TAG WARS 2008

April 18, 2008

So, there’s this fellow in ROH named Tyler Black that all the kids seem to be digging these days. After a good three years of not really following ROH all that much I’ve decided to bite the bullet and see what all the fuss is about.

Pelle Primeau . . . is forced to think of a reason to tell his doctor how exactly he managed getting rope-burn on his junk.

Rhett Titus . . . is the moon walking chopping amalgamation of Rick Rude and Michael Hayes, and he rules for it!

Kota Ibushi . . . puts on a much better showing for himself here than he did during his trip to New Japan.

PELLE PRIMEAU/MITCH FRANKLIN/ERNIE OSIRIS vs. DANNY DANIELS/MICHAEL ELGIN/MICHAEL NAKAZAWA

As far as openers goes, this isn’t the best, nor is it the worst. The ROH students and spunky and Daniels and Elgin are surly enough to get the crowd behind the students. It helps that Elgin is a beast, especially compared to Primeau and Franklin, which allows for them to take a few big bumps from him. Nakazawa isn’t bad, but he comes off like a pretender compared to his partners, his only real contribution is trying to give Primeau rope-burn on his crotch. Surliness wins out for a while, and the Primeau outsmarts Elgin and makes a tag to give the babyfaces a little hot run, culminating with a flying stunner to Elgin to give the students the win.

RHETT TITUS vs. SILAS YOUNG

Silas Young might just be the most nondescript non-student member of the ROH roster. Aside from his choice of using “Don’t Stop Believin” for his entrance theme, and his contrived headstand to springboard moonsault finisher, there’s nothing at all remarkable from him during the match. The few noteworthy spots from him, such as the Northern Lights suplex and the Finlay Roll were done with Rhett doing 90% of the work to pull them off. Rhettski the Jettski puts on a fine showing here, his wrestling itself isn’t all that special, but he’s got the personality and character to overcome it. He’ll hit Silas with a chop, stop to gloat, and then moonwalks back to the corner for another chop. He’ll hook up Young for a suplex, and pause for a Rick Rude hip swivel. Hell, the first thing out of Lenny’s mouth after the finish is that Titus put on a good showing even though he lost.

JIGSAW vs. JOEY MATTHEWS

There’s a trios match between Matthews’ and Jigsaw’s respective factions the following night, so there’s at least a reason for this match to happen. But, there’s no reason for it to be mostly a squash for Matthews until Jigsaw gets a flash pin with a crucifix. Granted, Jigsaw isn’t exactly a top of the line member of the ROH roster, but he ought to be high enough on the pecking order to look good against a part time roster member, former WWE superstar or not. Jigsaw takes his beating like a man, and there’s a cool moment when he gets some revenge on Matthews by tying his arms in the ring apron and chopping him, but that’s about all there is to say about Jigsaw without getting on a soapbox about him losing the mask. It’d be one thing if Matthews took Jigsaw lightly and Jigsaw responded by showing him what exactly he’s capable of, en route to winning, but this was the polar opposite of that.

NIGEL McGUINESS/CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI vs. KEVIN STEEN/EL GENERICO

This accomplishes its two main goals, if gives Claudio his title shot (Nigel promised him one if he helped him win this match) and it heats up the Nigel/Steen feud heading into their ROH Title match the following night. So it does what it’s expected to do, which is all that you can really ask for a match like this. The fans don’t really get behind Generico all that much during the heat portion, partially because Claudio is also popular and they want him to get a title shot as well as see Steen beat Nigel. It doesn’t help that Nigel and Claudio weren’t especially heelish with working him over, it’s expected from Claudio to a point, although it’s not like he doesn’t know how to heel things up, but it’s disappointing to see Nigel following suit. Considering how good he can be at picking apart an arm, it’s weird that Nigel didn’t go that route, especially since he busts up Steen’s shoulder to take him out of the match so that Claudio can finish Generico with the Ricola Bomb.

Even though the fans didn’t seem to care too much, Generico is good when he’s getting worked over. His bumping from Claudio’s European Uppercuts is great, and he makes a couple of Ricky Morton-ish attempts to tag in Steen that don’t work out. His reaction to Claudio’s Giant Swing is perfect, and he takes a sadistic bump when Claudio catches him with the Uppercut while he’s airborne. The heat segment pays off when Steen gets tagged and Steen finally gets his hands on Nigel. It’s hard to say if there was really anything they could have done to make the match marginally better given that they were basically booked into a corner.

NECRO BUTCHER vs. DELIRIOUS

They’ve got a few amusing tricks up their sleeves, but for the most part this is rather mindless, they spend most of the match brawling around the arena and stop brawling so they can hurl chairs into the ring. Delirious trying to win via small package and O’Connor roll while they were in the crowd was a nice touch, as was their use of the ringside staff, especially Necro slamming the timekeeper into Delirious. But those amusing and inventive things are the exception rather than the rule. After spending so much time filling the ring with chairs, they each take a couple of big bumps onto the pile, but, aside from Necro’s trademark bodyslam spot and the backbreaker he uses to win they don’t use them to do anything else. There’s a nice tease of Delirious using them to assist in Shadows Over Hell, but Gowen puts the kibosh on that. I’ve said it before, it’s easy to respect them for putting their bodies through this sort of pain, and I do, but I think it’s a shame that they felt that this was the sort of match they needed to have.

CHRIS HERO/BRENT ALBRIGHT vs. JACK EVANS/RUCKUS

The best parts of this were when Hero and Albright were destroying Evans, because that was the only time this was really believable. Hero and Albright are sadistic enough to believably want to torture Evans like that, and Evans has proven before that he’s resilient enough to take that sort of beating and not stay down. It’s the rest of the match that’s a bit hard to swallow. Yes, the whole concept of the Vulture Squad is that they attack from the air, but they don’t need multiple rotations and flips for every flying move that they do. The finish sees Ruckus hit Hero with a single pele kick and finish him off with a corkscrew senton. Given that the finish came on the heels of Hero accidentally hitting Albright with a Yakuza kick, it’d have been more sensible for Albright to take the fall and use Hero’s kick to explain why he stays down. I’m wondering if Jigsaw wouldn’t make a better partner for Evans, since Ruckus works a style very similar to Jack, but isn’t nearly as good, and his non flying stuff wasn’t terribly impressive either. He’s not the worst wrestler I’ve ever seen or anything, but heaven help us if someone books Ruckus vs. Kenzo Suzuki.

JAY BRISCOE/MARK BRISCOE vs. AUSTIN ARIES/KOTA IBUSHI

If anyone was going to put on an insane tag match that got the Detroit fans rockin’ and rollin’ it was going to be these four, this also has the bonus of being very smartly worked, more often than not. The only real mark against the match are some of Ibushi’s flying spots, and he’s nowhere near as frustrating as he was in the 5/09 New Japan tag match. The biggest offender of Ibushi’s is the missed flying moonsault turned into standing moonsault. Yes, it’s a gorgeous spot and he pulls if off almost seamlessly, but it’s totally predicated on Ibushi’s opponent moving out of the way of the first moonsault, and it’s just not believable that it’s going to happen every time. If it does, why doesn’t his opponent just roll a couple of more times so that Ibushi misses both moonsaults?

Once you get passed the few contrived spots, you’ll find a damn good tag match going on. Instead of the usual feeling out portion that just eats up time before the heat segment on Ibushi, they use it to lay some groundwork for the story they tell. Aries has plenty of experience against the Briscoe Bros, which is probably why he’s teaming with Ibushi to begin with, so Aries uses that to his advantage and outsmarts both Jay and Mark several times. The Briscoes don’t just work over Ibushi because he’s the guy with the big buzz on him, they do it because they have to, because they’re not able to get Aries in any real trouble. The Briscoes’ control segment on Ibushi is best described as a Midnights/Fantastics formula with a Dragon Gate pace. They utterly dismantle Ibushi with double teams and knock Aries off the apron every now and then to distract the ref and keep him from helping. The fans, who seem to be perfectly happy just enjoying the action, even get into their heel act a bit and start booing when they switch without tagging.

It gets even better when Aries gets the hot tag, because they don’t forget about the groundwork they’ve laid, Aries is the proverbial house of fire and he’s still easily dealing with both Jay and Mark, not getting ambushed. He even gives them a double team at one point by himself. After Aries’ tag the match falls apart to an extent, the idea of tagging is mostly out the window and all four of them try at various points to win, but it’s not strictly a spotfest, because the idea of Aries being the strong link is kept in mind. The Briscoes finally get one over on Aries by hitting their Doomsday Device on him (a split second before Ibushi can stop them) and taking him out of the match and allowing them to finish off Ibushi with the spike Jay Driller. Just to top things off, the angle advancement with Aries and Age of the Fall isn’t until after the match has ended, rather than having Lacey or Jacobs interfere to continue the will he/won’t he storyline of Aries joining. ***3/4

JIMMY JACOBS/TYLER BLACK vs. ALEX SHELLEY/CHRIS SABIN

It’s too bad that this had to follow the Briscoe Bros tag match. Otherwise, it’d have probably been a good main event. It’s got the tools to be match of the night, but it doesn’t come together as well as the semi main event. The big reason is that they don’t tell their story nearly as well, despite having over thirty minutes to do so, and having nearly five years of history as a backdrop. So, at its core, this is little more than both teams busting out all kinds of flashy spots and unique double teams.

The first ten or so minutes are completely controlled by the Machine Guns, which is fine, they’re the ones making their big return to ROH and that’s who the crowd is fully behind. But as the match goes on, the Machine Guns are still in firm control and it gets to the point that they’re putting sympathy on Jacobs and Black. There’s even a point where Sabin is stretching out Black and Black gets his foot on the ropes, but Shelley distracts the ref so that Sabin can continue stretching him out. Finally, Age of the Fall gets a chance to control the action, and they seem to have the right idea, keeping the fans strongly behind Shelley and Sabin by heeling things up as much as they can. But, it doesn’t stretch out as long as it should, it’s not even half as long as the Guns’ opening segment.

From there on the match basically degenerates into a giant spotfest of double teams and flying. All four get their chance to impress in various ways, but it’s sorely lacking in the story structure that Aries, Ibushi, and the Briscoes had in their match. That’s not say it’s devoid of good wrestling, they’ve got their share of good and smart moments, Shelley and Jacobs’ sequence of End Time to Border City stretch (actually it was the Crippler Crossface), and back to End Time was especially nice. The finish is practically flawless, with Jacobs countering Shelley’s Schwein into the End Time and finally getting a win over him. But, good things like that are counterbalanced by silly things like Black jumping at Sabin and being caught in position for a vertical suplex, and the Guns doing an ungodly amount of single and double superkicks, but AOTF show zero sign of any cumulative effect of that. Its still got the wall-to-wall action that the ROH fans want, and it’s hard to fault them for giving the fans what they want, but it’s too bad they couldn’t top the Briscoes match when it had the chance to. ***

Conclusion: The last two matches are the big reason to pick this show up. It’s mostly solid and watchable, but it comes off feeling like they’re just warming up for the following night in Chicago (which is recurring trend with the first night of ROH double shots).