NotJayTabb

Really enjoying these write-up's @El Dragon, especially for guys like Brodie Lee who I've always liked, but haven't thought much about in the context of this project. I'm already planning a CHIKARA deeper dive for Kingston, Hallowicked, Hero, Claudio and (sigh) Quackenbush, but this now has me excited for Brodie there too.

Apparently it's been moved to 9th July, so my dream of seeing Braun Strowman vs a UFC fighter I've not heard of still remains intact.

It's almost certainly a poorly timed joke, but there was one of those "Who's going to Double Or Nothing?" tweets by a wrestling news site, and Ricky Starks replied "No". He's deleted the tweet, and it's probably a heel answer that he's had to delete once he's heard the MJF situation, but coupled with Joe's accidental no-show it doesn't help the rumour mill.

The segment ended with a legitimate "Shanky" chant, which I would have previously thought impossible

In a lovely twist of fate, I've been bought tickets for this show for my upcoming birthday. My mum had bought me some WWE house show tickets before, and I'm guessing the Motorpoint Arena e-mailed her to say "Hey this other wrestling show is coming up" and now I'm the proud owner of 2 tickets to the AoP island of misfit toys promotion and I'm kinda pumped about it. She did tell me that she's so far had two e-mails from the arena giving her a partial refund on the price as "The promotor has reduced the ticket prices", just in case you were wondering how sales were going.

Really hope Tony K has his delegating boots on, or the next few months could be tricky. With Fulham preparing for their bi-annual season in the Premiership, he's likely going to be involved in a lot of transfer negotiations and scouting meetings for the next few months, which is a full time job. He's either going to need to hire a director of football at Fulham (this would be the smarter move, as he's not great at it himself) or delegate a lot of the AEW booking for risk of burnout. There's already a few worrying signs that he's not firing on all cylinders (the terrible state of the TNT title scene), and it might end up getting worse.

I quite like KOR's goofiness, it's not overbearing and little touches like air-guitaring the NXT tag belt or "Peter DUNE" made him stand out a little bit. He was not only in a promotion of indy darlings in NXT, he was also in a stable of four similarly sized, pretty generic wrestlers, so he needed to stand out. Roddy was the worker, Cole had the catchphrase, so KOR started amping up the goofiness to stand out and it worked.

As a Nottingham resident, which is where this show is taking place, I know the Motorpoint Arena very well, and I can't see this being remotely profitable. It's a 10,000 seater arena, and to put on a show at 3 weeks notice with basically undercard WWE talent feels like a madness. The last time WWE ran there in 2021, they only got 4,500. I guess this might have morbid curiosity value, but it feels very odd.

I don't think it's being cute to call Keith Lee an NXT guy, in as much as he was one of the faces of NXT when they were going head-to-head with AEW. I think the perception of "signing NXT guys" thing is because AEW have signed a bunch of them in a really small timeframe - you've got Cole, Fish, O'Reilly, Lee, Swerve, Toni, Nese, Shafir all debuting in the space of a few months. At the same time, I don't see the validity in the argument that AEW are signing too many guys for their TV time. It makes sense to me as such a young company that they're still building, and in this case they're bringing in a lot of options, seeing what sticks and who they can use. It's like the original roster signings - some caught on, others like Janela and Evans didn't, so they weren't retained when their contracts ended. It makes sense to bring in people, see how they fit and how they are as people, then use the ones you can use, while the others get a payday until their deal expires. Everyone wins.

Yeah, I think Gulak trained Bad Bunny, along with Adam Pearce. If you're this off-the-radar and have avoided the chop so far, you must be doing some other backstage role and doing it well at this point

LuFisto was on Dark Elevation last night, she'd fit the BCC vibe as the only female member.

Possibly burnout? I wonder what percentage of those fans had also attended SD!, NXT and both days of Mania.

I think part of it is that Takeover used to be the night before Mania, rather than the same day. Hard to get that hype when it's hours before a bigger show. It was still a plenty good show though. Cameron Grimes has been, at worst, a top 3 worker in NXT since the day he arrived, glad to see him finally get a belt

Can't wait for Ryback to win BOLA

Fit also has at least one more son working the indies if they had trouble getting the older Finlay son.

What I've seen has been decent, he seems like a solid big man with some good movement and a big old clothesline as a finish. Seems like a nice guy on Twitter too, hope he does well

I mean, for a few years the only sighting of Mansoor was picking up wins on the Saudi shows, they can at least give us Wild Boar beating Tozawa in the opener

There is a part of me that wonders if they'll use any of their Welsh talent from NXT UK on the show. Feels like they could have done a Tegan Nox title chase story if she'd survived the last cull.

"Chaos ensues in the PROJECT PIT" made me laugh out loud

I've no issue with Sharmell making the HoF. She was a good character for a few years, arguably enhancing the reign of world champion Booker T, she's a good promo so she'll probably do a nice speech, and I imagine her and Booker live in Texas, so it's a nice local induction. The idea of Booker getting to induct his wife into the HoF in his home state is sweet enough that I'm happy with this one.

It's frightening how quickly this all escalated too. Last week he's hospitalised with a broken hip, then on Saturday he suffers 3 heart attacks and is now at the end of the line. Very sad news. Like a lot of people above, I was a big fan as a kid. Razor Ramon just oozed cool, he stood out as someone with a bit of an edge in the WWF babyface landscape. He had some really good matches over the years when motivated, and clearly had a mind for wrestling. I remember Matt Morgan saying in TNA that Hall had taken him aside and advised him to slow down his back elbows in the corner, as that would let the impact of each one sink in with the audience. I wish we'd got to see more of that side of him.

Had half an hour spare on Saturday, so watched a couple of Tito matches on YouTube, both of which I very much enjoyed. Not all-time classics, but matches where I thought "If Tito wasn't this, it would be a lot worse". First was a 1990 match against Al Perez, a guy who I've always thought was fundamentally fine, but I've never been excited by. This was a really good 10 minute match, with Perez focusing on the back and Tito selling and making Perez look great. The other match was a 5 minute sprint from 1993 against Headshrinker Fatu, and it was good fun. I assumed by June 93 that Tito would be checking out, but he still had great energy, still knew how to work underneath against a bigger guy, and still really fun to watch. Feel like I want to go on a deeper Tito dig now.

Ridge Holland's real name is Luke Menzies, so a pairing of Luke and Butch means this definitely feels like its intentional

I'm not going to say Bron is a no-brainer either, because we all know how that goes, but he's got the advantage over Keith Lee of being 12 years younger and working the style that WWE like. As opposed to Lee, who they wanted to work more like a big man and to talk differently.

I think Zayn will finish lower in 2026, but I don't think it's his last few years negatively affecting him as much as the fact he was on a high when the last poll took place. At the time, he was coming off a great NXT run about to culminate in the highly anticipated Nakamura match, so his stock was at an all-time high. I actually think his main roster run has added to his case - we all knew he could play a great babyface, both with his body language in a mask and with his facial expressions without it. Now we also know he can play a great stooging heel, who knows exactly how to work to that character whilst still having great matches when he needs to. I think more highly of him now as an all-round performer than I did when I voted in 2016, but he wont have the buzz that he did at the time.