rolling Jericho calls The New Day trap queens 2016

*I* thought

yeah cena has absolutely mastered the finisher-heavy dramatic kickout-heavy wwe main event style match, and the match with aj was as good as that form gets, but i do understand people getting a little tired with the form itself

I would think it would be really worth Cena getting a new finisher for one of these event matches, like when Bryan won his first title at SummerSlam with a running knee he had never done before.

^^Totally agree, and it's an interesting thing to think about: what would be a suitable late-career new finisher for John Cena?

A new submission maybe, like when taker started using the triangle choke (I cant remember the name taker used). He isn't much of a striker or kicker and he already does a lot of power moves like the occasional powerbomb.

give him the Burning Hammer as a kind of modified AA. the transformation into spot-heavy mutant indy demi-god would be complete

just watched that Miz promo back again. really interesting time for someone to cut that promo and Miz was really the perfect guy to do it considering his history, his style and his talking ability.

the wider debate about concussions, the constant and massive injury list, not to mention the aesthetic merits of the current in-house go-go-go indy bombfest style - so many reasons why this is an important conversation to be having rn. surely they've got to start thinking about reining it back in pretty soon and teaching the fans to like slower, more methodical matches.

It would have to mutate into another thing altogether, you'd have to kill me before I watched another raw dominated by people only wrestling like sheamus.

well there is a middle ground between the two positions. if you think about the mid '80s thru mid '90s in the U.S. guys were mostly working a way safer style (with notable exceptions like Foley and Vader I guess). i don't look at the great stuff that Flair, Steamboat, Hart, Michaels, Austin, Sting etc. were doing in those years and feel that it was unsustainable in quite the same way as i do watching guys now.

i'm not advocating that people start wrestling like Dory Funk Jr. or anything, just that they stop bumping quite so hard all the fuckin time. it's no wonder their bodies are crumbling. especially the guys who've got 10-15 years on the clock already from the indys who are coming in and wrestling like 25 year olds.

Michaels being the misnomer there, as he bumped like a boss and had an injury a year since he was in the rockers.

Yeah fair enough Michaels not a good example especially. I'm not trying to argue that those guys were 100% safe or immune from injuries, obviously wrestling is still wrestling. But there used to be ways of working safer without necessarily making everything boring

Yeah, I get ya.

I think a lot of guys are close to that, and if half the roster just gave up doing suicide dives in every match it would instantly solve a lot of problems. (and one of those problems is not injury related and instead about how boring suicide dives are now)

yeah. honestly i GET why someone thinks a powerbomb into the wall is better than a whip into the wall aesthetically but they both accomplish the same thing

That'll change now, I think, kind of like how chairs to the back replaced chairs to the head.

Gulak vs ZSJ from this week's CWC was something else. All action, amazing chain wrestling, and not a single high spot!

tbf dean ambrose's suicide dive is probably the safest move in wrestling

A question:

I've always read about how wrestling attendances throughout the years have been topped up by free tickets, often to make filmed shows look popular. I've just been reading the excellent observer roundup thing on reddit where a guy is summing up meltzers 90s papers daily and it said wm8 could have had 8000+ free ticket holders in attendance.

So what happens with these? Surely people don't regularly turn up in the hopes of getting a freebie, at least not in those numbers. Do/did companies then have to actively promote the free tickets? Does it still happen and if it does, anyone ever thought of trying to figure out how to be one of those to get in free?

i assumed it was radio/corporate giveaways etc

i don't really know though, it's a massive amount of tickets, you'd think if everyone knew how easy they were to get free they'd never pay for them

I've always wondered about this too. I also assumed it was media giveaways, youth groups, etc.

I've been meaning to check out the reddit guy's WOL summaries, I've been following Scott Keith's similar roundup of 80's Meltzer and it's pretty entertaining.

they're good, the guy generally knows the right amount of interjecting, though he can sometimes waver in that. there's always the fear that he's going to get a big head and make himself the main event, because reddit

he also does it literally every day and it's easy to get way behind

but they're great definitely read them

it also led me to the onita/funk time bomb match, which is probably now my favorite match ever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPbn8Hsrv1g

So what happens with these? Surely people don't regularly turn up in the hopes of getting a freebie, at least not in those numbers.

I can't remember who said it or where I read it or heard it, but I recall talk about how the Royal Rumble in San Antonio a few years after that was heavily papered; they'd only sold about 40,000 or so of the 60,000 seats, so they were apparently giving away free tickets at 7-Elevens in the city on the day of the show.

It's more a case of just shoving casuals in to fill the seats, I would think, as I'd imagine the more serious fans had already paid up. They didn't run big dome shows very often, after all, so it's hard to judge the popularity and whether it's worth waiting for a comp.

Totally different situation today, of course - though I could easily imagine scoring a freebie to a weekly taping would be fairly easy compared to a PPV.

worth grabbing yourself a full set of Observer Newsletters if that's your thing imo, the recaps on Reddit / blogofdoom are v. good but the newsletters themselves are immensely readable and full of little tidbits that compensate for the total lack of proofing and editing

was reading one from (i think) some time in 1995 the other day when Meltzer is talking about Rey Misterio Jr. and explaining how this guy will be a massive crossover superstar and basically upset all preconceived notions of what a jr heavyweight can be ito drawing for a US promotion. Meltzer otm

xxp yeaaah Onita is so dope, he really understood that the essence of those horrorshow death matches was building the whole thing around two or three obvious major spots and generating tension around them, getting the audience to buy into the near misses rather than just spamming the garbage hardcore spots

lol the reddit recaps are in 1992 and every single week right now includes "dave goes on AGAIN about how great this rey misterio jr kid is"

I totally agree re: Onita, his matches were full of cool psychology leading up to the big spots.

It's off-topic I suppose, but this v. famous Onita vs Hayabusa match from '95 is one of my all-time favourites, and there's never a bad time to link to it/watch it, so here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycb4R_dQkWQ

The exploding cage is really impressive, and everything that follows looks like a post-nuclear apocalypse. I love everything about this match.

nice, not sure i've seen that one! will watch later for sure. also don't see how it qualifies as off-topic seeing as we don't have a dedicated thread for people to pimp awesome matches (something we should do more of in fact)

a dedicated thread to posting awesome matches from wrestling history

slowly coming to the conclusion that i just don't gaf about modern wrestling

Raw, SD, NXT, Cruiserweight Classic, NJPW (G1, Super Jrs), Lucha Underground and so on and so on

there is SO MUCH WRESTLING rn and somehow I find it difficult to focus on one thing and ignore the others. totally overwhelming. there were some books i was planning on reading this summer

i pretty much pared down to nxt, cwc and ppvs and even then summerslam weekend almost killed me

Kevin Steen is WWE champion and Chris Jericho is doing his best ever character as his mate.

It is really easy to cherry pick what is worth paying attention to in modern wrestling, I've got it down to about an hour or two a week. The above is definitely one of the things worth my time.

that is cool for sure but otoh Triple H and Stephanie McMahon are still by a distance the most important characters on WWE tv and that is a huge problem. i mean why even bother at this point? for the awesome matches?

I guess I feel kinda out of step with the general consensus wrestling hivemind rn. matches that other people have been pure wetting themselves over as all-time wrestling classics this year (let's say Zayn / Owens at Battleground, or any of the Styles/Cena series, or anything whatsoever involving Balor, just for example) have done very, very little for me. like, i recognise from a distance that these are "SUPERB" from a technical standpoint but it's the same deal with the Cruiserweight Classic - how fckin easy it to have a "4*+ match" in this day and age (a clue: it is very fuckin easy)

I kinda feel the same way, not necessarily the specifics but definitely the feeling of being overwhelmed by the options, and getting burned out on quality - if every match is supposedly objectively fantastic, it gets pretty samey after a while.

On a related note, I wish the WWE Network had a weekly recap show more like in the old days, with WWF Mania, rather than the half-hour This Week show which is good but too short, pretty much skips the mid-card and includes unnecessary extracurricular stuff like media appearances blah.

More greatness from the CWC ... Tozawa vs Metalik was the match of the night, but Ibushi vs Kendrick was great too and featured the WWE debut of the BURNING HAMMER &$&#!!! Like most Ibushi matches, he completely ignored the body part he's supposed to be selling (in this case the neck) once it was time to get his stuff in, which really hurt the match IMO. I've been avoiding all CWC-related spoilers, but I assume that Kendrick has won himself a regular job with WWE once all this is over.

i think these matches were shot under 7 days ago, because i accidentally opened the spoiler-filled bracket last cwc and it was up-to-date with last week's ep. i also think the semis and finals are live???

Ah so Kendrick has been training wrestlers in NXT and on "Total Divas" (a show I've never watched), and was already announced as part of the cruiserweight division on last week's RAW (which I didn't see). Good for him.

Ibushi didn't seem too interested in his inspirational comeback story during their match, but it still came across well on TV thanks to the video packages and commentary.

but I assume that Kendrick has won himself a regular job with WWE once all this is over

He was announced last week for the Raw cruiserweight division, so you're in luck.

Haven't seen this week or last week's CWC or NXT due to life and stuff, might catch up a bit this evening.

xpost missed you already said it, dang

has there been a single match in the CWC where the odds-on favorite didn't win? this is getting annoying

perkins swann is the closest thing to a tossup so far but you know the winner's just gonna lose to ibushi anyway

perkins over gargano was not the odds-on favourite... also i am not that concerned about a lack of upsets really, as long as the winners make logical sense.

Good stuff as usual from the CWC last night. Noam Dar finally justified his spot in round three by having a great match. I was less into Perkins vs Swann, but obviously I'm missing something in Swann that the Full Sail crowd can't get enough of.

Predictions for the final week -- I think it's obvious that the winner has to be somebody they have under contract, which as of now means Perkins or Gran Metalik. WWE is always looking for Hispanic stars, and Perkins is great but maybe not "face of the cruiserweight division on RAW" great, so I'm predicting Gran Metalik over Kota Ibushi in the finals.

full sail crowd has probably watched some of swann's stuff on other promotions, because he is good but i haven't really seen him crack it open on nxt or cwc yet. from what i can tell though he's kind of one of those new-school wrestlers who's a little bit ironic about the whole thing (chuck taylor, the young bucks, kenny omega, etc.) which isn't to take away from his incredible ability, but it makes it SLIGHTLY harder to buy him sometimes as a guy having the fight of his life.

there's a highspots interview series (that replaced the kevin steen show when he signed w/ wwe) called best friends with chuck and trent, you can watch the 5-min previews on youtube. there's a fairly telling one with rich swann where he says he hates choreographing a whole fight in advance, he kinda just wants to do dance moves instead. (then he proceeds to fake-call like 5 minutes of a match off the top of his head which is kind of... really impressive). anyway i like the guy. depending on how they handle the cruiserweight division i think he could really be incredible because he's very very very entertaining. i just hope that it doesn't try to drag him into some sort of self-serious universe that he doesn't fit into (this is totally going to happen isn't it)

I completely agree. He's entertaining, super athletic, and can have a good match with just about everyone, but not a guy you want to build the division around. Which is fine! They've been emphasizing all the different wrestling styles on display throughout the tournament, which is great for building characters in a division they're trying to build from scratch. I'd like to be optimistic about it being totally unlike anything that's ever been on RAW ... but at the same time, I won't be surprised if by week three we're seeing distraction roll up finishes and cruiserweight handicap matches vs Braun Stroman.

reminding myself of what actually happened with the 97/98 revival of the light heavyweight championship, i'm left wondering what exactly they were trying to do with it - was it intended as just a showcase for taka after he was so over in that match with great sasuke, or what?

looking into it a bit more, i see the original plan was as a showcase for sasuke before he started mouthing off about how he was going to win it. but yeah i don't suppose i should work too hard in trying to discern the logic behind wwe's various aborted half-hearted attempts to appeal to foreign markets

Holy fuck punk fights tonight

lol

fully expected, still difficult to watch

Catching up on the cwc and Metalik-tozawa was great. Wish they wouldn't use the generic Japanese music for ibushi though. The cwc is like the least racist thing the wwe have done in ages, so little things like this annoy me.

The cwc is like the least racist thing the wwe have done in ages, so little things like this annoy me.

It's still less racist than the new Nakamura shirt. It was REEEEEALY uncomfortable seeing him wear it backstage a couple of weeks ago.

Can you post an img link?