougher on this match than it really deserves. They do some things to vary this up from other matches in the series and this is probably honestly better than a lot of their previous matches. It's just that by this point, this series is so beyond overdone that it has a lot working against it, fair or not.

That I'm not sure about, but I think talk had already started by this time of bringing Bischoff back in a consulting role, so that timeline would make sense if he knew he'd be returning within a couple of months.

Wow, to the extent it's possible, Yoshida is even better at her style in 2000 than she was in 1999. This was a fantastic match. I loved all the chain wrestling with Yoshida against both Hamada and the still promising Akino, but also, Aja spends more time on the mat when Yoshida is around. She is still Aja and will uraken a fool but she isn't the same Aja Kong she was in GAEA just a few days earlier. This was a really terrific mix of mat wrestling and more traditional Joshi, nearfalls and credible submission attempts. I don't have that much to say about it except that it was a great match. ****1/4

I opted to tune out the pre-match angle because it just didn't interest me at all. Who really gives a shit who the most extreme wrestler is in the indies? I did the same for the post-match angle. It did set up a rematch, so it was noteworthy, but both of those things just took too damn long. I'm a little split on this. At first, I hated it, but about halfway through it became pretty great. I had high hopes at first when they started circling the glass and both had their fists up. I thought that was a pretty cool visual. But then there was no build to the blood. They just took turns slicing each other while the slicee just passively accepted it. I started feeling like I was watching camcorder footage of someone getting a tattoo because everyone was just sitting still. There wasn't much in the way of brawling or teasing bumps on the glass. Imagine a ladder match contested entirely on the ladder with absolutely nothing but climbing and that's sort of what the first half of the match seemed like to me. The two big spots, as soup mentioned, were Ian's powerbomb and Robinson's DDT, and both of those were set up well and delivered well. This went from something pretty one-note and gore for the sake of it to a tribute to Black Friday fights in Wal-Mart parking lots gone horribly wrong when Corporal started leveling Ian outside the ring with his glass-covered fist. Robinson has great punches and wrestles with a lot of conviction, which made that look pretty awesome, even shot from a distance like this was. That's kind of his last hurrah, as once the match spills back in the ring, Ian takes control, hitting Robinson with a great lariat and a very strategically placed Russian legsweep, resulting in two big bumps right on the glass. I absolutely loved when the referee tried checking in and the blood-soaked Corporal gave him the bird and told him to fuck off. I also liked the Fujiwara armbar finish in the center of the glass. Somehow that seemed fitting and strangely credible. This was half amazing brawl and half just mindless gore. I think if the first half had been the last half, and the last the first, I probably would be going ****+, because it makes sense you'd gig someone after you have them weakened with some big moves. But it wasn't to be, so I don't think overall, this rose above good. There were some moments that were truly awesome though, more than a star rating meant to capture the overall experience can fully articulate. ***

I think this was the first time we got Kobashi pinning Doc in a singles match on tape if you can believe that. He beat him before this, but it wasn't recorded. Something about All Japan brings out the best in Doc because he has looked better in 2000 than he has looked in ages against both Misawa (in a previous tag) and Kobashi here. I wish we had this in full. It doesn't appear to rise to the level of 1993, but I wouldn't expect that anyway. It does seem to be a respectable addition to the series, though.

Interesting matchup here. Ikeda doing a sunset flip is an assault on the senses of this wrestling fan. We get a little under 7 minutes of the match. I like Ogawa as a weaselly and undersized heavyweight so much more than as a junior who can work parity matches. The action is good, but it negates the best parts of his character. (I'd say the same about Ikeda in fact.) What we got didn't inspire me enough to see the rest.