Migs

It's not, actually. (Certainly not here, at least.) The argument is that in the great history of wrestling that we all discuss on here, Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks (and more broadly, this style / generation of wrestling, because there are plenty of AEW fans on this board who aren't the biggest Omega or Bucks fans) absolutely should be in the conversation and respected in the way that other top eras are. To use a term that comes up a lot around here, their best stuff is all canon, in the same way Flair-Steamboat is, in the way 90s All Japan is, in the way you'd get nowhere in a conversation around here if you didn't see the value in Lawler or Funk's work. But it's a lopsided argument because no one here is arguing you shouldn't watch that other stuff (I'm sure someone on Twitter is right now, but that's not who I'm interested in chatting with.) Moreso, this stuff needs to be understood in context. All of these guys grew up working for the smartest possible crowds. One thing about the Bucks that gets misunderstood is that they absolutely can do a southern style tag match. But watch some 2010 PWG, and you can see them figuring out that the whole crowd is sitting on their hands for the first 2/3 of the match because they know the style too well - the hot tag is coming, and the awesome finishing sequence is what they're waiting for. So they restructure the matches to not have that downtime, figure out how to get responses out of that crowd. They figure out the ways to be a heel for those crowds when the classic shtick wouldn't work (and they've figured out how to do it again - Kenny and the Bucks are getting booed in a promotion that's literally built on how beloved they were.) If you want to call what they do "meta," so be it, but it's really understanding your audience. (Now, some may feel that something is lost when wrestling is performed for a smarter audience - there's certainly a joy in watching old Mid-South hick crowds want to murder someone for using a fake chain. But it's pretty unfair to ding these guys for working a style that's clearly turned on a lot of people.) Look, it's great that people are jumping in now and watching these matches. It shows that people are coming to the idea that this stuff is going to be in the historical conversation long-term. I respect that different people are in different stages of their journey with this. Same as @El-P, it took me a while to fully get the Bucks and Omega, and even the apex of the modern style (mid-late 2010s New Japan) wasn't something I attached to immediately. If people feel like overly theatrical wrestling isn't their thing, that's fine (and please, also tell me how you don't enjoy Randy Savage gesturing with every move or wide swaths of lucha). I'd just prefer not being told that I like things that are "phony" on a pro wrestling board when someone hasn't connected to a performer.

I definitely had to show my vaccine card on the way in, although I was there on the earlier side. Possible they got lax on that to try and move people in.

He looked really good against Suzuki on Friday in GCW. He's mostly done multi-man tag stuff in ROH - might recommend him and Dickinson against Titus and Gresham from Best in the World as a good match in front of a crowd that wasn't a huge multi-man.

He tried to invoke a rematch clause to be added to Mox-Gage, but... there are no rematch clauses in GCW. Led to a match with him and Effy to try to win his way in, which he lost. The whole thing was a terrific bit of business - Cardona plays the whole role so well.

Did they show any of Eddie's post-match speech? Homicide getting a pop bigger than Mox was pretty wild, although I'm guessing what was left of the crowd at that point skewed pretty hard to the NY indy gang.

Tax used it for an off TV segment on Wednesday and it was great.

Go out of your way to see Suzuki-Homicide. What a great slice of professional wrestling. Homicide was so important in the early stages of the NY indy scene for bring the Japanese strong style influence and pushing the style away from just flippy stuff and garbage wrestling. To see him, after all these years, get basically his perfect opponent on home soil... special night.

I hadn't looked too far ahead and realized next Sunday (10/3) is both ZSJ-Ishii and Shingo-Ibushi. So there's some real rough A block nights ahead.

Hoo boy was ZSJ-Shingo great. And Ishii-Ibushi is one of my favorite match ups - always really like the way their personalities clash, in particular what Ishii brings out of Ibushi. On the exceeding expectations... I do feel like I didn't realize how front loaded the A block was - after ZSJ-Ibushi on Sunday, we'll have burned through most of the best matchups of the top 4 guys (Ibushi-Shingo and Ishii-ZSJ are the last two top level matchups). Barring a really good Kenta evening, things could get rough.

Yeah, I don't think it's really a red vs blue thing, because Cody's character isn't really about the jingoism most nights (other than the Ogogo match). My feeling is that toward the end of 2020 they were considering a heel turn with him (the stuff with Darby, teasing him aligning with FTR) and then when they decided not to pull the trigger, the character had completely lost its way. I also think he fell in love with his own promo ability too much, and began thinking he could cut one promo to heat up a feud instead of actually building a story. The Aldis match and the Dustin match didn't need a lot of build because the story was built in; not so much with Shaq, or even with Ogogo. (And I say this as someone who absolutely loved Cody's promo work in 2018-2019 and think it's an all-time classic run on the mic that is sadly over.)

The whole night was surreal, so I'm not sure Rampage was "better," but it was awesome and I can't wait for everyone here to see it. Some real special hometown pops on that show.

That was probably the greatest night of wrestling I've ever attended.

No one's slotting in for the tournament, they are doing special singles matches each night. (The most interesting one by far being Ishii vs Hiromu.) This also can't be great for whatever Gedo was going for, as Naito had O-Khan on the last night, which was likely a relevant match, given what happened in the NJ Cup. But I mean, who knows how much any of it will matter, with the way Japan's rules keep swinging and with New Japan's luck they could be taping Wrestle Kingdom at the dojo.

Didn't want to give him another attack by telling him about NXT 2.0.

I thought MiSu-Gresham was good but not quite great. But very excited on the whole for the Suzuki US tour.

The stuff that we expected to be great this weekend was really great, like remembering how good the G1 is great. The 30 minute time limit helps a lot, as the top level stuff didn't have 10 minutes of stalling to start (Okada-Tana was slow at first, but they always start slow to milk the crowd energy, so I don't think it was stretching there). Also, it's amazing how much better Yano is in these settings, where his opponents are equally desperate to win - it really allows a heightening of the energy when the other guy plays the game, because they have to, because they need the 2 points.

Improv would be a pretty obvious benefit for wrestlers (and there are plenty who've done it and are quite good at it). Working with your scene partner to build a world, understanding how to advance things forward, making strong choices and committing to them... a match is like an improv scene, and a dueling promo is almost exactly an improv scene. Would be invaluable.

Was there last night. As noted, real good crowd, probably helped that I'd guess a huge chunk of the crowd is going to Ashe so they didn't mind that this was an all setup episode.

They only really crossed paths from late 87 into 88. I know they were opposite in tags (Arn/Tully vs Sting/Nikita at Bash 88 for one) but I've watched a lot of 88 JCP and don't recall a single match.

I think they could absolutely do Omega-Danielson going 60. No one felt cheated at the end of Omega-Okada II.

Impact seems like the right answer. I think ROH did well with him, actually, shot him up the card quickly based on the responses he got, gave him the title, backtracked when it didn't really work with him as champion. Almost immediately after the pandemic hit and he the border issues made him a non-player.

He has looked pretty washed after the pandemic break. Not sure if it's him not being in matches suited to him anymore or if age just finally caught up to him.

Maybe I was a little too pessimistic. I do think ROH has strung together some good shows, and there's certainly a flow to things even without any big angles. I like the decision to go all in on Bandido, who's not my favorite guy but at least has star potential and they didn't wait until it was too late. If I were them I'd go full lucha and do him vs Dragon Lee at the next major show, use Vincent as a bridge guy for whatever live show they do next month. At the very least Bandido-Dragon Lee might get some people talking.

After watching the last section, kinda bummed they didn't just give us a Brody-Bandido PWG singles match. As usual, perfectly good ROH show that it feels like will have no impact on anything.