[2000-01-27-ECW-St. Petersburg, FL] Sabu vs Spike Dudley

[soup23]

This has a much more wrestling base start to it that I thoroughly enjoyed. I have always found Sabu's fundamentals to be sound when he shows glimpses of that. Sabu is the one that makes this a street fight which makes sense from a kayfabe perspective. He throws some hard shots at Spike and sends him to the outside. Spike gives Sabu a really flush forearm on the inside. As Sabu retreats, Spike comes off the top rope with a big elbow drop. With the table now on the inside, Spike goes for the Acid Drop but Sabu is able to throw him on top of the table. The table is propped in the corner and an Arabian Facebuster is utilized against Spike. The table doesn't break again. The third time is the charm for Sabu. That gets a nearfall. Randomly, Sabu slows things down now with a submission. Finish to this is the weakest portion with Spike barely catching Sabu going for the triple threat moonsault and him face planting the chair haphazardly. The Acid Drop is blocked again but Spike turns the momentum into a neckbreaker. Sabu powers back and ends the match with a legdrop through another table. I really thought they were setting this up to be something different with the early going but it turned into the same Sabu plunder affair by the end with repetitive spots. Disappointing. **3/4

[Loss]

Sabdullah the Butcher tries to spike Spike with a trusty pencil to start things off but misses. Cool moment, but following it by basically saying, "Oh fuck it, I guess I'll wrestle" and taking it to the mat was an awesome gear shift. How dumb can a crowd be to chant "You fucked up" when Spike takes a bump on a table that doesn't break? So much more impressive. This sort of had the makings of a good match early on, then fell apart the longer it went, partially because of a clueless crowd and partially because they keep pulling tight between two extremes of a mat clinic and a tables match, which is sort of like having a cinnamon roll topped with Chinese takeout. And once again, ECW, when you routinely put people through tables and your guys take unprotected chairshots, you can't expect me to care about rope breaks on the count of five when you are doing matwork.

[GSR]

I’ll give these two credit, they mixed it up more than Awesome/Tanaka, Tajiri/Guido/Crazy and Sabu/CW, with Sabu even attempting to ‘spike’ Spike before the bell, but very similar to the match they did on 1/21. A lot of the main spots were contained in both, although the order was different (for example, the triple jump moonsault occurred later in the match here). The table again didn’t break when Sabu blocked the ‘Acid Drop’ and tried to slam Spike through it, to the point I was wondering if it wasn’t ‘meant’ to break in the first place? Sabu had trouble setting up the table for the legdrop off the top finisher, and I lost track of the number of ‘you fucked up!’ chants. No Fonzie here and I cared as much for this as I did the match on 1/21. Bonus point for mixing the match up though!