Matt D

The Tornado Tag was a blast. I asked Pete and apparently neither of us liked the follow up much, which is a shame. Sometimes you just want heated main event heavyweight wrestling, with all the stakes and emotional weight and clash of the titans feel and that was what this was about. Plus how amazing were Reed's shoulder tackles? I'm not sure if it was just Dr. Death taking them or what, but they were dynamic. As for the Savannah Jack tag, I envision this world where Magnum doesn't get hurt and Rick Steiner gets brought in as his understudy. I try not to imagine it too thoroughly though as it's a scary world. Taylor was pretty explosive. That's the main takeaway I had on that one.

Well aren't you special. Thanks for noticing Johnny. In this case, I think I am. I had so little time last night because I was taking care of my family. Wife and 4 year old had a late nap, so I ended up doing the weekly food shopping and was out doing that when the PPV started. Then the dinner plans were all pushed back so I came up with breakfast for dinner and made waffles and bacon. I did have just enough time to go back and check out Bayley's entrance pop between waffles. Cat puked somewhere in there, so I dealt with that. Then I came back and put the kid to bed, not shortchanging her on a story or anything else. Somewhere in the midst of the bedtime process we had a big water spill, so we took care of that too. And it turned out to be right around 10:30 that I was able to turn the show on, expecting the main. Did Jericho probably do a good job being annoyingly entertaining? Sure. Was Orton more human than usual? Maybe Was I entitled to them giving me wrestling at that point in a PPV? No. But it's what I wanted at that point. And I figured I could come on here and gripe a bit and express how great it is that we don't have to be spoonfed what they force us in a world that NWAOnDemand exists. So yeah, thanks Johnny. It's nice to be recognized.

They made a win feel like it really, really mattered. That feels so good.

This is pretty cool, but the Usos raising him seems so dickish somehow.

By the way, I loved Sasha selling her ribs in the plain janes picture from 2013.

Holy geez. The main isn't even on yet? That Duggan/JYD Texas tornado tag was aces though.

I have half an hour to watch now and turned it on for the frigging Orton segment? Screw this. I'm watching JYD/Duggan vs the Russians

Reposting my write up here since I'm usually terrible at commenting in the actual match threads: ---- The pre-match antics stressed Matt's heel advantage, having picked the time and prepared the place and gotten into Jeff's head by destroying his precious lawn. Even though this is, for the sake of comparison, an empty arena match, they played to the crowd at home the whole time, starting with Matt intimidating the referee and then with his heat-garnering violin rendition of "Cool, Cocky, Bad" for an audience that can't even boo him. Despite that, Jeff arrived, albeit sans theme music, to cut it off. Matt refused to show ass, though, keeping his back to Jeff until he made it into the ring. Here, a brief note about the early camera work. Matt's stable at this point consists of a 90s-esque WWF gardener gimmick elderly Virgil of sorts, his wife as an annoyingly supportive valet in multi-colored garb, his baby as a mascot, and a legion of nameless drones. In order to suspend disbelief on why the drones (bruised from an earlier pre-match assault on Jeff which he fought off with his own symbolic instrument) aren't interfering, I think we're supposed to imagine that they're the ones flitting around the ring managing the camera work. What we got out of that, at least in the early going, were a lot of Dunn-ian quick cuts. Instead of the usual WWE style that whips about right at the point of impact so that the moment of it is dulled and lost, this switched right before, so that we almost fell into the impact of the blows. On to the match itself. Matt ambushed Jeff first with a quick punch, winning the first few seconds of exchange until he was shrugged off of a bulldog. Jeff was too quick to rush in (obviously thrown off his game by Matt), and ran into a foot, but since we're in the shine, he recovered quickly and hit a far too early superplex, which, in the context of this match, was basically an overglorified armdrag. Due to the TV format, and presumably the production costs for a company that may or may not be funded by racist corporate biker twins and/or over the hill (also) bald, moody artiste types, they only have around ten minutes of actual in-ring work that they can show. By symbolically using the superplex in this function during the feeling out process/shine, they define the initial scope of the match immediately at a higher point, which will allow for the later explosive escalation. Jeff followed the superplex by bouncing off the ropes and hitting a bit splash for a nearfall. While a strange move for him, it's also a heightened version of a normal pinfall which hits the higher tone that they were in the process of defining. Immediately thereafter, Jeff pulled out the trellis, a table stand-in given the setting. While yes, this wasn't just Matt's homefield advantage, but also the strange redneck distopia that Jeff was used to, the fact that he didn't even sell, as a character, the strangeness of finding the trellis under the ring, took me out of the match a bit. Matt was going out of his way to react to everything and, at times, it felt like Jeff was just moving on to the next spot. He could make it work as a flustered stoicism at times, but here I was half expecting for the spot to fail, and for him to simply continue to pull out multiple trellises until he hit it correctly as Matt just had to lay there, like a modern-day Sabu at his very worst. Regardless, the spot did work correctly and led to another nearfall. Much like the superplex functioned as an armdrag, however, Matt's twist of fate out of nowhere, his full on finisher, were this not a gimmick match, served as a TRANSITION. Once again, it's a precarious balance. If at any point of the match, they lost the beat, lost the tenor and tone, failed to symbolically level out the point where they were at, the entire structure would collapse and the match could never build to the later points it was trying to reach. The ladder would be missing a number of rungs. Instead, due to the lack of time alotted, and the dramatic end point, they started higher up the rungs and as such, Matt's finisher served as a transition and a transition only onto his well-scouted (inoculated?) brother who was not nearly worn down enough to be put away by it. This allowed Matt to get back into the match, the escalation continuing now with the kendo stick shots and the introduction of the actual ladder, the images of violence climbing further up those proverbial rungs, with the choking in the corner and the outright biting. It's only when Matt stumbled back towards reality and went for an actual move, in this case, the side effect, that Jeff was able to elbow out and, in a stroke of synergy, used the phony Twist of Fate and his own Swanton finisher as yet another transition, though really one that would be an extended hope spot, not cut off by any quality of Matt's, but due to Jeff's own reckless abandon, which has been costing him matches and momentum within matches for well over a decade. He climbed the tree (ladder-assisted) and went for the Swanton onto Matt who was prone on a ladder; Matt moved, though this wasn't as definitive as it should have been. Jeff still went for the pin after this and Matt had to scramble to regain some distance and the advantage. They could have punctuated that moment better, especially considering what was to come. Now, as the third act began, and the hope spot was cut off due to Jeff's own recklessness, Matt, having seen his brother's resolve again first hand and knowing he couldn't defeat him through sportsmanlike means (especially after the two defeats that led up to this match), brought the world's most destructive chain out from his tights. For a match that used a superplex as an arm drag and finishers as act break transitions and hope spots, the only place to go was to high explosives. Matt launched the fireworks across the ring as Jeff desperately defended himself with a trash can lid. It seemed all for naught as the smoke cascaded around them. Matt, limping, selling, calling out, with another weapon in hand stalked around the ring to finish the job only to find that Jeff, hulked up and in the midst of his babyface comeback had gotten the "chain." As fireworks flew back the other way, Matt ran from the comeback, only to get chased down by his brother, at the height of his righteous fury and power. Here, however, Jeff slipped on a banana peel (or a splotchy bit of mud) and Matt was able to put on the late match sleeper, assisted not by the ropes, but by a lake instead. Companies have house styles. You know when watching a WWE TV Tag Team match when they're going to go to commercial. A TNA main event style match will, at this point of near-finish, almost always have some bullshit Jarrettesque run-in. Here it came in the form of a fake Sting, the Mountie's Stun Stick, and a false finish the valet. The confusion allowed for Jeff to recover from the sleeper and lock in one of his own. Once again, his hubris, always his failing, now mixed with that righteous babyface fury took over, and unsatisfied with a simple choke out victory, Jeff climbed up the Hardy Boyz symbol, meaning to leap off of it onto Matt one more time. The viewers were well prepped with this due to its call back nature. The first time he went up, it backfired, so wrestling conditioning told us this should work. Moreover. We'd already gotten the false finish on the Fake Willow, so Matt was thoroughly protected at this stage. There was every reason to see this as the blow off and for Jeff to win. They utilized the callback of Matt setting the scene earlier on however, and Chekhov's Gun went off, with Reby slipping him the hair spray (or well, something inflamed instead of flammable) allowing Jeff to get shoved off the top so that Matt could heelishly steal the win. Good match that fit the feud so long as you could accept the shifted scale where they started higher on the rungs, allowing for a consistent climb towards a higher peak. Jeff dropped the selling of the situation a couple of times early on in a way that came off as more than pissed off stoicism, unfortunately. This, more than any match in history, perhaps, needed total commitment, but it's likely a problem we would have had with Jeff in almost any match. Matt on the other hand played his role perfectly. In general though, it followed the traditional structure for this sort of a grudge match that went around 10 minutes in a hardcore/falls count anywhere setting, just further along the spectrum with different tools used in the same old places.

Ah yeah, I forgot about Naomi. EDIT: They just missed out on Backlund doing the Millions of Dollars thing. Wasted opportunity.

No, it was just announce out of order. Raw picked up Sin Cara, Swagger, and Young. Smackdown got Kallisto and them. Why Kallisto isn't with the cruiserweights is beyond me.

Nia Jax is too nice a person for her own good.

They need to do long matches in hour one to kill time.

Awesome. Three matches so far.

They can do the nontelevised picks on the network.

During the arm wrestling contest.

Finally got to see the Conway/Lothario tag. Couple of thoughts: 1.) In general, I liked this a lot. The major thing it had for it was that it really maximized the stuttering heat. Conway and Lothario had a lot of comebacks but the heels took a little more out of them with each one until they were able to take the second fall. That's not something I've seen as much in the Guerreros matches. There was a real sense of progression here. 2.) To some degree, it's real easy to tell whether or not you'll like the match. There's a moment relatively early on where Lothario's on the wrong side of a test of strength and after a monkey flip, he's selling huge. It's absolutely wonderful, the sense of struggle and meaning and competition and pain that he was able to portray in that moment. It's the sheer joy and wonder of selling, not just the damage a move is doing, but the other side of the coin, the effort of fighting back. It's "selling" the reality of the match and it's what Lothario was so amazing at. Either you value that or you don't. If you do value that, this match had a lot to offer.

Dumping this here since I forgot to before. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/mar/24/bolivia-cholitas-female-wrestlers-cholitas-discrimination-stranglehold

He's a much better heel.

They could put the belt on him again?

Now we're not going to get the Miz/Lesnar tag team I wanted. I hate MMA so much.

Write up: The pre-match antics stressed Matt's heel advantage, having picked the time and prepared the place and gotten into Jeff's head by destroying his precious lawn. Even though this is, for the sake of comparison, an empty arena match, they played to the crowd at home the whole time, starting with Matt intimidating the referee and then with his heat-garnering violin rendition of "Cool, Cocky, Bad" for an audience that can't even boo him. Despite that, Jeff arrived, albeit sans theme music, to cut it off. Matt refused to show ass, though, keeping his back to Jeff until he made it into the ring. Here, a brief note about the early camera work. Matt's stable at this point consists of a 90s-esque WWF gardener gimmick elderly Virgil of sorts, his wife as an annoyingly supportive valet in multi-colored garb, his baby as a mascot, and a legion of nameless drones. In order to suspend disbelief on why the drones (bruised from an earlier pre-match assault on Jeff which he fought off with his own symbolic instrument) aren't interfering, I think we're supposed to imagine that they're the ones flitting around the ring managing the camera work. What we got out of that, at least in the early going, were a lot of Dunn-ian quick cuts. Instead of the usual WWE style that whips about right at the point of impact so that the moment of it is dulled and lost, this switched right before, so that we almost fell into the impact of the blows. On to the match itself. Matt ambushed Jeff first with a quick punch, winning the first few seconds of exchange until he was shrugged off of a bulldog. Jeff was too quick to rush in (obviously thrown off his game by Matt), and ran into a foot, but since we're in the shine, he recovered quickly and hit a far too early superplex, which, in the context of this match, was basically an overglorified armdrag. Due to the TV format, and presumably the production costs for a company that may or may not be funded by racist corporate biker twins and/or over the hill (also) bald, moody artiste types, they only have around ten minutes of actual in-ring work that they can show. By symbolically using the superplex in this function during the feeling out process/shine, they define the initial scope of the match immediately at a higher point, which will allow for the later explosive escalation. Jeff followed the superplex by bouncing off the ropes and hitting a bit splash for a nearfall. While a strange move for him, it's also a heightened version of a normal pinfall which hits the higher tone that they were in the process of defining. Immediately thereafter, Jeff pulled out the trellis, a table stand-in given the setting. While yes, this wasn't just Matt's homefield advantage, but also the strange redneck distopia that Jeff was used to, the fact that he didn't even sell, as a character, the strangeness of finding the trellis under the ring, took me out of the match a bit. Matt was going out of his way to react to everything and, at times, it felt like Jeff was just moving on to the next spot. He could make it work as a flustered stoicism at times, but here I was half expecting for the spot to fail, and for him to simply continue to pull out multiple trellises until he hit it correctly as Matt just had to lay there, like a modern-day Sabu at his very worst. Regardless, the spot did work correctly and led to another nearfall. Much like the superplex functioned as an armdrag, however, Matt's twist of fate out of nowhere, his full on finisher, were this not a gimmick match, served as a TRANSITION. Once again, it's a precarious balance. If at any point of the match, they lost the beat, lost the tenor and tone, failed to symbolically level out the point where they were at, the entire structure would collapse and the match could never build to the later points it was trying to reach. The ladder would be missing a number of rungs. Instead, due to the lack of time alotted, and the dramatic end point, they started higher up the rungs and as such, Matt's finisher served as a transition and a transition only onto his well-scouted (inoculated?) brother who was not nearly worn down enough to be put away by it. This allowed Matt to get back into the match, the escalation continuing now with the kendo stick shots and the introduction of the actual ladder, the images of violence climbing further up those proverbial rungs, with the choking in the corner and the outright biting. It's only when Matt stumbled back towards reality and went for an actual move, in this case, the side effect, that Jeff was able to elbow out and, in a stroke of synergy, used the phony Twist of Fate and his own Swanton finisher as yet another transition, though really one that would be an extended hope spot, not cut off by any quality of Matt's, but due to Jeff's own reckless abandon, which has been costing him matches and momentum within matches for well over a decade. He climbed the tree (ladder-assisted) and went for the Swanton onto Matt who was prone on a ladder; Matt moved, though this wasn't as definitive as it should have been. Jeff still went for the pin after this and Matt had to scramble to regain some distance and the advantage. They could have punctuated that moment better, especially considering what was to come. Now, as the third act began, and the hope spot was cut off due to Jeff's own recklessness, Matt, having seen his brother's resolve again first hand and knowing he couldn't defeat him through sportsmanlike means (especially after the two defeats that led up to this match), brought the world's most destructive chain out from his tights. For a match that used a superplex as an arm drag and finishers as act break transitions and hope spots, the only place to go was to high explosives. Matt launched the fireworks across the ring as Jeff desperately defended himself with a trash can lid. It seemed all for naught as the smoke cascaded around them. Matt, limping, selling, calling out, with another weapon in hand stalked around the ring to finish the job only to find that Jeff, hulked up and in the midst of his babyface comeback had gotten the "chain." As fireworks flew back the other way, Matt ran from the comeback, only to get chased down by his brother, at the height of his righteous fury and power. Here, however, Jeff slipped on a banana peel (or a splotchy bit of mud) and Matt was able to put on the late match sleeper, assisted not by the ropes, but by a lake instead. Companies have house styles. You know when watching a WWE TV Tag Team match when they're going to go to commercial. A TNA main event style match will, at this point of near-finish, almost always have some bullshit Jarrettesque run-in. Here it came in the form of a fake Sting, the Mountie's Stun Stick, and a false finish the valet. The confusion allowed for Jeff to recover from the sleeper and lock in one of his own. Once again, his hubris, always his failing, now mixed with that righteous babyface fury took over, and unsatisfied with a simple choke out victory, Jeff climbed up the Hardy Boyz symbol, meaning to leap off of it onto Matt one more time. The viewers were well prepped with this due to its call back nature. The first time he went up, it backfired, so wrestling conditioning told us this should work. Moreover. We'd already gotten the false finish on the Fake Willow, so Matt was thoroughly protected at this stage. There was every reason to see this as the blow off and for Jeff to win. They utilized the callback of Matt setting the scene earlier on however, and Chekhov's Gun went off, with Reby slipping him the hair spray (or well, something inflamed instead of flammable) allowing Jeff to get shoved off the top so that Matt could heelishly steal the win. Good match that fit the feud so long as you could accept the shifted scale where they started higher on the rungs, allowing for a consistent climb towards a higher peak. Jeff dropped the selling of the situation a couple of times early on in a way that came off as more than pissed off stoicism, unfortunately. This, more than any match in history, perhaps, needed total commitment, but it's likely a problem we would have had with Jeff in almost any match. Matt on the other hand played his role perfectly. In general though, it followed the traditional structure for this sort of a grudge match that went around 10 minutes in a hardcore/falls count anywhere setting, just further along the spectrum with different tools used in the same old places.

Bo Dallas is the worst case.

When in the trainwreck that was Russo's career did he comment on how his new company's matches were different than his old company's matches? Far more exciting and action packed, etc, and thus worthwhile instead of just getting rid of matches altogether?

That sounds like a fun change of pace. Now that we're past the holiday I have to play some catch up.