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[2018-11-17-WWE-NXT Takeover: War Games II] Aleister Black vs Johnny Gargano


paul sosnowski

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  • GSR changed the title to [2018-11-17-WWE-NXT Takeover: War Games II] Aleister Black vs Johnny Gargano

I'm getting pretty tired of Gargano's shtick to be honest. He still wrestles like he's in PWG in that all of his recent matches are about getting his shit in and looking as "epic" as possible. It's like the Almas match put him on a pedestal, and every match since then has just been hokey in a "look how cool my storytelling is guyz" kind of way. Nothing he does comes off like he's trying to win the match either. Don't even get me started on his 13 year old fan fiction character arc. Fortunately, he had Black as his opponent who oozes seriousness in an edgy way, yet it's executed great. You could feel his hatred in every strike, and the way he finished the match too was just incredible. This could've been a MOTYC with the right build and a more serious Gargano, but what we got was really good anyways if I'm just looking at the match itself, ****1/4.

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Good match on paper and that's what we got. This was really good. Gargano had his best match in a good long while. Going all the way back to January in the Almas match. Black's striking was fantastic, Gargano's wrestling as a heel is much improved over him wrestling as a face. Some bits had me worried such as the drama bits, they are bit comical, and the selling was meh (being generous here), but this was a very good match overall. ***1/4

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I did not know Johnny Gargano had turned heel. He didn't really wrestle this much differently to how he wrestles babyface, but there were enough moments sprinkled throughout that it didn't come off like a total exhibition. Just...mostly one. I like Black well enough and Gargano's had a couple matches this year that I've enjoyed a bunch, but this was kind of hokey. The WWE-style melodrama didn't bother me, it was that the match was mostly about striking. Missed strikes, counter-strikes, strikes being reversed into moves, elaborate strike sequences. That poses a couple problems, the first being that I don't think either guy is a particularly great striker. Black will hit a few now and then that look good and those two Black Mass at the end were suuuper crisp (first one especially), but he's not really the guy I want to see in a match largely built around that facet of pro-wrestling. I mean, it’s unfair to compare him to a Shibata or Suzuki let alone a fucking Ishikawa or Ikeda, because at the end of the day this is not Battlarts and it is in fact very much a monkey show, but still, that knee strike was cool and everything but Takeshi Ono will uppercut your nose through the ceiling and when you’ve seen that it’s sort of hard not to have the bar set somewhere around there permanently. The second problem is that it just came off way too choreographed. NXT are usually really good at walking that modern juniors epic line without crossing all the way over into something I can't be bothered with, but this had too much of what I'm not into. I did like the early parts with Gargano coming off super cocky, like he had Black's number for everything, but before long all those reversals lost their charm and it crossed over into Stomp the Yard territory. 

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I liked this quite a bit even if the ending got a bit too hokey. Gargano working as a cocky heel was pretty interesting considering how great he usually is as a babyface. Black is usually just "good" but when he works with urgency here like he did against Almas in New Orleans he can be great. The match went on about 3-5 minutes longer than it needed to and Gargano losing completely removes what little credibility he had (with that hokey "I will absolve you of your sins" doing neither guy any favores), but most of this was a blast and full of action.

****1/2

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