Welcome to the “week 12 of the Wednesday Night Wars” edition of The Wrestling List. Let’s get right into my recapping of the happenings and random booking thoughts as we go along.
NXT opens up with the NXT championship on the line with Adam Cole defending against Finn Balor. We are commercial free here. Balor nails the sling blade but then catches a nasty super kick by Cole. Balor kicks out. Good stuff here in this match as expected. Cole and Balor both nail pele kicks on each other. A bunch of near falls follow. Balor nails the double dropkick in the corner. As he goes to the top rope, Cole kicks him off to the floor. Cole goes for Panama sunrise on the floor but Balor counters with a backdrop. Balor then dropkicks into the barrier corner taking out the corner of people sitting there along with Cole. They are really loving this corner barrier spot lately,. LOL. Balor lands coup de grace and looks to be about to put Cole away but he is distracted. Up on the stage is Johnny Gargano. Cole hits Balor low and then pins Balor to retain. The story is now that Johnny Gargano is coming for revenge. He gets a chair and Balor starts to beg away. Johnny starts wearing out Balor with the chair. Johnny Payback is wearing him out. Good stuff here. Another chair shot sends Balor into that same barrier of people in the crowd taking out the barrier and the people. This is becoming like the old days of the Spanish announce table on the main roster where you knew you weren’t safe around it and that it was going to be destroyed. LOL. Second match of the night is Damien Priest taking on Killian Dain. Priest wins the match by pinfall with the reckoning. We get the announcement that the Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic will be returning in 2020. Back to the ring with KUSHIDA taking on Cameron Grimes. Grimes gets the win by pinfall. Io Shirai takes on Santana Garrett and they were talking this match as a way of building to the next contender for the women’s title. With that, it has to be a Io win and it is. Io wins with the moonsault. Pete Dunne defeats Travis Banks next with the bitter end. Cathy Kelley here as she interviews Dakota Kai about the happenings of last week and the injury to her. Dakota goes around discussing that instead pointing out on who won the match between her and Mia. She says she is after the NXT women’s championship. It’s main event time with Shayna defending against Rhea Ripley. Loving the old school walk through the back with the champion with the old music from the 90’s playing. Always thought that was cool back in the day and still is now. This match has a big fight feel. After about five minutes, Duke and Shafir get involved but Rhea takes them out. Their distraction is just enough to get Shayna back on offense. Shayna then stomps Rhea’s arm into the steps. During the commercial break, Duke and Shafir put Rhea’s arm into the post. The ref then kicked both of them out of the ringside area sending them to the back. So, it is one on one from here. The story of the match now is can Rhea overcome this? Rhea lands a dropkick on Shayna but she kicked Shayna into the referee. Rhea hits the riptide and has the pin but the ref is down. Nasty bump on the floor by Rhea when she tries to land a somersault on to Shayna but Shayna moves. Shayna grabs a chair as the ref is still down. Shayna nails Rhea on the chair but Rhea is able to kick out as the ref got up. Shayna then hooks the submission finish as Rhea continues to try and battle out. As Rhea looks to be about out, the ref raises her arm to check her consciousness. As the arm goes to fall the first time, she defiantly grabs a hold of the ref’s shirt with an intense look right at in the ref’s eyes and powers out. She then hooks the submission on to Shayna. Rhea lands an avalanche riptide off of the second turnbuckle for the pinball. Rhea Ripley is the new NXT women’s champion. Big moment at Full Sail. The over one year reign of Shayna’s is over. The ring fills up for the celebration of Rhea as she is hoisted up on shoulders to celebrate as we go off the air.
AEW opens up immediately into a match to counter NXT with their big opener. AEW opens with Lucha Brothers against Kenny Omega and Hangman Page. Lucha Brothers end up winning the match. The post match is the story as Omega and Page start shoving each other. We cut backstage to see Pac calling out Omega for what he is about to do. He opens a locker room door showing Nakazawa sitting with his back to the door listening to music. Pac shuts the door and Omega runs from the ring. As Omega gets to the room, there is no one in there. Omega ends up getting attacked by The Lucha Brothers. Page shows back up to help him. Page and Omega then start searching the hallways looking for Nakazawa. Next up is Darby Allin and Cody against The Butcher and The Blade with the Bunny. They are really pushing that “since she got the haircut, we saw a transformation” line with Allie. LOL. They kept repeating that on commentary last week too. She continues to distract during the match helping her team out and save them from losing. Allin hits the coffin drop on the apron on the Butcher. Cody then finishes off The Blade in the ring with the pinfall. Women’s division is up with Awesome Kong arriving with Brandi Rhodes and Melanie Cruise. Curious to see how this goes as they have done some good story building videos of Brandi’s evolution as she builds an army named the Nightmare Collective. Kong wins a squash. They cut some of the opponent’s hair after the match. We see a sit-down interview with Jim Ross talking to Jungle Boy Jack Perry discussing the match with Chris Jericho. They discuss what it would be like for his dad to see him wresting the world champion. Every time I see him I just miss his dad. He looks so much like him. We go into the close of the first hour with Chris Jericho taking on Jungle Boy in a ten minute time limit match with Jericho saying he couldn’t last ten minutes with him. Jungle Boy is accompanied by Luchasaurus and Marco Stunt. Perry’s family is in the front row to watch and support. That tugged on the heart strings with it being his mom, sister, and grandmother. They can really make Jungle Boy here. Let’s hope they do it. Hagar gets involved on the floor at around the 3 minute mark into the match. Luchasaurus brawls with Hagar. Stunt tries to get involved but gets flattened by Hagar. The ref kicks everyone out of the match. They are all sent to the back. That leaves it one on one in the ring. Cool spot as Perry does a dive through the bottom rope on Jericho. Then, the second rope and followed by a dive over the top rope. Liked the three rope combination. Jericho misses the lionsault and then Perry nails one of his own. Jericho starts to get control as we get deeper into the ten minute time limit. With a. minute and a half left, Jericho hooks the walls. Perry tries to get to the ropes and nearly gets there. With about 40 seconds left, Jericho pulls him back and sits down on the walls. Perry is able to hang on and makes it to the time limit. Jericho thought he had him and demands another five minutes. Ok, now Perry has to win this match with that heel tactic. Two near falls by Perry. Jericho bails out and takes the belt walking up the ramp leaving. Jericho leaves while Perry is giving him the “this close’ sign. Jericho returns during the picture in picture commercial throwing a tantrum and throwing chairs. Jericho has words with Perry’s sister at ringside as Jericho continues to be irate over the match. Tony talks to Jericho up on the stage. Jericho says I told you that Jungle Boy couldn’t beat me and he didn’t. Tony reminds him that you didn’t say that. You said he couldn’t last ten minutes with you and he did. Jericho turns the conversation to Moxley and the invitation to him to join them. He continues to hype up Moxley. Kris Statlander against Britt Baker is next. Winner of this faces the champion for the title on New Year’s night. Quite the day for Baker to even get to this show as she was posting about her travel delays all day. I laughed at the Join Dark Order promo text that popped up on the screen during the match with the commentators saying well, all right. LOL. Clever way to continue the Dark Order stuff. Baker countered the lariat into a submission attempt. Statlander is able to pick Baker up off the mat powering her up. She nails a modified tombstone piledriver for the win. It will be Statlander against Riho on the New Year’s edition of AEW Dynamite. Tony interviews Statlander on the floor. Brandi walks out on the stage interrupting it. She walks out with a mic to interview Statlander. She asks if Statlander is with them or not. Statlander gives a no. Kong and Cruise arrive while Brandi nails Statlander with her shoe from behind. Backstage segment with Spears and Tully where they talk about finding Spears the right tag team partner to challenge in the tag team division. Main event time with The Bucks against SCU for the tag team titles. SCU pulls out the win to retain. We still have five minutes left here in the show so waiting on some post match activity here. Here we go. A bunch of guys show up looking like the Black Scorpion straight out of WCW 1990. Sting. Sting. Listen to me Sting. Sorry, I’m back from 1990. Oh, they’re called the creepers apparently. LOL. It’s The Dark Order. They attack both the Bucks and SCU. The ones they recruited last week have joined and are in on the attack. Omega hits the ring and he is taken down quick. Cody and Dustin get involved and the numbers get them too. This is about the size of the 1998 nWo at this point with this beatdown. LOL. It’s probably Scott Norton, Nick Patrick, Horace Hogan, Mike Wallstreet, and others under masks. LOL. They leave everyone laying in the ring and the Dark Order ends the show.
Ratings for Wednesday night. NXT prevails. Last week was a tie at 778,000 viewers. This week saw NXT climb up to 795,000 viewers. AEW fell down to 683,000 viewers. NXT also won the 18-49 demo with a 0.27 to a 0.25. With AEW being off next week for Christmas, it will be interesting to see what the rating is on New Year’s. AEW was pushing that New Year’s show pretty heavy. I was also watching the NBA on TNT last night and there were promos for January 1 so it is getting pushed heavy. NXT will be on next week with a show of matches that have been taped in advance. So, NXT will run unopposed on Christmas night.
Match of the Night: Shayna Baszler against Rhea Ripley on NXT
Show of the Night: NXT
Line of the Night: “And she doesn’t work by the hour either.” Jim Ross calling Awesome Kong ending the match early. Laughed at that line.
Not sure what I will do with the List over the next week with Christmas. There won’t be much to cover so I may just land one somewhere in the mix of it. Have a great weekend!
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