MikeCampbell

After a second viewing, I can't say that much has changed as far as my feelings on it. It's got tons of simple and smart work from both teams, some cute throwbacks in the form of the slingshot suplex and the vege-matic, and the intensity as the match wears on is perfectly believable. The match genuinely feels like it could have gone either way. And, FTR winning the match in a totally clean manner puts them over even more, because Daniels and Kazarian put them through the ringer, and they still managed to pull off the win. Honestly, the only thing that I didn't care for was the spot where Kazarian stoped Cash from coming off the top, while Daniels countered the super plex into a near fall. It looked too coreographed and rehearsed. It'd have been better if Daniels had done it first, and then Kaz ran over to cut off Cash before he could try to break things up.

I'm literally headed out the door right now, so I'll write more later. But, the short of it is that this is easily the best match I've seen all year!

This is easily the best UWF Miyato match that I've seen so far. There's not much of that to attribute to Miyato, which is even more remarkable, since it was still Suzuki's rookie year and only his second UWF match! Suzuki quite literally wrestle circles around Miyato, and his mannerisims honestly aren't far off from what we'd see from him nowadays. Miyato basically stays in the match by sheer force of will to not let the rookie show him up by beating him. Miyato winds up winning when he figures out that Suzuki is susceptible to suplexes, and getting a few lucky shots when they were both throwing wild swings at each other. After a year of snoozefests with Nakano and Anjo, this is certainly a breath of fresh air. With the new blood coming into the company in the form of Suzuki, Funaki, and Tamura, I'm wondering if/hoping that this match is the catalyst for bringing something fresh out of him that he can keep up.

Let's not forget Austin being booked to win the Final Four match, and his knee injury happening mid-match and causing on-the-fly booking for Bret to go over.

I'll jump on the bandwagon and put in another vote for Daniel Bryan. The only other name I can think of would be Okada.

Me and my friends always loved this segment. Pillman says "Seek and you shall find" - Well Austin was seeking, and he found Pillman!

This was entertaining for a bit, and there were some parts where it looked believable that both teams wanted to rip the other's head off. But, that's about it. And, whomever came up the idea of Ortis and Santana trying to drown Matt, right after Shad's passing, deserves a kick in the balls.

Twelve years ago, I wrote something about the Lockdown match between Joe and Angle to the effect of "TNA wanted to do something completely different than what WWE was doing. But, WWE is smart enough to know that they don't have anyone who can do this. But, TNA didn't either." Well, I've finally been proven wrong! Aside from a few of the over-the-top pro-style aspects, like Riddle's senton off the platfrom and Thatcher ramming Riddle's head into the cage, this would look right at home on a UWF show. The struggle in the matwork, and the nastiness and intensity that they both show is completely believeable. This was just about the perfect sendoff for Riddle, and an awesome way to establish Thatcher as a bad motherfucker. Now, let's get that North American Title on him, and put him with Imperium already!

I can't really say I do too much on forums anymore, outside of posting in this section of PWO, so I may be super late to the party with this one. But, if Fujiwara isn't already considered one of the best workers of 1985, then he ought to be! The matwork was methodical, but never boring, and you always got the feeling that they were struggling and trying to win. Fujiwara gives a lot of respect to Maeda's kicks, by dodging and blocking them, as well as by selling them like death when Maeda started to land them. I can see why some people may not care for the finish, with Meada busting out a Capture, German, and Dragon suplex, and still losing. But, it works (for me anyway) on the level of the UWF trying to show that their style of wrestling is superior, by having the pro-style spots shown to be useless, even against a man as beat up as Fujiwara had been.

Why has nobody else started a thread for this match? It seems like a nice exhibition at first, with a couple of skilled wrestlers doing their thing. The matwork is fluid and effortless, but it doesn't seem like either of them is really trying for anything. Then, Soranaka escapes Takada'a Octopus hold and Takada gets pissed and starts kicking the hell out him. Soranaka decides he isn't going to just curl up and die for him, and it turns into a heated fight. Complete with Takada bumping and letting Soranaka keep him locked up in holds for extended stretches, to make it look more likely that he's going to win, and Sornaka looking like superman for kicking out of a running Tombstone and then returning fire. Takada eventually wins out and taps him with a chickenwing, when something more brutal seemed for fitting. But, holy smokes, this was all kinds of awesome, and it's truly a shame that Soranaka's career didn't last much longer, if this is any indication he'd have been fit right in in the Newborn UWF, and maybe the openers with Nakano and Miyato wouldn't have stunk up the joint.

That's hardly something that Cole can be blamed for. NXT Main Events have been like that since Gargano vs. Ciampa in 2018, and since Cole became a main event player every Takeover Main Event he's had has been against Gargano or Ciampa in some form. How have Cole's NXT Title matches outside of Takeover, and away from either of those two looked? He's had televised defenses against KUSHIDA, Riddle, and Balor. He wrestled Dunne at Surivor Series, and Tozawa on the EVOLVE anniversary show.

Same here, brother! My father watches this every week and raves about it. I finally checked out a random episode and the first thing I see is Filthy Tom Lawlor bringing out the real toughest Von Erich, Rip Von Erich the son of Lance! Suffice to say, I am on the Filthy Tom bandwagon.

The Survivor permier, plus Chicago PD on NBC returning off of a major cliffhanger. But, I think that was hands down the best Dynamite episode since the show started in October. Literally, the only thing that I didn't care for was the schmozz at the end with all the tag teams. It just felt like a poor excuse to trot them all out and push the battle royal. Dr. Britt's reference to Whataburger was great. In just a few weeks, she seems to have found her footing on her heel promos. MJF vs. Jungle Boy looked like it would have been right at home in a Jim Crockett ring, for all the right reasons! Santana and Dustin both had killer promos, and being in Austin, the crowd was great during Dustin vs. Sammy. No Cody, which seems like a bad thing, but it gets over the fallout from the lashes, and I can only imagine the intensity we'll see from him in Atlanta this week. And, AEW's marked improvement the last few weeks, seems to coincide with Tony Khan taking on a more hands on role in the creative end.

This is a damn fun match, from two of the best. There's a lot of long matwork, but neither is ever lazy about it, you always get the feeling that they're both struggling to either escape the hold or to keep the pressure on. Fujiwara even has some fun with a monkey flip (in a UWF match!) to escape a crab hold. They even throw down and exchange some nasty shots to each other, with the crowd eating it up. Kido's win looks like a fluke, but it shows that even a single mistake is all he needs to finish you off. I won't go as far as calling it the best match from the original UWF, but, it definitley ought to at least be in the discussion!

I have no idea why this was chosen to eat up space on the commercial tape that feataured matches from the 1/20 show. Especially when the 1/20 card had a match between Yamazaki and Fit Finlay! Credit where its due, Yamazaki tries. But, Maeda just can't be bothered to do much of anything to put the kid over. Like Sleeze says above, maybe this was intended to rehab Maeda after losing to Sayama in January. But, it's a pretty awful way to do it. Maeda takes a young gun, who he clearly doesn't view as much of a threat to him, and goes for close to twenty minutes.

I get why people are down on the whole Marko Stunt thing. I'm not a fan of it either, but I understand why it needed to happen. 1. They'd just done a hot angle to make Lucha Bros into dirty heels. 2. With Luchasaurus hurt, there was literally nobody else to take his place that would make any sense, with how the brackets were structured, they couldn't just hold off until Luchasaurus healed up. But, once Pentagon caught Marko with that superkick, it should have the beginning of the end.

I remember way back when fans at ROH shows would wave dollar bills at Lacey. Yes, Austin Aries never felt the need to have someone sent to him backstage so he could 'teach them to respect women.'

ROH has put out another statement on the Bully Ray incident from last weekend. It more or less says that fans can cheer and boo, and that wrestlers and fan interactions are supposed to be part of the show, but Bubba crossed the line. What sticks out to me is what it *doesn't* say, which is anything about how ROH expects it's fans to behave and conduct themselves during live events. Which tells me that the ROH office and/or Sinclair Brass must not have thought that anything the guy did or said was exceptionally out of line. There's also this great piece from Cageside Seats. According to a guy in the comments, Bryan Alvarez said that he had some friends who attended the show, and they absolutely back up the fan's story as far as how things played out at ringside.

Bubba put a response on Twitter, and nothing he said refuted any part of the original story. There's simply no way that any of this makes Bubba or ROH look good. The fan may have been a mouthy asshole. But, Velvet was the one who made the virgin remark, and Mandy spit at him. He didn't do anything physical. If Velvet is so sensitive to having someone bring up who she's banging, then she ought to do a better job of making sure it's not public knowledge. Now, if she'd gotten out of rehab recently and the guy made some comment about booze or pills, that's a different story. Would this even have happened if Velvet wasn't banging Bubba? I could just picture someone like Veda Scott coming up to him and talking about some mouthy kid in the front row that got under her skin. His likely response would be "You're supposed to be a professional. If you don't have thicker skin, find something else to do!" I'm hoping like hell that some wise ass fan yells out to Velvet that her boyfriend should teacher her how to suck dick.

I liked this one a lot more than their 2/3 Falls match. There were still things I could have done without, like the finisher stealing and the zillion superkicks. But, they did a good job of using the hurt limbs to get themselves ahead in the match, and also to get themselves out of trouble. After the Destroyer in Young Bucks match in AEW was a totaly throwaway, it was nice to see it used to give Cole a near fall, and then to set up the finish.

So many things to like here. There's plenty of stiffness and hate. There's questions surrounding the Bucks being able to get on the same page after a few mishaps. And, if you know the history between the Bucks and Lucha Bros it only makes the match better. I could have done without the Destroyer on the apron and the double package pile driver spots, only becuse they ought to be match breakers, and neither was. But, I loved pretty much everything else.

There were things I really liked about the main event, but it came off like Johnny was having the same match with Cole that he would have had with Ciampa. Like Ricky said it's a bloated epic, that I wasn't terribly fond of last year. Hopefully, with Johnny no longer chasing something, he can have a different type of main event in a few months at the next Takeover.

Last year Barnett was making noise about reviving the Japanese UWF. How do the Bloodsport matches, in general, compare to the style of UWF/UWFI/U-Style/etc?

I went into this hopeful, having enjoyed their January match for the 3-Crown, and also having enjoyed Akiyama's Carnival matches against Hansen, Kawada, Kobashi, and Ace. But, I can't say that this did a whole lot for me. It just didn't strike me that Misawa really cared to make Jun look good this time around, he totally no-sells the opening Dragon screw. Later on, when Akiyama works over the leg for a bit, Misawa makes his comeback by kicking him away and him doing a dropkick of all things! The knee doesn't factor into his having trouble doing any of his usual moves, including a bridging Tiger suplex for a near fall. Akiyama gives Misawa his best shots, and Misawa just sucks it up and makes it look easy to put him away. And I echo the sentiments on why Misawa even needed to be here in the first place? Given that he was taking some time off after the Dome, there's a storyline right there of having him miss the finals and lose the titles, leading to his time off.