Matt D

My condolences.

Hadn't seen this one before. I enjoyed it. Faraon's a guy I have less of a sense of than, let's say, Talisman, but he was more than willing to meet Satanico halfway here. Good, heated, stuff.

Apparently Faraon was a tecnico here but you wouldn't know it. This was a heated (stakeless) mano a mano match. Structure was Satanico taking over in the primera with a beatdown into the segunda, Faraon coming back at the end of that, and then getting his revenge into the tecera until they went towards the finish. Satanico's beatdown was as good as it ever was. He's the best heel in the history of wrestling after all. Faraon wrestled dirty for the most part, trading nasty tactic for nasty tactic with Satanico. Most of the main transitions were due to the ref getting involved which is never ideal. Despite being gritty, this still felt "big" with big whiffs at certain points. Faraon's Slam/Senton/Mecedora was a cool sequence. They were playing for the back rows even if they were plenty mean about it. I liked the parallel spots but they would have made more sense if Faraon was a rudo. Satanico was having matches like this every week for decades on end. That we don't have more of them readily available is a travesty. The foul on the finish was so good I wish he had gotten away with it. Only Satanico.

Bucks are ICP if ICP were very talented musicians.

I have no interest in watching it, but I want the thing to succeed. I kind of want to see how Vince responds if it does, too.

Realism doesn't matter anyway. Symbolic consistency does.

Maybe we should take a second on timelessness actually. I was having a talk with Loss earlier and as part of the tweets over the last few days, he pointed out to me that Dave said this: "First time I saw them in PWG I realized they had excellent psychology and that was years ago. But I'm a lot more open minded on that, in that I was taught by Terry Funk you play to your audience on that night, not adhere to specific rules. -- Dave on the Young Bucks" Loss wasn't taking a position on it, but he knew it was something that would interest me. We went around with it a bit (including talking about burning out crowds or leading crowds/killing the golden goose/creating unsustainable escalation) but where I ended up was with this: "I also think we criticize art in different ways than it was intended often. I imagine portrait artists in the 1600s were very focused on pleasing their audience. We don't judge their art on how big a commission they got or how happy their patrons were, do we?" There are interactive elements in wrestling but I think, in general, it's the notion I stick to. I think it's possible to judge wrestling (even specific matches) on how successful they were financially, on how successful they were for the crowd that they were in front of, AND for some general, comparative artistic value. You can rate/judge/compare/criticize wrestling on any of those axes. It's fine so long as you admit what you're doing and try to admit your biases. It's when people start to argue with one another across those lines that you get the unsolvable problems.

So I don't see EVERY tag team match on PPV and certainly not on TV but my impression is that the current WWE tag style peaked back during the Shield/Rhodes Brothers year, and it's just been greater and greater escalation since then. It's hallmark is that 2/3rds of the match is the finishing stretch with endless near-falls/break-ups and momentum shifts within that action-packed period. But again, I haven't seen enough to be sure about this. It's just a gut feeling. The Usos have had a lot of good/exciting matches within that formula, but it's not at all my favorite sort of tag match.

I'm only elitist about people who call La Casita "La Magistral." That's it. Nothing else.

Present company excluded, this is going to be the most annoying, entitled crowd in the history of wrestling. And that's saying something.

I still think that hitting 9000 could be more profitable for them in the long term because then they can come back in 2019 with a chip on their shoulder and really mobilize a fanbase that came close and want to be part of that first grasp of "glory."

Ogawa's probably my favorite Japanese wrestler.

The pool was admittedly bigger a few weeks ago. Most weeks I try to make sure its different than the last few weeks but I was rushing yesterday. This week it was spin the wheel, make a deal.

Vince will just get rid of the Womens division altogether.

Ok Rah, I'm giving you two but they're both 10 minutes or less. Two Skull Murphy vs Pat Roach matches.