Jimmy Redman

Devil's Advocate: For the people who objected to Omega and Okada kicking out of a top rope dragon suplex in January, what is the fundamental difference between that and Braun kicking out of a top rope KO Punch of Doom?

Right back at ya mate.

They had a miraculously good one with AMW in TNA from memory.

I still to this day remember during the Miz/Cena feud from 2009, where Miz was still a midcarder and calling Cena out every week, there was a battle royal on Raw one week. Now Cena wasn't winning it, so Stevie Wonder could have seen that this was the perfect opportunity for Miz to get a little heat on Cena by eliminating him from this battle royal in some sneaky way, just to have something to crow about before he inevitably got beat at the PPV. Like, this was The Miz, he needed all the help he could get. But no, of course he got tossed like a geek, and never laid a single hand on Cena before being beat in 5 minutes at the PPV. It's just an example, like, a battle royal presents these total no brainer opportunities to do something that will build a future match or a wrestler, and so often they just airswing and use them to reinforce the status quo, making them redundant. I think that's why people get so pissy during the Rumble when it's like, hey, this guy was in here for 30 minutes doing all this stuff, and then his elimination is...someone comes in and tosses him like nothing? And then nothing comes of it afterwards. Or the opposite, where a guy who is ALL over TV, and who SHOULD be doing something interesting in the Rumble to set something up...he comes in for 2 minutes and gets tossed by someone irrelevant for no reason. And it's like...huh? It's just, why put all these guys in the same room together if you're not going to do something with it. Anyway, I digress.

There have been a smorgasbord of great 3 and 4 way matches on TV over the years, if you're looking for good matches. The pace and bodies and opportunities for spots mean that it's pretty hard to have one that's less than fun at a minimum. On promotion, I think that has been explained, they're usually used to shoehorn as many guys in a match as they can instead of logically building to one, so they become throwaway. Also in the end, it's hard to deny the stronger appeal of the one on one match. But sure they should be used better. So should 6 man tags. So should handicap matches. So should battle royals. So should a lot of things.

The only time I have ever noticed it or let it bother me was one time when Charlotte was going for a kick that was supposed to miss so her opponent could duck and counter...but she still slapped her thigh and there was a huge crack for her kicking the air, which was just stupid. Muscle memory I guess.

Cena didn't learn to speak Mandarin for fun.

Years ago Dave published a huge demographic study on sports that included wrestling and the main thrust was that wrestling fans were actually a majority Democrat/left leaning.

The thing about the Ohno name is that the point was to have the initials K.O., because he was keeping the "Knockout Kid" persona and they wanted to make KO puns and KO merch. But then Kevin Owens came in and basically took over the K.O. stuff. I don't see them wanting to have two guys running around as K.O. ("people might confuse Shane Helms with Shane McMahon.."), so it kind of kills the whole point of the name and all the merch opportunities for it.

Can't think of a specific one yet. The Young Bucks were called Generation Me in TNA so you might have some luck there if they used that in promos?

I so wish I could participate in this, I love a good list as much as anyone, but honestly I don't know if I could even name 50 wrestlers from ROH. Will be watching with interest though.

On their first proper Bogus Journey, Stacey and Elliott could not have picked more opposite matches to showcase, a Divas match and a French match from the 60s. Which one can they not stop screaming about? Which one could possibly be the greatest match of all time? Can a Divas match really be that great? Tune in to find out! http://placetobenation.com/stacey-elliotts-bogus-journey-1-shattering-expectations/ On the docket: – Trish Stratus vs Mickie James at WWE WrestleMania 22 Link to video Link to Match Discussion Archive thread – Gilbert Cesca vs Billy Catanzaro from 1960s French catch Link to video

Random thought, did we ever get Joe vs Generico on the indies? Surely we must have.

On the Roman and dumb marks thing...I mean, I at least like to think I'm not too much of an hysterical Wreddit commenter type fan. I am absolutely not a WWE hater on principle. And I honest to God have nothing against Roman Reigns per se. But when he came out at #30 it completely killed the match for me. My actual reaction was the same as I posted it live: I laughed hysterically for a second and then said "get fucked". Then I left the room to go get snacks or whatever. I had been glued to my seat for a good while because I was so into the match, everything was going great, and then Roman comes out in the end again and it's like "Oh right, this is modern WWE. Back to Roman." He is just so played out, and every subsequent push they give him is more and more groan inducing. Not even in a fun troll way. It just makes me leave the room, check out of the match and reinforces my decision to stop watching Raw. It wasn't just Roman though, by the time they got to the final four I thought "I don't give a shit about any of these guys" and the whole finish was such a letdown after such a generally good Rumble. None of those guys felt like they should be winning it. So it felt pretty flat. And the shame of it is that I did really enjoy the Rumble until then. I thought they kept it really interesting the whole way through, Braun looked outstanding, the little cameos we got were fun (Gallagher, Tye, Enzo), the Brock/Goldberg bit was awesome, and they managed to do big eliminations in a way that surprised me without making me think "that was a stupid swerve". It was probably the best Rumble with the least amount of nearfalls, if that makes sense. There was a dearth of "Woah hey he almost got eliminated but he saved himself!" spots, it was mostly just battle royal hugging in the background of whatever was going on in the middle of the ring, not a lot of tossing and hanging and saving. But that meant that the times they DID go there, they had weight - especially when hosses like Henry or I think Braun had big feet dangling moments, they both made me jump out of my seat. It was a good match, easily the best Rumble since at least 2013. But the finish let it down and totally sucked all my interest out. I don't even hate Roman, he was just a really shitty #30.

I delicately preface this by saying that you're clearly referencing a particular incident that I am not aware of so I'm not speaking to that. Nor do I agree with the theoretical principle of "Your opinion on the product is invalid because you don't watch every single show". BUT, there is a difference between criticism of booking and judging match quality. Booking, even for a single show, is usually part of a larger storyline, storylines or direction, and they have beginnings, middles and ends (hopefully, at least) and on any show you could be at any point on that timeline. So in following a narrative it helps to have seen, be aware of or understand the steps that lead to that point. Again, I'm not saying you can't criticise if you haven't seen every step, but when you're talking about a story, the more you know of the story the better you will understand it, I think goes without saying. I have what I think are perfectly valid criticisms of, say, Orton winning the Rumble, but I still can admit that I don't know everything about the Wyatt angle and it's possible it may come off better to someone who is following it. As someone who's familiarity is that sometimes I walk into the room when Smackdown is playing, I can admit that my judgment of Smackdown as a television show is less informed than the judgment of someone who does watch it every week. I can absolutely watch a single episode and form an opinion, but when it's about a long term pattern, a weekly viewer can speak to that much better than I can. Judging match quality in itself, which is what we're doing here, has nothing to do with narrative or following a story, so you don't need understanding of a context in the same way. It's just a different thing to do. Take every match you've ever seen and pick the best one. Of course everyone's list of matches will be different sizes and depths and breadths. We've done this before but this is where I come up against your mania for watching absolutely everything in existence before being comfortable giving a value judgment. We (that is, the rest of us who aren't you) will never, ever, in a million years be able to see everything. It's an impossible standard to even strive for, and it's really not the same thing as being someone who does or doesn't watch Smackdown every week. When we're talking about the Best X Ever, of course we can only judge on what is available and what we've seen. That's all we ever do and it goes without saying. In this particular context, I think all of us at PWO have seen enough wrestling in our lives to be able to tackle this question without worrying about having seen enough wrestling. I mean, if you look at the bunch of us just trying to have this thread and your reaction is "Well how can we possibly know when there's so much we haven't seen?" then you're basically just snuffing out any kind of discussion at all. It's not GWE or anything, this is just a thread, I wouldn't take it too seriously.

Are there ANY babyface women on Raw apart from Bayley and Sasha? I honestly don't know the answer to that.

Orton winning still bothers me, because EVEN IF you want to make this Orton/Bray thing for the title, the sequence of events is now ass backwards. If you want to do it, have Bray win the Rumble. Have Orton sacrifice himself at a key moment to help Bray win it. Bray holds the power, and you can still tease Bray/Cena as a pretend direction. Harper turns on Bray the same and faces Bray at EC, while Orton gets put into the Chamber match by Shane/Bryan. Harper keeps stirring up shit between Bray and Randy - what if Orton wins the title in the Chamber? But Bray is confident that Orton knows his place because Orton keeps saving him, while Harper betrayed him. So Orton wins the title. Now you get the tension of if/when Orton will turn on him, because being in the Wyatt Family is one thing, but having the WWE Title in your hands and being asked to basically give it up is another. Or maybe Bray pre-emptively turns on him for getting too big for his boots, for winning the title before he can. Either way, you do that big on a Smackdown and bam, there's your Mania match. You know, I actually felt sorry for Kevin Owens in that match. There he is taking a super gross, reckless, ridiculous bump through a literal high rise tower of chairs, all hard edges and bits sticking out, I mean it must have fucking sucked no matter how controlled his bump was. I was going mental and there are the announcers going "Oh, look at that, Kevin Owens might be in trouble in this match up.." like he'd just been hip tossed and I'm like "HE ALMOST FUCKING DIED YOU ASSHOLES, WHY DON'T YOU CARE!!" I was thinking to myself, this is the bullshit that made Mick Foley quit WCW. But then I kept thinking and realised, Foley painstakingly built to that one big bump to powerfully payoff a serious angle that was a big deal 12 months prior, and it was ignored. Owens' death was ignored because it was just another spot in a match full of suicidal death bumps. Then I stopped feeling sorry for Kevin Owens. Also, how fucking cool was Cena's roll through double-pump FU finish. That shit was ridic.

I dunno, I would imagine it far more likely that they have a non-turning "respect" feud. Roman here didn't seem like a heel turn since he didn't...do anything particularly heelish except eliminate someone more popular than him, but literally everyone in the Rumble would have been more popular than him. If that was a heel turn, I don't think they made it very clear.

About halfway through I figured that Jericho always stays in so long so he can direct traffic.

And fuck Roman, my favourite troll of the night was that, after all of us making "Undertaker walking slowly to the ring" jokes forever, and then seeing the length of the Alamodome ramp we were doubling down at my place...and then Taker comes out and just goes BONG and teleports to the ring instead! I laughed forever.

On the other hand, the Smackdowns between now and EC where they tease another historic, epic Cena vs Orton match at Mania to the sound of absolute, stone cold, deathly, deafening silence will be pretty hilarious.

For someone not really watching the TV or reading Dave's spoilers, Orton winning just seems very, very...strange to me. Like, it just didn't seem like it was a direction they were going in. He's in the middle of this angle with the Wyatts, he's basically one half of a heel tag team right now, there are plenty of guys more relevant to the title picture ahead of him, and PLENTY of bigger stars and guys that seemed more likely. It's just...weird. What it does is telegraph that Bray is winning the belt at EC, because the only way Orton is relevant to a title match at Mania is if he's facing Bray. So you're using John Cena's historic, Flair-equalling title reign as a two-week transition, AND you're using what was admittedly a huge, STACKED Rumble to give the win to a midcard heel to set up a title match that will be AT BEST like the fifth biggest match at Mania. Both of those things seem like a waste to me. Also, I will fucking lol if Braun Strowman, after getting over and looking AMAZING tonight, is used to put Roman fucking Reigns over at EC to build him up to face the 90 year old Undertaker.

AHAHAHAHAHA get absolutely fucked!

GALLAGHER!

Take his head off! God I love John Cena.