Kadaveri

You'll probably never find another match like this outside of Marvelous. There's not much 'action', the dynamic is all about two youngsters being hopelessly outmatched against the Ace Takumi and their trainer Chigusa. It's really compelling and there's a few big moments where Mei fires up and manages to get the advantage, if but for a few moments. Not sure how to rate this but strongly recommend checking it out.

The story is she's been (less publicly) speaking in favour of unionisation for several weeks now. That's what Dave's referring to, not saying she got fired for that tweet.

The first hint that NXT Bayley wasn't gonna be on the main roster is when she came to Raw wearing a tiny backpack asking people for directions. Turned her NXT youthful optimist character into "literal child." 

Bayley didn't say anything remotely similar last year. She just factually stated what the situtation was, she didn't criticise anyone.

Bayley vs. Sasha was the best match of the COVID era. Closest I've been to forgetting there's no crowd.

Alright so the QAnon conspiracy theory is that there's an anonymous member of the Trump Administration (known as "Q") leaking information about a Satan-worshipping pedophile child-trafficking gang who rule the USA and are trying to overthrow Donald Trump as he's about to expose them. To convert people into being true believers, they never tell you the whole thing from the beginning, because it's obviously crazy, so they just put out non-controversial memes about "end human trafficking" and stuff to lead you down the rabbit hole.

From the Twitter lamenting The Ditch went down October 3rd.

Haha OJ, his main obstacle getting into Joshi is being squeamish about female violence and you direct him to Aja Kong vs. Bull Nakano matches. If you want to avoid the blood and guts stuff (or at least to start with) I'd start watching the best of the early 80s stuff first. The AJW style was a bit slower and more mat-orientated back then. You'll see it gradually move towards the "classic" Joshi style (or at least from the typical Western fan viewpoint) over time. The Ace of the promotion in 1980 is Jackie Sato, formerly one half of the Beauty Pair. Tomi Aoyoma is one half of the 'Queen Angels' with Lucy Kamaya, who had two long tag title reigns in 1978-80. Rimi Yokota (later known as Jaguar Yokota) is the 18/19 year old challenger pushing up the ranks. The top heel is Yumi Ikeshita who is part of the 'Black Pair', Devil Masami is one of her proteges who'd also be a big name later on. Check out these matches and see what you think: Chino Sato vs. Rimi Yokota - 01/04/80 Jackie Sato vs. Tomi Aoyama - 01/04/80 Devil Masami vs. Jackie Sato - 11/27/80 Jackie Sato vs. Rimi Yokota - 12/16/80

He's eligible to be voted in now because he's 35 years old and has been wrestling 10+ years. It's been remarked on before that Dave's criteria for eligibility is a bit outdated as wrestlers are older than they used to be.

It wasn't that he thought she tapped out. According to Mike Johnson it's that she was selling so realistically she fooled the ref into thinking she was genuinely injured so he stopped the match.

He's two years younger than Vince.

That's not a plausible explanation. The famous Sasha vs. Bayley Takeover matches were nothing like their previous matches (none of which went more than 8 minutes), had way too much reacting to the crowd and playing off their current storylines to have just been them going through spots they'd practiced in the PC/previous matches. The idea they'd practiced stuff like poison frankensteiners off the top rope in the PC is absurd. They'd be banned from doing it. The Observer may have been right about Takeover matches generally being practiced beforehand, but Sasha wasn't even in NXT anymore when the Bayley vs. Sasha Takeover matches happened or even announced. She'd been working full-time on the main roster house shows 6 weeks before the Brooklyn match and 3 months before the Ironman match. So really the facts available is that Bayley was able to have really great matches on Takeover shows without getting to practice them. Plus her performances on the main roster don't show this being any sort of problem for her. Just watch her Raw debut against Charlotte where you can see Bayley physically dragging Charlotte around/putting her feet into the correct positions etc... that's the kind of wrestler she is. There's also the impromptu match with Ronda Rousey where Ronda was completely botching what was meant to be a long promo and Bayley was just sent out to salvage the situation by having a match and totally carries Ronda through it. Steve Austin spots stuff like this and he talked about being a ring general when she was on his podcast. There's an amusing segment where he forces her to admit that when her opponents aren't able to think on their feet fast enough she just physically takes them over even if they get roughed up in the process. Anyway, whenever this 'Takeover matches are practised beforehand' thing gets brought up it's always directed at the women's matches for some reason, when there's no evidence this applied to them any more than the men. Yet getting to practice matches didn't stop Finn Balor/Samoa Joe etc having loads of subpar matches on those shows. Maybe practicing matches beforehand doesn't necessarily create great results.

I've seen this claim a thousand times on internet forums and nobody ever actually produces evidence of it. For one thing Bayley's most famous matches in NXT happened while she was on the Florida loop and Sasha Banks was working the main roster house shows, so they couldn't possibly have "endlessly practiced" them beforehand. And anyway, the issue with Bayley on the main roster has never been the quality of her matches, it was her getting booked to look like a complete loser.

Yeah nobody watch the Stardom World version of that Io vs. Mayu match. It's terrible, the camera misses like half the match. Watch this.

Is there any reason to think that wasn't legitimately the reason why Roman was away for 5 months.

Being based in New York isn't a result of Vince's creative genius though. A lot of this success specific to WWF was still luck.

The whole "Daniel Bryan got over while losing" isn't even really true. His big push began by ending the undefeated streak of The Shield in trios by tapping out Seth Rollins, then tapped out Randy Orton (who was very protected at the time) in a street fight to end their feud and go into Summerslam as the #1 Contender, where he won the WWE Championship by being the first guy to defeat John Cena totally clean who debuted post-2002. Who else got a huge push like that?

Can't wait to see your ballot OJ

There aren't really many early NXT women. Emma, Paige, Sasha, Bayley and Becky Lynch were all on the indies first and Charlotte Flair was trained in FCW. Braun Strowman Alexa Bliss The Street Profits Carmella Liv Morgan Chad Gable Pretty sure that's it, and I'm stretching a bit with the last few.

The CFE Arena tapings in January 2016 was the end of the golden era of NXT. Taped four weeks of TV and didn't advance any storylines except having Sami Zayn vs. Samoa Joe end in a double pin resulting in a rematch at the next tapings (if that counts...). The rest was just random matches with little discernable purpose, the 'main event' of the whole thing being Adrian Neville returning to NXT to have a one off non-title (!?) match with Finn Balor. If you'd watched NXT in 2014-15 the most distinctive thing about it was almost everyone on TV had a storyline going and every appearance would advance it one way or another. Sometimes the storylines were bad, but they were always there. Then suddenly there's this big change in philosophy to having the show just revolve around nice matches. Since then we've seen the whole show gradually adjusting to that new philosophy. I think it's connected with WWE's big signing sprees. There were always indie names in NXT, e.g. Rollins, Sami Zayn etc... but in the first few years they were a small minority. The roster was mostly home-grown or people who'd been on the indies a little while but virtually unknown (e.g The Revival, Sasha Banks) so they might as well be WWE homegrown. This meant the main attraction of NXT was seeing a new wrestler and watching them develop into someone who could join the main roster. Seeing that development was part of the appeal, so fans would be far more forgiving of bad gimmicks or awkward matches as they knew they were watching a work in progress. But once the show started to get dominated by indie stars, that model doesn't work anymore, so instead it became the 'great matches' promotion.

Yeah I don't think the 1998 match was harmed by excess either, it's a match where they do approach that line but do a great job of never quite crossing it. It's their 1999 match where they started to go off the rails a bit, although it's still very good.

Kane tombstoning Pete making little sense is what's so hilarious about it. All we know about the guy so far is that he was horrendously burned as a child and has spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals before being released to launch fireballs at his undead wrestler brother. That he also hates Pete Rose is such a random inexplicable character development. Maybe he was a Red Sox fan as a child? And yeah it really doesn't matter that it's a heel getting a pop when there's zero chance the crowd would turn on The Undertaker.

Bruce Prichard talked about this in his podcast and says Kurt only won the title because 9/11 happened and Vince wanted a patriotic title win. Austin getting the belt back was just righting the ship. Not surprising they turned Kurt soon after, losing the title so quickly killed his babyface heat.

They seem really reluctant to push any male wrestlers who haven't been on TV at least 10 years. Seth Rollins is the only exception though he's not far off either. Compare how long everyone's been around on WWE TV now to 2000, it's really stark.

That was a very good match.