[2004-04-21-NWA TNA] Jeff Jarrett vs A.J. Styles (Cage)

[El-P]

Jeff Jarrett vs AJ Styles (04/21/04 TNA)

 

The conclusion to the quite good "Road to the cage" ends with AJ Styles taking the place of Chris Harris after Raven goes after him and fucks his shoulder up. Although the Russo promo was bad as always, this was a neat twist in that raven manipulated his way to that point but Russo refuses to give him the props and design AJ Styles, whom he "owned" one from their past history. Raven gets crazy of course and watches the match from afar (as does Ron Killings, but who the fuck cares ?).

And the match is really good. They not only play familiarity, but they do it in a nice, subdued way (as opposed to super-obvious underlined way), just like they really don't use the cage much for the longest time until Jarrett takes advantage of a mistake to throw AJ around. Gotta say something about Jarrett here, for the last few weeks, he's been showing signs of trying new things, not relying on his own lazy formula (dating back from 2000 WCW), incorporing new moves, doing smarter stuff, for instance as he got small packaged on a figure-four attempt, he goes into a scorpion deathlock next. He also does a very nice looking (AJ bumping helped) triple back suplexes here. AJ is terrific as always. One could argue they could have used the cage more, but they weren't going for a bloodfest here, more a regular match worked inside a cage to prevent the bullshit. Plus when they finally did, it was creative and fresh, as AJ gets on top of this very high cage and Jarrett shoves the referee into it, making AJ lose his balance, take a bump on the jaw but still hanging on until Jarrett bumps himself into the cage and AJ goes flying outside. In a neat dick move (much like Jarrett went all Flair/Lawler with use of powder and foreign object before), Jarrett asks for a count out. Well, Jarrett goes outside to get AJ and... his guitar, goes back inside, and after an irrelevant Russo run-in, AJ kicks the guitar which explodes and pins Jarrett to win the title. I actually marked out a bit, that's how well they worked the whole finish. I have no idea what's happening with Jarrett, after months, hell, years of coasting and being lazy, he suddenly seems interested in doing new stuff to the point he's been interesting to watch. He also did of his his best promo in years before this match (as in : really solid). AJ, as always, was pretty much stellar here.