[1985-02-09-MACW-TV] Tully Blanchard vs Manny Fernandez

[shoe]

This is on the network with the new uploads. Tully is the tv champ with Baby Doll. Manny is a tag team champion at the time. Tully has no answers for their 1 st 2 exchanges. Tully takes a powder and the crowd is hot. Cheapshot by Tully, but Manny slugs it off. Tully tries to flee, but Manny won't have it, and now Manny is working the leg. Tully underneath is great constantly fighting or reacting to it. Manny destroying the leg in the ropes. Eye rake by Tully gets some space. Tully limping away. All of Manny's Manny  stuff looks great. Baby Doll trips up Manny. This sets up Tully's heat. Tully working the neck. Tully laying his weight on Manny. Tully tosses him to the floor. It looks like Manny pins him, but Tully has his foot under the rope. Tully tosses Manny over the top for the DQ. Tully had you beliving from the get go that he was losing the belt. This was well done. 3 1/2*

[KB8]

Bring back the TV title already. Seriously, it's such an easy way to build or put heat on wrestlers without actually requiring someone to outright lose. WWE have what, ten hours of content on television every week? More than that? In this workrate world that's surely enough time to throw out a fifteen minute time limit draw. Tully is really a master - maybe THE master - of working this sort of match. He can spend the first half on the back foot in a thousand different and satisfying ways, can take over through shenanigans, kill some more time working over the babyface, then when his back is up against the wall he can run down the clock to save his belt. The first six or seven minutes of this had Manny on top with Tully trying and failing to gain a foothold. We got some nice leg work, and there was this cool little moment where Manny took a bit too long to hook in a submission, so Tully just reversed it into one of his own and made Manny fight to regain control. Usually in those situations the person in Tully's shoes would lay there waiting for Manny to finish rallying the crowd, even if plausibly they could've done something to escape in that time. I love Fit Finlay because he'd never let your rest on your laurels like that and Tully has a lot of the same qualities. He won't let you forget that it's supposed to be a contest. I don't know if anybody right now is as good as Tully, but the framework for something like this isn't that difficult to replicate. In the end your heel escapes by the skin of his teeth while still looking smart and competent, while your babyface takes it right to the wire and might've pulled it off with an extra minute or two. Or in this case, had Tully not decided to just chuck him over the top rope.