Matt D

Elias sliding Owens a steel chair is a cute little spot too.

I will say I sort of enjoyed that initial stall segment, especially the trip.

I love that the ten minutes I have to watch right now it's the end of that Bayley match and Shane.

I do like Bayley's Blue Pants color tribute though. And the top rope belly to belly looked good... once she actually got her footing.

I just turned this on for a few. This has not looked good for the minute I saw. The reverse crab thing was not good, and I have no idea what the elbow drop/kip up spot was supposed to be.

I'm still two hours from getting these kids to bed. Do you guys need me for this one or will you be ok?

Florida is basically the second worst territory (past Stampede) for that. I'm glad we got these though. Pretty much everything was work watching. You got a really good sense of the Briscos tag. You get the beginning and end of the Brisco singles match. I wish we'd start to get some entire 80 babyface Flair matches though, yeah, because the glimpses are really enjoyable. The outtake was great. I love how Frenchy Martin just turns it on when the camera starts rolling. The craziest part of the demo (which was cool in general) was seeing the Iron Sheik with hair.

@NintendoLogic I really liked this actually. This is probably my favorite Fergal match ever and I've certainly seen a decent amount of his NXT/WWE work. I've never seen him so present in a match. He's a much more natural heel, whereas he's a smooth and occasionally explosive babyface and one that the crowd can at times get behind (more because of who they are and what they want than who he is and what he delivers I think; he fits the mold of the times). There's just so much more personality here, so much more reactiveness. His natural dorkiness plays right into the bullet club motif and the little gestures he makes (whether it be the gun or doing the "I see you" to the ref). I really liked how most of this breathed too. They were going twenty minutes and there'd be a lot of bs and nearfalls at the end. They made sure to work in the Anderson spots smartly and it all fit into an overall narrative about Gedo's swagger. I imagine this had run for a while by this point, and it was enjoyable to see a lot of the interference attempts backfire while still not deflating the idea of a threat. Fergal's selling was excellent even in the back third of the match. Gedo had to work to take out a leg. It was a good strategy early on but not one that he could really engage with. Transitions were generally good. I liked the back focus and really liked the whip reversal cut off; it just seemed that Gedo was less hurt after that than the first time he went into the buckle. I bought into the finishing stretch. The double stomp not working was a great moment, and I did buy the next one or two move from Fergal despite the fact that his leg should have been shot. He portrayed adrenaline bursting through it quite believably because he was just so into the moment. When he had the chair towards the end, you got the sense that it was empowering, that it almost made him feel super human. That's, in part, why he made a mistake with it. I thought everything after the frog splash was a little much, especially the chair roll-ups. It was a near comedy bit way too late in the game, and I get part of what was over here was the Bullet Club and you need a bit of that right at the end, AND they played with it metatextually but I thought it subtracted more than it added. In general, though, this had really good set pieces, was very aware of what it was supposed to be, and hit the right marks. You have Gedo sell the back a bit more, cut a minute off the end, and maybe have Fergal struggle just a bit more after his flurry after the double stomp, and you'd REALLY have something.

Worcester?

It's the crossfit. Coming into being a fan as a teenager during the Attitude Era? The interesting comparison point is Jinder Mahal maybe?

I was trying to make sense of why the heck they were focusing so much on 97. It's because he's building to a big Survivor Series 97 show, I'm guessing. Part of the problems is that the most interesting thing with these shows aren't the shows themselves but the little news bits from the month that JR then comments on. That becomes less interesting if you're doing a bunch of PPVs in a row instead of jumping around.

"It's those damn ROH Originals."

Fergal is such a natural name for a heel, especially this one. No light up jacket though. Ok! I'll watch and get a review up ASAP. Honestly, when I started this project the first time, I figured people would be slamming me with modern New Japan matches. This is probably one of the first I've gotten. Thanks.

I think a lot of us want anything to work and anything to be hot and anything to feel meaningful. Wrestling's more exhilarating to watch when the crowds are hot and when they're pushing acts that are getting over. Even if it's a guy we don't necessarily like, it could pump life into everything on the card. Obviously it didn't quite work out, not with Becky, not with him.

So by my reasoning, we had C.S., Jetlag, Nintendo Logic, and myself post reviews. Let's just mix those four and as we get more people coming in with reviews they can be paired off. Jetlag C.S. Nintendo Logic Matt D @NintendoLogic Here's one in the Segunda Caida queue that I'm not sure we're ever going to get to at this point, but it's a ripper of a young boys match.

I do think a more low effort/risk way of doing this might be as a "match of the week" where one person selects a match and everyone watches/discusses. I like the current format because it hypothetically lets us get to know each other a bit more, but that might be less frustrating.

Not listening to the audience, leading them. Subtle difference.

Well yeah, but that's because they were wrestling in front a bunch of.... wait, I think I hit my limit for calm deliberation for the day. We were doing so well too. Let's revisit again tomorrow.

And if you read at how I used it in my post, I didn't say that something was necessarily preferable for its own sake. Instead, I said that they weren't utilizing tools (norms) at their disposal that have been proven to have a certain effect. Do I have a bias here? Sure, my preference, admitted as it is, wasn't the issue at play.

Oh, no way, not at all. There are reactions and reactions are everything. They're what gives the match an emotional weight. They are the investment in the match. They're interacting with the crowd. Now, they use their bodies (which is where we may hit a semantic logjam) to sell and sometimes people might call it good acting or bad acting or mugging or whatever else, but I don't think people put that in the same classification as execution. It's more along the lines of selling but then selling has almost always traditionally been used to indicate expressing the effect of something that has been done to you, not the acting/expressing emotions otherwise. Norms matter. They exist in every genre. There are trappings in a western movie or a Philip Marlowe detective novel. We just watched the new season of Veronica Mars and there's absolutely norms that it follows there and sometimes that norms move away from the logic of our day to day reality but everything works within the logic of the world they're presenting and builds off both our biases and our previous experience. This is a good thing, not a bad thing, and there may be a great benefit of ignoring (or willfully inverting) a norm in the moment, but there's a cost in the long-run, and there's also potential benefits to utilizing the norms that they're leaving on the table. That's how I feel about a lot of modern tag team matches. They get to be more action-packed by not following the southern tag structure but then they jettison a lot of the heat/emotion they could have garnered otherwise. The biases aren't a bad thing so long as we admit them. Moreover, I probably wouldn't find some of those spotfests great even if you would. So past issues of semantics, we also have issues of subjectivity. I don't think we ever get to thread the needle. That's why we're still having this talk, but maybe the talk is worth having in the first place even now?

I refuse to give you that satisfaction, friend. So, what I'm seeing here is that the issue is one of precision in changing times. Classification isn't necessarily just a shortcut, but it does have to be accurate. I think this actually speaks to how much I was willing to agree or disagree with you. Some of that was because you were talking in generalities with specifics that I couldn't speak to well, or that I wouldn't speak to well, but the generalities still struck a nerve, which could well say more about me than about you or your argument. I've argued in the past that everything is a tool and everything works on multiple levels. Execution for the sake of execution only gets you so far in creating an overall effect. The same is true as logic for the sake of logic or spots/moves for the sake of spots/moves. To me, logic is the thing that underpins everything, but you still have to be able to perform the story you're trying to tell in a way that creates the suspension of disbelief, willful or otherwise. Something looking poor (or on the other side of the nexus, excellent, but overly cooperative, for instance) can ruin the effect just as easily as something making no sense as part of a larger story or something not being sold enough and thus not being allowed to have weight and meaning relatively. When everyone's the internet, what's the internet anymore? I don't know. There are still communities, but maybe there's just more of them now and maybe they interface with one another more often. I am generally here and DVDVR and like I said, that feels like a subsection of a subsection (of a subsection?) All that said, I do think that certain traits/tools were undervalued by people, and I do think certain aspects of certain wrestlers needed to be revisited accordingly. I agree with you that we probably need more precision and even that it's something of a shortcut because it's hard to keep putting in the effort here and now. But I think dismissing arguments over semantic choices isn't the way to go about it either.

Tangents are ok. JR repeating stories on a weekly basis or arguing something no one's arguing is less so. There are times where he'll be on such a string/pattern of logic that he'll willfully not understand something too, like the Steamboat/Luger No DQ stip and how Luger consistently dodging it wasn't because of creative team upheaval but instead as a way to get heat on newly turned Luger for looking cowardly and wanting (then using) the easy out.

I disagree with 45% of this in 45% of situations. It's sort of hard to pin down though. Nothing automatically means anything. Most of the internet still values workrate/execution over most other things. People who feel otherwise are a subsection of a subsection. I don't disagree with the notion that they might have already existed, especially that they existed along the lines you criticize. We've spent a decade here litigating and honing this, frankly.

Glad you liked it. So far it's just been C.S. and myself who have put up reviews. I won't post new pairings until we see at least a few more.