ohtani's jacket

This was a fun match. It was easily the best Suzuki match I've seen since he returned to pro-wrestling and finally he looks like the Suzuki I've been expecting. I'm sure he transitioned into this type of wrestler in matches that I didn't bother to watch, but he brought it here and that's the main thing. KENTA went hard as the upstart looking to knock off the veteran punk. Hard to imagine a better version of this.

This was another good match between these two. It differed from the PPV match in that it was more of story-driven bout with the stipulation being that Bischoff would fire the loser. They worked a tight about under the circumstances. Eric paraded around ringside like a dime store Vince McMahon trying to help Jericho win. The most exciting news was that Angle attacked Cena after the bout and absolutely brutalized him. Rampaging Kurt Angle is a scary mofo. I guess he's out of the doghouse and ready to tear Cena a new one.

I guess Smackdown is the place to be now. This was a decent Smackdown that served as a coda to a bunch of SummerSlam matches. Usually, you'd expect to see this type of match on a go home show, but here it was on the Smackdown after the PPV and a lot of the workers were selling how banged up they were. It wasn't as red hot as some of the more famous WWE six-mans but it was a fun bout. Batista doesn't look great as the Ace. He should really be working a program with a guy like Guerrero, imo, but they tried to put him over as an unstoppable badass with the finish.

This was a lot more enjoyable than recent Perros del Mal matches. It didn't get going until the tecnicos made their comeback in the second fall, but the crowd was red hot for Mistico and Perro. Lots of great action in the tercera. The crowd kept booing Atlantis, which would lead to a heel turn the following month. The ending was anti-climatic but the real finish was Pierroth sending his crew to attack Perros del Mal. Pierroth forced Los Perros to eat dog food, which was a brilliant piece of booking. One of the better faction beatdowns in a while. Pierroth came across like a don.

This was an interesting blend between a Hogan match and a WWE main event. The crowd were really into it. Hard to call it anything less than successful.

I don't think I've seen it. I haven' seen much footage post '88.

What year is it from?

I'm no Saint fan, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were some great Johnny Saint matches locked away in the archives.

The Fabulous Rougeau Brothers vs. The Rockers (WWF, 10/13/89) The WWF's European tour continues with a stop in Paris. I thought this was more exciting than the London match as there was less stalling and the crowd was hotter. Others may argue that it was more of a sprint than the drawn out London bout, but the quick action hit the spot for me.

Did Gorilla Monsoon ever wrestle in France? I was watching a Rockers vs. Rougeau Brothers match from the WWF tour of Europe in 1989 where Lord Alfred Hayes talks about the pair of them wrestling in Paris twenty years prior, and Gorilla brings up a shady promoter who Hayes names as Alex Goldstein. Lord Alfred mentions Édouard Carpentier, whom Gorilla claimed to have wrestled many times. Then they joke about some area of Paris that Lord Alfred lived in, and some dodgy stuff he got up to that I couldn't really understand. I don't think I've come across any results of Gorilla in France so I'm assuming it's BS.

This wasn't the match I was expecting from these two, but it was a damn good brawl that turned into an exciting fight. I wouldn't bat an eyelid at anyone who had this as their Japan MOTY.

Another mediocre brawl. I wish it wasn't mediocre as I'd love to see some awesome rudo contra rudo action from these teams but there's a surprisingly lack of character work from such talented performers.

This isn't the only thread with review of British matches. There are threads in the Microscope section of the board. Originally, I started commentating on these matches on another site, so there won't be comments for every match. It's a bit of a mess but it is what it is.

This was an excellent match. If it had been a tad longer, I think it would have a bigger rep as far as early Cena matches go. Two things stand out about Cena in this era. The first is his intensity. The dude is locked in. The second thing is that he appears acutely aware that every big match is a banana peel, and there are plenty of folks who can't wait to see him fall. The dude's working his ass off.

Custody of Dominik or not, this was still a shitty ladder match.

The Fabulous Rougeau Brothers vs. The Rockers (WWF, 10/10/89) This is the most house show match imaginable except that it's wrestled on the first ever WWF show in the UK so the British fans don't know what to expect. That makes it a more special bout than it would have been if it had been worked on the usual WWF circuit. Michaels may have gotten hammy later on, but he was a solid FIP in his early days. The action here was much better than in the Hart Foundation matches.

This was spotty, but I guess you should expect that from a Samoa Joe vs. AJ Styles match in TNA. These guys were two of the best workers in the world in 2005 (no hyperbole), so the match builds and builds until it's edge of your seat stuff. Then the bullshit kicks in. Oddly, the finish didn't bother me that much since I've seen a million Daniels vs. Styles matches, so Daniels costing Styles the bout felt somewhat natural. I also liked the fact that they continued the bout for a few beats after the interference instead of it being a one-two punch. They keep trying to put Joe over like he's Vader, which he isn't, but overall I liked West & Tenay on commentary and the overall presentation of this.

Kawada as a good shoot style worker is a fantasy, but the final minutes of this were exciting as far as pro-wrestling matches go.

Whaddayaknow, another killer Kurt Angle TV match from 2005. I don't know if Kurt was still in the doghouse at this point. He had faced Eugene on PPV the night before, which doesn't sound like the greatest of pushes, but there's no way that an opening match on RAW should be this good. It almost felt like Angle had an agenda to get himself over and back into the mix. This wasn't as good as the Michaels/Benjamin bout, but it was several steps above your run-of-the-mill WWF bout. Angle is the man.

Fascinating stuff. I had seen this referenced before but never in this much detail. Regardless of what happened afterwards, Catch was never the same to me post-61.

This was billed as rudo contra rudo. I remember there was a subset of lucha fans who preferred these types of brawls to anything else that was happening in CMLL at the time. I suppose that they're the antithesis to the average Mistico bout, but are they really good by rudo contra rudo standards? I have my doubts.

Man, it's been an age since I've seen a Sean Waltman match. I thought the early athletic stuff was weak, but once they ramped up the physicality this got really good. Jerry Lynn was the special guest referee, so you knew that would play a part in the finish, but the enjoyable part was Styles beating the crap out of Waltman and Waltman replying in kind as a semi-washed up veteran who still has a little fight left in him. It's too bad they couldn't have beaten the shit out of each other without any storyline.

I am still skeptical about how many purists were watching Saturday afternoon wrestling in 1987, though to be fair, I'm skeptical about how many purists there were watching at the height of wrestling's popularity. Nevertheless, I don't think two young rookies having a match on television meant much to anybody. My point from a decade ago, as snarky as it appears, is that this was not the type of thing that was going to keep wrestling on the air. It may have been an acceptable, or even welcomed part, of wrestling in the past when there were plenty of stars around to complement it, but the talent pool and the product was dwindling at the time. It was a slow march towards the end even without the globalization of the WWF. Now I realize you don't see it that way and have championed everything that happened from 1988 onward to the present day as a continuous lineage, and that's fine. However, that's not how I consumed the footage when I went through all of it. You have a much different perspective of it having lived through it week-to-week. I'm just an overseas guy who made comments on it a decade ago. I think we're coming at this from different angles.

This was a heck of a PPV debut from Joe. It turned form a squash match to a competitive squash match to a a hell the hell do I put this guy away match, and Joe stayed the course the whole way through, Impressive showing from the big man.

Orton Jr was a pretty decent wrestler, at least by American standards, but that's besides the point. The average person watches wrestling for the stars. in 1987, that may have been Rocco, Kendo Nagasaki, Fit Finlay, etc. I can't remember exactly. Walton may have beat the drum for years about real wrestling and pure contests for the true grappling fans, and God Bless him for dong so, but there was a reason why Walton championed those matches and it was because the average fan preferred the comedy and the flamboyant heels. If there were a bunch of learned fans watching Clwyd and Bainbridge in '87 and forming new opinions on pro-wrestling, I apologize, but I fancy it was whatever goes in terms of available footage.