Edwin

Just watched the Shield/Evolution and I thought it was on par with the second best Shield/Wyatt match which I thought was the RAW match. Rollins second suicide dive, the one he missed was a crazy bump to take and the huge dive from the balcony was amazing. The finish was on point with Reigns going over Batista clean. I also watched El Torito/Hornswoggle and I also thought that was particularly awesome. I honestly have no idea how I'd rank it, but it was just a ton of fun to watch.

This was was a lot better than it had any right to be, still not great, but definitely a solid, very good match though. I agree that it gets extra points in its favor mainly because it's worked very differently than almost every match in Japan today specially for a Jr.'s match which really sets it apart. I believe Takanashi is from the T2P Toryumon class. He was King Pocota I believe. I could be wrong though. This was worked very smartly as it's a given Takahashi is ranked lower than HARASHIMA and if he has any of actually beating HARASHIMA it's by surprising him with some type of pinning combination and that's what he does exactly pulling out some pretty awesome and contrived pinning combinations meanwhile HARASHIMA plays the bully throwing Takahashi around and beating him up with some pretty good strikes. However I thought the early ground work was a bit weak and cooperative or maybe I've been watching too much Rumina Sato combat wrestling and grappling in Shooto and I've set my standard too high. I thought the armwork by Takahashi was solid, but HARASHIMA isn't exactly 1990's Shinjiro Ohtani at selling, but he still did fairly well at selling it. Takahashi also isn't exactly Johnny Saint at the pulling the arm trick, but it still worked since it allowed Takahashi to continue working over the arm. There was too many awesome spots in this such as the HARASHIMA reverse curb stomps to the chest and the Yama Ori Manjigatame counter by Takahashi. HARASHIMA's deadlift moves weren't exactly at the same level of how awesome Cesaro is at pulling them off, but they were still pretty much on point. HARASHIMA's striking was particularly good in this and Takahashi's slaps were pretty awesome. HARASHIMA countering the standing kimura with the crazy throw dumping Takahashi was one of the many awesome counters in this match. The finishing stretch was particularly awesome as the crowd who was dead for the majority of the match came alive and brought into Takahashi's pinning combinations and into the crazy spots they pulled out. The Gannosuke Clutch counter leading to the Canadian Backbreaker Piledriver was particularly nasty and legit made me cringe and shout ouch out loud. Overall a very good match which I highly recommend, so give it a watch.

I thoroughly enjoyed this too. Everyone was great in this match, specially Ambrose for all the previously mentioned reasons. I think it's worth noting his post match selling was excellent too. It really added to the beating he had taken and it added to his character too. I also loved Rollins highflying babyface offense. As good as this was, this is the one I enjoyed the lest from the 3 and that's not necessarily a bad thing considering they're all top 10 WWE matches for the year until now. The EC match is easily my favorite of the 3 and deciding where you'd rank this one and the RAW match comes down as to what role you prefer Ambrose in since he's the one who's role changes the most in both matches. In the RAW match he's more of his usual wild man brawler and in this match he's the FIP. I personally prefer him more as the wild man brawler and that's why I gave the RAW match the nudge over this one even though the execution of the offense was a little sloppier than in this one. Great match nevertheless no matter however you put it.

Watching zombie Kane sit up after the match and entire post match staredown was a given the feud hadn't ended which is a shame since there's no chance Kane's going to take the title from DBryan and is only going to continue on with the pointlessness.

I need to check that one out. Considering Kana has some of the best strikes in Joshi along with Meiko and Aja, that maybe a weird match structure, but I'll definitely take your word on it and give it a watch if I can find it.

Bray/Cena was way worse considering they're both capable of putting together a great match together as proven by past matches with other opponents. I'll blame the goofy booking for bringing this down a notch though.

It was obvious he was gonna light it on fire since 2 ring crew guys appeared with fire extinguishers.

FORKLIFT!

Forgot to mention, that Cena bump face first into the cage near the end was extremely goofy. That throw by Bray followed by the wild senton he does was awesome though.

That was bonkers. I really have no idea what I just witnessed. Pretty cool I 'pose. The best thing about that was JBL's post match reaction.

I thought it was better than the RAW match, but not as good as the EC or Main Event matches. Thought Shield-Evolution was pretty good, but not great. Thanks. Reminds me I need to watch that ME match too. I'm a little skeptic on the wrestling I watch now a days; so is there anything else aside from the Shield/Evolution match that I need to go out of my way to see since I just began watching?

Was the Shield/Evolution match better than any of the Shields/Wyatts matches?

I don't know what's the criteria you guys have for this, but anyway, I'll give this a shot. These aren't exactly fresh in my mind since I haven't watched them in years, but here's some non-ROH US Indy recommendations of what I thought was good back then, however I don't know how they stand up to this day: IWA-MS: Homicide & B-Boy vs. Matt Sydal & Delirious Homicide & B-Boy vs. Tracy Smothers & Chris Hamrick Chris Hero vs. Arik Cannon Bryan Danielson vs. Arik Cannon Chris Hero vs. Bryan Danielson 2/3 Falls Match: Chris Hero vs. Bryan Danielson Chris Hero vs. Mike Quackenbush Samoa Joe vs. Roderick Strong Claudio Castagnoli vs. Nigel McGuinness Alex Shelley vs. Bryan Danielson Super Dragon vs. Arik Cannon Samoa Joe vs. Nigel McGuinness CM Punk vs. Bryan Danielson Bryan Danielson vs. Mike Quackenbush Samoa Joe vs. AJ Styles vs. Bryan Danielson CZW: Super Dragon & Excalibur vs. El Generico & Kevin Steen Cage of Death Match: Eddie Kingston, Jack Evans, Ruckus & Sabian vs. Sexxxy Eddy, JC Bailey, Nate Webb & Chris Ca$h PWG: Samoa Joe vs. Bryan Danielson Bryan Danielson vs. Bobby Quance Bryan Daniels & Super Dragon vs. the Havana Pitbulls B-Boy & Homicide vs. Samoa Joe & Puma B-Boy & Homicide vs. Chris Hero & CM Punk B-Boy & Homcide vs. Bryan Danielson & Super Dragon NJPW: Kazuyuki Fujita vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi Kazuyuki Fujita vs. Katsuyori Shibata

Given the same access I do now to things, I'd go with pre-1996 obviously. There's just so much quality to pick against after. Great territories across the US, great Joshi, great lucha, great Japanese men's wrestling, hotter crowds all around, better booking, etc.

I hope Cena/Wyatt is better than WM match which was hugely underwhelming. Three Way is most likely going to be a mess mainly due to RVD being in there and him trying to pull off innovative spots involving the other 2. I think they would've been better off going straight up with Cesaro/Swagger. Big E/Barrett has potential of being fairly decent. Shield/Evolution should be good. Maybe not at the same level as the Shield/Wyatt matches, but it should still be good and possibly MOTN. DBryan/Kane isn't a match I'm particularly looking forward to completely, but I'm curious to see what DBryan can get out of Kane at this point.

This maybe a bit extensive, but: Miller vs. Lauzon Gastelum vs. Hall Hendricks vs. Condit Rousey vs. Carmouche Wanderlei vs. Stann Kaufman vs. Eye Anderson vs. Weidman I Bermudez vs. Grice Zingano vs. Tage Lauzon vs. Varner Korean Zombie vs. Poirier Jones vs. Gustafsson Melendez vs. Sanchez Hunt vs. Bigfoot Watson vs. Nedkov Mayday vs. Pickett Trujillo vs. Varner Saffidine vs. Lim Nam vs. Tokudome Pickett vs. Seery

Remember, it was in ROH. Sadly the a lot of the ROH loyal were pretty uneducated on anything aside from whatever happened in ROH. They could've brought in Survival Tobita and built him up as a huge star from Japan in the newswire and then have him go toe to toe with Joe and he still would've gotten a huge pop even if they didn't know who he was. This makes me wish some of the old ROH board posts were archived so I could bring some of those posts back.

I watched Kana/Sara del Rey from 2011 from CHIKARA and I must say it wasn't as great as I've read it was. First off the ring is missing the bottom rope and it interferes in certain aspects of the match such as breaking submissions and Kana somewhat almost botches a spot due to it. Also the commentary in itself is pretty horrible. They continuously remark how Kana has some background in MMA, yet there's no proof of said fact and I'm guessing they're just basing this on the fact that she wears kicks pads, works a lot of armlocks (which ironically enough they don't even know are) and leglocks and throws a lot of brutal stiff strikes. As hard as they try, they just can't seem to coordinate some of the offense and seemed sort of lost in between some of the strike exchanges and it leads to some awkward spaces. Despite the coordination on some of the strike exchanges being somewhat wonky, they were still really laying in some stiff strikes which somewhat made up for it a bit. Aside from that, the only other things I thoroughly enjoyed was Kana's submission transitions which looked so smooth and not overly goofy and fake.

There was a huge boom in Japanese wrestling discussion online once ROH began acknowledging it. I'm sure if you ask a lot of current Japanese wrestling fans, some will admit they began following after watching Joe vs. Kobashi.

Actually, Japanese pro wrestling has the following it does stateside because of Dave Meltzer and the WON. When he started the WON, Terry Funk told Dave he should follow and cover the Japanese scene because it was a good indicator of where business in the U.S. would eventually go. He fell in love with the style and started trading tapes and praising matches. Everything evolved from there. Perhaps that's why some people have jumped on board since the 2000s, but there have been plenty of Americans following Japanese wrestling since the 1980s. I'm aware of that, but it really boomed and gained a huge following stateside after the entire US indy thing.

No or at least I'm not aware of it ever happening. I hope I'm not breaking the rules by posting this:

So by your logic, if they didn't drop themselves on their heads constantly, they wouldn't have gotten massive emotional engagement out of people even watching it 20 years later? So a death match is of higher quality than a standard match? They do project a higher sense of legit violence and perseverance. That match was highly underwhelming. Take out the shock factor of Taker losing and it's straight up horrible. I've been reading the wrong reviews if the Tiger Suplex spot is the most talked about spot from that match then. Had that spot not happened, the match still would've gotten tons of praise since it's not even a key point in the match. This is rather amusing.

The only reason Japanese pro-wrestling has gained a lot more fanfare stateside online is because of the huge gain in popularity of US indy wrestling in the early 00's namely ROH. ROH was really what got a lot of US indy fans into Japanese wrestling since a lot of their wrestlers blatantly knocked off moves they saw in Japanese wrestling, they name dropped Japanese wrestlers in interviews, they brought over wrestlers from Japan and they did shows in Japan. However they didn't do the same with lucha and that's why lucha isn't as largely accepted online by foreign fans as Japanese wrestling is. Had ROH endorsed lucha more than they did Japanese wrestling and I assure you US indy wrestling would've been crossing the border to watch Atlantis and Blue Panther wrestling live instead of flying across the globe to watch Hiroshi Tanahashi and Shinsuke Nakamura. There would've been less injuries in US indy wrestling too since a lot of the guys would've been locking on complicated submission moves instead of throwing their opponent on their head for the sake of getting a big "OH!" pop from the 50 fans in attendance. IWA-MS running the Strong Style Tournaments pretty much proved that US indy wrestling is a really bad knockoff of Japanese wrestling as it's just a bunch of fat, white Americans hitting themselves really hard and dropping themselves on their heads for the sake of doing it in a broken ring for $40 in front 25 people in some high school's gym or basketball court. This is something that I'm sure Hashimoto would be embarrassed by if he'd been alive and saw it. The pathetic You can't watch this type of wrestling on Monday nights mentality was something that a lot of former US indy wrestling fans turned Japanese wrestling fans carried over and that's why they think anything done in Japan immediately is better than anything done in the WWE.

First off, I used to be a huge Japanese wrestling from the late 90's until recent years when I just lost interest in it since it's quality has downed a lot. I still frequently read results on Puro Love and every now and again watch the New Japan 1/4 Dome shows or may watch a match here and there on YouTube, but it's just no the same anymore to me. Anyway, there's been plenty of great American and Lucha matches over the years that are equally as good/if not better than a lot of the matches that have happened in Japan and that are 1,000 times better than most of the highly regarded ROH matches. It does depend on your preferences though. I know some people like Ditch who may enjoy the highly regarded 6/9/95 match more than the highly regarded Atlantis/Villano III mask match, yet I know some Lucha fans will disagree with him and doesn't mean that the AJPW tag match was better nor worse than the mask match since they're both great match in very diverse styles. The only reason you may assimilate ROH with Japanese wrestling is because they've taken some of the elements from Japanese wrestling and have tried to replicate them which in a lot of cases they have failed to do. Throwing streamers at some wrestlers, dropping your opponent on his head for the sake of getting a pop and hitting each other hard doesn't mean they're the closest there is to Japanese wrestling. Huh? Like I said before, I used to be a huge Japanese wrestling fan, but I really don't understand what head dropping epic even means... I just hope you're not implying a great match necessarily needs head drops to be epic or to be considered good, because I can name a lot of great matches from over the years where there hasn't been a single head drop, yet it's still better than that of many matches featuring numerous head drops. Also I hope you do realize that a lot of the highly regarded AJPW matches from the 90's aren't highly regarded because the guys in it constantly dropped themselves on their heads. Well said on all accounts. One of the things I dislike the most about Japanese wrestling fans that aren't Japanese is the fact that they have this weak mentality where everything that happens in Japan is so much better than anything WWE can produce and try and bash WWE on any account they can to look cool online or something and that itself is an ironic mentality since Japanese wrestling fans who are indeed Japanese who live in Japan support their local organizations don't even have this type of mentality.

They wrestled in the US a bunch of times.