SmartMark15

https://ko-fi.com/post/Three-Star-Matches-and-a-Sun-The-Road-to-Wrevol-G2G2197K2 Part two! This time I cover the road to Wrevolution X 2017 with four full shows available on YouTube (with the exception of one match)! It's the classic Jake de Leon vs. Billy Suede match!

I'm excited to do it. I'm currently in the 2017 footage which is probably the year with the most available footage in the country.

I began a project to watch every available match from PH wrestling. Here's the spreadsheet tracking my ranking as well as a write up I did of my initial impressions of 2014-2016. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yfWUNfItDmW6anlrCBmjd5az7JpMorRZ0JiZMwxnRtI/edit?usp=sharing https://ko-fi.com/post/Three-Star-Matches-and-a-Sun-Observations-on-Ea-K3K218Z91

I do. It's amazing.

Together, the team of Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada blazed a path for the AJPW World Tag Team Championships held by the Miracle Violence Connection of Terry Gordy & Steve Williams. Let's take a look at the path they took to the titles before digging into their underrated title defense against rivals Jumbo Tsuruta & Akira Taue.

The Cornette trouble put me off on watching last week's episode and seeing the clip show format for this week threw me off for this week. It's a bit of a shame but I do definitely hope they get things back on track.

You could even arguably include the Goldberg squash for how great of a moment it was. I've come to term them Brock's annual Survivor Series bangers. Can't add much else to your analysis. Same rating too.

O'Ryan seems to be denying the rumors at least based on this tweet and going to bat for the company.

An awesome match here, very match in the vein of CHIKARA's best stuff with a strong babyface-heel dynamic and a great attention to detail. Dasher works as the much larger rudo with the years and experience as an advantage while Boomer has the speed and the nerve to go up against his father. Quack sets the narrative perfectly and does a great job catching the little things that really help to make the match work. Boomer was a great bumping babyface and his selling made him sympathetic but it was his comebacks that really made him look great here. Big offense and his continued return to the Guillotine Choke really worked well to establish the narrative of the match. Dasher getting progressively desperate turning to the fake low blow and ripping at the mask was a nice touch to add some urgency to the finishing stretch. ****1/2

Cheers man! Thanks for all the support.

Corny just officially resigned from the company.

This week I take a look at the hidden gems from 2019 that can be seen for free on YouTube LEGALLY! I tried to get as much variety on this list as possible with no wrestling have more than one match (or else there'd be too much Daniel Makabe) and no more than one match per promotion. Enjoy!

Was thinking about this forum and how everyone pretty much knew that something from Corny would slip through the cracks eventually on Powerrr and there it is. Terrible.

While I really enjoyed this, my favorite is probably Starr-Mercedez. I thought they worked the indie epic formula really well. Speaking of Santell, I thought he had a really great sprint against Wheeler YUTA this season as well.

Hey all! I've been posting these videos in the match threads they relate to but I've been encouraged to start up a thread on its own just so I can collate them all in the same place. I've been doing video essays since around May basically just covering and discussing some of my favorite matches and moments in pro wrestling. I've put everything in a playlist that I will link below and I will be posting subsequent videos on this thread as well! Probably the stuff I'm proudest of is my Walking the King's Road series where this sight has been an absolutely invaluable source for putting everything together. So thank you to everyone who contributes to the forums for helping to collate the knowledge necessary to make that series work. If you guys enjoy what I do and you want to help out the channel, you can contribute to my Ko-fi page at http://ko-fi.com/josephmontecillo.

PnP squashed The Beaver Boys in their TV debut.

Made a video about the Thomas Santell Discovery Gauntlet run which was awesome. The Casanova match in particular was a really great piece of work.

I think it speaks to the quality of the show that pretty much everyone I've seen online has had an entirely different favorite episode and yet no one has ever gone out of their way to say any episode has been bad. It shows a nice variety week to week while still maintaining a consistent product.

That was pretty much my favorite episode of Dynamite. The pacing felt miles ahead of what it's been and I thought this was the easiest episode to sit through yet. Another great show closing brawl that, sure, we may have seen variations of it in the last few weeks but it's a great way to send the crowd home happy. I do think they've been staggering things from week to week just enough that everything still feels fresh. The Inner Circle vs. Elite brawls have been some of my favorite stuff in wrestling all year. Also, Sammy Guevara, man. From someone I wanted to have nothing to do with this promotion to one of my favorite heels bumping his ass off and selling for every major babyface in sight, he's probably my favorite part of the Inner Circle.

What a promo, oh my god. Genuine passion that you can't help but root for.

Adam Cole contributed absolute zero to this match. He doesn't even ragdoll so much as just do the bare minimum to sell any of the offense Bryan throws his way. Again, nothing offensive but my god was he bland. His only idea for a transition in the whole match was a boot to the face with cutting off Bryan's dive being the only cool variation on this at all. Otherwise, Bryan was fantastic. Probably the best spot for me was the constant shifting he did on the LeBell Lock to try and keep Cole from the ropes. It felt like a less perfunctory version of Joe's similar spot. Really looked like he might win it at that point too which there was pretty much zero chance of. ***3/4

Unlike their first encounter this year, this definitely trended towards the melodramatic and overambitious. In many ways, it reminds me of Punk vs. Cena in that the real asset here was the crowd. Where Punk and Cena wrestled a mostly fundamentally sound match though, Starr and Devlin up the intensity and go for big emotional setpieces in line with everything OTT's done from WALTER-Starr at WrestleRama onwards. Tonally, it fit what OTT's been doing but I couldn't help but feel that some goodness was left on the table and sacrificed to the need to "tell a story" as opposed to just work a match. But they laid everything in and the tension was there for the most part. The emotion was definitely there and the crowd came along with them the whole way through. Hard to complain too much when the right person wins and the crowd is in love with the action. A flawed match but a great match nonetheless. ****1/2

Here's a video I did on the three matches. One of my favorite matches this year.

Adam Cole is quickly becoming a barometer to me for how great his opponents are. In the sense that, one can learn a lot about a wrestler by how they approach the problem of having a good match with Adam Cole.

We sure can dream.