tim

I do feel like if there was ever the right guy to feed Taker's streak to, it's Bryan right now. How much he'll need months from now is the question.

not a MOTYC or anything but i thought that match was very good overall. some really great stuff like bryan's dive series, orton headbutting himself out of an arm wrench early on and the finishing sequence. dusty finish coming tomorrow but i dig it as getting over that bryan really is the best wrestler in the company and heightening the injustice of the angle.

even this dead crowd goes nuts for d bry, what a beautiful thing

that match was really good

Heatless match but I rather liked it. Might've been the match I liked the most overall tonight so far.

"miz and r truth had some fun with fandango while khali watched"

my stream was pretty laggy for a lot of that but it seemed pretty decent actually. i liked aj grabbing natalia's leg and just pushing her through the ropes. double sharpshooter was amusing too.

hey check it out, axel's shitty finisher looked pretty good

triple h is trying to be a cool faceheel again

Watched that Andre/Warrior match and man I thought it was pretty good. As for its WON accolades Meltzer probably has ****3/4 rated matches that are worse than that. I don't even think Warrior sucked in it. Even the bear hug spots tended to be good as far as those go with Warrior pumping himself up in his making the crowd go nuts and Andre grabbing that awesome headbutt to the gut on his.

Cesaro vs. Bryan from RAW in late July is an absolute must-see. If someone called it the MOTY full stop I wouldn't think they were crazy. I think it's my #5 right now.

I watched this last summer and didn't think it was good at all. Maybe I should watch it again some day. Here's what I wrote over at WKO: I really went into this expecting it to hold up better than one would expect. Nope. This is not a good match at all. First 10 minutes or so they just meander around not really knowing what to do. The outside brawling just has no intensity or sense of violence. The transition to Shawn in control doesn't feel like a big deal at all, and is followed by dominating Taker in boring fashion for way too long, concluding in Taker just inexplicably sitting up after a top rope elbow and a superkick. The whole match is just like "who gives a shit until we get to the outside." And yeah Shawn takes a cool bump I guess, the top of the cage stuff is iconic etc etc w/e. I mean right after Shawn falls off the cage, Undertaker hits a chokeslam FROM THE TOP ROPE, and it doesn't even feel like a big deal because, up to those last moments, there were no nearfalls, no attempts of either to win the match, no sense of urgency or of a real fight. For some reason I expected to still like this match but it's straight up BAD.

Came across my working list that I had PMed to myself as a backup on a forum I post on. Here's my top 20, which should be taken with a huge grain of salt because I didn't watch anything more than once and never went through to finalize anything (I sort of fell out of wrestling for a year or two before I finished the set): Ted DiBiase vs. Hacksaw Duggan (No DQ, Loser Leaves Town, Coal Miner’s Glove on a Pole, Tuxedo, Cage Match) (3/22/85) Ric Flair vs. Butch Reed (8/10/85) Butch Reed vs. Dick Murdoch (9/22/85) Chris Adams vs. Terry Taylor (5/3/87) Mr. Wrestling II & Magnum TA vs. Butch Reed & Jim Neidhart (Cage Match) (12/25/83) Ted DiBiase vs. Bob Sweetan (Taped Fist) (10/11/85) Terry Taylor vs. Ric Flair (6/1/85) Midnight Express vs. Bill Dundee & Porkchop Cash (4/6/84) Buddy Landell, Chavo & Hector Guerrero vs. Brickhouse Brown, Bill Dundee & Jose Lothario (Elimination Match) (11/16/84) Ric Flair vs. Terry Taylor (4/28/85) Butch Reed vs. Dick Murdoch (10/14/85) Dick Murdoch vs. Barry Windham (7/11/87) Rock N Roll Express & Hacksaw Duggan vs. Midnight Express & Ernie Ladd (6/8/84) Dick Murdoch vs. The Nightmare(7/14/85) Terry Gordy vs. Hacksaw Duggan (8/3/86) Terry Gordy vs. Dr. Death (9/15/86) Ted DiBiase vs. Hacksaw Duggan (No DQ) (3/8/85) Midnight Express vs. Bill Watts & Stagger Lee (4/22/84) Junkyard Dog & Mr. Olympia vs. Ted DiBiase & Matt Bourne (Loser Leaves Town) (10/27/82) Mr. Olympia vs. Chavo Guerrero (6/24/83)

there were some cool things in that much but overall it was just an overly long US indie match to me. and 3 canadian destroyers?

very lame. crowd being enraged is hilarious though.

I thought that match was really great. As short as it was the hold working in the first fall was awesome and the third fall was just great. Really good deliberate, struggle-filled submission work and the multiple dive spot was awesome.

Rush/Casas trios ruled. Casas' double stomp was nasty as hell.

Dustin still wins in that case for me. Awesome tag work in 2002/3 and the ECW run in 2009 I'll take over any extended Taker stretch. Dustin has apparently been pretty bad as Goldust (I haven't watched much 97-99 WWE since it happened) but so has Taker. I'd also take Goldust/Orton that just happened over any of the WM Taker matches of the past several years.

Dustin easily. Taker had a good year in 2008 and has been a decent hand in certain big matches but he's never had the level and consistency of quality as for example 2009 ECW Goldust, to say nothing of early 90s WCW Dustin.

man trips killed it in that backstage with edge

The 2/27 Misawa/Akiyama match I actually think is a classic having watched it today and would give it serious consideration for a top 20 of AJPW of the decade if it happened in the 90s.

Been watching a bunch for this the last week or so. My ongoing list that just reached a top 20, not exactly formatted for public inspection: Kobashi/Honda Kawada/Sasaki Nagata/Kawada tag Fujinami/Nishimura Kawada/Tenryu Shibata/Akiyama Akiyama/Inoue Honda/Ikeda Tamura/Ito Kanemoto/Hayato Ishikawa/Murakami Kobashi/Ogawa Ishikawa/Greco Hashimoto/Tanaka 02 Kobashi/Sasaki Hashimoto/Iizuka v. Murakami/Ogawa Taue/Marufuji Hashimoto/Nagata v. Misawa/Akiyama Tenryu/Kojima Bernard/Nagata

Yeah the fixation on the body type of wrestlers even by "smarks" who will on the other hand lambast McMahon for loving body builders to no end is baffling. Look how fast the internet at large turned on Ohno because he carries a little extra weight for a wrestler and there were vague reports of him not "taking full advantage" of the gym.

Tanahashi's offense really doesn't particularly bother me but I recognize it isn't at all "good" and is oftentimes bad. My main gripe with Tanahashi is more often than not he's just absolutely boring. I mean just some of the most nondescript, uninspired Japanese style work you can think of. I have no idea how he got the rep as a great workers, and though I don't want to be too dismissive of people who think so I think it has a lot to do with them heaping love on him for being a super over, charismatic ace of their favorite company. He can participate in a near-fall heavy, back and forth puro home stretch adequately. It's not the kind of thing I particularly like but he's fine at that stuff; it's the whole working a match outside of the 5-10 minute back-and-forth homestretch that Tanahashi is absolute garbage at. Really garbage might not be the right word because it implies he is actively offensively bad, which he isn't, he's just completely boring and lacking in any positive qualities in that regard. I don't know if I've ever watched a Tanahashi match and thought "hey that's a cool thing Tanahashi did." Though I did think his performance in the Suzuki match was good. Suzuki was the better man in that match to the point where even saying that is a comical understatement, but I did think Tanahashi was baseline good.