Welcome to the “week 22 of the Wednesday night wars” edition of The Wrestling List. Live typing as this show goes on and recapping the happenings while telling my booking and random thoughts along the way.
AEW is on the air from Kansas City, Missouri. We are starting hot with the 30 minute ironman match between Pac and Omega. Good stuff to start here. We’re going right into it. They go 0-0 for a while with falls. The first fall goes to Omega after Pac pulled out a chair from under the ring and nailed Omega to get DQ’d. The Bucks run out to help. A 30 second time out is called which was announced as the normal break in between falls. After the 30 seconds, Pac hits a 450 for the pinfall to even it back up. That was the Triple H/Rock ironman match from 2000 strategy of get DQ’d for something vicious but get ahead in the overall match cause you did big damage and it only costs you one fall. The match gets near the end of the time limit and they are still tied 1-1. Bucks have remained at ringside cheering on Omega. Pac locks in the submission as the clock nears the end and Omega is able to hold on as the time expires. Tied at 1. Pac then nails the ref out of frustration. It is announced that the match will continue under sudden death rules and a new ref arrives. First one with a fall wins the match. Omega is able to win the match in a short amount of time. Tony interviews Pac after the match about the loss. Orange Cassidy walks out on the ramp and he and Pac face off. Pac then attacks Cassidy. Next is Jurassic Express against Inner Circle. Fun match here. Finish has Guevara looking to use a weapon but Darby Allin arrives to pull it away from him. That distraction leads to Jungle Boy finishing off Guevara with a rana for the pinfall. Inner Circle tries to attack Darby after the match but Darby gets the better of them. Time for Best Friends with Orange Cassidy taking on Butcher and Blade with the Bunny. The Ali and Orange Cassidy face off in the ring was fun. She takes his sunglasses and puts them on. He takes her bunny ears and puts them on. It was a fun face-off which the crowd popped for and I enjoyed too. Best Friends get the pinfall victory. Best Friends are interviewed by Tony in the ring and one of them says “Tony, Tony, Tony, it feels good” and I popped for that cause I’m probably the only one that got that 90’s reference. LOL. Tony announces that it will be Orange Cassidy against Pac at Revolution. Interesting. I wonder if this is when they launch Cassidy into something more serious. Four way women’s match next with Sakazaki vs. Shanna vs. Shida vs. Swole. Shida gets the win here. Dark Order promo next. Don’t care. LOL. Next. JR with a sit-down interview with Omega, Page, and the Bucks. This is good stuff here. They talk about the tag team titles with JR saying that it is surprising that the Bucks have yet to win the tag titles to which they reluctantly agree of yeah, we don’t get it either with what has taken us so long. JR points out how uncomfortable Page looks being here for this interview. Bucks say that they will win the tag team titles and then they will all be friends because the Elite is the most important thing. Page takes opposition to that saying he doesn’t even want to be part of the Elite to which the Bucks say that Page would be nothing without them saying he was a jobber in Ring Of Honor. All of this is not setting well with Page. Omega just sits there stuck in an awkward spot throughout not saying anything. This sure makes it look like the Bucks may be turning heel here. Definite heel tendencies in that interview. Main event segment time. Time for the weigh in with Moxley and Jericho. Oh wow, Tony just introduced Gary Michael Capetta. WOW! This is awesome. My late 80’s/early 90’s WCW fandom is bouncing up and down hearing his voice again. Loving Jericho’s entrance here. Lot of fun energy to it. Jericho is already throwing heel lines at Capetta on WCW. LOL. Capetta doing a fun job of playing off of it. Well, this is at least something different here with a weigh in. The brawling contract signings for WWE get old after a while. You see it booked and say ok, talk for a little bit and brawl. LOL. So, this is at least a fresh look at a way to do something similar to a contract signing. Moxley has weighed in. Now, Jericho is doing all the heel stalling tactics. Now, the building is doing a Kansas City sports chant at him. Jericho is having fun playing off of that and going back at them. I think it has been five minutes since Moxley weighed in. Jericho steps off not weighing in again and Moxley headbutts him. Inner Circle all piles on him. Jericho is bleeding. Not sure if that was hard way or not. Dustin shows up to go at Hagar. Jericho is back up and now him and Inner Circle are still piling on Moxley. We cut to the lobby area and Dustin and Hagar are going at it. The last time we had something like this we had……I spot Dippin’ Dots again!!! LOL. That is what I was looking for. And JR just now said, “stay away from the DIPPIN’ DOTS!” I popped for that! LOL. Dustin just got thrown into the Dippin’ Dots set up. JR: The Dippin’ Dots didn’t do anything to anybody. Tazz: That’s heat. Here comes Darby Allin getting in the fight in the ring to a big pop. Guevara beaks the skateboard over Allin. And now we have Jericho and Moxley to themselves and they start brawling. As Moxley is about to take down Jericho, Guevara nails him from behind. The numbers game catches up to Moxley again who hits Moxley’s own finisher on the weigh machine. That is how the show ends with Inner Circle prevailing. That was an awesome closing segment. Loved all of that!
NXT goes on the air from Full Sail and this crowd already sounds louder than last week. I felt like there wasn’t much energy in the building last week but this feels better. We cut to outside seeing Regal welcoming Charlotte who has arrived to compete. Opening match has Dominik arriving and crowd chanting with the music. Ok, here we go with crowd energy. Dominik takes on Cameron Grimes. Daiman Priest runs in late in the match and nails Dominik in the knee on the apron with what looked like a nightstick. Ref is counting and Dominik is struggling to get up. He slides back in the ring just in time at nine to avoid the countout. Grimes nails him immediately as he slides in and gets the pinball. Backstage to Regal being interviewed. Aww, this would have been Cathy Kelley’s spot. We miss you Cathy Kelley! Regal announces next week that qualifying matches will start happening to determine the challenger for the women’s title at NXT Takeover Tampa. Finn Balor has arrived in the next segment. He’s on the mic saying how he has put everything on the map and done everything. He starts talking about who is the next person to get the Finn rub. Ohhh, IMPERIUM has shown up. They say that the UK champion, WALTER would like to send his regards. Finn starts attacking both IMPERIUM members. IMPERIUM numbers catch up to Finn and the two on one is taking down Finn. I’m here for a Finn/WALTER match. That will be fun. Xia Li is up next taking on Mia Yim. Match goes on but early on Dakota Kai arrives. She reminds Yim of the time that she stole her spot in Wargames and how it is time for payback. That allows the distraction for Li to get the rollup win on Yim. After the match, Raquel gets in the ring and takes out both of them in the ring as King slayer, Dakota Kai watches from the ramp. Next segment is up and it is Austin Theory taking on Ciampa. Ciampa wins with fairytale ending. Gargano runs in in street clothes attacking Ciampa. Ciampa is able to fight back but Theory gets up at this point wanting back in the Ciampa fight. Ciampa nails Theory but that little time allows Gargano to land a super kick on Ciampa. Crowd is totally against Gargano here. Gargano leaves Ciampa laying and then sits on the apron doing mock clapping of what Ciampa does. This will clearly be Takeover Tampa. Ok well, now we have a mixed crowd chant. Some cheering Gargano and some not. Bronson Reed takes on Killian Dain. Dain wins the match with the Vader bomb. Forgotten Sons vs. Grizzled Young Veterans is up in tag team action. Veterans get the pinfall victory. Backstage to an interview with Tegan Nox talking about the cage match next week between her and Dakota Kai next week. HERE FOR THAT! Speaking of cage matches, it will also be Velveteen Dream vs. Roderick Strong next week as well. Main event time with Charlotte returning to NXT to take on Bianca Belair. Thunderous “you don’t go here” chants at Charlotte backing up Bianca and that is awesome. Charlotte is even grinning at it. Crowd is really into this one. Good energy atmosphere to this match. We’ve got an overrun time for this match as we are past the two hour mark of the show. Charlotte gets the win with a spear and followed by natural selection. Good match here. After the match, Charlotte grabs a chair and goes in the ring for more damage. Rhea Ripley’s music hits and Charlotte continues the attack on Bianca. She puts Bianca’s ankle in the chair and stomps down on it followed by the figure four. Rhea is doing more with her entrance than she is with actually helping here. LOL. One thing I really liked here was that even with that music hitting, Charlotte had a look of I have a few seconds here to do damage before Rhea gets here. Most talent will just stop whatever they are doing when the music hits. She was in hurry mode of I can still do what I want to do and injure here before she gets here. Now, I don’t know what Rhea was doing. LOL. Technically, her and Bianca aren’t friends so she shouldn’t actually be in a rush to save her but at the same time, Rhea has had the you don’t come in here and attack “us” mentality of NXT. Don’t come in our house kind of thing. So, from a logic standpoint, if I’m Bianca and I’m about to get injured in the ring and I’m watching you make sure you are hitting your timing with your stomp on your entrance, I’m kind of annoyed. LOL.
Show of the Night: AEW
Match of the Night: 30 minute Ironman match between Omega and Pac from AEW.
Ratings: Both shows saw a little drop this week but the win goes again to AEW. AEW did 865,000 viewers which was down from last week’s 893,000. NXT did 717,000 viewers which was down from last week’s 794,000. Interesting that Charlotte didn’t move the needle at all with having someone main roster on the show. 18-49 demo had AEW with a 0.30 while NXT had a 0.23.
I watched a couple of matches of the WWE Super Showdown this afternoon. Not much on this lineup that I cared about so I tuned in and out. I only had a couple of matches I cared about. I tuned in to see Ricochet and Lesnar cause I wanted to see Ricochet get that big championship match moment. Well, he got squashed. What was the point in that? LOL. Why not have him go in there and get a run to where he has Brock on the ropes for a bit. I can understand wanting to make Brock look dominant but why not at least give Ricochet a nice run of a series of moves where Brock is getting more than he can handle for a minute or so. Nope, squashed in probably two minutes. That was disappointing. I tuned in also just to see if they were dumb enough to put the belt on Goldberg over the Fiend. The mess up on the Goldberg pyro wasn’t a good start. I assume that was a mess up cause the pyro that he normally walks into went off and he wasn’t there. Then, he walked up and just stood there awkwardly. So either they fired it early or he was late getting there. The last set of pyro went off as he was going down the ramp kicking and punching like normal. The Fiend no sells some spears including him setting up and looking at him. Goldberg looks shocked. Fiend gets the claw on at one point. Goldberg gets out of it and hits the jackhammer for the win. The match goes maybe 3 minutes and Goldberg is your new universal champion. I just knew it. So, they are dumb enough to do this. Let’s recap this run of The Fiend. Let’s think back to the cell with Seth Rollins where Rollins is hitting him with everything possible including every weapon you can find and The Fiend is no selling everything. I said at the time that they had booked themselves into a corner here to where now how do you ever possibly find a way to book him as beatable? It was silly with how they booked that match and they took a ton of heat over how bad it was booked. Fiend runs through others since then. Now, you have 53 year old Goldberg, who barely wrestles and one of his last go arounds had one of the worst matches in wrestling history, beat The Fiend. It’s really hard to feel bad for this company a lot of times when they have troubles like the last conference call where they are struggling with Network subscriber numbers. You just built this monster heel up to the point of where he is too unrealistic unbeatable and you have a 53 year old guy that never wrestles be the one to beat him. I’m sorry WWE. But you get what you deserve with backlash and numbers when you do dumb things like this. These are the days when we are thankful that AEW is around for competition cause we need someone to put pressure on them. I totally get these full time roster talents that get upset this time of year when they are working their brains out year round only to have these part timers show up at WrestleMania season and derail it all. Guess who has to carry the product when WrestleMania is over. The talent that get booked into oblivion every year so they can get the part timers on this show. I am not hating on the part timers cause I enjoy most of them. But there is a way to do it all. You can’t make your full time talent look like garbage at the expense of these part timers. If you want Goldberg on WrestleMania, put him on the show but he doesn’t need the championship match. This is two recent WrestleMania seasons where this has happened to a full time talent as champion. This also happened to Kevin Owens where Goldberg ran through him after he had been built as such a credible champion and I’m not sure he has ever recovered with momentum. I have said over and over for the last several years that this ranks up there with one of most talented rosters that this company has ever had. So, why can’t this company be having more success with this amount of talent? Case and point today. You can’t keep making the talent look like garbage and being fed to legends that are way past their prime. It makes the full timers look like a joke. And they’re not. They have an amazing talent pool right now. Vince McMahon can’t keep doing this and then act completely puzzled why fans aren’t interested and that the current talent is not full over like they should be. I tuned into this show because I just felt like this was going to happen and that Goldberg was going to win. It was like tuning into something you knew was going to be bad but you couldn’t take your eyes off of it. So, Goldberg is your Universal champion. All that work on The Fiend goes back to nothing. Just like when Bray Wyatt and The Wyatt Family were the most over in that company back years ago and they fed Bray to John Cena for three PPV’s in a row and they ruined Bray to the point of where the fans cared nothing about him anymore. Do not forget the one moment that year where the Wyatt Family and The Shield faced off on the ramp to the ring and the crowd was chanting this is awesome before they had even touched. That was how over both groups were. The Wyatt Family got ruined in the Cena feud. The Shield went into a feud with Evolution. The fans wanted the other. This Fiend reboot was the only way they have brought that character back and I think this made it just like anything else on the show. If you have Roman Reigns beat Bray, that’s fine. I know some fans will hate that too but that is your current big babyface on Smackdown and it is understandable. Reigns is your babyface monster and him taking down The Fiend would at least make sense. What likely happens from here is Goldberg loses the belt to Reigns. I just assume that. So, you had so little faith in Bray that you had to use Goldberg as a middle guy. Today was another example of what Vince does. Booking wrestling is not rocket science. Here in about six months, Vince will probably fire somebody else in the hierarchy when numbers are down while he sits around puzzled as to why the numbers are down. Eventually, you are going to run out of nostalgia to do.
Fun podcast this week with JR and Conrad talking about Wrestle War 1990 on the Grillin’ JR podcast. That was a show that I didn’t get to watch live at the time cause Comcast didn’t carry that one. This was back in the day when Comcast would pick and choose which PPV’s that they would air. Think about that. We would have to call Comcast and say are you going to carry this show? Most times it was no. I always dreaded that phone call. For reference on WCW for that year in order. No on Wrestle War. Yes, on Capitol Combat and The Great American Bash. No on Halloween Havoc and Starrcade. Yes, it’s crazy that I remember that. LOL. So, Wrestle War, I watched on home video when it was released a couple of months later as a kid. I always thought the show was solid but not one I went back and watched much. Bash 90 and Havoc 90 were the top WCW PPV’s of the year for me. Interesting to hear the backstory of this show cause as you may remember, WCW was having to work around the real life injury of Sting from Clash X where he accidentally nailed his knee on the cage. That required surgery. JR discussed that show and it sure sounded like originally it was going to be Sting/Flair and that Sting would win the belt there. I am a lot more happy with the fact that Sting won it at the Bash. That atmosphere for the Bash was way better for that title win. Was Luger always the option of who to replace Sting in that main event? Yes as far as the booking committee goes as they just didn’t seem to have any other idea. JR was big on putting anyone else in that match just for it to be different and give someone else a boost pointing out the amazing talent on that roster. Instead they rushed a Luger face turn out of nowhere and saying that the match didn’t do much for Luger. I will disagree with that cause I think that if you are rushing a face turn with Luger to where you are trying to get the crowd behind him, I think having Luger give up what was likely his win to go and help Sting on the floor sure helped get the crowd back with him quickly. Sting had made his way out to the ring on crutches to pump up Luger who was getting beaten down. He slaps Luger and tells him to wake up and get up to go destroy Flair. Then, you have the Horsemen grab Sting ready to do more damage. Story of the finish had Luger about to win the match till he saw the Horsemen had Sting so he ran out to save Sting and it cost him the match. So, I think if anything they accomplished that with that main event finish with building sympathy for Sting and putting Luger back in the babyface graces of the fans. JR was asked if they should have put the belt on Luger that night and had that as finally Luger’s big win. JR said no. I say no too. JR’s reasoning and mine matched up. Why have Luger win it when you can just wait and put it on Sting in a few months? The plan was to go with Sting and that is what the fans wanted. It’s what I wanted as a kid. I wanted Sting to be champion and beat Flair. Bash 90 was the ultimate culmination of it. Still one of my favorite wrestling moments as a kid watching Sting beat Flair to win the world title in the historic traditional Bash venue of the Baltimore Arena. When asked what to rate Wrestle War out of a 1-10, JR said a 7 and I said the same thing. It is a very solid show and one that probably gets overlooked more from that year of WCW. I tend to overlook it myself in favor of the other shows that year as well.
AEW runs their Revolution PPV this Saturday night from Chicago. Lineup includes Chris Jericho defending the AEW title against Jon Moxley. Cody takes on MJF. AEW tag team titles will be defended as Omega and Page defend against The Bucks. Women’s title on the line as Nyla Rose defends against Kris Statlander. Darby Allin vs. Sammy Guevara. Dustin Rhodes vs. Jake Hager. Pac vs. Orange Cassidy.
That is it for this week. Have a great rest of the week!
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