Tetsujin

Been rewatching a ton of Orton recently. Man I did dirty on this guy. He really shines through most of his career, with exquisite selling and iconic offense, and he's a master of little details. He also hace a lot of underrated/hidden gems: the Benoit match, the WM Punk match, the WHC Henry match, some of the Cena matches (I specially like Breaking Point 2009 and HIAC 2014), a random RVD match in fucking 2013 at SmackDown, the great Cesaro match in early 2014, the very first Reigns great singles match, and even carried motherfucking KANE to some of his best stuff ever in 2012 (one of Orton's weakest years). I even rewatched some of his considered worst stuff (the HHH Mania main, for example) and most of it wasn't even that bad, it was actually kinda decent, at least for his part. I don't see Gordy having a chance at basically anything. I don't even like the 88 RWTL finals as much, I'd put some Orton matches above it with no doubt.

I think Rey wins this one pretty easily just by consistency alone. Even if he doesn't have as many elite stuff as you would want for a project like GWE (and Steamboat might have him beat in that regard for a lot of people), he's just been too good for too long, and has as many good to great matches as anyone else ever. Steamboat doesn't have that, even though he was pretty good for a decent amount of time as well, he wasn't as consistent through the 80s. If I find myself in a random Rey match, probs are I'm gonna like it more than a random Steamboat match. And Steamboat's greatest hits, for me, are even fewer than Rey's... Althought I would rank his Ironman with Rude and WrestleWar 89 higher than any Rey match ever, but those are just two matches. At this point in my list, Rey is still a top 25 contender, while Steamboat struggles to remain at the top half.

How is a ten year old peak considered "short"? I think Hash and Ogawa did show some chemistry, but only on the few moments of their big matches that weren't heavily marked by booking. If they let them had usual wrestling matches, I'm sure they would have been at least great. And yeah Nagata > Hash isn't anything crazy at all. I'm not sure I'd rank them that way on GWE, but I don't have any problem with it, think it's pretty fair. I can buy the argument of Nagata having a clearly higher floor than Hash.

Jeff Hardy going over Darby is stupid. Also, I guess It makes sense for Eddie and PnP to join the BBC, but I expected the stable to be more like "Mox and Bryan recruiting young guys to make them violent enough" as promised since the beginning. If these three guys officially join, now they would be too many and no room for more Yuta-like wrestlers on it.

Some would say it's too early for making a GWE case for her, but she's already 33, and has been active for six years. Right now I wouldn't rank her, but if she adds four excellent years to what she already has... By 2026 she could be a lock for a lot of people. She has all the tools, as explained above, and she's one of those young wrestlers who just seems to "get it", and is so satisfying to watch. She's a natural.

Two of the greatest White heel performances must be the G1 2020 Ishii match, and last year's Tanahashi NEVER title match (which is the only pandemic era match I'm considering all time great, and the only japanese one that made me forget the crowd couldn't do shit 100% of the time). But yeah, any match since his 2019 G1 run serves you to see how much of a prodigy he has become. Already one of the best wrestlers in the world, and probably the best heel in pro wrestling in at least the last five years.

They could start their rivalry as soon as possible, have UE dominate for a while, and then Omega returns by surprise, cleaning the room and equalizing things before the ultimate showdown. They don't need to wait for Kenny to start the whole war. BCC still rocks obviously, but now that Yuta is formally in it, they need to move to another storyline. It's time for Bryan and Mox to go for the tag titles.

I think it was clearly a botch. Mox even smiles at the end after hitting the ref like wtf dude.

Don't get the Sammy heat. He was becoming a natural heel during his babyface title reign, so they made the right move and turned him heel to regain the championship and start what should be a very enjoyable heel title reign. And he's a very good young wrestler so, again, why the hate?

If WWE failed to exploit a market in India, what the hell do AEW think they can do? The product is better, for sure, but that alone doesn't mean much (sadly). WWE is a globalized monopoly and still India didnt gave a fuck about wrestling.

Punk/Penta bothers me. It sounds too good to be thrown randomly at this Dynamite, in a moment where I don't think is a good idea to make neither one of them lose. That match up deserved some build up and higher stakes.

They should make an angle about the TNT Championship corrupting his holders like it's the wrestling's version of the ring of Sauron or something.

His best tv matches are the ones worked like a big ppv match but in RAW (vs HBK, Punk, Rey, his best US title challenge matches...), so I'm not sure those count. I'd say he's a mediocre tv worker because he always did the exact same match with any random opponent and just filled time for the finishing sequence and/or overbooked finish of the week. Cena's case is all about big matches.

This was stupid. Not in a offensive way like the 2018 matches were, but in a dull, boring way: they just went full easy mode. The character work was very inconsistent as well: sometimes Reigns needed to cheat, but then he casually pinned Brock clean (I know some people say it was done that way due to a legit injury, but sadly it still hurts the match anyway). Combined with the awful build up and the fact they've been sacrificing the whole roster throughout eight fucking years, you have one of the worst WM big matches of all time, even if, as a match, I could go 2* or something like that and there's definitely worse matches out there. But damn. This is depressing. One of the worst sagas ever made in wrestling, only saved by one all timer at the verh beginning that now seems like an almost unbelievable miracle.

I 100% agree. Other than that, absolutely phenomenal match, holy fucking shit.

This was great, as it should've. It's been a loooong time since I watched any Briscoes match, so looking at them, looking in their 50s, while wrestling like they were in their 20s was super satisfying. And for FTR, they had been always good, but since the NXT days I haven't seen them as good as they were here. I missed more multiman action towards the climax, for example, having a tag partner break a count instead of forcing a clean finisher kickout by a single guy, but the last sequence of the match really captured what tag team wrestling can be at its best: an unpredictable storm where only teamwork can decide who stays on top. I also would have loved if they worked a FTR face turn in a more clear way. Having them being assholes to the Briscoes the whole match but wanting to hug them and give them respect at the end felt a bit outta nowhere to me. I get that sometimes all you need to change your mind is a fucking fight for your money, but I would have loved more character work in that direction. Still: fantastic action, real dream match atmosphere (I know that term is devaluated af today, but this time is legit) and strong character moments. The strikes here looked amazing, and there were a variety of them, not just generic forearms or chops. All this while working at a formidable pace and doing strong character work. Yeah, pretty good pro wrestling here.

Man what a run FTR is having. I wonder if TK would dare to put the titles on reDragon so they can drop them to FTR as soon as possible. The tag titles need some interesting and consistent storylines, instead of random big matches with some title changes here and there. Babyface FTR could make that work, I'm sure.

Edge/AJ was good. Pretty good, even. It was worked slowly but everything had a purpose and meaning. Not the best match I've seen this WM (Becky/Bianca), but still pretty good. Annoying finish outta nowhere, but it is what it is with this company. The main event was boring. Same old shit with these two, but now Roman fucking Reigns is a chicken shit heel for most of the match. How interesting. Obviously, for the finish, he becomes some sort of allmighty god that can beat Brock clean. He's so terribly inconsistent in his character by this point. This has to be one of the worst big sagas of matches of all time, up there with Cole/Gargano, and it's even more frustrating because we 100% know how great they can be together. But sadly WM 31 wasn't the rule.

Becky/Bianca was really good. Charlotte/Ronda was a bit of a mess with an awful finish, but still watchable if you want to give it a try. Oh and it's super charming to look at how excited Byron Saxton was to receive a Stone Cold Stunner.

I've always thought the same. Nick is far better than Matt in every aspect and it's a shame they're basically inseperable at this point, because they'll do Young Bucks stuff until their 70s or something, but I've always wanted to see a Nick's singles run.

Claudio should 100% be in the Blackpool Combay Club. In fact, he should debut right against Hangman and semi-squash him for the title. Man, having Claudio being the dominant, stoic world champ of the stable, with Regal, Mox and Bryan doing the promos, while also having Bryan and Mox dominate the tag division and young guys like Yuta or Dante to play the students role, man that sounds waaaay too good to me. Bring Mercedes, Cargill and/or Serena too and it's as perfect as you could ask for.

There was a singles match with Jungle Boy last year on Dynamite that I really liked. That was one of those matches that I saw as "ok I don't like neither of these guys but I can appreciate they're good enough".

His rivalry with Dean Ambrose for the IC title in the first half of 2017 is pretty good. I would specially recommend the january SmackDown match, and, ironically, the "title changes hands via DQ" at Extreme Rules. I still don't get how they made that gimmick work but they absolutely did; both are great matches. The GBOF one was lame, though, but overall they had surprisingly good chemistry.

But how's that a bad thing? I repeat: Michaels was the one staying. Flair put him over. Also, in retrospective, I'm glad we have the "I'm sorry I love you" line, because that way we still have some drama surrounding Flair's retirement, even after Flair himself devaluated it later at TNA, or working that Hogan tour, or whatever. Maybe the reason some people don't think about that match as THE Flair retirement match is because Flair himself wasted it. But we still have Shawn's inner conflict to add emotion to it to make up for it.

I don't get this critic. I mean Shawn was the one staying, and Flair got his ceremony the night right after, so it's not like he didn't had the attention he deserved. Also, Flair dying with the sword in his hand, telling Shawn to bring it on (for a *third* Sweet Chin Music), was a very powerful image as well. The angle was about how tragic it was for Michaels to be the one that had to retire his old friend, and Flair not wanting any mercy at all. They perfectly delivered with that finish.