NotJayTabb

Roman Reigns? I mean, he'll win the big one eventually, but he's had quite a few title matches that he's not won. To continue the "nations as wrestlers" theme, Samoa strike me as being like most Samoan wrestlers: Tough, always capable, but never going to be world champions. They're like the gatekeepers between the contenders and everybody else.

I'm very tempted by the CZW streaming service, just want them to add a few more older events before I do. Something about 2001-2004 era CZW that I love, and the idea of an archive full of Cory Kastle or GQ matches makes me happier than it really should

Ha, always thought O'Driscoll was a knob, so I was more than happy with that outcome

There's a certain smugness that comes with English rugby. You can see it in the way Chris Ashton dives for tries, how unbearable Matt Dawson is on Question of Sport or how a London rugby club can decide to move to Coventry and buy our stadium. I loved how much stick Gatland got in the press for primarily picking Wales players for the 2013 Lions tour, as if building around the core of the 6 Nations winning team was a bad idea.

Perfect description. As someone brought up supporting Wales (Welsh mother), the Alain Rolland heel turn in the last WC still rankles to this day. We've got a bastard of a group this time, but I'm still hopeful.

This is a fun old school bout. http://youtu.be/b_bKc2x8JSU

Magnus is reportedly joinng GFW, which makes sense. My understanding is that he's always been a guy Jarrett is high on, and I can't see him in RoH or LU. I think he's a guy with enough positives that he'd be a good fit for the WWE, and one who could improve at a good rate in NXT, but I don't see it happening.

Man, Sheamus/Reigns would've been so much better than Wyatt/Reigns. The matches would've been better, there's an easy storyline to insert (MITB holder vs man who got screwed by last MITB holder) and Sheamus is less likely to get cheered than Wyatt.

Can you link to these? I can't find them. Edit: I found them, I think. What is KB though, and who is Thomas Hall? http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Hall/e/B00E6282W6/ Sounds interesting. I just added it. James Dixon has about twenty other books, so I assumed he was a hack pushing out quick cash grabs. I may be wrong on that (or I may be right). I know nothing about the author, to be honest. Thomas Hall writes reviews for Scott Keith's blog. He's terrible. James Dixon also co-wrote the 1PW book All Or Nothing, which is on Kindle Unlimited. That's a really good book, pretty much the definitive "how not to run an indy company". It's worth reading for the Samoa Joe/Jay Phoenix stuff alone.

Pretty sure he's one they've trained from scratch. I think it's mainly his football background that makes me curious to see what he's like in the ring. I know Kevin Owens tweeted about how much he enjoyed watching him, so hopefully he's somewhat decent.

Of the top of my head, the Cage of Death at COD V was a really fun spectacle. A two-ring, scaffold cage match, it was essentially a big stuntfest, but all the big spots looked great. Also, Nate Hatred vs Nick Gage from Aftermath 2003 was a really fun brawl

The other real issue is that it's raising expectations too much. If you look at when Big Cass, he's one of the more popular guys on the show. However, when he debuted, he was the second-best guy in a singles match with Mason Ryan. If his debut was today, he'd get booed out of the building within a week or two for being a poor wrestler, instead of being able to find his feet and develop his act with Enzo, which has clearly paid off. A guy like Corbin probably needs to be in NXT for a year or two to tighten his act, but he's already getting the crowd turning on him despite him being perfectly passable in the ring.

It does feel like there's a number of guys in the Performance Centre who have had to take a backseat due to the recent influx of name indy talent. I've been hearing about people like Gable, Sawyer Fulton, Hugo Knox and Angelo Dawkins for a while, but they've either not made TV yet, or been job fodder. In a way, they're the ones I'm most excited about. I mean, I know what Hideo Itami can do, but I've barely any idea what Dash Wilder or that guy with the enormous hands are like, and that makes me curious.

In a nice bit of BritWres news, the first two entrants for BOLA have been announced as Will Ospreay and Marty Scurll. Ospreay isn't my favourite UK guy, but given that he'll only have a weekend to make an impression, he's someone who has enough flashy highspots to get over. Marty is a guy whose biggest US exposure is overshooting Jessie Godderz on a suicide dive on an episode of Impact, but his evolution since then has been great, and I'm sure he'll put in a good showing. Also, Marty being there makes it more likely his long-time tag partner Zack Sabre Jr will show up as well.

I don't know if Lovefilm is a "thing" in the US, but it's basically a postal DVD rental where you create a list of DVD's you'd like to watch and they mail them to you at random. They only agreed a deal with the WWE last year, so their wrestling section consisted of a load of TNA, assorted Big Vision stuff like 3PW and XPW, and a few odds and sods. Suffice to say, I've been sent quite of lot of bad wrestling to watch from Lovefilm, but in spite of this I'm always quite excited when it's wrestling they send rather than a film. The last disc they sent me was LPWA Wild Things. I'd heard of the LPWA, but I didn't know much about them. Didn't know if they were a serious promotion, or one of those GLOW/Wrestlicious products that wasn't quite so serious. Having watched it, there were certainly a few terrible gimmicks, my favourite being "the Desert Rose" Sheeba, who turned face, rediscovered her American roots and hilariously started coming to the ring to "Born In The USA". The wrestling was mostly terrible, though a few people clearly stood out as having some ability. The match between Susan Sexton and Leilani Kai was easily the best match, just by virtue of little things like Sexton actually working a hold and Kai selling it. A lot of bouts seemed to involve one lady casually holding her opponents foot, letting go and letting her opponent hold their arm in return. Aside from that, Reggie Bennett and the imaginitively-named Bad Girl had some decent power moves, and La Gata seemed decent enough, but the likes of The Goddess and the afore-mentioned Sheeba were wretched.

There's a Clewd tag match reviewed on the last page that I really enjoyed when I watched it. A lot of that was due to the heeling of the Superflies in opposition, but I thought the faces looked good too. Let me find what I wrote at the time..(looks like I got Clewd's first name wrong) The Superflies (Jimmy Ocean and Ricky Knight) vs. Tony Stewart and Geraint Clewd You only have to look at the Superflies to know theyre heels: with bleached blond mullets and garish multicoloured tights, they ooze scummy heat. Stewart and Clewd seem much younger and less experienced, but have a great babyface energy and swiftly win the first fall with a Clewd rollup on Ocean. The Flies pull out all the stops from the Heel Tagteam playbook, with tag-rope chokes and ref distractions a-plenty. A handful of salt to the face of Stewart evens the score to 1-1. A pin in the corner with feet on ropes almost earns the Superflies the win before the ref spots it, before allowing the young faces a chance to make their comeback. At this point, the Superflies turn into stooges of the highest order, frantically grabbing the ropes to avoid submission holds and each taking huge bumps to the outside from face offence. Clewd and Stewart more than hold up their end of the bargain, and pick up the win when Ocean accidentally hits Knight with some barricade meant for Clewd, allowing the face to pin Ocean following a sunset flip. Good tag action made more enjoyable by the efforts of the heel team.

Saw Triple H's tweet pop up, and spent a while trying to work out what it meant, as the last thing I wanted to accept was that the Dream had died. Absolutely horrible news, one of the most magnetic personalities ever.

I actually thought this was the best I'd seen Mojo look. He looked more toned than before, and his offence didn't look feather light. I thought the elevated Rough Ryder was a good finisher too.

I think the nature of the Rollins push is different to the HHH one though. HHH was pushed as more of a tough guy who ultimately outsmarted everyone to position himself into the top spot. He was the catalyst for his own success, rather than being a chosen champion. The Rollins push is more akin to the Rock in 1998 - the talented, but vainglorious Corporate champion who needs protection to ensure he keeps his title. Can I imagine Patterson and Briscoe rolling up the Rock after a ringside distraction from Stone Cold? Absolutely.

Halfway through an old CZW tape (Aftermath 2003) that I grabbed at random. CZW were my US indy of choice when I first started to explore wrestling outside of WWF/WCW, so it's quite fun to revisit these shows, even if a lot of these guys are a lot sloppier and less talented than I remember. So far, there's been a couple of CZW rookie matches that were actually ok, a really fun hardcore match between Nick Gage and Nate Hatred, a decent match between Jonny Storm and Nick Berk (that the crowd couldn't care less about) and an overbooked mess between the Backseat Boys and Adam Flash/Ian Knoxx (that the crowd loved).

I really feel WCW really dropped the ball when it came to music. Think about how the WWF trained their audience to recognize a wrestler within seconds of their theme hitting to maximise the pop. As soon as crowds heard the glass smash/a car skidding to a crash/"If you smell...", they knew who was coming out and reacted accordingly. In contrast, WCW in 99 has very few memorable themes. Goldberg, Booker, Hogan, Flair, Nash, (surprisingly) Bagwell.....now think about other guys near the top of the card. Could anyone here hum Bret's ring music? Sid? Rick Steiner, Benoit, Luger? I can only remember Macho Man's new theme because I bought a copy of the WCW Mayhem album for £1 in Cash Generator. Basically, the WWF guys had music that made even lower card guys memorable (Gangrel being the prime example), whilst WCW had music that made their stars unremarkable.

Banger Walsh once drunkenly invited my friend and I to his house to look at his collection of memorabilia and to see the old Coventry City dugout he'd bought and had put in his back garden. I kinda regret not going, but I suspect I'd have got there only for him to have no memory of the conversation.

I think at that point, WCW needed to concentrate less on trying to compete with the WWF and more with being a sustainable business. Cut back on the enormous undercard of guys that never made it to Nitro or Thunder - people like Van Hammer or Hardbody Harrison had zero value and were just a drain on resources. Stop overpaying for celebrity guests like Megadeth or Master P, who managed to lure in no viewers. I also think that, rather than try and lure away the WWF audience, WCW needed to consolidate the audience they currently had. They still had millions of viewers who were tuning into Nitro because they weren't fans of what the WWF was offering, which was a lot of character work, but one of the worst in-ring years in the companies history. The fans they had left were probably tuning into WCW because they wanted to watch some actual wrestling. You can see how much the company started to lose popularity when Russo turned it into WWF-lite, and in October 99 WCW still had a great roster in the midcard who could put on good 10-15 minute TV matches. You can still use guys like Hogan, but don't have him wrestle on TV every week, make him a special attraction so that his matches still feel like a big deal. Bottom line in, WCW needed to accept being no.2 (and there's no shame in being Pepsi rather than Coca-Cola), try and run like a real business and try and keep their existing fanbase happy (and maybe appeal to the WWF fans who were bored of a lack of good wrestling on TV)

PROGRESS have an insanely passionate crowd. They managed to sell out their next show, 700 tickets, within half an hour of them going on sale. Decided to check out Legacy Wrestling in Royal Leamington Spa last night. Not a huge crowd, just over 50 people, but hopefully they'll start to pick up some steam. They did a lot of things right. The set up was great, the ring well lit with the ringside area darkened, and they seem to be going for a WoS vibe to the rules, with the use of public warnings, no throwing your opponent over the top rope, and even down to the announcements of the hosting Mr Legacy, who announced weights, times of public warnings and times of pinfalls in a very proper manner. All the matches were pretty fun, with a lot of guys I'd never seen before and now would like to see again. The standout of the undercard guys was probably Jack Starz, a Robbie Brookside trainee who was really crisp on the mat and had some brutal sounding uppercuts. Also, the tag team match between the Henchmen and Arcade/Terry Seddon was a lot of fun. The Henchmen (Jim Diehard and Benton Destruction) are probably my favourite act in the UK, two huge bearded men whose motto is "Pumping iron and pounding beers" and have a nice line in cheating and using their considerable weight to keep their opponents down. They picked up the win here after a great looking senton from Diehard. Which leaves us with the main event between Justin "Hammer" Sysum and the Wild Boar, which was really great. Sysum is nicknamed "Hammer" due to his resemblance to Thor, all long blond hair and muscled torso. In contrast, the Wild Boar is not quite so handsome: he's short, slightly dumpy, and isn't blessed with model good looks. He looks like a feral creature, and he wrestles like one too. After a period of Sysum controlling the match on the mat, Boar gets control (and his first public warning) by viciously biting Sysum in the corner. He gets his second public warning, and a real period of dominance, by charging Sysum as he enters the ring, leaving Hammer's leg tangled in the rope. This gives Boar a focus point, and he's all over the leg from that moment, attacking it every chance he can. In contrast, Sysum's selling of the leg is great. He knows he can out wrestle the Boar if he can only get him on the mat, so he positions himself on all fours, keeping his bad leg as far away from Boar as possible, trying to get a takedown. The end was really good too - Sysum uses a 450 splash as his finisher, so when he gets Boar down, he slowly tries to climb to the top, but Boar is able to cut him off. Boar traps Sysum's arms to give him some headbutts, but Sysum returns the favour from earlier by biting Boar in the face, sending him crashing back to the mat and prone to the match winning 450. Really great main event to a really fun show that delivered more than I was expecting.

One of the things I always thought TNA did right was their treatment of the piledriver when Eric Young turned heel in 2009. He started using the piledriver, with the commentary putting over that it was an unwritten rule in the dressing room that people didn't use the move since it could end careers and affect livelihoods. Thought it put over both the move and how ruthless the newly heel Young was.