MJH

That was the point. Or rather, what's the point of a dominant Misawa working over an injury?

There wasn't any on the British scene - Joint's monopoly pretty much kept any rival company from even starting until Brian Dixon/All-Star Wrestling.

Yeah, I read the Seau thing as "look, the deaths in wrestling aren't as bad as the NFL"... as if that somehow proves there isn't a problem.

From today's update, which I thought was pretty crass and fits right into Bix's wrestling death thing (not sure if this is Dave or Bryan?): --With the suicide death of Junior Seau, that makes eight players from the 1994 San Diego Chargers Super Bowl team who have passed away. Seven people who wrestled at WrestleMania that year passed away. (thanks to Brian Hoops)

An old favourite of mine. It's so... casually excellent, for lack of a better phrase.

More to the point... what wrestling fan doesn't react to this with a 'well, duh...'?

I've always thought so too... about as good a 'sprint' (of sorts) that you could expect from these guys (Taker at the time).

WWE (to an extent: I'll read what happened on Raw/Smackdown and watch whatever's of interest/is getting discusses; watch the PPVs) and All Japan (though my watching has fallen behind).

Just jumping in before Loss answers - I understand wanting to keep any MMA off the year books, but there are instances, and Nagata/Crocop is one of the most obvious, Takayama/Frye another in the opposite way, where they're really essential to the year for pro-wrestling in Japan.

Counters as regular offence suck - period. It's one thing to have x amount of transition counters that you like to use... shit, you watch enough of anyone you'll see them repeating spots like that. And the worst offender is Taiyo Kea. His hiptoss-counter-DDT actually has a name.

I think everyone's pro-FIP when done well; the hero/es need(s) to go through hardship. But, like everything that works, and gets repeated ad nauseum, it becomes stale/cliche. I can totally understand the original complaint because, let's face it, the traditional 'hot tag' is silly, 9/10. I mean, I enjoy it, especially if the 'Gibson' is great, or if the heels are great stooges, but, yes, people doing it because 'uh, well, that's how it's done...' and sticking steadfast to the formula, it gets very 'meh' very quickly. But, really, how many guys have excelled at the delayed comebacks and drawn-out transitions needed to make it less so? There're the AJ-guys, of course, but the best US tag matches (off the top of my head) tend to stick to that same formula pretty rigidly, but just do it really fucking well... and, really, 12/93 isn't far removed from it either.

Science.

I always felt the best part of Hogan/Michaels was Hogan, having hit the big boot, and seeing Shawn's stooge, does the rounds with the ear-cupping and makes him lay there waiting for the legdrop, to a point almost where you're sure Shawn has to move, but, of course, doesn't.

I'll watch Big Egg again sometime soon... but, yeah, don't recall liking this much. Not quite the disaster that Yoshida/Sakie was, but Grade A shit for Hotta haters.

God, this is infuriating by the end. The first two falls are perfectly fine; they don't amp up the "Sakie as underdog" aspect as much as you'd think, but the way she wins the second fall by herself you feel the point is that she's proving herself as getting to a point where she can start to challenge the higher girls. But then the third fall, similar to 1/24 vs. LCO, though this time I put it completely on the workers, things fall apart. Toyota/Yamada take things down, giving Sakie a rolling cradle and stretch muffler giant swing into a long sleeper sequence (which at least follows on fine enough from the "she's disorientated as fuck" thing). Then Aja chooses to throw her weight around and things start to get strange. She gives Yamada a waterwheel drop through a table, picks her up, and discards her about 10 feet away, leaving her there. She then piledrives Toyota through another table, and instead of rolling her in the cradle, leaves her there to sell for a bit and eventually make her own way back in. And then, with Yamada incapacitated for the next few minutes, Aja and Sakie go about beating Toyota, only there's no level of urgency to what they're doing. Aja puts Toyota on top for, you figure, her waterwheel drop, and instead hits a suplex. The fans don't bite on the near fall at all. She puts her up top again, OK, now comes the waterwheel drop, no, basically a super jackhammer. The crowd still don't bite. Sakie does reel off her uranages and at least looks like she's trying to win(!), but by this point it's clearly not happening, at least not yet, and Yamada is able to get back into the match pretty casually. Toyota/Yamada do rev it up, and run through a good series of near falls on Sakie before eventually putting her away, but it would've been nice if they'd taken Aja out of the equation with something that might have constituted a payback spot for what she did to them. This is still very good in parts; the first fall is cut from 21 to about 13 but they casually work a nice fun fall, the last two falls airing complete (or just about, maybe a minute was shaved off the third). But like the previous tag, though far more frustratingly so, you know they had a much better match in them.

More copying over: I guess you've heard of this one? This is probably my favourite Hotta match, and not just because she get's the shit kicked out of her. You could make the case, actually, that she even out performs Aja. I'm not sure it's a "great" match, but it's memorable as anything to say the least. It starts out great, Aja comes roaring out of the gate and she's pissed that Hotta beat her three works earlier, and is fucking killing her. Hotta makes a great comeback after about five minutes, damn near kicks Aja's head off in the process, and lands a piledriver... and then Aja nonchalantly takes control and works a pretty mundane control segment for five minutes. If I'm Fuji TV director I'm cutting that shit right out, as its proof 20 was still probably 5 minutes too long here. Then of course, Aja goes after the hand and it picks up again. Hotta is selling (though I'm not sure how much acting was going on) it for all she's worth, and you can't say that often about her. They go to the Carribean Crush a bit too soon (crowd don't buy it), but the work around the Pyramid Driver is great. The finish is a little flat because it looks more like a counter than Aja's actual waterwheel, but like just about everything in the match it still looked like it hurt like hell. Brutal, brutal, brutal match. But then, I guess you already knew that.

OK, getting things started by copying over what I wrote on DVDVR from when I last watched this: I haven't been disappointed by a match in a long time. Let me qualify that. The first fall is good. LCO work a nice control segment on Toyota's back, they build to a few near falls, and Toyota takes it home. LCO are "outclassed" and change it up. The second fall is damn fucking near perfect. LCO bring more of their normal heel schtick (though stop short of brawling), the action builds great, Mita ends up pulling a DVB out of the blue on Toyota and the crowd lose their minds. Shimoda holds off Yamada for all she's worth, and a second DVB evens the falls. Up until now the match is awesome, and I'm already getting the first line in my head, y'know, "a year to the day after Hokuto slapped them backstage, Hokuto's watching from the announce table as Mita and Shimoda are working their first great match without her..." But then the third fall... LCO come out of the blocks amped up. Mita kills Toyota with a couple of piledrivers on the floor whilst Shimoda assaults Yamada with chairs. They toss Toyota back inside, Toyota's done for, Yamada's out of the picture, and they give Manami their big piggyback drop/splash combo... and the crowd don't give a shit about what should be the biggest near fall of the match by far. I really don't get it. I mean, if LCO were going to win (unlikely), it wasn't going to be by getting two straight falls in the span of two minutes, but the selling and action and drama was right there and the crowd just didn't bite. And unfortunately, it seems to throw them. Mita seems to go "OK, then" and scales the work back down to the level of the first fall. Shimoda goes on to blow a few spots, and the five minutes after that phantom near fall are as close to a disaster as they were going to have. They do work things back up, and the final few minutes are good, but flat compared to the final few minutes of the second fall. Shame.

No, but they've thrown more money at people before, and I guess the idea is that they won't just recoup it through Brock (if they do), but in other avenues by the bump they hope he brings. I mean, it's not to the same extent, but I'm sure Mania 14's buyrate didn't recoup the money they spent on Tyson, but in the coverage it brought and help make Austin a bigger star, they sure did, y'know?

FTR, I don't think the literal definition of a MOTYC in anyway affects the initial point; if anything, it was the point. Punk/Henry might very easily end up being one of the best WWE TV matches of the year. Whether one thinks the term 'MOTYC' is bandied about too much, and I'm liable to agree, it is far more specific/statistical (is that a word?) than calling something 'great': it's one of the best 5/10/~20 matches of the year. And qualifying it as 'free TV (or even WWE) matches' is besides the point - Dylan's list in the initial thread is all-encompassing.

I don't remember having seen that Kendo/Bridges match, but the one in which he hypnotises Robbie Brookside is enough to put anyone off the guy for good.

OK. By the standards of Free-TV-US Matches, yes, it's a MOTYC. And it'd be a 'nice TV match' in pretty much any era. My point wasn't a critique of the match - me, Jerome, most people, we've almost uniformly liked it and called it a 'good TV match' - but rather 'what does it say about wrestling in 2012 when a nice, simple TV match is considered a MOTYC'. I mean, I agree with you on Japan. I'm less-versed on Mexico, though what I have seen hasn't connected with me as much as stuff from the past. The point is, a 'nice TV match' should never be a MOTYC. It'd be like a nice collection of folk traditionals or blues covers being the best album of the year, or something. I wasn't making a case for Benoit/Eddy as a MOTYC in the slightest, but doing exactly the opposite. Now, maybe if I was limited myself to the US I'd have it in my Top Ten, but that's beside the point. And Benoit's the wrong guy to be having the debate over anyway. As for... Is it not patently obvious that Punk/Jericho were trying to have a great match, significantly moreso than Punk/Henry? I can understand confusion with 'self-conscious epic' and how it might need an explanation, but 'weren't trying to have a classic' seems self-explanatory; it's the same/a similar phrase to one people have used plenty of times regarding matches were guys, not go through the motions as such, but clearly aren't going 'all out'. Punk/Jericho were pretty clearly going 'all out' (and understandably so it being a World Title match on the biggest show of the year) but I don't see how one could think Punk/Henry were. The point is, guys misconcieve (or fail at) the big matches now. Someone on DVDVR - I forgot who - talked about how 'no one knows how to work the body of a match anymore; it's all about the finishing run'. It's the reason why so many people (and you've said so yourself, Dylan) are so apathetic to endless near falls now, because it's become so forced and unnatural - it's how people 'identify' big matches at this point, and so the big matches generally come in two parts: before the near falls, and the near falls. Not to be an 'AJPW Fetishist' (though I see nothing wrong with preferring that), but the difference between a Punk/Jericho (or HBK/Taker I; or even an ROH match :|) and the matches that brought these near falls into vogue (and ignoring a lot of NJ Juniors had the same problems), the difference is night-and-day. The problem isn't the near falls themselves, but how they get to them and what they do between them: in a nutshell, they just don't do it as well. And so, what we're left with is that the best matches are those that don't fail, which are the nice, little TV matches were everything makes sense, a few nice spots, nothing too reaching... I mean, that's quite the negative phrasing for a match I liked (Punk/Henry), and it may well end up a solid Top 10 WWE match, but yeah, it says a lot about the standard that guys are at were it's a MOTYC.

What 'APW wrestlers' know about stadium settings is irrelevent to John's argument; any wrestler, on any level, will know about working to whatever particular audience they have on that show. You don't go out and work your Misawa/Kobashi tribute on a holiday camp. You don't go and work a RINGS tribute on a US stadium show. They're absurd hypotheses, but, the fact remains that Jericho/Punk, whilst it might have been a technically better match than HHH/Taker, or Rock/Cena, didn't get over to nearly the same extent. Could it? Probably not. But it felt totally flat until the near falls kicked in. I'm not sure HHH/Taker should be working so much in-ring/non-mic'd talking which only the ringside fans will have picked up, never mind those a few hundred feet away. And even then they didn't start the match that way. Punk/Jericho, though, were only cursing themselves starting out like that.

This is where I really see how much our views on matches differ. I enjoyed the match quite a bit, I thought it was *good*, hell, as a TV match I thought it was very good despite a shit finish. But MOTYC, no way, that would mean the quality of wrestling dropped to depressing low levels in the last 10 years. Exactly this. As far as ten-minute TV matches go, does it really hold a candle to something like Benoit/Eddy 10/95? Granted, that was both much faster-paced, and Punk/Henry aren't even near the same ball-park as workers, but, as great as that Benoit/Eddy match is for a ten-minute Nitro match, no one would have called it a MOTYC in 1995. Like Jerome, I don't see MOTYC at all, but, doesn't it tell you how much these guys fail when they go for something bigger and more complex? I mean, Punk and Henry certainly weren't going for any kind of 'classic' (even by Raw standards), they were just trying to have a very good, little TV match (in the same way Benoit and Eddy were just trying to have a good TV match and put Benoit over strong in his debut), and they nailed it as best as anyone could expect from them.

I really liked Henry/Punk as well, but I wonder (riffing on Coffey's thread in a way but it fits better in here) what it says about wrestling in 2012 when what was basically a nice, little match done rather well is considered a MOTYC. It shows as much as anything how wrong a turn the guys of this era took from the last.

I'm not sure if this will be understood by people who aren't, but I find the Britishness of it to be nauseating. I've also never felt that there was any great evolution in the style; if anything, it devolved near the end of the TV run. And, whilst I understand doing a Dynamite Special, a Rocco Special, a McManus Special etc... did TWC/anyone ever put together a run of just the original broadcasts in sequential order over a period of time? You're never going to get into a product as much if it's all selected like that. -- That said, there are a good few wrestlers/matches that I like; similar to Lucha (or anything else), if you watch enough those 'quirks' start seeming less-so.