pol

The rear chinlocks at the start were killing me. I can totally dig a slow start, but good god do something interesting with it. After they got that out of their system, well, you can hardly call it boring, but it was a total my turn/your turn stretch and the nearfalls got silly. Like I said, very indie. Great finish though.

That was very indie

Thumbs slightly up show for me. - Honma/Ibushi was a good but not very good match, which was disappointing given what both are capable of. I thought the match suffered a lot from not having Ibushi work a sustained heat segment on Honma. They must have known Honma would be a huge crowd favourite in Osaka, so there's no excuse. - The Junior tag was my favourite of all the multi-team matches these guys have had. I'm still ready for an end to the car crash matches and a sustained feud between two of these teams, though. - Omega/Taguchi was really fucking bad. Sooo boring. I like the idea of The Cleaner gimmick and I get that it's supposed to be over the top, but Omega comes off too much like he's playing a character for my liking. I'm glad they're doing something with Dorada, hopefully those matches are a bit more interesting. - At the start of the tag titles match the show was really starting to feel like a drag to me. Other than the aforementioned match nothing was bad, but so many tag matches that were no better than average and that had no real consequences really started to take it out of me. That said, they got me back by the end and the finishing stretch was great until the wrong guys won. - I feel like AJ and Tanahashi have this problem in their matches where they never seem to quite kick it into high gear. I thought this was the best of their series thus far, though. I really thought from the way they worked the opening 5-10 minutes that they were going 40-50. Given that they only went 26 the way they paced this is mystifying, unless they brought it home early because of how fucked up Tanahashi was which doesn't seem like the Japanese way. I did think the working of holds and methodical heel work from AJ was really very good though. Very old-school, 80s NWA title match feel, which was very cool, just a shame it lacked a satisfying final third. Tanahashi doing the 2nd rope senton after spending the previous 5 minutes getting his back worked over was uncharacteristically stupid on a psychological level. I'm not really a fan of the AJ win here; it devalues the drama of the WK9 main event and postmatch when Tanahashi just loses the belt in his next defense anyway, plus I'm so fucking done with the Bullet Club. Color me pretty skeptical about NJPW booking going forward. I guess these double shot shows make sense from a business perspective but they are kinda a chore to sit through so that kinda sucks too.

Seems like the classic situation where they'd punish a midcard guy but a main event guy will have it overlooked to me.

Okada's aloof character strikes me as similar to Malenko's Iceman gimmick, where it's a kayfabe cover for a genuine in-ring deficiency.

Word from Dave is that the plan now is for a three way at Mania.

Just got around to watching that Ambrose/Wyatt match. Thought it was very good, surprised not to see more talk of it. Ambrose's selling was great.

The Akito vs. Makoto Oishi no rope escape match from the 01/25 DDT show that just surfaced is one of my top 10 matches of the year so far. They did a lot of fun stuff with the gimmick and it had a great finish.

I watched Jonathan Gresham vs. Joe Gacy from a recent CZW show. Given what little I've seen of those guys before I thought it might be a cool mat-based match, and I guess it was for about five minutes before they switched to the indie bomb-throwing style and neglected to sell anything that happened prior. Disappointing.

I remember the Observer reporting that the NXT show was a sellout at ~2000 tickets sold.

I was operating on the basis that often when he says "this could mean that..." it often turns out to have meant "this is what I was told was happening, but things could change". Hard to tell though.

Cutting through the Davespeak, the latest Observer seems to be hinting that the plan is for Bryan to win at Fast Lane, or a heel Reigns, or both.

It strikes me as a match that may be difficult to work. Roman doesn't have the offense to control a long match or really even go 50/50. But if he wins after a guy half his size controls most of the match he comes out looking pretty bad. I'd say they'd benefit from being agented to hell but we saw how the Rumble turned out...

I'd imagine international house shows draw a lot more adults than the US ones do.

It's funny, in a different era of the WWE Bryan would've been a protected upper midcarder and while people might think he deserved better you wouldn't see the kind of fan insistence on him in the main event. The guy could've been the ace of the IC title, having great matches for that belt on every show. Of course they had to beat him constantly and the concept of a protected midcarder is practically dead anyway so they ended up creating this monster that is now biting them in the ass.

With the Royal Rumble fiasco I thought this might be fun to think about. In a few places I've heard people float the idea that WWE created the monster that results in reactions like they got at the Rumble by pushing the whole "WWE Universe", "we listen to the fans", Twitter voting to make matches etc. It's resulted in a fanbase that not only sees themselves as the stars of the show, but also as entitled to call the shots. The flipside of that though (and probably why they do it) is that they've created a fanbase that's far more invested in their product, even when it's bad. There's a significant section of the fanbase for whom Raw isn't simply three hours of entertainment on a Monday night; it's a (pseudo-) social event. Watch the show and tweet along with thousands of others about it, praising the good and eviscerating the bad. They keep watching regardless of the quality of the show because, ultimately, quality TV isn't their primary reason for watching. I think this is what leads to the curious environment of modern WWE where a poor product doesn't seem to drive down TV ratings and a shitty show doesn't result in fans simply emptying the stands, but staying and shitting on everything they see. These people are too invested to go elsewhere. They're also primarily, as Meltzer has observed, WWE fans as opposed to wrestling fans, so it's not like they're going to start following ROH or NJPW or something instead and give up on WWE. It's kind of a worrying situation in the sense that if such a signification proportion of the fanbase is never going away, there's little economic motivation for WWE to improve the quality of their product. Thankfully I think Vince still cares to some extent what the fans think regardless of economic evidence; we saw that last year with his changing of the Wrestlemania card, when that show would have done well regardless, as Wrestlemania does, based purely on the Wrestlemania name. There's more stuff I want to talk about (specifically what it is that gets over with the modern fan) but this is getting long enough for a stream-of-consciousness rant already . Thoughts?

http://www.wwe.com/shows/raw/2015-02-02/tripleh-announcement-on-raw "The incident The Game was referring to was, of course, the emergence of and subsequent interference by The Rock."

What a weird first half hour or so that was. Triple H cuts a total babyface promo, they go further into obnoxious worked shoot territory than I can ever remember them doing post-Russo, Reigns and Big Show have a match with a bunch of over-the-top-rope spots (surely you do this BEFORE the Rumble?) while Cole practically begs everyone to puh-leeeeeeze like Roman Reigns on commentary. Are they panicking or just fucking with us?

I can see them resigning themselves to the notion that anyone pushed as a top babyface is inevitably going to get a mixed reaction. Which is nonsense of course but hey.

It's hard to see the company heating up ever again. Yes, the launch of the Network has been a bumpy road but they're on track to once again being comfortably profitable under a model that should theoretically demonstrate even less variance with booking than the PPV model. There's no motivation to take the kind of risks necessary to get things hot. As long as there are wrestling fans and no competition WWE will continue to make money with a mediocre product. I think if the quality of the product increases, it will be because whoever's calling the shots at the time is personally driven to create a quality product, not because of any economic motivation.

If they're not planning on having him win the New Japan Cup and win the IC title from Nakamura, I think a tag team spot is good for Ibushi right now. It allows him to have showcase matches and also be protected from singles losses. I'm sure Gedo and Jado realise the heavyweight tag team division is pretty weak right now, so hopefully they've made it a project to get it popping a little more in 2015 - with Goto/Shibata, Ibushi/Naito and potentially Haste/Nicholls they seem to be taking good steps towards that already. I still think the long-term goal should be Ibushi as IC champion by WK10 though.

I think Naito and Ibushi are being built up to challenge for the tag titles. The fact that they're formally a team now with a name and everything is a clue. Plus they teased tension between Naito and Shibata at New Year Dash.

That six man was super fun. The spot style really works a lot better in the trios format, so they should do a lot more of these. It would also allow them to not burn through singles matches so quickly, which would be helpful given the limited roster. As annoying as Striker is, Vamp constantly burying and no-selling everything Striker sets up for him is even worse. That said, as horrible as he is an announcer he really shines in those backstage interview segments. If the rumors of him being replaced as an announcer are true I hope they at least keep him on in that role. I thought Puma/Cage was really pretty bad. Everything both guys did came off so rehearsed and performative, like they were wrestling in an empty arena. Really dug the post match though, how many years has it been since the last incidence of televised gigging?

The fact that Bryan was consistently booked weak and portrayed as not being on the level of other main eventers even when asked to main event may have something to do with it. It also may not. The correlation or lack thereof between crowd reactions and drawing power has always been a funny thing and in modern WWE seems harder to understand than ever.

Sounds like I probably need to rewatch that match. I don't think I watched it since it first aired. I will say I do think Nakamura is one of the absolute best at emoting pain, but that's only one aspect of selling. Not that I think he's a bad seller at all, but I'm not sure he's superlative.