Shows You've Been To In 2016

[NotJayTabb]

Thought as the year is still young, it might be fun to have a thread for people to write about shows they've been to this year. I'm always curious to see what shows people have been to, who's been standing out and who to keep an eye out for. To get the ball rolling, here's some words on the only show I've been to so far in 2016

 

House of Pain Wrestling - 31/01/16

 

My first show of the year was a House of Pain Wrestling show in Calverton, Notts,. HOP is an academy based promotion, with all the workers coming from their training school, run by BritWres standout Stixx. HOP shows are a nice opportunity to see up-and-coming guys for a reasonable price (6 matches for £5) and a core of workers who are noticeably improving month on month.

 

Joseph Conners & Gabriel Kidd vs Brett Ryans & The Collective Conners is easily the best guy in the promotion and is one of the better guys in the UK. He’s been working bigger shows than this for years, but he still works HOP shows seemingly for the love of helping to work with less experienced guys. This was a comedy opener, as Conners had another show in Leeds to work that afternoon, but was plenty enjoyable. The face team of Kidd and Conners had plenty of fun mocking their mismatched opponents (Ryans is working a royalty gimmick, whilst Collective seems to be some kind of fashionista, who yells “Collective!” a lot), as well as Conners mocking his partner’s ever-increasing gut size. Kidd is a decent young worker with bags of natural charisma, so this was fun without ever threatening to steal the show. The heels won with a quick roll-up on Conners after a clash of heads.

 

Juken vs Danny Thomas Another nicely-worked match. Juken recently turned face, causing him to jettison his former persona of angry German Jurgen Heimlich, a name which was never going to see him taken seriously. Plus he isn’t actually German. He’s another experienced head in the company, working a few tours of Japanese indies to get more seasoning, and he looked great here, really comfortable on the mat and with nice looking strikes. I’d only seen Thomas before in a six-man tag, and he’d not stood out, but he kept up well here, and I liked the story of his stealing Juken’s moves to try and show him up. They’d fought previously with Thomas winning with a low blow. Here, he hit a low-blow again, but was too cocky with his cover, allowing Juken to cradle him for the win.

 

Lucas Archer, Tommy Taylor & Vasillios vs ABH (Johnny Concrete, Eddy Martins and Dante Deurden) Before the match, we were warned that the action would spill out all over the room, but it actually turned out to be a regular six-man bout that operated almost entirely in the ring. The format really helped, as there were enough quick tags to avoid exposing how inexperienced these guys are. Taylor in particular is a guy I’ve not been too high on in the past, but he looked great here, crisp in his offence and looking more comfortable in the ring, so it was nice to see his improvement. This built logically, with a long face-in-peril section before the big spot of Vasillos slamming the 25 stone Concrete. The faces won by DQ, when Vasillos got laid out with a kendo stick.

 

LJ Heron vs Ritmo Heron is super-solid in the ring, really reliable and the right person to put in the ring with someone like Ritmo, who shows potential but is still a bit green. I saw him before Christmas taking on another green worker and that match felt like it went on too long. Here, Heron was able to reel him in and take control of the bout, resulting in a much better match. There were a couple of minor timing flubs from Ritmo but this was decent on the whole, with Ritmo winning in an upset.

 

Mr Goodman vs Disco Dan This was Goodman’s debut, and his gimmick is one part Mr ZERO, three parts Right To Censor, cutting a pre-match promo in dress clothes with a thermos mug, complaining about vulgarity and tomfoolery. Disco Dan works a comedy disco gimmick, so a lot of this match was based around trying to fool Goodman into dancing, with a test of strength/Saturday Night Fever gag being pretty effective. Probably the weakest match of the day, and it was still fun. I liked Goodman’s serious focus on the arm leading to an armbar tapout win

 

TimbaWolf & Barricade vs The Foundation (Danny Chase & Alex Gracie) This was for the tag titles, held by TimbaWolf and Mike Wyld, but Barricade had to sub for the missing Wyld (in a great bit of heeling, Gracie came out wheeling a spare tyre which he hinted was Wyld’s, and lamenting Wyld getting a puncture). The Foundation of Chase, Gracie and LJ Heron have been the main heel stable in HoP for nearly 2 years, but have been showing signs of falling apart, with Chase failing to help Heron cheat in his earlier match up. I think Chase and Gracie have both gotten really good in 2015, with Gracie stellar on the mic. He’s manages to be a really entertaining talker, whilst also being utterly unlikable, which is a hard line to balance. This was a good tag match, given a bit of time and with a fun heat section on Wolf. Barricade is a beast, as well as a former HoP champion, so he was really effective as a hot tag, overwhelming the Foundation. Predicatably, Heron showed up to run interference, which backfired as he accidentally hit Chase with a spear, leading to a face victory. Really good main event, and the post match fall out of the Foundation falling apart left a cliffhanger for the next show.

[NotJayTabb]

Going to try and keep this thread going.

First, went to see HOPE Wrestling in Mansfield (19/2/15). HOPE started as an off-shoot of HoP Wrestling, and use a few local guys mixed with bigger UK names and the odd import. Since the end of last year, the company have booked a lot of shows around the heel stable Se7en. Se7en consist of one excellent worker, a handful of decent workers, and The Worst Wrestler I’ve Ever Seen. The first half of the show was based around them, with Chris Tyler’s victory over Lionheart being the best of their matches. MVP-lookalike Money Benjamin actually had the best match I’ve seen him in against El Ligero, including taking a superplex from the top rope onto the other stable members on the floor, but his defeat saw him kicked out of the group. Thankfully, “Rough House” Stevie Mitchell didn’t have a match.
Elsewhere, Jack Jester beat Chris Dickenson in a decent bout (Jester is the HOPE champion, and has this magnetic aura that’s made him the leading face in the company) and Jigsaw beat Joseph Connors in a fun main event.

The next week (28/02/16) I went to another House Of Pain show in Calverton. This was another decent show, and a few guys I’d written off surprised me with some good matches. Barricade is a guy I’ve found hit-or-miss over the years, but he had a fun semi-comedy match with Brett Ryans here. HoP champion Alton Thorne is someone who had never impressed me, and he was taking on the decent-but-spotty Ritmo, so my expectations were low, but they ended up having a great match. Thorne has always been a second-rate knock-off Barricade in my eyes, but they worked a giant heel/high-flying face match that really worked. Nice to have my expectations confounded. It was actually better than the main event between Juken and Alex Gracie, which surprised me as I’m quite high on both guys. The match they had was perfectly fine (after some excellent mic work from Gracie), but I preferred the Thorne/Ritmo match.

Finally, I popped back to the lovely city of Coventry for Mother’s Day, and took advantage of being home to check out an AMP Wrestling show for the first time. AMP is the family-friendly offshoot of my favourite Brit promotion, the sadly-on-hiatus Triple X Wrestling. They seem to use a lot of the same wrestlers as TXW, but with some of the antics toned down (for example, Chris Brookes isn’t billed here as “a bit of a c**t” like he is in TXW). What heartened me is how full the venue was, easily 400+, and for a card with no imports and no real big UK names (the most well-known on a national level being arguably Brookes and Mike Bird), and how loudly the crowd reacted for everything. The matches were all super-enjoyable too. Bird had a fun match with local wrestler Rayador in the opener, the Henchmen took on Mike Peace and Chase Alexander in a really well-worked tag match that apparently paid off a year of storyline and sent the crowd wild, and Brookes had a short-but-good title match against 300lb champion Scott Grimm. The show finished with a Rumble that featured mainly local trainees I’d not heard off, but was still lots of fun. It ended up with Mike Bird teaming up with the Henchmen to try and eliminate Bison Brody. Both of the Henchmen and Brody are massive, massive guys, so the storyline saw the smaller Bird trying to get the Henchmen to do his bidding, until they got fed up of his orders and threw him out. This left them distracted and Brody managed to recover and throw both of them out to a huge pop. Honestly, I loved this show, and seeing a swarm of kids crowding round a victorious Brody like he was a member of One Direction was the most/best Pro-Wrestling thing I’ve seen in a long time.

[NotJayTabb]

A couple more shows to update. By the way, if anyone else wants to talk up show's they've been to this year, please feel free. The more the merrier

 

WWE (Nottingham Arena, 17/04/16). My mum and I have gotten into a bit of a routine with Christmas presents, where every year I’ll get her tickets for the Strictly Come Tour as one of her presents, and she gets me tickets for the post-WrestleMania WWE UK tour. This year was no exception, and so I sat in really good seats for a really fun house show. The main event was Roman Reigns defending the title against Sheamus, and I was heartened to hear Reigns get a generally positive response. There were a few pockets of boos, but they were immediately drowned out by a wave of cheers. Match was really good too, both guys seemed happy to work snug when they really didn’t need to, and the finishing run was really heated. Elsewhere, there was a Women’s title three-way with Charlotte, Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks that was fun, but no-one was buying the nearfalls (even kids knew the title wasn’t changing hands in Nottingham), a really good Usos vs Dudley Boys match and Sin Cara being surprisingly over in his match with Tyler Breeze. Only real letdown was Cesaro, who looked really off in his match with Rusev, with his strength spots looking laboured and his uppercuts barely being in the same postcode as Rusev’s head. Given he’s looked fine on TV since, I assume this was just him working off the ring rust.

 

A week later, I went to Triple M Promotions' debut show (23/04/16) in Whittick. Now normally I wouldn’t set foot in Leicestershire without a face mask and a couple of shots of penicillin on my person, but then I don’t normally get the chance to meet my number one entrant on my GWE ballot. Triple M normally run Q&A sessions around the UK, with the likes of Kurt Angle and Ric Flair doing “An Audience With…” shows in the past. This time, they had Bret Hart on tour, and decided to put together a wrestling card to coincide with this. As it was St George’s Day, the main event was an England vs Scotland themed match, with Stixx taking on Jack Jester. I don’t think Stixx gets anywhere near enough credit for being a great wrestler, he’d easily make my top 10 workers in BritWres. He’s a big guy, who moves so well, great bumper, makes his opponents look great then can cut them off with a beautifully timed move. The match was really good, with Jester building up a load of heat with his pre-match stalling and Stixx getting a big pop for pointing to Bret when applying a Sharpshooter. I thought the whole card was really good – a great opener between Joseph Connors and Nathan Cruz, an insane brawl between the Hooligans and the London Riots, a fun three-way spotfest with Jake McCluskey, Robbie X and Chris Tyler….when you’ve got guys like Dave Mastiff and Tyler Bate in a pre-main throwaway 6man tag, you know the card is stacked. Plus, I got to met Bret, so a pretty great night all in all.

[NotJayTabb]

Friday night (06/05/14) saw HOPE Wrestling's biggest show of the year to date, headlined by a title match between champion Jack Jester and Martin Kirby. The late Kris Travis was a mainstay of the promotion and, though not explicitly stated, this title match for his long-time tag partner had a nice underlying feeling of tribute. Both guys are massively popular with the HOPE audience, so there was a 50/50 split in the crowd, and the resulting match was excellent. Given Jester’s slight size advantage and the dominance of his reign, he was in control for a good portion of this match, with Kirby fighting from beneath and putting in enough hope spots to show he was still in it. The end saw Kirby kick out of Jester’s tombstone finisher, frustrating Jester to the point that he grabbed his trademark weapon (some kind of corkscrew) and looked to be thinking about using it. Instead he cast it aside, but the hesitation had allowed Kirby to recover and escape a second tombstone with a backslide for the huge win. Big pop for that, and really great to see a guy like Kirby win a title. He’s an outstanding performer, seems happy to work any role up and down the card, and is capable of having a good match with just about anyone. He’s so good at building heat that last summer Southside Wrestling was able to take a show featuring a Chris Hero/Tommy End match and headline it with Kirby vs a referee Joel Allen bout…and it got the biggest reaction of the night PLUS Kirby carried Joel to a decent bout. He’s got to be one of the most underrated wrestlers on the planet right now.

The undercard was good too – CJ Banks became #1 contender to the title by winning a fun fourway match (in which Pete Dunne really shined), Ryan Smile and the constantly-improving Burchill had a really good match which saw Smile hit a pair of insane dives over the turnbuckles and El Ligero and Chris Tyler had a fun match where the “evil referee” subplot added to, rather than subtracted from, the bout. Really great show.