sevendaughters

DAVE speaks

Dave said on WOR that he's seen a bit and is in mad sexlove with Kento, he adored the Okabayashi match

it's a 15 show tour, G1 Climax with 2 x blocks of 10 doing a block a day is usually 19. i guess they'll do a couple of nights like at Korakuen where there's 10 singles?

I hope that this tour is all juniors and the top-line heavyweights get some time off. I never liked having them jerk the curtain on BOSJ. No need. They've a heavy load off the back of this. That said I like this field a lot.

I dropped $50 on UWF DVDs so I could finish off the blog in my signature, feel free to have a read about a very good UWF show to open 1990.

As someone who has seen about 40/50 Britindy shows - ranging from seaside happy-clappy kidfests to local indie mayhem to large professional feeders to small pretenders to their throne of realism - I agree that British wrestling is essentially clowning comic book violence with poses and faces and is now divorced from the basic idea of applying real techniques in a work.

the DAVEs dark women tag 2.25 Honor Rumble (incredibly long write up and then...) 1 Cobb-Ospreay 4 Rush-Castle no rating WOH 2 Bully Ray Introducing Emzo D'Amore & Brig Cazz 1.5 jr 3-way 4 quad tag 3.5 Rev Pro 4 IC title 4.5 ROH ladder 3.5 IWGP HEBBYKYU 4.75 Generous on most. That makes Jay White's best match by my reckoning of both Dave's scores and my actual opinion.

others have covered the book (the original release is the absolute best autobiography in wrestling) but I'd also like to say Bret is one of my 3/4 favourite shoot interview subjects too. Very lucid and credible, self-critical to a point, a natural storyteller without too much of the gaga. High opinion of himself but anyone from the biz usually acquires one.

One of my lifetime top 5 for sure and the reason I kept going back to WWF after he'd gone but before I discovered wrestling elsewhere - I wanted a taste of that world-weary, palpably actually-aggrieved wrestling that emerged after his heel turn until he left. I couldn't find it. But when it was there it sliced through the artifice - it was Bret, not Vince - and played with the boundaries of kayfabe/real without exposing the lie in a way that teenage sevendaughters could appreciate and adult sevendaughters likes even more nowadays. He was always a babyface, too - the world turned against him, it went completely mad, and we were asked to side with the world. He was never goofy enough to 'change persona' and ask us to buy some shit he wasn't selling last week or last year if it didn't make real emotional sense. I love that about him. His strength was his flaw and led to Montreal. If you put the pipebomb of CM Punk next to Bret snaps promo in 1997, I think Bret's is much better.

I've seen Redman (not that one) a couple of times over here, he's quite good, fine as a second string big foreigner. His match vs Okada in Rev Pro was lacklustre but I think Okada was having a quiet one.

I just watched Shuji v Yuji and I want to go and lariat a bus, that is extremely my stuff

Tanahashi off the show. News reports he got injured legit against ZSJr but it should be noted he usually has a bit of a break between NJC and G1 and is probably always legit injured in some way.

Your logic and reason has no place here pal, I've stamped it.

I think the next Dome headliners are Kenny-Kota and Okada-Naito, I am stamping this prediction MON APR 8 19hr22 10 degrees celsius 2mph wind overcast

Dragon Lee/Ishimori got to be headlining for that Hiromu pop

Well, I haven't watched too many full Wrestlemanias since we hit the 20s, so I don't know if it was the best in a while. I preferred 30 for what that's worth. There were enjoyable moments on the show and Bryan vs. Kofi was poetry - the match of the weekend of all shows. Worth tuning in for that. Conversely HHH vs. Batista was my least favourite match of the weekend outside the hour I caught of the Blackcraft show, which I went into knowing it was already gaining legend as WrestleCrap. I also felt the slow death during Shane vs. Miz. The executives need need to stay backstage on a show with 90 talents booked. The whole thing was just too damn long. We're heading toward AJW Egg Dome levels of over-indulgence. Anything pleasurable will feel tarnished if it is packaged alongside a lot of mediocre to regulation stuff, and doubly so if that takes 8hrs to digest. Seriously, people sometimes bag on those 4-6 min WK/WM matches but they keep the show going if you feel that that feud needs to blow off/amplify in this spotlight. Brock/Rollins was smart opening the regular show. It was a cool surprise when energy was rising. Good thinking. I'm not sure I liked the thinking behind the match (oh, Brock has a weak dick, he is the anti-Joey Ryan, BOOK IT) though. The main felt rushed but I liked the style they tried out. Didn't feel like a main event in execution though I understood why they got the spot. Maybe it's because I can usually be found over in the Japan sub-forum that I think G1 Supercard was better (certainly not beyond critique), but let it be known I thought Takeover was better than both. Brevity and impact can never be underestimated in art.

It's a shame because there is stuff to enjoy in ROH in Cobb, Rush, Lethal, the Briscoes and a couple of others but they had to bring all the strange uncles and cousins along.

OK finally steamed through this and it was too long and ROH is just a rank average promotion. Ibushi-Naito was good, Tanahashi-Sabre was good, the main was nearly a classic, the jr title match was a super sprint, everything else ranged from occasionally amusing (PCO bump, the post-match to that) to please move on (Ladder,) to the outright drizzling. Too many cooks in the NJPW/ROH relationship I suspect, unable to present the best at expense of compromise and inclusion.

I finally saw Takeover. Based on what I have seen, including G1, it is probably the show of the weekend. That isn't to say that I loved it with all of my heart - I still find it a little overwrought, a little overexplained, and the matches were five different flavours of super-indy spectaculars. But the show is a reasonable length and is fat free and all the matches range from 3.5-4.25. I think sometimes I'd like to see NXT test their crowd a little more instead of rewarding them for simply liking indie wrestling. Being coherent and doing escalating stunts can only get you so far. If this is such a great crowd, why not take them somewhere deeper? Test the comfort zones. Do they have it in them?

It feels strange as a Brit to have a NJPW show that you NAmericans have seen before me. Just watched the main event and loved the hell out of it. The crowd flattened mid-match but I couldn't see why. Maybe needed some crowd work rather than MOVEZ. Anyway, White is gonna make it, he's gonna be ok. The crowd were completely worked twice over the finish.

watched the rest of that AJPW show. Iwamoto is very fun isn't he? Love him just hurling people around. Strong juniors are fun. Kotaro started slow and his control portion only got interesting with that pair of knee strikes, but once it clicked it was great, even with a Kotaro slip running the turnbuckle. Probably my favourite show since G1 that isn't WK (joint with NJ Cup semi).

yeah you can see why there's a semi-puro hardcore wave migrating toward it (the hardcore were there already) because it is good wrestling done well, there's loads of promising guys, they get people in from other places so it doesn't get too stale (small roster though), and now the crowds are starting to pop it makes it a lot easier to watch. all hail King Jun.

woah the heavy tag semi-final on the same show was just as good!

late to the party but Nomura vs. Miyahara was really great, super atmosphere and a star-making performance from Nomura. Miyahara top 5 in the world right now.

how about - Okada wins at MSG Naito wins at Dominion the title usually stays stable, why not move it around in an unstable era? Naito-Ibushi at a Dome would blow the roof off